Ramadan is often described as a month of worship, gratitude, and community. But at the level of human psychology, it is also something very concrete: a structured intervention in self-regulation that repeatedly places the individual in contact with desire and then trains them to relate to it differently.
Modern life runs on amplifying appetitive desires, such as food engineered for “craveability,” infinite scroll designed for compulsion, and consumer culture that repeatedly suggests we are one purchase away from a better self. In psychological terms, appetitive desires are the motivations that push us to approach stimuli that promise immediate pleasure or relief from discomfort. Desires differ from needs precisely in their felt urgency. Needs can be planned and satisfied instrumentally; desires “take control,” dominate attention, and pull behavior toward immediate reward.
This distinction is not philosophical hair-splitting. The public-health cost of poor self-regulation is enormous. In 2007 the New England Journal of Medicine published research indicating that behavioural causes such as smoking, diet patterns, alcohol use, and other high-risk behaviours account for nearly 40% of deaths in the United States. This is not because human beings are irrational. Desire is efficient: it recruits attention, narrows working memory, and builds persuasive justifications in real time.
The same mechanism shows up clinically. Desire can emerge automatically as reward-processing systems evaluate cues against internal need states and learning history, often outside conscious awareness. When intrusive desire-related thoughts break into awareness, they commonly trigger cognitive elaboration (replaying images, planning, and “mental simulation”) which can crowd out competing goals in working memory and intensify urge states. This elaboration can also promote motivated reasoning that licenses indulgence. When desire conflicts with one’s values, the result is often an aversive and destabilizing tug-of-war between “two souls” within oneself.
Nafs as a Trainable System
Within Islamic psychology, nafs (self) is often framed in functional, behavioural language. It includes impulses and behaviours that can be shaped, refined, and disciplined rather than simply condemned. Importantly, nafs is treated as malleable and trainable -- capable of becoming “praiseworthy” through repeated choices, habit formation, and moral effort. Classical typologies capture this developmental arc: the nafs that urges indulgence (al-ammarah), the nafs of self-reproach (al-lawwamah), and the nafs at peace (al-mutma innah).
Read clinically, these are not just theological labels; they also map stages of self-regulation such as from impulse dominance, to insight with struggle and increasing stability. This matters clinically and socially. Self-control is not merely a personality trait but also a capacity shaped by environment, habit, and practice. And Islamic psychology gives a practical framing for that capacity: nafs as behavioural inclinations with competing drives that can be nurtured and self-regulated over time. This begs the question, what sustained practice reliably trains self-regulation across multiple domains?
Ramadan as Repeated Exposure and Response Prevention
From a behaviour-change perspective, Ramadan does something elegant. It creates daily, repeated exposures to cues and pairs them with an intentional “not now.” To this end, fasting is not only abstinence but a timed inhibition of impulse. This trains three core self-regulatory skills:
1. Self-monitoring and attentional control. Fasting makes desire conscious. Many cravings normally run in the background. Ramadan pulls them into awareness and forces a deliberate response. That is psychologically powerful because the moment you can name an urge, you can choose a skill instead of a reflex.
2. Internal regulation through behaviour first. Islamic models of behavioural reformation emphasize practicing the desired behaviour with exertion in the beginning in order to train the nafs until it becomes more natural. Over time, persistent behavioural modification can begin to soften and challenge the cognitions that maintained destructive patterns in the first place. In other words, change the action first, then watch the inner world reorganize.
3. Reciprocal inhibition and embracing discomfort. Substituting incompatible actions (prayer instead of scrolling, dhikr instead of reacting, charity instead of consumption) weakens the old response loop. Ramadan also repeatedly trains a willingness to tolerate discomfort without immediate relief-seeking, which is central to durable behaviour change.
Freedom not Deprivation
Nafs-control is pro-agency rather than anti-pleasure. It is the difference between choosing a good life and being dragged through it by the loudest impulse in the room. In a world optimized to trigger appetites, Ramadan gives us a rare structural advantage: a communal, time-bound training block in self-regulation-supported by meaning, worship, and shared norms. If Ramadan is approaching, the most strategic intention may not simply be “I will fast,” but “I will use this month to retrain my relationship to desire.” That intention reframes the fast from a rule to a methodology, one that aligns Islamic psychology with what contemporary science already knows: repeated, values-based inhibition of impulse is how self-control is built.
(Dr Fahad Habib Khan is Assistant Professor of Islamic Psychology at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Islamic Studies.)
• This piece has been submitted by HBKU’s Communications Directorate on behalf of its author. The thoughts and views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect an official University stance.