Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

By midcentury, though, people’s character armor was different. Wheelis and his colleagues found that people achieved insight more quickly than in Freud’s day, but then the therapy often stalled and failed.

Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with “Oh, my grandmother knew that.” Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory,

some managed to wait out the whole fifteen minutes for the bigger reward. The ones who succeeded tended to do so by distracting themselves,

Self-control also proved to be a better predictor of college grades than the student’s IQ or SAT score.

Not surprisingly, some of these differences were correlated with intelligence and social class and race—but all these results remained significant even when those factors were taken into account. In a follow-up study, the same researchers looked at brothers and sisters from the same families so that they could compare children who grew up in similar homes. Again, over and over, the sibling with the lower self-control during childhood fared worse during adulthood. They ended up sicker, poorer, and were more likely to spend time in prison.

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

Experts surmise that the smartest nonhuman primates can mentally project perhaps twenty minutes into the future—long enough to let the alpha male eat, but not long enough for much planning beyond dinner.

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

The students who’d been allowed to eat chocolate chip cookies and candy typically worked on the puzzles for about twenty minutes, as did a control group of students who were also hungry but hadn’t been offered food of any kind. The sorely tempted radish eaters, though, gave up in just eight minutes—a

No control for glucose or hunger?

People can sometimes overcome mental fatigue, but Baumeister found that if they had used up energy by exerting willpower (or by making decisions, another form of ego depletion that we’ll discuss later), they would eventually succumb.

A covert agent could claim not to speak Russian, but he’d take longer to answer correctly when looking at Russian words for colors.

Testing for skills via interference

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

We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts. Sometimes it’s a losing struggle, whether you’re fruitlessly trying to ignore something serious (“Out, damn’d spot!”) or

HSP ADHD and overstimuation on willpower

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.

The glucose itself doesn’t enter the brain,

Seriously?

One study found below-average glucose levels in 90 percent of the juvenile delinquents recently taken into custody. Other studies reported that people with hypoglycemia were more likely to be convicted of a wide variety of offenses:

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

In the lab, students who have just performed a self-control task eat more sweet snacks but not other (salty) snacks. Even just expecting to have to exert self-control seems to make people hungry for sweet foods.

My chockolate and work explained

There has also been a successful series of experiments carried out with thousands of teenagers in correctional institutions. After the institutions replaced some of the sugary foods and refined carbohydrates with fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, there was a sharp decline in escape attempts, violence, and other problems.

Junk food & violence

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.

In the lab, as in life, the alcoholics and addicts and smokers are exemplars of the hazards of short-term goals.

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.

With a monthly plan, you can make adjustments. If a delay arises one day, your plan is still intact.

“Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.”

Allen, stoicism

The to-do list was not supposed to have items like “Birthday gift for Mom” or “Do taxes.” It had to specify the very next action, like “Drive to jewelry store” or “Call accountant.”

Getting things done

Allen says, “your ability to make a creative mess is your most productive state. You want to be able to throw ideas all over the place, but you need to be able to start with a clear deck. One mess at a time is all you can handle. Two messes at a time, you’re screwed.

Creativity vs productivity

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.

All paths not taken

Every single time you make a choice, you’re stepping into an existential void.”

Sure enough, the shoppers who’d already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems.

the results showed that it was much less depleting to decide for a casual acquaintance than for oneself. Even though it might seem difficult to choose a sofa for an acquaintance whose taste you don’t know, that difficulty is apparently offset by not caring a great deal about the outcome.

This form of procrastination helps explain why so many people put off the biggest choice of their lives: picking a mate.

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.

Men who saw photos of hot women shifted toward getting an immediate reward instead of waiting for a larger payoff in the future.

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.

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. Programs like Head Start boosted intellectual performance while the students were enrolled, but the gains seemed to fade pretty quickly once they left. By and large, there didn’t seem to be much you could do to increase the intelligence you were born with.

Iq and wp

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

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.

Even the most critical biographers of Stanley hailed his bursts of literary productivity on deadline. After finishing that awful trek through the Ituri Forest and returning to civilization, he quickly produced an international bestseller, In Darkest Africa. By working from six in the morning until eleven at night, he wrote the two-volume, nine-hundred-page work in just fifty days—binge writing at its most extreme.

After all, 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.

Stanley, chronically insecure about his workhouse roots, apparently invented the line afterward to make himself sound dignified. He’d always admired the stiff-upper-lip credo of British gentleman explorers, and he sometimes tried to mimic their sanqfroid by affecting a dispassionate air toward his adventures.

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.

High-school

Did students’ self-esteem lead to good grades, or did good grades lead to self-esteem? It turned out that grades in tenth grade predicted self-esteem in twelfth grade, but self-esteem in tenth grade failed to predict grades in twelfth grade. Thus, it seemed, the grades came first, and the self-esteem came afterward.

Their self-esteem generally does not lead to better performance at school or at work, and it does not help prevent cigarette smoking, alcohol and drug use, or early sexual behavior.

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.

happiness as a resource

the narcissists seemed to be everyone’s favorite person, but only during the first few meetings. After a few months, they usually slipped to the bottom of the rankings.

That marshmallow experiment caused some researchers to conclude that controlling attention is what matters, not building willpower, but we disagree. Yes, controlling attention is important. But you need willpower to control attention.

Willpower & attention

While parents and educators have been promoting the everybody-gets-a-trophy philosophy, children have been seeking games with more demanding standards. Players need concentration to fight off Ork after Ork; they need patience to mine for virtual gold; they need thriftiness to save up for a new sword or helmet.

Games

Peer pressure helps explain why people in Europe weigh less than Americans: They follow different social norms, like eating only at mealtimes instead of snacking throughout the day.

The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now.

It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never.