Impulse buys, impulse texts, impulse tattoos. Same lesson, different price tags.

One mechanism sits behind all three: a strong feeling arriving together with a way to act on it, and no gap in between. What you want in that moment is real. It is simply much shorter-lived than the thing it commits you to, and the only difference between the three is what undoing it costs, which runs from a refund to something permanent.

Build the gap in rather than trying to want less. Sleep on anything above a set amount, keep the message in drafts overnight, give a tattoo idea six months on your phone. An urge that cannot survive a delay has told you what it was.