Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

People feel overwhelmed because there are more temptations than ever. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant through the click of a mouse or a phone. You can put off any job by checking e-mail or Facebook, surfing gossip sites,

People with good self-control seemed exceptionally good at forming and maintaining secure, satisfying attachments to other people. They were shown to be better at empathizing with others and considering things from other people’s perspectives. They were more stable emotionally and less prone to anxiety, depression, paranoia, psychoticism, obsessive-compulsive behavior, eating disorders, drinking problems, and other maladies. They got angry less often, and when they did get angry, they were less likely to get aggressive, either verbally or physically. Meanwhile, people with poor self-control were likelier to hit their partners and to commit a variety of other crimes—again and again,

Self-control is a vital strength and key to success in life.

Smoking one cigarette will not jeopardize your health. Taking heroin once will not make you addicted. One piece of cake won’t make you fat, and skipping one assignment won’t ruin your career. But in order to stay healthy and employed, you must treat (almost) every episode as a reflection of the general need to resist these temptations. That’s where conscious self-control comes in, and that’s why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

The first step in self-control is to set a goal,

Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

Either way, the effort to control their emotional reactions depleted their willpower. Faking it didn’t come free.

If you’re trying to resist temptation, you may find yourself feeling the forbidden desires more strongly just when your ability to resist them is down. Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.

All sorts of good habits were forsaken as the students’ self-control waned during exam period. They stopped exercising. They smoked more cigarettes. They drank so much coffee and tea that their caffeine intake doubled. The extra caffeine might have been excused as a study aid, but if they were really studying more, you’d expect them to be drinking less alcohol, and that didn’t happen. Even though there were fewer parties during exam time, the students drank as much as ever. They abandoned healthy diets and increased their consumption of junk food by 50 percent. It wasn’t that they suddenly convinced themselves that potato chips were a brain food. They simply stopped worrying about unhealthy, fattening food when they were focused on exams. They also became less concerned about returning phone calls, washing dishes, or cleaning floors. Final-exam time brought declines in every aspect of personal hygiene that was studied. The students became less diligent about brushing and flossing their teeth. They skipped washing their hair and shaving. And, yes, they wore dirty socks and other unwashed clothes.

What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

Other experiments have shown that chronic physical pain leaves people with a perpetual shortage of willpower because their minds are so depleted by the struggle to ignore the pain.

We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts.

Another broad category is the control of emotions, which psychologists call affect regulation when it’s focused specifically on mood. Most commonly, we’re trying to escape from bad moods and unpleasant thoughts,

A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses.

Finally, there’s the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, persevering when you feel like quitting. In the rest of the book, we’ll discuss strategies for improving performance at work and at home, and we’ll look at techniques for improving self-control in all the other categories, too—thoughts, emotions, impulses.

Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.

When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes as well. People who are trying to quit smoking, for example, will have their best shot at succeeding if they aren’t changing other behaviors at the same time. Those who try to quit smoking while also restricting their eating or cutting back on alcohol tend to fail at all three—probably because they have too many simultaneous demands on their willpower. Research has likewise found that people who seek to control their drinking tend to fail on days when they have other demands on their self-control, as compared with days when they can devote all their willpower to limiting the booze.

A better plan is to make one resolution and stick to it. That’s challenge enough. There will be moments when that will still seem like one resolution too many,

These men apparently had less self-control because of their impaired glucose tolerance, a condition in which the body has trouble converting food into usable energy. The food gets converted into glucose, but the glucose in the bloodstream doesn’t get absorbed as it circulates. The result is often a surplus of glucose in the bloodstream, which might sound beneficial, but it’s like having plenty of firewood and no matches. The glucose remains there uselessly, rather than being converted into brain and muscle activity. If the excess glucose reaches a sufficiently high level, the condition is labeled diabetes.

Researchers testing personality have found that diabetics tend to be more impulsive and have more explosive temperaments than other people their age. They’re more likely to get distracted while working on a time-consuming task. They have more problems with alcohol abuse, anxiety, and depression. In hospitals and other institutions, diabetics throw more tantrums than other patients. In everyday life, stressful conditions seem to be harder on diabetics.

No glucose, no willpower:

When you eat, go for the slow burn. The body converts just about all sorts of food into glucose, but at different rates. Foods that are converted quickly are said to have a high glycemic index. These include starchy carbohydrates like white bread, potatoes, white rice, and plenty of offerings on snack racks and fast-food counters. Eating them produces boom-and-bust cycles, leaving you short on glucose and self-control—and too often unable to resist the body’s craving for quick hits of starch and sugar from doughnuts and candy.

To maintain steady self-control, you’re better off eating foods with a low glycemic index: most vegetables, nuts (like peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits (like apples, blueberries, and pears), cheese, fish, meat, olive oil, and other “good” fats. (These low-glycemic foods may also help keep you slim.)

When you’re sick, save your glucose for your immune system. The next time you’re preparing to drag your aching body to work, here’s something to consider: Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated. That’s because your immune system is using so much of your glucose to fight the cold that there’s not enough left for the brain. If you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office (assuming you make it there safely)? Sometimes the job has to be muddled through, but don’t trust the glucose-deprived brain for anything important. If you simply can’t miss a meeting at work, try to avoid any topics that will strain your self-control. If there’s a make-or-break project under your supervision, don’t make any irrevocable decisions. And don’t expect peak performance from others who are under the weather. If your child has a cold the day of the SAT test, reschedule it.

Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair the processing of glucose, which produces immediate consequences for self-control—and, over the long term, a higher risk of diabetes.

Not getting enough sleep has assorted bad effects on mind and body. Hidden among these is the weakening of self-control and related processes like decision making.

To get the most out of your willpower, use it to set aside enough time to sleep. You’ll behave better the next day—and sleep more easily the next night.

The first step in self-control is to set a clear goal.

Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than aimless change, like trying to diet without any idea of which foods are fattening.

By asking people about their goals and then monitoring them, the researchers identified three main consequences of conflicting goals: First, you worry a lot. The more competing demands you face, the more time you spend contemplating these demands. You’re beset by rumination: repetitive thoughts that are largely involuntary and not especially pleasant. Second, you get less done. It might seem that people who think more about their goals would also take more steps to reach them, but instead they replace action with rumination. The researchers found that people with clear, unconflicting goals tended to forge ahead and make progress, but the rest were so busy worrying that they got stuck. Third, your health suffers, physically as well as mentally. In the studies, people with conflicting goals reported fewer positive emotions, more negative emotions, and more depression and anxiety.

researchers identified three main consequences of conflicting goals: First, you worry a lot.

Second, you get less done.

Third, your health suffers, physically as well as mentally.

The more the goals conflicted, the more the people got stuck, and the more unhappy and unhealthy they became.

humans suffer when their conflicting goals leave them sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t resolve those conflicts until they decide which kinds of goals will do them the most good.

The typical person in the control group contemplated the future over four and a half years, while the typical addict’s vision of the future extended only nine days. This shortened temporal horizon has been demonstrated over and over in addicts of all kinds. When drug addicts play games of cards in the laboratory, they prefer risky strategies with quick big payoffs, even if they could make more money in the long run by settling for a series of smaller payoffs. Given a choice between getting $375 today or $1,000 a year from now, the addicts are more likely to take the quick money, and so are alcoholics and smokers.

When drug addicts play games of cards in the laboratory, they prefer risky strategies with quick big payoffs, even if they could make more money in the long run by settling for a series of smaller payoffs. Given a choice between getting $375 today or $1,000 a year from now, the addicts are more likely to take the quick money, and so are alcoholics and smokers.

A short-term perspective can make you more likely to become addicted, and then the addiction can further shrink your horizons as you focus on quick rewards. If you can manage to eliminate or moderate your addiction, your future horizon is liable to expand,

In the lab, as in life, the alcoholics and addicts and smokers are exemplars of the hazards of short-term goals. Ignoring the long term is hazardous to your health, both physically and fiscally. In another experiment with those stories about Joe and Bill, researchers found that people with high incomes tended to look further into the future than people with low incomes. That difference is partly due to necessity: If you’re scrambling to pay the rent, you don’t have the luxury of comparing 401(k) retirement plans. Yet being unable to pay the rent can also be a consequence of short-term thinking. As in Aesop’s fable, the farsighted ant is better prepared for the winter than the live-for-the-moment grasshopper.

In another experiment with those stories about Joe and Bill, researchers found that people with high incomes tended to look further into the future than people with low incomes. That difference is partly due to necessity: If you’re scrambling to pay the rent, you don’t have the luxury of comparing 401(k) retirement plans. Yet being unable to pay the rent can also be a consequence of short-term thinking.

For decades, psychologists have been debating the merits of proximal goals (which are short-term objectives) versus distal goals (which are long-term objectives). One of the classic experiments was conducted by Albert Bandura, a legendary figure in the field (one survey of citations ranked him in fourth place behind Freud, Skinner, and Piaget). He and Dale Schunk studied children between the ages of seven and ten who were having difficulty with math. The children took a course featuring self-directed learning, with many arithmetic exercises. Some of the students were told to set themselves proximal goals of trying to do at least six pages’ worth of problems in each session. Others were told to set only one distal goal of completing forty-two pages by the end of seven sessions. The pace was thus the same for both goals. A third group did not set goals, and a fourth group did not even do the exercises.

The group with the proximal goals outperformed everyone else when the program was over and competence was tested. They succeeded, apparently, because meeting these daily goals gradually built their confidence and self-efficacy. With their focus on a specific goal for each session, they learned better and faster than the others. Even though they spent less time per session, they got more done, thus progressing through all the material faster. At the end, when faced with hard problems, they persevered longer and were less likely to give up. It turned out that the distal goals were no better than having no goals at all. Only the proximal goals produced improvements in learning, self-efficacy, and performance.

“On the whole,” Franklin concluded, “tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”

“tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”

In addition to receiving the usual instructions on how to use time effectively, the students were randomly assigned among three planning conditions. One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans. The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise.

One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans. The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise. Why?

Why? Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans than a broad plan for the month without any daily details. Another drawback of daily plans is that they lack flexibility. They deprive the person of the chance to make choices along the way, so the person feels locked into a rigid and grinding sequence of tasks. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, and so the daily plans can be dem...

Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans than a broad plan for the month without any daily details. Another drawback of daily plans is that they lack flexibility. They deprive the person of the chance to make choices along the way, so the person feels locked into a rigid and grinding sequence of tasks. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, and so the daily plans can be demo...

“First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”