Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

you can understand why people of that era turned for relief to Oscar Wilde’s philosophy: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

To reach a goal, how specific should your plans be? In one carefully controlled experiment, researchers monitored college students taking part in a program to improve their skills at studying. 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. 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...

When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

After learning of the wide-ranging benefits of the willpower-strengthening exercises, Blaine nodded and said, “That makes perfect sense. You’re building discipline. Now that I think about it, when I’m training for a stunt and I have a goal, I change everything. I have self-control in every aspect of my life. I read all the time. I eat perfectly. I do good things—I visit kids in hospitals and do as much of that as I can. I have a whole different energy. Complete self-control. I eat food based on nutrition. I don’t overindulge. I don’t drink. I don’t waste time, basically. But as soon as I’m done with that, I go to the opposite extreme, where I have no self-control, and it seems to spread through everything. It seems like when I stop eating right, then I’m not able to sit down and read for the same amount of time. I can’t focus the same way. I don’t use my time the same way. I waste a lot of time. I’ll drink. I’ll do silly things. After a stunt I’ll go from 180 pounds to 230 pounds in three months.”

“You’re catching me at a time when I’m the opposite of disciplined,” he said. “I’ll eat perfectly for five days and then eat horrifically for ten days. I’ll eat perfectly for ten days and then eat like a maniac for twenty. And then, when I’m ready to train again, when I get really serious, I’ll drop about three pounds a week, and that stays consistent, so I’ll drop twelve pounds a month. So in five months, I’m completely transformed and my discipline levels are really high. It’s amazing. I have self-discipline in work, but I have none in my life sometimes.”

Hanging out with sharks, holding his breath for seventeen minutes, freezing for sixty-three hours and ending up in purgatory—all that he could handle, but the mundane daily stuff could still frustrate him. His ordeal in the ice set a world endurance record, but the feat didn’t make it into the Guinness book because he never got around to filling out the paperwork. He had the papers, but he kept procrastinating. He had fasted for forty-four days in London, but nowadays he didn’t have the willpower to avoid the food in his refrigerator. One reason, of course, was the ready availability. “I don’t think I could have succeeded on a forty-four-day-straight fast if I was in this apartment,” he said. “At the box in London, there was no way for me to be tempted because I was in that space. Which was part of my reason to make it public, because I knew that I would have to do it.” But even if he couldn’t do a seven-week fast at home, why couldn’t he simply cut back a little on the daily meals? Why did keeping up a modicum of discipline—in eating and reading and working efficiently—seem so difficult at the moment? Because he didn’t have the motivation. He had nothing to prove to the public or to himself. He and everyone else knew that he could control himself when he wanted to, and nobody was going to fault him for giving himself a break between stunts. For all his amazing willpower, he faced the same problem as the rest of us when dealing with the biggest self-control challenge of al...

“It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused,

I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body.... No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!

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. Precommitment is what Odysseus and his men used to get past the deadly songs of the Sirens.

No one, of course, can anticipate all temptations, especially today. No matter what you do to avoid physical casinos, you’re never far from virtual casinos, not to mention all the other enticements perpetually available on the Web. But the technology that creates new sins also enables new precommitment strategies. A modern Odysseus can try lashing himself to his browser with software that prevents him from hearing or seeing certain Web sites. A modern Stanley can use the Web in the same way that the explorer used the social media of his day. 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. Having piously lectured his men about the perils of drunkenness and the need to shun sexual temptations in Africa, he knew how conspicuous his own lapses would be. By creating the public persona of himself as Bula Matari, the unyielding Breaker of Rocks, he forced himself to live up to it. As a result of his oaths and his image, Jeal said, “Stanley made it impossible in advance to fail through weakness of will.”

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. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately,” that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems—a dieter cannot stop eating all food—but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too. And if you believe that the rule is sacred—a commandment from God, the unquestionable law of a higher power—then it becomes an especially bright line. You have more reason to expect your future self to respect it, and therefore your belief becomes a form of self-control: a self-fulfilling mandate. I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.

On the whole, benefits of high self-esteem accrue to the self while its costs are borne by others, who must deal with side effects like arrogance and conceit. At worst, self-esteem becomes narcissism, the self-absorbed conviction of personal superiority. 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. They tend to make very good first impressions but don’t wear well. When the psychologist Delroy Paulhus asked people in groups to rate one another, 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. God’s gift to the world can be hard to live with.

when the going gets tough, people with high self-esteem often decide they shouldn’t bother. If other people can’t appreciate how terrific they are, then it’s the other people’s problem.

Asian-Americans make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population but account for a quarter of the student body at elite universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell. They’re more likely to get a college degree than any other ethnic group, and they go on to earn salaries that are 25 percent above the American norm.

Chinese-American parents were determined to 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.”

Forget about self-esteem. Work on self-control.

Watching scenes like this, it’s hard to believe that parents traditionally considered it their duty to beat their children. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” really was standard advice, and spoiling the child was considered to be the essence of failed parenting. The Puritan Cotton Mather put it even more starkly: “Better whipt, than damned.” We’re not advocating a return to spanking, much less whipping, but we do think parents need to rediscover their roles as disciplinarians. That doesn’t mean being abusive or getting angry or imposing Draconian penalties. But it does mean taking the time to watch your child’s behavior and impose appropriate rewards or punishments.

Whether you’re giving a time-out to a toddler or revoking a teenager’s driving privileges, there are three basic facets of punishment: severity, speed, and consistency. Many people associate strict discipline with severe penalties, but that’s actually the least important facet. Researchers have found that severity seems to matter remarkably little and can even be counterproductive: Instead of encouraging virtue, harsh punishments teach the child that life is cruel and that aggression is appropriate. The speed of the punishment is much more important, as researchers have found in working with children as well as with animals. For lab rats to learn from their mistakes, the punishment generally has to occur almost immediately, preferably within a second of the misbehavior. Punishment doesn’t have to be that quick with children, but the longer the delay, the more chance that they’ll have forgotten the infraction and the mental processes that led to it.

By far the most important facet of punishment—and the most difficult one for parents—is consistency. Ideally, a parent should quickly discipline the child every single time he or she misbehaves, but in a restrained, even mild manner. A stern word or two is often enough as long as it’s done carefully and regularly. This approach can initially be more of a strain on the parents than on the child. They’re tempted to overlook or forgive some misdeed, if only because they’re tired or because it may spoil the pleasant time everyone else is having. Parents may rationalize that they want to be kind; they may even tell each other to be nice and...

It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears. —Plutarch

The fact that they ate less than the others is remarkable. The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree—and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat.

It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never. In the long run, you end up wanting less and also consuming less.

So when it comes to food, never say never. When the dessert cart arrives, don’t gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. In the spirit of Scarlett O’Hara, tell yourself: Tomorrow is another taste.

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. —Prayer of St. Augustine during his pre-saintly youth

We don’t minimize the obstacles, but we’re still bullish on the future of self-control, at both the personal and the social level. Yes, temptations are getting more sophisticated, but so are the tools for resisting them. The benefits of willpower are appreciated more clearly than ever.

people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did.

Self-control is supposedly for resisting desires, so why are the people who have more self-control not using it more often? But then an explanation emerged: These people have less need to use willpower because they’re beset by fewer temptations and inner conflicts. They’re better at arranging their lives so that they avoid problem situations.

people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.

people with high self-control consistently report less stress in their lives. They use their self-control not to get through crises but to avoid them. They give themselves enough time to finish a project; they take the car to the shop before it breaks down; they stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets. They play offense instead of defense.

This vice has often been blamed, by psychologists as well as ditherers, on people’s compulsion to do things perfectly. Supposedly these perfectionists are flooded with worry and anxiety whenever they try to start a project because they see it’s not living up to their ideals, so they get bogged down or just stop working. This makes sense in theory, and doubtless it’s true in some cases, but researchers have repeatedly failed to find a reliable link between procrastination and perfectionism. One reason psychologists were initially fooled into seeing a link might have been selection bias: A procrastinator with high standards would be likelier than a less ambitious ditherer to seek help for the problem, so perfectionists would show up more often in the offices of psychologists treating procrastinators. But there are plenty of other people with high standards who don’t procrastinate and do perfectly good work without pulling all-nighters. The trait that does seem to matter is impulsiveness, which shows up over and over in studies of procrastinators.

No matter what you want to achieve, playing offense begins by recognizing the two basic lessons from chapter 1: Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things.

Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide.

Remember, too, that what matters is the exertion, not the outcome. If you struggle with temptation and then give in, you’re still depleted because you struggled. Giving in does not replenish the willpower you have already expended.

watch yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Do things seem to bother you more than they should? Has the volume somehow been turned up on your life so that things are felt more strongly than usual? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about even simple things? Are you more than usually reluctant to make a decision or exert yourself mentally or physically?

Another simple old-fashioned way to boost your willpower is to expend a little of it on neatness. As we described in chapter 7, people exert less self-control after seeing a messy desk than after seeing a clean desk, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat and wellorganized Web site. You may not care about whether your bed is made and your desk is clean, but these environmental cues subtly influence your brain and your behavior, making it ultimately less of a strain to maintain self-discipline. Order seems to be contagious.

Watch out for other kinds of cues, too, that can influence your behavior one way or the other. Bad habits are strengthened by routine: The doughnut shop you pass on the way to work, the midafternoon cigarette break or chocolate binge, the after-work drink, the late-night bowl of ice cream while watching the same TV show in the same easy chair. Changing your routine makes it easier to break these habits. Take a different route to work. Go for a midafternoon stroll. Schedule a session at the gym after work. Eat ice cream only at the kitchen table, and switch to doing sit-ups during that TV show. Do your Web surfing on a different computer from the one where you work. To break a really entrenched bad habit like smoking, do it on vacation, when you’re far away from the people and places and events you associate with cigarettes.

anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Anthony Trollope’s writing regimen is one path to self-discipline, as we mentioned in chapter 5. But what if, unlike Trollope with his watch at his side, you’re incapable of producing 250 words every fifteen minutes? Fortunately, there’s another strategy for ordinary mortals, courtesy of Raymond Chandler, who was bewildered by writers who could churn out prose every day. Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”

Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

Monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make—and it can even work if you don’t make a plan at all. Weighing yourself every day or keeping a food diary can help you lose weight, just as tracking your purchases will help you spend less. Even a writer who doesn’t share Trollope’s ability to meet daily quota can still benefit just by noting the word count at the beginning and end of the day: The mere knowledge that you’ll have to put down a number will discourage procrastination (or the kind of busywork that might feel virtuous but doesn’t contribute to that word count). The more carefully you keep track, the better. Weighing yourself every week is good. Weighing yourself every day is better. Weighing yourself and recording it is even better.

Online games became essentially the largest experiment ever conducted into motivational strategies. By getting instant feedback from millions of online players, the game designers learned precisely which incentives work: a mix of frequent small prizes with occasional big ones. Even when players lose battles or make mistakes or die, they remain motivated because of the emphasis on rewards rather than punishment. Instead of feeling as if they’ve failed, the players think that they just haven’t succeeded yet. That’s the feeling we should aim for in the real world, and we can do it by steadily rewarding ourselves for successes along the way. Achieving a big goal, like quitting smoking for a year, deserves a big reward—at the very least, use the money you would have spent on cigarettes for some extraordinary indulgence, like a meal at a hideously expensive restaurant.

When societies modernize, the newly affluent people at first tend to gorge themselves on previously forbidden (or unaffordable) fruit, but eventually they look for a more satisfying way to live.

Too many of us tend to procrastinate even when it comes to pleasure because we succumb to the planning fallacy when we estimate “resource slack,” as behavioral economists term it. We assume we’ll magically have more free time in the future than we do today. So we say yes to a work commitment three months from now that we’d never accept if it were next week—and then discover too late that we still don’t have any time for it. Researchers term this the “Yes . . . Damn!” effect.

Inner discipline still leads to outer kindness.

despite all the foibles and failings described in this book, there’s reason to be bullish on self-control. Willpower is still evolving. Lots of us have succumbed lately to new temptations, and there will be plenty of unexpected challenges ahead. But no matter what new technologies arise, no matter how overwhelming some of the new threats seem, humans have the capacity to deal with them. Our willpower has made us the most adaptable creatures on the planet, and we’re rediscovering how to help one another use it. We’re learning, once again, that willpower is the virtue that sets our species apart, and that makes each one of us strong.