Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

people with more confidence in their ability and their self-worth tended to be happier and more successful.

“Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of our time,”

the large brain did not evolve to deal with the physical environment, but rather with something even more crucial to survival: social life.

the will is to be found in connecting units across time

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

“ego depletion,” Baumeister’s term for describing people’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

If you find yourself especially bothered by frustrating events, or saddened by unpleasant thoughts, or even happier about some good news—then maybe it’s because your brain’s circuits aren’t controlling emotions as well as usual.

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.

Correlation is not causation.

No glucose, no willpower: The pattern showed up time and again as researchers tested more people in more situations.

Glucose depletion can turn the most charming companion into a monster.

The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action,

you worry a lot.

you get less done.

your health suffers,

the Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.

make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity.

the Two-Minute Rule: If something will take less than two minutes, don’t put it on a list. Get it out of the way immediately.

two main types of mental processes, automatic and controlled.

Self-awareness always seemed to involve comparing the self to these ideas of what one might, or should, or could, be.

Self-awareness evolved because it helps self-regulation

Keeping track is more than just knowing where things are. It means knowing where things are in relation to where they should be.

Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man.

Once you’ve taken the first two steps in self-control—setting a goal and monitoring your behavior—you’re confronted with a perennial question: Should you focus on how far you’ve come or how much remains to be done?

For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.

People care more about what other people know about them than about what they know about themselves.

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.

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.

He wouldn’t even be able to enjoy a vacation, he wrote to his friend, because his conscience would torment him for wasting time.

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.

They prevented themselves from being tempted at all,

By creating the public persona of himself as Bula Matari, the unyielding Breaker of Rocks, he forced himself to live up to it.

orderly habits like that can actually improve self-control in the long run by triggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy.

thinking about others can increase our own self-discipline.

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.

a correct principle of self-control: Focus on lofty thoughts

“Why” questions push the mind up to higher levels of thinking and a focus on the future. “How” questions bring the mind down to low levels of thinking and a focus on the present.

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.

it mainly affects behaviors marked by inner conflict,

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.

When neuroscientists observe people praying or meditating, they see strong activity in two parts of the brain that are also important for self-regulation and control of attention.

hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.

Ainslie found that as we approach a short-term temptation, our tendency to discount the future follows the steep curve of a hyperbola, which is why this tendency is called hyperbolic discounting.

He needs the help of “bright lines,” a term that Ainslie borrows from lawyers. These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line.

I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.

High self-esteem seems to operate like a bank of positive emotions, which furnish a general sense of well-being and can be useful when you need an extra dose of confidence to cope with misfortune, ward off depression, or bounce back from failure.

It can also lead people to ignore sensible advice as they stubbornly keep wasting time and money on hopeless causes.

Narcissists are legends in their own mind and addicted to their grandiose images. They have a deep craving to be admired by other people (but don’t feel a special need to be liked—it’s adulation they require). They expect to be treated as special beings and will turn nasty when criticized.

instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.”