Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

“When we’re trying to decide what to do with our stuff or what movie to see,” Allen says, “we don’t think to ourselves, Look at all these cool choices. There’s a powerful thing inside that says, If I decide to do that movie, I kill all the other movies. You can pretend all the way up to that point that you know the right thing to do, but once you’re faced with a choice, you have to deal with this open loop in your head: You’re wrong, you’re right, you’re wrong, you’re right. Every single time you make a choice, you’re stepping into an existential void.”

When Spitzer hired a hooker, when the governor of South Carolina snuck off to Buenos Aires to see his girlfriend, when Bill Clinton took up with an intern, they were all subject to the occupational hazard that comes with being, as President George W. Bush once described himself, “the decider.” The problem of decision fatigue affects everything from the careers of CEOs to the prison sentences of felons appearing before weary judges. It influences the behavior of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, every day. Yet few people are even aware of it.

As the ultimate real-world test of their theory, researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the mall. Shoppers in a suburban mall were interviewed about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who’d already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

Also happens online. Impulse shopping happens in batches. The first purchase is always the most resisted.

Psychologists distinguish two main types of mental processes, automatic and controlled. Automatic processes, like multiplying 4 times 7, can be done without exertion. If someone says “4 times 7,” 28 probably pops into your head whether you want it to or not—that’s why the process is called automatic. In contrast, computing 26 times 30 requires mental effort as you go through the steps of multiplying to come up with 780. Difficult mathematical calculations, like other logical reasoning, require willpower as you follow a set of systematic rules to get from one set of information to something new. You often go through steps like these in making a decision, through a process that psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul.

The third group had to choose which features they wanted on their customized computers. They didn’t simply ponder options or implement others’ choices. They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured afterward by asking people to solve as many anagrams as they could, the people who had actually made decisions gave up sooner than the others. Crossing the Rubicon appeared to be tough mental work, whether it involved deciding the fate of an empire or the size of a computer drive.

Interesting that merely approving what someone else has already done the legwork for is more exhausting.

Choosing for others, though, isn’t always so difficult.

Outsource decisions!

On average, each judge approved parole for only about one of every three prisoners, but there was a striking pattern to the decisions of all the judges, as the researchers found. The prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time. Those who appeared late in the day won parole less than 10 percent of the time.

The link between willpower and decision making works both ways: Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions. If your work requires you to make hard decisions all day long, at some point you’re going to be depleted and start looking for ways to conserve energy. You’ll look for excuses to avoid or postpone decisions. You’ll look for the easiest and safest option, which often is to stick with the status quo:

At the online dating service, customers filled out an extensive questionnaire about their attributes. In theory, that detailed profile should have helped people find just the right mate, but in practice it produced so much information and so many choices that people became absurdly picky.

Faced with fewer options in mates and an immediate deadline, the speed daters quickly pick out potential partners. But because the online seekers have so many choices, Ariely says, they just go on browsing.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we’re so eager to keep options open that we don’t see the long-term price that we’re paying—or that others are paying. When you won’t settle for less than a perfect mate, you end up with no one.

When your willpower is low, you’re less able to make these trade-offs. You become what researchers call a “cognitive miser,” hoarding your energy by avoiding compromises. You’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: Just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying).

But there was one group that changed dramatically: Men who saw photos of hot women shifted toward getting an immediate reward instead of waiting for a larger payoff in the future. Apparently, the sight of an attractive woman makes men want cash right away. They focus on the present rather than the future. This effect is probably deeply rooted in the psyche and in the evolutionary past. Modern DNA research has revealed that most men in the past did not leave a line of descendants—their odds of reproducing were only half as high as the typical woman’s. (For every prolific patriarch like Genghis Khan, there were lots of other men whose genetic lines died out.) Men today are therefore descended from the minority of men who managed to reproduce, and their brains seem primed for a quick response to any opportunity to improve their reproductive odds. Other studies have shown that the sight of an attractive woman (but not an unattractive woman) activates the male brain’s nucleus accumbens, which is connected to the part of the brain activated by rewards like cash and sweet-tasting foods. In the past, there might well have been some evolutionary advantage in going for a quick display of resources upon seeing an attractive female; today, it might still be useful on occasions, especially if you think the woman’s decision might be affected by your owning a hot car. Clearly that’s the strategy of marketers of upscale cars and other goods. Advertising agencies figured out long ago that ...

Ever since Frankenstein, science fiction writers have fretted about artificial intelligences that become aware of their own powers and turn against their human creators.

Self-awareness is a most peculiar trait among animals. Dogs will bark angrily at a mirror because they don’t realize they’re looking at themselves, and most other animals are similarly clueless when they’re subjected to a formal procedure called the mirror test. First the animal is dabbed with a spot of odorless dye, then it’s put in front of a mirror to contemplate this strange-colored spot. The test is to see whether the animal touches the spot or indicates in some other way that it realizes the spot is on its own body (such as turning the body to get a better view of the spot). Chimpanzees and the other apes can pass the test, and so can dolphins, elephants, and a few more, but most animals flunk. If they want to touch the spot, they reach for the mirror instead of their own body. Human infants also flunk this test, but by their second birthday most of them can pass it.

Before long this trait will turn into the curse of adolescence. Somehow the carefree confidence of childhood is smothered by embarrassment and shame as teenagers become exquisitely sensitive to their own imperfections. They look in the mirror and ask the same question that psychologists have been studying for decades: Why? What’s the point of self-awareness if it makes you feel miserable?

When people were placed in front of a mirror, or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. These self-conscious people worked harder at laboratory tasks. They gave more valid answers to questionnaires (meaning that their answers jibed more closely with their actual behavior). They were more consistent in their actions, and their actions were also more consistent with their values.

Nature doesn’t really care whether you feel good. It selects for traits that improve survival and reproduction. What good is self-awareness for that? The best answer came from the psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who arrived at a vital insight: Self-awareness evolved because it helps self-regulation.

The link between self-awareness and self-control was also demonstrated in experiments involving adults and alcohol. Researchers found that one of the chief effects of drinking was to reduce people’s ability to monitor their own behavior.

Critics and fellow writers—particularly the ones who couldn’t meet deadlines—were appalled at his system. How could an artist work by the clock? How could inspiration be precisely scheduled and monitored? But Trollope had anticipated their criticisms in his autobiography. “I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he wrote. “I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius, but had I been so I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels. Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

In 2008, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf created a Web site called Quantified Self, or QS, catering to users of self-regulation technology. The QS movement is still small and heavily geeky, but already it has spread far from Silicon Valley, and devotees in cities around the world are convening—in person—to talk gadgets, share data, and encourage one another.

Interesting point: the vast majority of Quantified Self followers don't consider themselves followers. They don't meet to discuss QS. They just use a Fitbit or whatever else and interact with friends. A movement is mainstream when it doesn't depend on tight interpersonal relationships (can we say cultish behaviour?)

Esther Dyson, the famously prescient Internet guru and investor, sees the Quantified Self movement as both a smart financial investment and virtuous public policy: a revolutionary new industry that will flourish by selling what’s good for you. Instead of paying doctors and hospitals to repair your body, you can monitor yourself to avoid illness. Instead of heeding marketers’ offerings of fast foods and instant pleasures, you can set up your life so that you’re bombarded with messages promoting health and conscientiousness. “So far, marketers have been really effective at selling goods and other things that undermine our willpower,” Dyson says. “We need to apply those techniques to strengthen it.”

I'm suspicious of this claim.

Some people are so horrified to see their spending totals that they vow to take drastic actions right away, but Mint’s founder advises a gradual approach. “If you cut too hard and too fast, you’ll never stick with it and you’ll hate yourself,” Patzer says. “If you’re spending $500 a month on restaurants and you try to set a new budget of $200, you’ll end up saying, ‘Forget that!’ It’s too hard. But if you reduce to $450 or $400, you can make that without radically changing your lifestyle. Then the next month you can go another $50 or $100. Keep the monthly changes to 20 percent until you get things under control.”

The ones who wrote about what they had already achieved had higher satisfaction with their current tasks and projects, as compared with the ones who reflected on what they had not yet achieved. But the latter were more motivated to reach their goals and then move on to more challenging new projects. Those who focused on what they had already done did not seem eager to move on to more difficult and challenging tasks. They were reasonably content with where they were and what they were currently doing. For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.

But the most enthusiastic walkers were the ones who shared each day’s tally with a few friends. They were applying a sound psychological principle that was demonstrated in some of Baumeister’s earliest experiments, long before he got involved in studying self-control: Public information has more impact than private information. People care more about what other people know about them than about what they know about themselves. A failure, a slipup, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. After all, the other person might not buy the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling that excuse when you expand from one person to a whole social network. By going public, you’re not just exposing yourself to potential shame. You’re also outsourcing the job of monitoring, which can ease the burden on yourself.

Behavioral economists have found that neurotic penny-pinching may be even more prevalent than neurotic overspending, affecting some one in five people. Brain scans have similarly pinpointed the culprit: an insula that reacts with hyperactive horror at the prospect of parting with cash. The result is a condition that researchers call hyperopia (the opposite of myopia), in which you focus too much on the future at the expense of the present.

Blaine could relax so completely, both mentally and physically, that his heart rate would drop to below fifty beats per minute, sometimes below twenty.

By training, he didn’t mean simply his recent exercises in breath holding, although there had been plenty of them during the previous year. Each morning he’d do a series of ordinary breath-holds (starting with regular air instead of pure oxygen) separated by short intervals, gradually increasing the duration and the pain. Over the course of an hour, he’d end up holding his breath for forty-eight minutes, and then he’d have a pounding headache for the rest of the day. Those daily breathing drills got his body used to the pain of carbon dioxide buildup.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Blaine forced himself to practice card tricks hour after hour, day after day. He learned to win swimming races by not coming up for air the entire length of the pool—and then, with practice, eventually won five hundred dollars in bets by swimming five lengths under water. In the winter, he eschewed a coat, wearing only a T-shirt even when walking for miles on bitterly cold days. He regularly took cold baths and conducted the occasional barefoot run in the snow. He slept on the wooden floor of his bedroom, and once spent two straight days in a closet (his tolerant mother brought him food). He got in the habit of continually setting goals that had to be met, like running so far every day, or jumping to grab a leaf from the branch of a certain tree every time he walked under it. At age eleven, after reading about fasting in the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, he tried it himself and soon got up to four days on just water. By age eighteen he managed a ten-day fast with just water and wine. Once he became a professional endurance artist, he reverted to the same techniques before a stunt, including little rituals that had nothing directly to do with the stunt.

A third group was used to check the effects of altering one’s state of mind. They were instructed to strive for positive moods and emotions during the two weeks. Whenever they found themselves feeling bad, these students should strive to cheer themselves up. Sensing a potential winner, the researchers elected to make this group twice as large as the other groups, so as to get the most statistically reliable results. But the researchers’ hunch was dead wrong. Their favorite strategy turned out to do no good at all. The large group that practiced controlling emotions for two weeks showed no improvement when the students returned to the lab and repeated the self-control tests.

Emotion regulation does not rely on willpower. People cannot simply will themselves to be in love, or to feel intense joy, or to stop feeling guilty. Emotional control typically relies on various subtle tricks, such as changing how one thinks about the problem at hand, or distracting oneself. Hence, practicing emotional control does not strengthen your willpower.

Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture.

The experiment also revealed an important distinction in self-control between two kinds of strength: power and stamina.

Thanks to the students’ posture exercises, their willpower didn’t get depleted as quickly as before, so they had more stamina for other tasks.

There’s nothing magical about sitting up straight, as researchers subsequently discovered when they tested other regimens and found similar benefits. You can pick and choose from the techniques they studied, or extrapolate to create your own system. The key is to concentrate on changing a habitual behavior.

One simple way to start is by using a different hand for routine tasks. Many habits are linked to your dominant hand. Right-handed people, in particular, tend to use their right hands for all sorts of things without giving the matter the slightest thought. Making yourself switch to your left hand is thus an exercise in self-control.

self-control was one of only two traits known to produce a wide spectrum of benefits, and the other trait, intelligence, had turned out to be quite difficult to improve.

In particular, the main improvements were found in resisting the effects of depletion (that is, on the last self-control test administered at each lab session). Thus, exercise increased people’s stamina, allowing them to hold out against temptations even when their mental resources had been depleted.

Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.

You might think that people who start doing physical workouts would naturally start eating better, but in fact the reverse has often been observed in other studies: Once you start exercising, you feel virtuous and therefore entitled to reward yourself with high-calorie treats. (That’s an example of the “licensing effect,” when you act as if one good deed gives you license to sin.)

Hanging out with sharks, holding his breath for seventeen minutes, freezing for sixty-three hours and ending up in purgatory—all that he could handle, but the mundane daily stuff could still frustrate him. His ordeal in the ice set a world endurance record, but the feat didn’t make it into the Guinness book because he never got around to filling out the paperwork. He had the papers, but he kept procrastinating. He had fasted for forty-four hours in London, but nowadays he didn’t have the willpower to avoid the food in his refrigerator.

Why did keeping up a modicum of discipline—in eating and reading and working efficiently—seem so difficult at the moment? Because he didn’t have the motivation. He had nothing to prove to the public or to himself. He and everyone else knew that he could control himself when he wanted to, and nobody was going to fault him for giving himself a break between stunts. For all his amazing willpower, he faced the same problem as the rest of us when dealing with the biggest self-control challenge of all: maintaining the discipline not just for days or weeks but for years and years. For that you need techniques from a different kind of endurance artist.

Now, at age forty-six, Stanley was a veteran explorer leading his third African expedition. As he headed into an uncharted expanse of rain forest, he left part of the expedition behind in a riverside camp to await further supplies. The leaders of this Rear Column, who came from some of the most prominent families in Britain, proceeded to become an international disgrace.

But the perils of the African wilderness already seemed quite clear to many Europeans once they read the nonfiction stories from Stanley’s Rear Column. Critics called for an end to such expeditions, and it was the last of its kind, much to Stanley’s dismay. He joined in the condemnation of his men’s behavior, and he certainly appreciated the dangers of the wilderness, but he didn’t regard them as insuperable. For while the Rear Column was going berserk, Stanley was maintaining discipline in a much wilder setting.

You would be hard-pressed to name any explorer in history who endured such sustained misery and terror so deep in the wilderness. Perhaps the only expedition as grueling was the previous transcontinental journey by Stanley that established the sources of the Nile and the Congo rivers. Yet Stanley persevered through all the travails, year after year, expedition after expedition. His European companions marveled at his “strength of will.” Africans called him Bula Matari: Breaker of Rocks.

What did that schooling teach him? Why didn’t the wilderness ever find him out? In his day, Stanley’s feats enthralled the public and awed artists and intellectuals. Mark Twain predicted that Stanley would be almost the only one of his contemporaries to remain famous a century later.

But recently yet another Stanley has emerged, a much more intriguing one for modern audiences than either the dauntless hero or the ruthless control freak. This explorer prevailed in the wilderness not by selfishness, not because his will was indomitable, but because he appreciated its limitations and used long-term strategies that psychologists are now beginning to understand.

When Stanley first learned of some of the Rear Column’s cruelties and depredations, he noted in his journal that most people would erroneously conclude that the men were “originally wicked.” People back in civilization, Stanley realized, couldn’t imagine the changes undergone by the men since leaving England:

Stanley was describing what the economist George Loewenstein calls the “hot-cold empathy gap”: the inability, during a cool, rational, peaceful moment, to appreciate how we’ll behave during the heat of passion and temptation.

In setting rules for how to behave in the future, you’re often in a calm, cool state, so you make unrealistic commitments. “It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused, as Loewenstein and Dan Ariely found by asking young heterosexual adult men some personal questions.