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January 24 - February 3, 2020
The relative unimportance of the willpower challenges allowed participants to exercise the muscle of self-control without the internal angst that derails so many of our attempts to change.
(www.quantifiedself.com) has turned self-tracking into an art and science.
When you’re trying to make a big change or transform an old habit, look for a small way to practise self-control that strengthens your willpower, but doesn’t overwhelm it completely.
“Fatigue should no longer be considered a physical event but rather a sensation or emotion.”
athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit,
Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body – we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are. In part, we can thank a brain motivated to conserve energy.
When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses – which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad.
Anything that makes us feel warm and fuzzy about our virtue – even just thinking about doing something good – can license us to follow our impulses.
Instead, we trust the feeling that we have been good, and that we are a good person.
the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself.
Moralizing a behaviour makes us more, not less, likely to feel ambivalent about it.
And so when you tell yourself that exercising, saving money or giving up smoking is the right thing to do – not something that will help you meet your goals – you’re less likely to do it consistently.
Progress can be motivating, and even inspire future self-control, but only if you view your actions as evidence that you are committed to your goal.
Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good.
Sometimes the mind gets so excited about the opportunity to act on a goal, it mistakes that opportunity with the satisfaction of having actually accomplished the goal.
This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.
Our optimism about the future extends not just to our own choices, but to how easy it will be to do what we say we will do.
Psychologists have shown that we wrongly predict we will have much more free time in the future than we do today.
We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do today.
Rather than giving himself permission to be good on some days and bad on others (which, predictably, led to more bad days than good), he decided to take the challenge of reducing the variability in his behaviour.
I’m the kind of person who does good things for the planet! And then we carry that identity with us, looking for more ways to live our values and achieve our goals.
identity shapes behavior
Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis.
Moving beyond moral licensing requires knowing that who we are is the self that wants the best for us – and the self that wants to live in line with our core values. When this happens, we will no longer view the impulsive, lazy or easily tempted self as the “real” us. We will no longer act like someone who must be bribed, tricked or forced to pursue our goals,
Every stimulation encouraged the rat to seek more stimulation, but the stimulation itself never brought satisfaction.
A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself – the feeling is more like arousal.
neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving and desire. But one thing is clear: it is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure or actual reward.
dopamine’s role in anticipating, but not experiencing, reward.
Knutson had a hunch that the brain does its own kind of salivation when it expects a reward – and, critically, that this brain response is not the same as the brain’s response when the reward is received.
Evolution doesn’t give a damn about happiness itself, but will use the promise of happiness to keep us struggling to stay alive.
The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: we search. And we search. And we search
Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward – combined with a growing sense of anxiety when we think about stopping – is enough to keep us hooked.
We can take a lesson from neuroadvertisers and try to “dopaminize” our least favourite tasks.
Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward,
dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy.
WE MISTAKE THE PROMISE OF REWARD FOR HAPPINESS
Because the pursuit of reward is dopamine’s main goal, it is never going to give you a “stop” signal – even when the experience does not live up to the promise.
There is growing evidence that when people pay close attention to the experience of their false rewards, the magic spell wears off.
When we free ourselves from the false promise of reward, we often find that the thing we were seeking happiness from was the main source of our misery.
When our reward system is quiet, the result isn’t so much total contentment as it is apathy.
neuroscientists now suspect that an underactive reward system contributes to the biological basis of depression.
APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them.
We’ll also need to give up the self-control strategies – like guilt and self-criticism – that only make us feel worse.
Outside the laboratory, real-world stress increases the risk of relapse among smokers, recovering alcoholics, drug addicts and dieters.
Why does stress lead to cravings? It’s part of the brain’s rescue mission.
That’s the power of the one-two punch of stress and dopamine: we are drawn back again and again to coping strategies that don’t work, but that our primitive brains persistently believe are the gateway to bliss.
The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. The guilt was driving them back to the bottle.
“what-the-hell effect”. First coined by dieting researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman, the what-the-hell effect describes a cycle of indulgence, regret, and greater indulgence.
Whatever the willpower challenge, the pattern is the same. Giving in makes you feel bad about yourself, which motivates you to do something to feel better. And what’s the cheapest, fastest strategy for feeling better? Often the very thing you feel bad about.
Crucially, it’s not the first giving-in that guarantees the bigger relapse. It’s the feelings of shame, guilt, loss of control and loss of hope that follow the first relapse.
The self-forgiveness intervention was a clear success: the women who received the special message ate only 28 grams of sweets, compared with almost 70 grams by women who were not encouraged to forgive themselves.
