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

by Kelly McGonigal

We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.

professors—Robin Tanner at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Kurt Carlson at Duke University—who were intrigued by the mistakes consumers make in predicting how much they will use exercise equipment, 90 percent of which is destined to collect dust in the basement.

Tanner at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Kurt Carlson at Duke University—who were intrigued by the mistakes consumers make in predicting how much they will use exercise equipment,

When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself.

Congratulations: You have just met, and fallen for, the halo effect. This form of moral licensing looks for any reason to say “yes” to temptation.

The study found that people who actually chose to purchase an eco-friendly product were more likely to then cheat on a test that paid them for each correct answer. They were also more likely to steal extra money out of the envelope they were told to collect their payout from. Somehow the virtue of green shopping justified the sins of lying and stealing.

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.

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

In 2001, Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson published the definitive experiment demonstrating dopamine’s role in anticipating, but not experiencing, reward.

What they were feeling when the reward system lit up was anticipation, not pleasure.

The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: We search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like—well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit,” looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough.

The main symptoms reflect dopamine’s role in motivating action: slow or impaired movement, depression, and occasionally complete catatonia. The standard treatment for Parkinson’s disease is a two-drug combo: L-dopa, which helps the brain make dopamine, and a dopamine agonist, which stimulates dopamine receptors in the brain to mimic the action of dopamine.

The result: You feel anxious as you anticipate your object of desire. The need to get what you want starts to feel like a life-or-death emergency, a matter of survival.

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.

The dangerous drug combination of cocaine, Ecstasy, oxycodone, and methadone led to a near-fatal drop in blood pressure and reduced oxygen to his brain. Although he was resuscitated and eventually released from intensive care, the temporary oxygen deprivation would prove to have profound consequences. Adam lost all of his cravings for drugs and alcohol.

psychiatrists at Columbia University who treated Adam discovered the answer in scans of his brain. The oxygen deprivation during his drug overdose had left Adam with lesions in the brain’s reward system. Adam’s case, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, is extraordinary because of the dramatic change from addict to absolute loss of “I want.” But there are many other cases of people who lose desire and the ability to expect happiness. Psychologists call it anhedonia—literally, “without pleasure.” People with anhedonia describe life as a series of habits with no expectation of satisfaction. They

If we are to have any self-control, we need to separate the real rewards that give our lives meaning from the false rewards that keep us distracted and addicted.

The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them.

the goal to feel better trumps the goal of self-control.

According to terror-management theory, human beings are—naturally—terrified when we think about our own deaths.

Welcome to one of the biggest threats to willpower worldwide: the “what-the-hell effect.” 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.

Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and these are not the same thing.

But we humans have all sorts of mental tricks for convincing ourselves that the time to resist temptation is tomorrow—and so we of the gigantic prefrontal cortices find ourselves giving in again and again to immediate gratification.

Economists call this delay discounting—the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you. Even small delays can dramatically lower the perceived value.

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

We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming. This leads to bounded willpower—we have self-control until we need it.

The ships—Spanish galleons and caravels—were made entirely of wood and waterproofed with an extremely flammable pitch. Cortés lit the first torch, and as his men destroyed the ships, they burned to the water line and sank.

Schelling believed that to reach our goals, we must limit our options. He called this precommitment.

Marc Rosen and Robert Rosenheck, psychiatrists at Yale University School of Medicine, have created a money-management program for recovering addicts that both Cortés and Schelling would approve of. It’s called ATM—short for Advisor-Teller Money Manager Intervention. The program uses a combination of rewards and precommitments to make it more appealing to spend wisely, and more difficult to spend foolishly.

It is one of the most puzzling but predictable mental errors humans make: We think about our future selves like different people.

High future-self continuity seems to propel people to be the best version of themselves now.

We like to believe that our choices are immune to the influence of others, and we pride ourselves on our independence and free will. But research from the fields of psychology, marketing, and medicine reveals that our individual choices are powerfully shaped by what other people think, want, and do—and what we think they want us to do.

Even if you don’t like carrot cake yourself, if you know that it’s my favorite (true), your brain will start anticipating a reward. When our mirror neurons encode the promise of reward in others, we long for a treat ourselves.

The first is unintentional mimicry.

The second way our social brains can lead us astray is the contagion of emotion.

self-control side effect of this automatic mind reading: It activates those very same goals in us. Psychologists call this goal contagion. Research shows that it is surprisingly easy to catch a person’s goals in a way that changes your own behavior. For

This is what epidemiologists call simple contagion.

Social epidemics—like the spread of obesity or smoking—follow a pattern of complex contagion

This is an example of what psychologists call social proof. When the rest of our tribe does something, we tend to think it’s a smart thing to do.

Social proof can strengthen self-control when we believe that doing the right thing (or the harder thing) is the norm.

But if the reports were honest, this study suggests a new strategy for discouraging unhealthy behavior: Just convince people it’s the habit of a group they would never want to be a member of.

For example, college students overestimate the prevalence of academic cheating among their peers. The best predictor of whether a student cheats is whether he believes other students cheat, not the severity of penalties or whether he thinks he will be caught. When students believe that their classmates cheat, a relatively honest class can become a class full of students who text their friends for answers during an exam (yes, I have caught a student trying this).

Once your dopamine neurons are firing, feeling bad intensifies your desire and makes you more likely to give in.

Anytime we feel excluded or disrespected, we are at greater risk for giving in to our worst impulses.

The latest research on anxiety, depression, dieting, and addiction all confirm: “I won’t” power fails miserably when it’s applied to the inner world of thoughts and feelings. As we enter that inner world, we will find we need a new definition of self-control—one that makes room for letting go of control.

ironic rebound. You push a thought away, and—BAM!—it boomerangs back.

The operator relies on the brain’s system of self-control and—like all forms of effortful self-control—requires a good deal of mental resources and energy.

Unlike the operator, the monitor runs automatically and without much mental effort. The monitor is more closely related to the brain’s automatic threat-detection system.

Several long-term studies have found that yo-yo dieting raises blood pressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels, suppresses the immune system, and increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and all-cause mortality. (And, if you recall, dieting also increases your chances of cheating on your spouse—though you won’t see any of these side effects listed on your Jenny Craig contract.)