Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

They’ve come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.

Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they’ll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery, and other virtues—even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than one million people around the world.

Conversely, when people were asked about their failings, a lack of self-control was at the top of the list.

You can do enough damage in a ten-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

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.

In these experiments, while depleted persons (once again) didn’t show any single telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier,

Desires intensified along with feelings. After eating a cookie, the people reported a stronger craving to eat another cookie—and they did in fact eat more cookies when given a chance. When looking at a gift-wrapped package, they felt an especially strong desire to open it.

So if you’d like some advance warning of trouble, look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings. 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.

Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.

When they eventually yielded to temptation, the German adults as well as the American college students probably blamed their lapses on some flaw in their character: I just don’t have enough willpower. But earlier in the day, or earlier in the semester, they’d all had enough willpower to resist similar temptations.

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.

“You know, humans are capable of incredible things,” she says. “If you simply decide that you’re not going to move, you just don’t move.”

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

Or are you one of the compulsive shoppers who buy when they’re feeling depressed or insecure. If so, you’re suffering from what psychologists call misregulation, the mistaken belief that buying something will regulate your mood for the better, when in fact you’ll just feel worse afterward.

The more the body suffers, the more the spirit flowers. ––David Blaine’s philosophy, borrowed from St. Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century ascetic who lived for decades atop a pillar in the Syrian desert

Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture.

Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.

He had fasted for forty-four hours 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.”

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. Therefore, it mainly affects behaviors marked by inner conflict, as when part of you wants to do something and part of you does not, like having sex with the wrong person, spending too much money, getting into a fight—or ordering another drink, and then another.

Ever since then, he has prayed for help every morning and night, kneeling down because he feels the need to humble himself. Why kneel and pray? “Because it works, as simple as that,” Clapton says, repeating a discovery that reformed hedonists have been reporting for thousands of years. Sometimes it happens instantly, as with Clapton or St. Augustine, who reported receiving a direct command from God to stop drinking, whereupon “all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”

But after looking at the data, we have no trouble believing there’s some kind of power working at 12-step meetings and religious services.

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

How did I let this happen again? —Oprah Winfrey

Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow. So they think, What the hell, I might as well enjoy myself today—and the resulting binge often puts on far more weight than the original lapse. It’s not rational, but dieters don’t even seem to be aware of how much damage these binges do,

As long as the diet wasn’t busted for the day, the dieters tracked what they were eating. But once they broke the diet and succumbed to the what-the-hell effect, they stopped counting and became even less aware than nondieters of what they were eating.

It worked the other way: Their obesity made them likely to go on diets, and their diets caused them to rely on external instead of internal cues. For what is a diet but a plan imposing external rules? Dieters learn to eat according to a plan, not to their inner feelings and cravings. Dieting means being hungry a lot of the time (even if the marketers of diets are always promising otherwise).

More precisely, dieting means learning not to eat when you are hungry, preferably by learning to ignore those feelings of hunger. You mainly try to tune out the start-eating signal, but the start and stop signals are intertwined, so you typically lose touch with the stop-eating signal, too, particularly if the diet tells you exactly how much to eat. You eat by the rules, which works fine as long as you stick to them. But once you deviate from the rules, as just about everyone does, you have nothing left to guide you. That’s why, even after downing a couple of big milkshakes, dieters and obese people not only continue but increase their eating.