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For every willpower mistake, we’ll conduct a kind of autopsy: When we give in to temptation or put off what we know we should do, what leads to our downfall?
How can we turn the knowledge of how we fail into strategies for success?
“I will” power challenge: What is something that you would like to do more of, or stop putting off, because you know that doing it will improve the quality of your life? • “I won’t” power challenge: What is the “stickiest” habit in your life? What would you like to give up or do less of because it’s undermining your health, happiness, or success? • “I want” power challenge: What is the most important long-term goal you’d like to focus your energy on? What immediate “want” is most likely to distract you or tempt you away from this goal?
People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it.
Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has argued that the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain—and therefore, you—toward doing “the harder thing.”
The most famous case of prefrontal cortex brain damage is the story of Phineas Gage.
Gage and his men were using explosives to clear a path through Vermont for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad.
blast sent a three-foot, seven-inch tamping iron straight into Gage’s skull. It pierced his left cheek, blew through his prefrontal cortex, and landed thirty yards behind him, carrying some of Gage’s gray matter with it.
Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind.
What does the impulsive version of you want? What does the wiser version of you want? Some
Neuroeconomists—scientists who study what the brain does when we make decisions—have discovered that the self-control system and our survival instincts don’t always conflict. In some cases, they cooperate to help us make good decisions.
We also possess self-awareness: the ability to realize what we are doing as we do it, and understand why we are doing it.
WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:TRACK YOUR WILLPOWER CHOICES
Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do. Some parts of the brain grow denser, packing in more and more gray matter like a muscle bulking up from exercise.
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.
WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:A FIVE-MINUTE BRAIN-TRAINING MEDITATION
1. Sit still and stay put
2. Turn your attention to the breath.
3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders.
CHAPTER SUMMARY 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.
You might ask yourself, “What was I thinking!” But a better question might be, “What was my body doing?” Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology.
The perception of an internal conflict triggers changes in the brain and body that help you slow down and control your impulses.
To do this, your prefrontal cortex will communicate the need for self-control to lower brain regions that regulate your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and other automatic functions.
It means that your heart is getting signals from both branches of your autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic nervous system, which revs the body into action, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes relaxation and healing in the body.
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.
Anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can interfere with the physiology of self-control, and by extension, sabotage your willpower. Anxiety, anger, depression, and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control.
You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That’s ten to fifteen seconds per breath—slower than you normally breathe, but not difficult with a little bit of practice and patience. Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode.
Research shows that regular practice of this technique can make you more resilient to stress and build your willpower reserve.
Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered.
The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other.
It hardly ever occurs to us that we don’t need to become better people, but to become better rested.
Sleep researchers even have a cute nickname for this state: “mild prefrontal dysfunction.”
So often we believe that stress is the only way to get things done, and we even look for ways to increase stress—such as waiting until the last minute, or criticizing ourselves for being lazy or out of control—to motivate ourselves.
We were a nation overwhelmed, and it’s not surprising that rates of drinking, smoking, and drug use increased for months following the attacks of 9/11. The same pattern emerged during the height of the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009.
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.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day.
Other studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower.
1924 by Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill. Hill had proposed that exercise fatigue might be caused not by muscle failure, but by an overprotective monitor in the brain that wanted to prevent exhaustion.
“Fatigue should no longer be considered a physical event but rather a sensation or emotion.”
1. How will you benefit from succeeding at this challenge?
2. Who else will benefit if you succeed at this challenge?
3. Imagine that this challenge will get easier for you over time if you are willing to do what is difficult now.
When it comes to right and wrong, most of us are not striving for moral perfection. We just want to feel good enough—which then gives us permission to do whatever we want.
Moral licensing doesn’t just give us permission to do something bad; it also lets us off the hook when we’re asked to do something good. For example, people who first remember a time when they acted generously give 60 percent less money to a charitable request than people who have not just recalled a past good deed. In a business simulation, managers of a manufacturing plant are less likely to take costly measures to reduce the plant’s pollution if they have recently recalled a time when they acted ethically.
Simply put: Whenever we have conflicting desires, being good gives us permission to be a little bit bad.
The worst part of moral licensing is not just its questionable logic; the problem is how it tricks us into acting against our best interests. It convinces us that self-sabotaging behavior—whether breaking your diet, blowing your budget, or sneaking a smoke—is a “treat.” This is lunacy, but it’s an incredibly powerful trick of a mind that turns your wants into shoulds.
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.
The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and remember the why.
Baruch College, City University of New York. The researchers were intrigued by reports that when McDonald’s added healthier items to its menu, sales of Big Macs skyrocketed.
