Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As Stanley discovered, there are mental tricks that enable you to conserve willpower for those moments when it’s indispensable. Paradoxically, these techniques require willpower to implement, but in the long run they leave you less depleted for those moments when it takes a strong core to survive.

He spent the first part of the journey slogging through a swamp and struggling with malaria, which left him delirious for a week with what he called “its insane visions, its frenetic brain-throbs & dire sickness.”

I recall having fevers like this, possibly when I had malaria, but it could be other diseases as well.

the act of writing it was part of a strategy to conserve willpower that he used over and over with great success: precommitment. The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible—or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful—to leave the path.

In Stanley’s private letters, newspaper dispatches, and public declarations, he repeatedly promised to reach his goals and to behave honorably—and he knew, once he became famous, that any failure would make headlines.

People who draw up a contract without a financial penalty or a referee succeed only 35 percent of the time, whereas the ones with a penalty and a ref succeed nearly 80 percent of the time, and the ones who risk more than one hundred dollars do better than those who risk less than twenty dollars—at least according to what is reported to stickK.com, which doesn’t independently verify the results.

The urge to smoke was so strong that a majority of them yielded to it even though they knew they’d lose their money. The good news, though, was that this incentive did help some of the smokers to quit, and they stayed off cigarettes even after passing the six-month test and collecting the money in their account.

Even though the people no longer had any financial incentive to stay off nicotine, the effects of the program were still evident.

What began as a precommitment turned into something permanent and more valuable: a habit.

Stanley himself offered a similar explanation for his need to shave in the jungle: “I always presented as decent an appearance as possible, both for self-discipline and for self-respect.”

But orderly habits like that can actually improve self-control in the long run by triggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy. Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in some remarkable studies.

Charity and generosity have been linked to self-control, partly because self-control is needed to overcome our natural animal selfishness, and partly because, as we’ll see later, thinking about others can increase our own self-discipline. The orderly Web sites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people unconsciously toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others.

The researchers assumed, logically enough, that people with high self-control would tend to exercise it most noticeably in the behavior they controlled the most. Yet when the results were totaled up in a meta-analysis, just the opposite pattern appeared. The people with high self-control were distinguished by their behaviors that took place more or less automatically.

The behaviors they had coded as automatic tended to be linked to habits, whereas the more controlled sorts of behaviors tended to be unusual or one-time-only actions. Self-control turned out to be most effective when people used it to establish good habits and break bad ones. People with self-control were more likely to regularly use condoms, and to avoid habits like smoking, frequent snacking, and heavy drinking. It took willpower to establish patterns of healthy behavior—which was why the people with more willpower were better able to do it—but once the habits were established, life could proceed smoothly, particularly some aspects of life.

Valedictorians are generally not the sort who stay up studying all night just before the big exam—instead, they keep up with the work all semester long. Workers who produce steadily over a long period of time tend to be most successful in the long run.

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

But however badly it turned out, Stanley did get something out of the relationship and that photograph: a distraction from his own wretchedness. He may have fooled himself about her loyalty, but he was smart during his journey to fixate on a “stay” and a “beacon” far removed from his grim surroundings.

Isn't this how religion also works, with faith in God?

this was the man renowned for the coldest greeting in history: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Even Victorians found it ridiculously stiff for two Englishmen meeting in the middle of Africa.

For his time, Stanley was remarkably free of racial prejudice.

I have learnt by actual stress of imminent danger, in the first place, that self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder, and, in the second place, that persistent self-control under the provocation of African travel is impossible without real, heartfelt sympathy for the natives with whom one has to deal.

Willpower enables us to get along with others and override impulses that are based on personal short-term interests. It’s the same lesson that Navy SEAL commandos learn during a modern version of Stanley’s ordeals: the famous Hell Week test of continual running, swimming, crawling, and shivering that they must endure on less than five hours’ sleep. At least three-quarters of the men in each SEAL class typically fail to complete training, and the survivors aren’t necessarily the ones with the most muscles, according to Eric Greitens, a SEAL officer.

Aha! So this is the point of harsh military training: not to break down ego, but test willpower.

Throughout history, the most common way to redirect people away from selfish behavior has been through religious teachings and commandments, and these remain an effective strategy for self-control, as demonstrated by research that we’ll discuss later. But what if, like Stanley, you’re not a believer? After losing his faith in God and religion at an early age (a loss he attributed to the slaughter he witnessed in the American Civil War), he faced a question that vexed other Victorians: How can people remain moral without the traditional restraints of religion?

his approach embodied a correct principle of self-control: Focus on lofty thoughts.

After engaging in high-level thinking, people were more likely to pass up a quick reward for something better in the future.

Was Stanley, in his moment of despair, succumbing to religion and imagining himself with a soul? Maybe. But given his lifelong struggles, given all his stratagems to conserve his powers in the wilderness, it seems likely that he had something more secular in mind. His “real self,” as Bula Matari saw it, was his will.

During Eric Clapton’s many suicidal moments, when wealth and fame and his music were no longer enough, he was sustained by one thought: If he killed himself, he would no longer be able to drink. Alcohol was his great enduring love, supplemented by serious affairs with cocaine, heroin, and just about any kind of drug he could get his hands on.

“My selective memory,” as he puts it, “told me that standing at the bar in a pub on a summer’s evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke, and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.”

Contrary to popular stereotype, alcohol doesn’t increase your impulse to do stupid or destructive things; instead, it simply removes restraints. It lessens self-control in two ways: by lowering blood glucose and by reducing self-awareness.

Karr resolved to remain sober and dutifully followed the Alcoholics Anonymous advice to seek a higher power. She put a cushion on the floor and knelt for the first time in her life to say a prayer—or at least her version of a prayer. The best she could come up with was: Higher power, where the fuck have you been? She still didn’t believe in any kind of deity, but she did decide to keep offering thanks every evening for remaining sober. About a week later, as she writes in her memoir Lit, she expanded her nightly prayer by listing other things for which she was grateful, and then mentioning some things she wanted, like money.

Religion was so irrational, and yet, when she found herself desperately craving a drink at a cocktail party for the New York literati at the Morgan Library, she retreated to the ladies’ room, went into a stall, and irrationally sank to her knees to pray: Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please, please, please. Just as with Clapton, it worked for her: “The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.”

Although many scientists are skeptical of institutions that promote spirituality—and psychologists, for some reason, have been particularly skeptical of religion—self-control researchers have developed a grudging respect for the practical results. Even when social scientists can’t accept supernatural beliefs, they recognize that religion is a profoundly influential human phenomenon that has been evolving effective self-control mechanisms for thousands of years.

Yet social scientists still aren’t exactly sure what AA accomplishes. It’s hard to study a decentralized organization without systematic records: AA’s chapters operate autonomously and, of course, insist on members remaining anonymous.

When two things go together and researchers want to know which one causes the other, they sometimes try to track them over time and see which comes first—assuming that causation moves forward across time, so the cause precedes the effect.

The less-inspiring explanation is “warehousing,” to borrow a term used by some skeptical sociologists to explain what high school does. They see school as a kind of warehouse that stores kids during the day, keeping them out of trouble, so that its benefits come less from what happens in the classroom than from what doesn’t happen elsewhere.

The other, more uplifting, explanation is that the meetings offer social support. Like everyone else, alcoholics and drug addicts are capable of remarkable feats of self-control in order to gain social acceptance. In fact, that desire for peer approval is often what got them in trouble initially. Most people don’t enjoy their first taste of alcohol or tobacco. Most people are scared to put unfamiliar drugs into their bodies. It takes real self-discipline to inject yourself with heroin the first time. Teenagers will disregard everything—their own fears, their parents’ warnings, physical pain, the possibility of going to jail or dying—because they’re convinced that social acceptance requires them not only to take risks but to do so in a cool, seemingly unconcerned manner. They exert self-control to overcome their inhibitions and more self-control to hide their negative feelings.

Heaven (like Hell) Is Other People

I remember figuring this out as a teenager.

Social support is a peculiar force and can operate in two different ways. Plenty of research suggests that being alone in the world is stressful. Loners and lonely people tend to have more of just about every kind of mental and physical illness than people who live in rich social networks. Some of that is because people with mental and physical problems make fewer friends, and indeed, some potential friends may shy away from someone who seems maladjusted. But simply being alone or lonely leads to problems also. A lack of friends tends to contribute to alcohol and drug abuse.

When the two women met for coffee to celebrate the two months of sobriety, Karr complained about the losers and loons in their AA group and their “spiritual crap.” Then, as Karr recalls, her sponsor suggested another way to think of a higher power, and of the group in the church basement: “Here, she says, are a bunch of people. They outnumber you, outearn you, outweigh you. They are, ergo—in some simplistic calculation—a power greater than you. They certainly know more about staying sober than you…. If you have a problem, bring it to the group.”

Smoking cigarettes has long been regarded as a personal physical compulsion due to overwhelming impulses in the smoker’s brain and body. Hence there was considerable surprise in 2008 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that quitting smoking seems to spread through social networks. The researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, found that kicking the habit seemed to be contagious.

If you’re in a religious congregation and ask God for longer life, you are likely to get it. It doesn’t even seem to matter which god you ask. Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity, according to the psychologist Michael McCullough (who isn’t religiously devout himself). He looked at more than three dozen studies that had asked people about their religious devotion and then kept track of them over time. It turned out that the nonreligious people died off sooner, and that at any given point, a religiously active person was 25 percent more likely than a nonreligious person to remain alive.