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

by Kelly McGonigal

Research shows that people who think they have the most willpower are actually the most likely to lose control when tempted.

Self-knowledge—especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble—is the foundation of self-control.

One thing the science of willpower makes clear is that everyone struggles in some way with temptation, addiction, distraction, and procrastination. These are not individual weaknesses that reveal our personal inadequacies—they are universal experiences and part of the human condition.

People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it.

(yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut).

Without self-awareness, the self-control system would be useless. You need to recognize when you’re making a choice that requires willpower; otherwise, the brain always defaults to what is easiest.

For example, one study asked people how many food-related decisions they made in one day. What would you say? On average, people guessed fourteen. In reality, when these same folks carefully tracked their decisions, the average was 227. That’s more than two hundred choices people were initially unaware of—and those are just the decisions related to eating. How can you control yourself if you aren’t even aware that there is something to control?

Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating.

One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control. After eleven hours, researchers could see those changes in the brain. The new meditators had increased neural connections between regions of the brain important for staying focused, ignoring distractions, and controlling impulses. Another study found that eight weeks of daily meditation practice led to increased self-awareness in everyday life, as well as increased gray matter in corresponding areas of the brain.

Meditation is not about getting rid of all your thoughts; it’s learning not to get so lost in them that you forget what your goal is. Don’t worry if your focus isn’t perfect when meditating. Just practice coming back to the breath, again and again.

The Idea: Willpower is actually three powers—I will, I won’t, and I want—that help us to be a better version of ourselves.

Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology. It’s a temporary state of both mind and body that gives you the strength and calm to override your impulses.

Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in.

Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered.

If you tell yourself that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy and willpower.

If you know you could use more sleep but you find yourself staying up late anyway, consider what you are saying “yes” to instead of sleep. This same willpower rule applies to any task you are avoiding or putting off—when you can’t find the will, you might need to find the won’t.

Because self-control also demands high levels of energy, some scientists speculate that chronic self-control—like chronic stress—can increase your chances of getting sick by diverting resources from the immune system. You heard it here first: Too much willpower can actually be bad for your health. You may be thinking: What about all that stuff in the first chapter about how important willpower is for health? Now you’re telling me self-control is going to make me sick? Well, maybe. Just like some stress is necessary for a happy and productive life, some self-control is needed. But just like living under chronic stress is unhealthy, trying to control every aspect of your thoughts, emotions, and behavior is a toxic strategy. It is too big a burden for your biology.

One of the best ways to recover from stress and the daily self-control demands of your life is relaxation. Relaxing—even for just a few minutes—increases heart rate variability by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and quieting the sympathetic nervous system. It also shifts the body into a state of repair and healing, enhancing your immune function and lowering stress hormones.

Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.

When our willpower challenges overwhelm us, it’s tempting to assign the blame to who we are: weak, lazy, willpowerless wimps. But more often than not, our brains and bodies are simply in the wrong state for self-control. When we’re in a state of chronic stress, it’s our most impulsive selves who face our willpower challenges. To succeed at our willpower challenges, we need to find the state of mind and body that puts our energy toward self-control, not self-defense. That means giving ourselves what we need to recover from stress, and making sure we have the energy to be our best selves.

Welcome to one of the most robust, if troubling, findings from the science of self-control: People who use their willpower seem to run out of it. Smokers who go without a cigarette for twenty-four hours are more likely to binge on ice cream. Drinkers who resist their favorite cocktail become physically weaker on a test of endurance. Perhaps most disturbingly, people who are on a diet are more likely to cheat on their spouse. It’s as if there’s only so much willpower to go around. Once exhausted, you are left defenseless against temptation—or at least disadvantaged.

Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day.

These observations led Baumeister to an intriguing hypothesis: that self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely, like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion.

If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength.

These athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit, and with sufficient motivation, they can transcend it.

Like a muscle, our willpower follows the rule of “Use it or lose it.” If we try to save our energy by becoming willpower couch potatoes, we will lose the strength we have. But if we try to run a willpower marathon every day, we set ourselves up for total collapse. Our challenge is to train like an intelligent athlete, pushing our limits but also pacing ourselves. And while we can find strength in our motivation when we feel weak, we can also look for ways to help our tired selves make good choices.

The students who had rejected obviously sexist or racist statements felt they had established their moral credentials. They had proven to themselves that they were not sexist or racist, but this left them vulnerable to what psychologists call moral licensing. When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad.

This is how feeling good about ourselves for past good behavior helps us justify future indulgences. When you feel like a saint, the idea of self-indulgence doesn’t feel wrong.

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.

When we free ourselves from the false promise of reward, we often find that the thing we were seeking happiness from was the main source of our misery.

In fact, neuroscientists now suspect that an underactive reward system contributes to the biological basis of depression. When scientists have watched the activity of depressed people’s brains, they’ve seen that the reward system can’t sustain activation, even in the face of immediate reward. There’s a little burst of activity, but not enough to create the full feeling of “I want” and “I’m willing to work for it.” This produces the loss of desire and motivation that many people who are depressed experience.

Whenever Denise, who was in charge of new project development for a high-tech start-up, had a difficult day at work, she rewarded herself with a bottle of wine and a rendezvous with her favorite real estate website. She clicked through the endless and mind-numbing options of living rooms, kitchens, and backyards. Not limiting herself to her own neighborhood, she would type in faraway cities to see what was for sale in Portland, Raleigh, or Miami. After an hour or so, she felt not so much relaxed as numbed (not to mention a little depressed about her own home’s square footage and decidedly non-granite countertops).

Studies show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief.

Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain.

Not surprisingly, people who drank too much the previous night felt worse in the morning—headaches, nausea, fatigue. But their misery wasn’t limited to hangovers. Many also felt guilty and ashamed. That’s where things get disturbing. The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. The guilt was driving them back to the bottle.

First coined by dieting researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman, the what-the-hell effect describes a cycle of indulgence, regret, and greater indulgence.

Most people are surprised by this finding. Common sense says that the message “Everyone indulges sometimes; don’t be too hard on yourself” will only give dieters permission to eat more. And yet getting rid of guilt kept the women from overindulging in the taste test. We may think that guilt motivates us to correct our mistakes, but it’s just one more way that feeling bad leads to giving in.

If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong. Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control.

Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

We all have the tendency to believe self-doubt and self-criticism, but listening to this voice never gets us closer to our goals. Instead, try on the point of view of a mentor or good friend who believes in you, wants the best for you, and will encourag e you when you feel discouraged.

Unfortunately, the promise of change—like the promise of reward and the promise of relief—rarely delivers what we’re expecting. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on. The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful fantasies (“I lost five pounds, and I still have a crappy job!”).

Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.”

Optimism can make us motivated, but a dash of pessimism can help us succeed. Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution.

Planning for failure in this way is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt. When that moment of possible willpower failure hits, you will be ready to put your plan into action.

Behavioral economists call this the problem of bounded rationality—we’re rational until we aren’t.

This leads to bounded willpower—we have self-control until we need it.

When our modern selves contemplate immediate versus future rewards, the brain processes these two options very differently. The immediate reward triggers the older, more primitive reward system and its dopamine-induced desire. Future rewards don’t interest this reward system so much. Their value is encoded by the more recently evolved prefrontal cortex. To delay gratification, the prefrontal cortex has to cool off the promise of reward. It’s not an impossible feat—after all, that’s what the prefrontal cortex is there for. But it has to fight a feeling that’s been known to make rats run across electrified grids and men blow their life savings on a slot machine. In other words, it’s not easy.

Although the study taught the researchers a lot about how four-year-olds delay gratification, it also provided a shockingly good way to predict a child’s future. How long a four-year-old waited in the marshmallow test predicted that child’s academic and social success ten years later. The kids who waited the longest were more popular, had higher GPAs, and were better able to handle stress. They also had higher SAT scores and performed better on a neuropsychological test of prefrontal cortex function. Being able to wait fifteen minutes for two marshmallows was the perfect measure of something far more important: How well could a child handle temporary discomfort to accomplish a long-term goal? And did the child know how to turn the mind away from the promise of immediate reward?

This is a favorite story of behavioral economists who believe that the best strategy for self-control is, essentially, to burn your ships.

It is one of the most puzzling but predictable mental errors humans make: We think about our future selves like different people. We often idealize them, expecting our future selves to do what our present selves cannot manage. Sometimes we mistreat them, burdening them with the consequences of our present selves’ decisions. Sometimes we simply misunderstand them, failing to realize that they will have the same thoughts and feelings as our present selves. However we think of our future selves, rarely do we see them as fully us.