Maximum Willpower: How to Master the New Science of Self-Control

by Kelly McGonigal

The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus and manage stress.

Self-knowledge – especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble – is the foundation of self-control. This is why both “The Science of Willpower” course and this book focus on the most common willpower mistakes we all make.

I’m a scientist by training, and one of the very first things I learned is that while theories are nice, data is better. So I’m going to ask you to treat this book like an experiment.

Within each chapter, you’ll find two kinds of assignments to help you become a willpower scientist. The first I call “Under the Microscope”. These prompts ask you to pay attention to how an idea is already operating in your life.

You’ll also find “Willpower Experiments” throughout each chapter. These are practical strategies for improving self-control based on a scientific study or theory.

To get the most out of this book, I recommend picking a specific willpower challenge to test every idea against.

Your willpower challenge could be something you’ve been avoiding (what we’ll call an “I will” power challenge) or a habit you want to break (an “I won’t” power challenge). You could also choose an important goal in your life that you’d like to give more energy and focus to (an “I want” power challenge) – whether it’s improving your health, managing stress, honing your parenting skills or furthering your career.

Although you could read this whole book in one weekend, I encourage you to pace yourself when it comes to implementing the strategies. Students in my class take an entire week to observe how each idea plays out in their own lives. They try one new strategy for self-control each week, and report on what worked best. I recommend that you take a similar approach, especially if you plan to use this book to tackle a specific goal such as losing weight or getting control over your finances.

When people say, “I have no willpower,” what they usually mean is, “I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or [fill in your anatomical part] wants to say yes.” Think of it as “I won’t” power.

“I will” and “I won’t” power are the two sides of self-control, but they alone don’t constitute willpower. To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want.

To exert self-control, you need to find your motivation when it matters. This is “I want” power.

Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t and I want to help you achieve your goals (and stay out of trouble).

People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it.

Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma, and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut).

This may sound simple, but psychologists know that most of our choices are made on autopilot, without any real awareness of what’s driving them, and certainly without serious reflection on their consequences.

Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re making a choice. For example, one study asked people how many food-related decisions they made in one day. What would you say? On average, people guessed fourteen. In reality, when these same people carefully tracked their decisions, the average was 227. That’s more than 200 choices people were initially unaware of – and those are just the decisions related to eating. How can you control yourself if you aren’t even aware that there is something to control? Modern society, with its constant distractions and stimulation, doesn’t help. Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has shown that people who are distracted are more likely to give in to temptation.

For example, students trying to remember a telephone number are 50 per cent more likely to choose chocolate cak...

Trying to keep track of your choices will also reduce the number of decisions you make while distracted – a guaranteed way to boost your willpower.

This week, commit to watching how the process of giving in to your impulses

Ask your brain to do maths every day, and it gets better at maths. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating.

Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but also at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control and self-awareness.

One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control.

It may seem incredible that our brains can reshape themselves so quickly, but meditation increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles.

Meditation is not about getting rid of all your thoughts; it’s learning not to get so lost in them that you forget what your goal is. Don’t worry if your focus isn’t perfect when meditating. Just practise coming back to the breath, again and again.

This is the moment you need to say “I won’t” when every cell in your body is saying “I want

You might ask yourself, “What was I thinking!” But a better question might be, “What was my body doing?” Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology.

This instinct is appropriately called the fight-or-flight stress response. You know the feeling: heart pounding, jaw clenching, senses on high alert. These changes in the body are no accident. They are coordinated in a sophisticated way by the brain and nervous system to make sure you act quickly and with every ounce of energy you have.

amygdala,

The alarm system also prompted a complex change in brain chemicals that inhibited your prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain in charge of impulse control. That’s right, the fight-or-flight response wants to make you more impulsive.

In other words, the fight-or-flight stress response is an energy-management instinct. It decides how you are going to spend your limited physical and mental energy.

What’s going on in the brain and body now? A few things. First, your brain is temporarily taken over by the promise of reward. At the sight of that strawberry tart, your brain launches a neurotransmitter called dopamine from the middle of your brain into areas of the brain that control your attention, motivation and action. Those little dopamine messengers tell your brain, “Must get tart NOW, or suffer a fate worse than death.” This might explain the near-automatic movement of your feet and hands into the bakery. (Whose hand is that? Is that my hand on the door? Yes, it is. Now, how much is that tart?) While all this is happening, your blood sugar drops. As soon as your brain anticipates your mouth’s first tasty bite, it releases a neurochemical that tells the body to take up whatever energy is circulating in the bloodstream. The body’s logic is this: a strawberry tart, high in sugar and fat, is going to produce a major spike in blood sugar.

For your willpower challenge, identify the inner impulse that needs to be restrained. What is the thought or feeling that makes you want to do whatever it is you don’t want to do?

pause-and-plan response,

The single best physiological measurement of the pause-and-plan response is something called heart rate variability – a measurement most people have never heard of, but one that provides an amazing window into the body’s state of stress or calm. Everybody’s heart rate varies to some degree. This is easy to feel when you run up the stairs and your heart rate soars. But if you’re healthy, your heart rate has had some normal ups and downs even as you’ve read this page. We’re not talking dangerous arrhythmias here. Just little variations.

When people are under stress, the sympathetic nervous system takes over, which is part of the basic biology that helps you fight or flee. Heart rate goes up, and variability goes down. The heart gets “stuck” at a higher rate – contributing to the physical feelings of anxiety or anger that accompany the fight-or-fight response. In contrast, when people successfully exert self-control, the parasympathetic nervous system steps in to calm stress and control impulsive action.

Heart rate goes down, but variability goes up.

Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in.

Studies also show that people with higher heart rate variability are better at ignoring distractions, delaying gratification and dealing with stressful situations.

Anxiety, anger, depression and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control.

Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate

Exercising also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain.

The first question my students ask when they hear this research is, “How much do I need to do?” My response is always, “How much are you willing to do?

The next question everyone asks is, “What kind of exercise is best?” To which I respond, “What kind will you actually do?

1. Are you sitting, standing still, or lying down? 2. Are you eating junk food while you do it?

“mild prefrontal dysfunction”. Shortchange your sleep, and you wake up with temporary Phineas Gage–like damage to your brain.

When your prefrontal cortex is impaired, it loses control over other regions of the brain. Ordinarily, it can quiet the alarm system of the brain to help you manage stress and cravings.

The biology of stress and the biology of self-control are simply

A 2010 survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 44 per cent of people surveyed in the UK felt under “excessive” pressure several days a week.

Welcome to one of the most robust, if troubling, findings from the science of self-control: people who use their willpower seem to run out of it.

Luckily there are things you can do to both overcome willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control strength. That’s because the muscle model doesn’t just help us see why we fail when we’re tired; it also shows us how to train self-control.