The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-control and How To Master It

by Walter Mischel

proved that the ability to delay gratification is critical to living a successful and fulfilling life: self-control not only predicts higher marks in school, better social and cognitive functioning, and a greater sense of self-worth; it also helps us manage stress, pursue goals more effectively,

In his groundbreaking new book, Dr. Mischel draws on decades of compelling research and life examples to explore the nature of willpower, identifying the cognitive skills and mental mechanisms that enable it and showing how these can be applied to challenges in everyday life – from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major

At the heart of the story are two closely interacting systems within the human brain, one ‘hot’ and reflexive, the other ‘cool’ and strategic.

Mischel argues, a life with too much self-control can be as unfulfilling as one with too little, this book will also teach you when it’s time to ring the bell and enjoy that marshmallow.

ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill. In

lower body mass index and a better sense of self-worth, pursued their goals more effectively, and coped more adaptively with frustration and stress.

At midlife, those who could consistently wait (“high delay”), versus those who couldn’t (“low delay”), were characterized by distinctively different brain scans in areas linked to addictions and obesity.

The ability to delay gratification and resist temptations has been a fundamental challenge since the dawn of civilization.

Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals.

It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.

I draw on findings at the vanguard of science to try to make sense of this. At the heart of the story are two closely interacting systems within the human brain, one “hot” — emotional, reflexive, unconscious — and the other “cool” — cognitive, reflective, slower, and effortful.10 The ways in which these two systems interact in the face of strong temptations underlie how preschoolers deal with marshmallows and how willpower works, or doesn’t. What I learned changed my long-held assumptions about who we are, the nature and expressions of character, and the possibilities for self-generated change.

When the SAT scores of children with the shortest delay times (bottom third) were compared with those of children with longer delay times (top third), the overall difference in their scores was 210 points.

had a significantly lower body mass index.

Individuals who had lifelong low self-control on our measures did not have difficulty controlling their brains under most conditions of everyday life. Their distinctive impulse control problems in behavior and in their brain activity were evident only when they were faced with very attractive temptations.

self-control ability early in life is immensely important for how the rest of life plays out, and that this ability in the young child can be assessed at least roughly on a simple measure.

Successful delayers created all sorts of ways to distract themselves and to cool the conflict and stress they were experiencing. They transformed the aversive waiting situation by inventing imaginative, fun distractions that took the struggle out of willpower:

Children who just couldn’t wait when cued to think “hot” about what they wanted right now could easily wait when cued to think “cool” about it.

In short, we are less likely to delay gratification when we feel sad or bad.12 Compared with happier people, those who are chronically prone to negative emotions and depression also tend to prefer immediate but less desirable rewards over delayed, more valued rewards.

The power is not in the stimulus, however, but in how it is mentally appraised: if you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes. The tempting chocolate mousse on the restaurant dessert tray loses its allure if you imagine a cockroach just snacked on it in the kitchen. Although Shakespeare’s Hamlet personified tragically unconstructive ways to appraise experience, he made this point insightfully: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The marshmallow experiments convinced me that if people can change how they mentally represent a stimulus, they can exert self-control and escape from being victims of the hot stimuli that have come to control their behavior.

Learning and practicing some strategies for enabling self-control early in life is a lot easier than changing hot, self-destructive, automatic-response patterns established and ingrained over a lifetime.

When dealing with temptations, one way to momentarily escape the hot system is to imagine how someone else would behave.

With practice, the desired action of an implementation plan becomes initiated automatically when the relevant situational cues occur:

By forming and practicing implementation plans, you can make your hot system reflexively trigger the desired response whenever the cue occurs. Over time, a new association or habit is formed, like brushing teeth before going to bed.

Such If-Then plans, when they become automatic, take the effort out of effortful control: you can trick the hot system into reflexively and unconsciously doing the work for you. The hot system then lets you automatically act out the script you want when you need it, while your cool system rests.6 But unless you incorporate the resistance plan into the hot system, it is unlikely to be activated when you need it most.

To resist a temptation we have to cool it, distance it from the self, and make it abstract. To take the future into account, we have to heat it, make it imminent and vivid. To plan for the future, it helps to pre-live it at least briefly, to imagine the alternative possible scenarios as if they were unfolding in the present. This allows us to anticipate the consequences of our choices, letting ourselves both feel hot and think cool. And then hope for the best.

Whether or not self-control skills are used depends on a host of considerations, but how we perceive the situation and the probable consequences, our motivation and goals, and the intensity of the temptation, are especially important. This may seem obvious, but I emphasize it here because it is easily misunderstood. Willpower has been mischaracterized as something other than a “skill” because it is not always exercised consistently over time. But like all skills, self-control skill is exercised only when we are motivated to use it. The skill is stable, but if the motivation changes, so does the behavior.

If you draw a map of what triggers your hot system, you might be surprised. A map of your If-Then situation-behavior signatures can alert you to your hot spots and when and where you are prone to react in ways that you are likely to later regret. Self-monitoring to discover these hot spots can become a step toward reappraising those situations and cooling them, giving you more control over your behavior in pursuit of the goals and values that matter most to you. Even if you don’t want to cool those automatic reactions, you might still benefit from tracking them and observing their consequences.

The emotional brain’s predisposition to overvalue immediate rewards and to greatly discount the value of delayed rewards points to what we need to do if we want to take control: we have to reverse the process by cooling the present and heating the future. The successful preschoolers demonstrated how to do

Regardless of age, the core strategy for self-control is to cool the “now” and heat the “later”

increasing your psychological distance from the event, you reduce stress, cool the hot system, and can use the prefrontal cortex to reappraise what happened so that you can make sense of it, gain closure, and move on.