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

by Kelly McGonigal

This week, pay special attention to how you handle any willpower failure. Do you criticize yourself and tell yourself that you’ll never change? Do you feel this setback reveals what is wrong with you – that you’re lazy, stupid, greedy or incompetent? Do you feel hopeless, guilty, ashamed, angry or overwhelmed? Do you use the setback as an excuse to indulge further?

We all have the tendency to believe self-doubt and self-criticism, but listening to this voice never gets us closer to our goals. Instead, listen to the point of view of a mentor or good friend who believes in you, wants the best for you, and will encourage you when you feel discouraged.

The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification – you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done.

That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good.

Chimpanzees chose to wait for the larger reward an impressive 72 per cent of the time. The Harvard and Max Planck Institute students? Only 19 per cent of the time.

Economists call this delay discounting – the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you.

This is good news for those who want to delay gratification. Anything you can do to create that distance will make it easier to say no.

When “never again” seems too overwhelming a willpower challenge to tackle, use the ten-minute delay rule to start strengthening your self-control.

The kids who waited the longest were more popular, had higher school results, and were better able to handle stress.

You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is. 2. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now?

This is a favourite story of behavioural economists who believe that the best strategy for self-control is, essentially, to burn your boats.

One reason this intervention works is that the participants are held accountable by someone who supports their goals. Is there someone you can share your goals with and call on for support when you’re feeling tempted?

Ran Kivetz, a marketing researcher at Columbia University, has found that some people have a very difficult time choosing current happiness over future rewards. They consistently put off pleasure in the name of work, virtue or future happiness – but eventually, they regret their decisions. Kivetz calls this condition hyperopia – a fancy way of saying farsightedness. Most people, as we’ve seen, are perpetually nearsighted. When the promise of a reward is in front of their eyes, they cannot see past it to the value of delaying gratification. People who suffer from hyperopia are chronically farsighted – they cannot see the value of giving in today. This is as big a problem as being nearsighted; both lead to disappointment and unhappiness in the long run.

Humans are hardwired to connect with others, and our brains have adapted a nifty way to make sure we do. We have specialized brain cells – called mirror neurons – whose sole purpose is to keep track of what other people are thinking, feeling and doing. These mirror neurons are sprinkled throughout the brain to help us understand the full range of other people’s experiences.

One person crosses his arms, and moments later, his conversation partner crosses her arms. She leans back, and soon enough, he leans back, too. This unconscious physical mirroring seems to help people understand each other better, and also creates a sense of connection and rapport. (One reason salespeople, managers and politicians are trained to intentionally mimic other people’s postures is that they know it will make it easier to influence the person they are mirroring.)

The second way our social brains can lead us astray is the contagion of emotion. We saw that our mirror neurons respond to other people’s pain, but they also respond to emotions. That’s how a colleague’s bad mood can become our bad mood – and make us feel like we’re the ones who need a drink!

There is, however, a self-control side effect of this automatic mind reading: it activates those very same goals in us. Psychologists call this goal contagion. Research shows that it is surprisingly easy to catch a person’s goals in a way that changes your own behaviour. For example, in one study, students caught the goal to make money just from reading a story about another student who worked over the Easter holidays.

What does all this mean for your self-control? The good news is, goal contagion is limited to goals you already, at some level, share. You can’t catch a brand-new goal from a brief exposure the way you can catch a flu virus.

They, too, chain up their bikes and leave their trolleys in the car park. But the consequences go further than that. When people saw a bike chained to a no-bicycles fence, they were also more likely to take an illegal shortcut through the fence. When they saw trolleys in a car park, they were more likely to dump their rubbish on the floor of the car park. The contagious goal was bigger than the goal to break a specific rule. They caught the goal to do whatever they wanted, rather than what they were supposed to do.

In the Framingham community, behaviours weren’t spreading over fences and across gardens. The social epidemics spread through networks of mutual respect and liking.

You can see it in a brain scanner, watching adults think first about themselves, then about their mothers. The brain regions activated by self and mum are almost identical, showing that who we think we are includes the people we care about.

But before we congratulate the Californians for being so civic-minded, consider this: the only survey question that predicted a person’s actual energy conservation was how much they thought their neighbours tried to conserve. The other beliefs and motivations – saving money, saving the planet for their grandkids – had zero relationship to what people did. People thought they acted for noble reasons, but the only belief that mattered was a far less altruistic “Everyone else is doing it.

Social proof has enormous sway over our everyday behaviour. It’s why we often check out the “most read stories” box on news websites, and why we’re more likely to go to the number-one film in the country instead of the box-office bomb.

The social proof door hangers included only one statement:

The only persuasive message that decreased a household’s energy use was the “everyone else is doing it” appeal.

People rarely want to be reminded of this. In the classroom, I find that just about every student believes that he or she is the exception. We’ve been trained since birth to do it our way, to stand out from the crowd, to be a leader, not a follower. And yet our cultural obsession with independence cannot suppress our human desire to fit in.

This flyer showed a postgrad student drinking, along with the warning, “Lots of graduate students at Stanford drink . . . and lots of them are sketchy [dodgy]. So think when you drink . . . . Nobody wants to be mistaken for this guy.

But if the reports were honest, this study suggests a new strategy for discouraging unhealthy behaviour: just convince people it’s the habit of a group they would never want to be a member of.

Pride, on the other hand, pulls through even in the face of temptation. Forty per cent of participants who imagined how proud they’d be for resisting the chocolate cake didn’t take a single bite.

Another reason boils down to biology: Laboratory studies reveal that guilt decreases heart rate variability, our physiological reserve of willpower. Pride, on the other hand, sustains and even increases this reserve.

Research shows that being kicked out of the tribe drains willpower. For example, after people are socially rejected,28 they are less likely to resist the temptation of freshly baked biscuits, and they give up sooner on a challenging assignment. They also become more easily distracted during a concentration task. Studies show that the more racial minorities are exposed to prejudice, the less self-control they have – and just reminding minorities of discrimination depletes their willpower. Any time we feel excluded or disrespected, we are at greater risk for giving in to our worst impulses.

during the

These students were the first participants in a series of studies by Daniel Wegner, who is now a psychology professor at Harvard University. Early in his career, Wegner had come across a story about Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

But as we’ll see, the problem with prohibition extends to any thought we try to ban. The latest research on anxiety, depression, dieting, and addiction all confirm that: “I won’t” power fails miserably when it’s applied to the inner world of thoughts and feelings.

The effect was strongest when people were already stressed, tired or distracted. Wegner dubbed this effect ironic rebound. You push a thought away, and – BAM! – it boomerangs back.

This cognitive bias seems to be hardwired in the human brain. We estimate how likely or true something is by the ease with which we can bring it to mind. This can have unsettling consequences when we try to push a worry or desire out of our minds. For example, because it’s easy to remember news stories about plane crashes (especially if you are a nervous flier handing over your boarding pass), we tend to overestimate the likelihood of being in a crash. The risk is actually about one in fourteen million, but most people believe the risk is higher than of dying from tuberculosis or diabetes – two of the top ten causes of death worldwide.

Studies of brain activation confirm that as soon as you give participants permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress, that thought becomes less primed and less likely to intrude into conscious awareness. Paradoxically, permission to think a thought reduces the likelihood of thinking it.

As a result, their lives get smaller and smaller, and even things that most people take for granted – meetings at work, making a phone call – can become overwhelming.

He has found that people with social anxiety are worse at controlling their thoughts than the average person, and it shows in their brains.

Goldin takes a very different approach. He teaches social anxiety sufferers to observe and accept their thoughts and feelings – even the scary ones. The goal is not to get rid of the anxiety and self-doubt, but to develop a trust that they can handle these difficult thoughts and feelings. If they learn that there is no inner experience that they need to protect themselves from, they can find more freedom in the outer world.

After the intervention, there was much more activity in the brain network associated with visual information processing. The social anxiety sufferers were paying more attention to the self-critical statements than they had before the training. Now, to most people, this would sound like a complete failure. Except for one thing: there was also a major decrease in the stress centre’s activity. Even as the anxiety sufferers gave the negative thoughts their full attention, they were less upset by them. This change in the brain came with big benefits in everyday life. After the intervention, the anxiety sufferers felt less anxious overall, and they were spending less time criticizing themselves and worrying. When they stopped fighting their thoughts and emotions, they found more freedom from them.

When an upsetting thought comes to mind, try the technique that Goldin

James Erskine, a psychologist at St. George’s University of London, is fascinated by Wegner’s research on white bears. But he believes that thought suppression doesn’t just make it more likely that we’ll think something – it makes us compelled to do the very thing we’re trying not to think of.

In each study, the results were the same: women ate almost twice as many chocolates if they had tried not to think about chocolate before the taste test.

Several long-term studies have found that yo-yo dieting raises blood pressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels, suppresses the immune system, and increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes and mortality from any cause. (And, if you recall, dieting also increases your chances of being unfaithful to your spouse.)

Bowen then asked these smokers to apply the surfing-the-urge technique during the craving induction.

the power of paying

It’s noticing how you give yourself permission to procrastinate, or how you use good behaviour to justify self-indulgence. It’s realizing that the promise of reward doesn’t always deliver, and that your future self is not a superhero or a stranger.