The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

by Kelly McGonigal

“I was so good, I deserve a little treat.”

Most generously, we even give ourselves credit for what we could have done, but didn’t.

Following this ridiculous line of logic, we can turn any act of indulgence into something to be proud of. (Feeling guilty about your credit card debt? Hey, at least you haven’t robbed a bank to pay it off!)

When you feel like a saint, the idea of self-indulgence doesn’t feel wrong. It feels right. Like you earned it. And if the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself.

And so when you tell yourself that exercising, saving money, or giving up smoking is the right thing to do—not something that will help you meet your goals—you’re less likely to do it consistently.

Giving in to dessert, sleeping late, carrying a credit card balance—we use them to determine whether we are being good or bad. None of these things carry the true weight of sin or virtue. When we think about our willpower challenges in moral terms, we get lost in self-judgments and lose sight of how those challenges will help us get what we want.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: VIRTUE AND VICE

Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself. You aren’t off the hook just because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your actual goal is.

Ayelet Fishbach, professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Ravi Dhar, professor at the Yale School of Management, have shown that making progress on a goal motivates people to engage in goal-sabotaging behavior. In one study, they reminded successful dieters of how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight. They then offered the dieters a thank-you gift of either an apple or a chocolate bar. Eighty-five percent of the self-congratulating dieters chose the chocolate bar over the apple, compared with only 58 percent of dieters who were not reminded of their progress. A second study found the same effect for academic goals: Students made to feel good about the amount of time they had spent studying for an exam were more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong with friends.

Progress can cause us to abandon the goal we’ve worked so hard on because it shifts the power of balance between our two competing selves.

Part of you is thinking about your long-term interests (e.g., weight loss); the other part wants immediate gratification (chocolate!). In the moment of temptation, you need your higher self to argue more loudly than the voice of self-indulgence. However, self-control success has an unintended...

The goal you’ve been suppressing with your self-control is going to become stronger, and any temptation will become more tempting. In practical terms, this means that one step forward gives you permission to take two steps back.

You were listening to the angel on your shoulder, but now the devil seems much more compelling.

Have you ever made a list of everything you need to do on a project, and then felt so good about yourself that you considered your work on that project done for the day? If so, you’re not alone.

as one of my students said, he loves productivity seminars because they make him feel so productive—never mind that nothing has been produced yet.)

Progress can be motivating, and even inspire future self-control, but only if you view your actions as evidence that you are committed to your goal.

“How much progress do you feel you have made on your goal?”

“How committed do you feel to your goal?”

simple shift in focus leads to a very different interpretation of their own actions—“I did that because I wanted to,” not “I did that, great, now I can do what I really want!”

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:TO REVOKE YOUR LICENSE, REMEMBER THE WHY

But the fuzzy math of moral licensing doesn’t limit us to taking only past actions into account. We just as easily look into the future, and credit ourselves with our planned virtuous behavior. For example, people who merely intend to exercise later are more likely to overeat at dinner.

This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today. I’ll smoke this one cigarette, but starting tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll skip the gym today, but I’m sure I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll splurge on holiday gifts, but then no more shopping for at least three months. Such optimism licenses us to indulge today—especially if we know we will have the opportunity to choose differently in the near future.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: ARE YOU BORROWING CREDIT FROM TOMORROW?

if we expected to fail at every goal we set, we’d give up before we got started. But if we use our positive expectations to justify present inaction, we might as well not have even set the goal in the first place.

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A TOMORROW JUST LIKE TODAY

Or he would use whatever he ate at breakfast to determine whether this would be a “good day” or a “bad day”—if he ate a bacon-and-egg sandwich for breakfast, it was going to be a bad day, which meant he was free to eat meat at lunch and dinner, too. Tomorrow (he told himself) would be a good day from start to finish.

Is there a rule you can live with that will help you end the kind of inner debate that talks you right out of your goals?

It has to do with our deep desire to convince ourselves that what we want isn’t so bad. As you’ll see, we are far too eager to give the object of our temptation its own moral credentials, licensing us to indulge guilt-free.

When we want permission to indulge, we’ll take any hint of virtue as a justification to give in.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: ARE YOU HANDING OUT HALOS?

Anything that lets us feel like we have done our part—so we can stop thinking about the problem—we will jump at.

We need to feel like the kind of person who wants to do the right thing. Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis. We only reward ourselves for good behavior if we believe that who we really are is the self that wants to be bad. From this point of view, every act of self-control is a punishment, and only self-indulgence is a reward.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

CHAPTER SUMMARY

when it comes to happiness, we cannot trust our brains to point us in the right direction.

When the brain recognizes an opportunity for reward, it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what to pay attention to and what to get our greedy little hands on. A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself—the feeling is more like arousal. We feel alert, awake, and captivated. We recognize the possibility of feeling good and are willing to work for that feeling. In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire. But one thing is clear: It is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure, or actual reward.

In 1927, Pavlov observed that if he rang a bell before feeding his dogs, they started to salivate as soon as they heard the bell ring, even if food was nowhere in sight.

Knutson put human participants in a brain scanner and conditioned them to expect the opportunity to win money when they saw a special symbol appear on a screen. To win the money, they’d have to press a button to get the reward. As soon as the symbol appeared, the brain’s dopamine-releasing reward center lit up, and the participants pressed the button to get their reward. When the participants actually won money, however, this area of the brain quieted down. The joy of winning was registered in different areas of the brain. Knutson had proven that dopamine is for action, not happiness.

When dopamine hijacks your attention, the mind becomes fixated on obtaining or repeating whatever triggered it. This is nature’s trick to make sure you don’t starve because you can’t be bothered to pick a berry, and that you don’t hasten human extinction because seducing a potential mate seems like too much of a hassle.

Or consider the effects of sexually graphic images on our reward system. For much of human history, you weren’t going to see a naked person posing seductively for you unless the opportunity for mating was real. Certainly a little motivation to act in this scenario would be smart if you wanted to keep your DNA in the gene pool. Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years, and we find ourselves in a world where Internet porn is always available, not to mention constant exposure to sexual images in advertisements and entertainment. The instinct to pursue every one of these sexual “opportunities” is how people end up addicted to X-rated websites—and victims of advertising campaigns that use sex to sell everything from deodorant to designer jeans.

Because we know there’s a chance we’ll have a new message, or because the very next You Tube video may be the one that makes us laugh, we keep hitting refresh, clicking the next link, and checking our devices compulsively. It’s as if our cell phones, BlackBerrys, and laptops have a direct line into our brains, giving us constant jolts of dopamine. There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology.

While not everyone who picks up an Xbox controller gets hooked, for those who are vulnerable, games can be as addictive as any drug. In 2005, a twenty-eight-year-old Korean boiler repairman, Lee Seung Seop, died from cardiovascular failure after playing the game Star-Craft for fifty hours straight. He had refused to eat or sleep, wanting only to continue. It’s impossible to hear this story and not think about Olds and Milner’s rats pressing the lever to exhaustion.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: WHAT GETS YOUR DOPAMINE NEURONS FIRING?

When dopamine is released by one promise of reward, it also makes you more susceptible to any other kind of temptation. For example, erotic images make men more likely to take financial risks, and fantasizing about winning the lottery leads people to overeat—two ways daydreaming about unattainable rewards can get you into trouble. High levels of dopamine amplify the lure of immediate gratification, while making you less concerned about long-term consequences.

In one study, participants who sampled something sweet were more likely to purchase indulgent foods such as a steak or cake, as well as items that were on sale.

Once I introduce these neuromarketing and sales tricks to my students, it ignites a hunt for evidence. They start to see how many of their willpower failures are hastened by dopamine triggers in their everyday environments. Students return the next week with stories of how their favorite stores are manipulating them, from the scented candles burning in the cookware store to the scratch-and-win discount cards handed out to shoppers at the mall. They recognize why a clothing store company has pictures of naked models on its walls, and why auctioneers open the bidding at bargain prices. Once you start looking, it’s impossible not to see the many traps that have been laid to ensnare you, your dopamine neurons, and your money.

Although we live in a world engineered to make us want, we can—just by paying attention—start to see through some of it. Knowing what’s going on won’t eliminate all your wants, but it will give you at least a fighting chance to exercise your “I won’t” power.

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: WHO’S MANIPULATING YOUR DOPAMINE NEURONS?

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: DOPAMINIZE YOUR “I WILL” POWER CHALLENGE

dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy.