The American Psychological Association says that Americans name “lack of willpower” as the main reason they can't achieve what they want in life. Most would jump at the chance to have more willpower, yet few of us realize that willpower isn't a character trait or a virtue but rather an innate instinct that's wired into our brains.
The Willpower Instinct by Stanford University psychology professor Kelly McGonigal explains how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep, not enough exercise, and other external factors. Utilizing scientific research, McGonigal provides a framework for how to increase our willpower and control our behaviors, appetites, and emotions. Each of this book’s sections describes various reasons for willpower failures and proposes methods to circumvent those failures.
You need willpower whether you want to start a business, train for a marathon, overcome procrastination, give up sugar, eat more vegetables, write a novel, break up with your social media accounts, or achieve any other major goal. Even if you're not looking to start a new habit or break an old one, your ability to activate your willpower on an everyday basis has a direct impact on your health, relationships, career, and financial security—and also how you feel about yourself.
We’d all like to believe that we have control over our own behavior, but the truth is that accessing our willpower is often a struggle. Often we’re at odds with ourselves: We want to achieve our long-term goals, but we also want to do what feels good right now. We might desire the long-term happiness of a healthy, slim physique, but we also want the 30-second happiness of devouring a silky lemon cupcake. We know we can’t have both, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting both.
In human brains, the prefrontal cortex is tasked with the important job of self-control. Some people are born with a larger, better developed prefrontal cortex than others, which makes a difference in their behaviors. When people with a larger prefrontal cortex think of saying “yes” to a second helping of dessert, their brains remind them that this is a poor idea, and they say “no” instead.
The rest of us have to contend with having what scientists call “one brain but two minds.” One mind caters to immediate gratification. The other mind delays gratification in the interest of achieving long-term goals. Our prefrontal cortex struggles to keep us focused on the long game, but when we are tired, distracted, stressed, or even mildly intoxicated, we tend to give in to immediate gratification.
We can’t alter the fact that we have conflicting desires, but we can learn strategies to minimize those conflicts. The foundation of gaining more willpower is understanding your own self-control traps and pitfalls. Gaining self-knowledge about how and why you fail at self-control helps you create strategies to succeed.
An important key to achieving greater self-control is paying greater attention to the hundreds of tiny choices we make each day. The choices we make while we’re distracted are usually founded on impulse, not deliberate thinking. Instead of operating on autopilot, we need to train our minds to wake up to the small daily decisions that have a direct impact on whether or not we achieve our long-term goals. For example, if you want to get fit, do you start the day by putting on your bedroom slippers or your exercise shoes?
In one study, people were asked how many food-related decisions they make in one day. Most people guessed an average of 14, but when they actually recorded each food-related decision they made in a day, they found it was more like 210. Instead of making small decisions by default, we need to cultivate our ability to pay attention.
No matter what your age, your brain is trainable, and that means you can improve your willpower. With training, you can learn to keep your big-picture goals at the forefront of your mind, which will motivate you to avoid getting derailed by fleeting desires. (In the moment, you may think you want to blow off some steam by lying on the couch and streaming your favorite show, but since you've decided that your big goal is to write a novel, that should take precedence in your mind.)
One brain-training method that's particularly effective is meditation. Even a five-minute daily practice of focusing on your breathing and quieting your mind can increase your impulse control. The goal is not to eliminate your thoughts; the goal is to keep your thoughts from ruling you. The training comes from the simple act of bringing your wandering thoughts back to focus on your breathing.
Studies show that people who meditate regularly actually have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Meditation increases blood flow to that part of the brain, which makes it grow and get more efficient at processing. As a result, it becomes easier to handle distractions and make good decisions.
Self-control is not just a matter of making up your mind to do something—the body has to partner up with the brain to make it happen. If you're struggling to restrain your impulses or force yourself to work on a certain task, you may need to adjust your physiology.
Any time you're lured into satisfying a craving or impulse—one that's contrary to your long-term goals—you must turn off your brain's innate fight-or-flight response and turn on its pause-and-plan response. In fight-or-flight mode, your brain and body are wired to act instinctively. There's no thinking involved—the brain's message to the body is simply, "Act now!" In pause-and-plan mode, your brain slows down for deliberate, careful analysis. It tells the body to wait, not act, and engages its higher-order thinking to weigh and balance options. With slow, deliberate thinking, you have a much better chance of making decisions that support your long-term goals.
Another physiological factor has a huge impact on our ability to access willpower, and that's heart rate variability (HRV). HRV unlocks your ability to access the pause-and-plan response instead of defaulting to fight-or-flight.
What exactly is HRV? When a doctor tells you your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, she doesn’t necessarily mean it’s beating once every second. She’s giving you an average. In actuality, there may be 0.9 seconds between two beats, then 1.1 seconds between the next two beats. Greater variability is highly desirable—the higher the variability, the more relaxed and adaptable your body is to stress. That means your brain isn’t in a panicky rush, and it can activate your pause-and-plan response.
The prime state for accessing willpower is when your heart rate slows down but variability goes up. This makes you feel steady and focused, and puts your pause-and-plan response in charge. People with higher heart rate variability are better at delaying gratification, dealing with stress, ignoring distractions, and exercising self-control.
So how do we increase our heart rate variability? Most importantly we need to diminish our stress. The enemy of HRV—and willpower also—are stressors like lack of sleep, poor diet, bad air quality, chronic illness, and lack of exercise. Even an argument with your spouse can negatively affect your HRV. Fortunately, we have a few physiological "hacks" to fall back on during stressful times:
Every time you utilize your willpower to make yourself do something that’s not fun—or to avoid some short-term pleasure you want to indulge in—it's like doing a bicep curl with a heavy dumbbell. You can only do so many reps before your arm muscles fatigue completely, and you can't lift the weight one more time. Your willpower reserve is limited, too. When your brain utilizes the pause-and-plan response, it gets weary. Once the willpower "muscle" is depleted, even your best intentions can backslide.
It's not surprising that for most people, self-control is highest in the morning and diminishes as the day progresses. Everyday mental challenges—even simple decision-making like choosing between 100 brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store—can exhaust that precious resource.
Although willpower ebbs and flows, it’s still possible to push past willpower exhaustion, just like a marathoner ignores her first wave of fatigue. One way to do that is to keep in mind your goal's "want" power. Think about what your willpower goal is, and why that goal matters to you. Those reasons can serve as your motivation to stay on track.
If you have tasks you want to accomplish that you never seem to get around to, see if you can schedule them for your peak willpower hours. For example, if you want to start a side business, work on your business plan first thing in the morning before you go to your job or run errands, and your willpower starts to wane.
Too often we frame our willpower struggles in terms of morality. We give ourselves credit for our perceived willpower successes, and we beat ourselves up for our perceived failures. But applying the labels of virtue and vice to our self-control choices sets us up to fall into several willpower-failure traps:
1. One common trap is "moral licensing," which means telling ourselves that being good gives us moral permission to be bad. We take a few steps in the right direction—perhaps we stop smoking or drinking alcohol for several days. Then we tell ourselves that because we've been good, we deserve a little "reward." By viewing indulgence as a treat for good behavior, we're sabotaging what we really want—our bigger, long-term goals. The classic example is a justification we’ve all heard (or said) at one time: "I just ran six miles, so I deserve to have a burger and fries for dinner."
2. A similar trap is giving ourselves permission to indulge as a reward for making a bit of progress toward our goals. Instead of thinking, "I've lost 10 pounds since January, so I'm going to eat this chocolate cake," we should be thinking, “I've lost 10 pounds since January, so I'm going to work on losing three more this month.” Progress should be our motivation for forging ahead, not for indulging.
3. Another common willpower trap is caused by the “halo effect.” This occurs when something that appears to be virtuous is paired with something that doesn’t, and somehow the combination still seems virtuous. It explains why people who shop for others at Christmastime almost always buy a few things for themselves. It's also why people who buy chocolate to support a charity feel perfectly justified in eating that chocolate, even if they wouldn't normally buy and eat chocolate. We tend to see our "virtuous" choices as canceling out our "bad" choices.
4. We can also fall into the "too much optimism" trap, in which we give ourselves credit for behaviors we believe we'll do in the future. It's our way of telling ourselves small, comforting white lies, like “I'll spend money at the mall today, but then I won't go shopping for the next two weeks,” or “I'll go hang out with my friends today, but then I'll definitely get to work on this project tomorrow.”
Part of the reason we deceive ourselves this way is because we wrongly predict that our circumstances will be different in the future than they are today. We can't fathom that tomorrow will most likely be much like today. We'll be faced with the same impulses, desires, and temptations. Instead of paying yourself today for the work you will supposedly do tomorrow, create a future-based framework that actually serves your long-term goals.
For example, if you're trying to give up your habit of snacking on candy bars, reframe the way you think of candy bars in the present and future. Don't ask yourself: "Should I have a candy bar this afternoon?" Instead ask: "Should I have a candy bar every afternoon for the next month?"
Your goal is to eliminate the mental crutch of believing that tomorrow will be different somehow—that tomorrow you won't “need” to have a candy bar like you do right now.
Ever since the days when humans were hunters and gatherers, we’ve been ruled by desires and cravings. Back in the Stone Age, if a cavewoman saw some beautiful ripe berries growing in a field, her brain would create a flush of desire, which would prompt her to walk over to the berry bush, pick the berries, and eat them. That helped to ensure her survival. Desire is an evolutionary adaptation designed to keep us from starving to death.
A neurotransmitter called dopamine creates our desires. When the brain senses the opportunity for a reward—like when it sees a patch of perfectly ripe berries—it releases dopamine, which causes a form of arousal. It tells the rest of the brain and the body to get ready for a reward that is coming soon. Dopamine makes us feel alert and excited. It directs us to take action.
Today, our brains release dopamine in response to all kinds of stimulating sights, sounds, smells, and tastes—like when we smell food cooking, see a sign in a shop window proclaiming "50 percent off," gaze at beautiful photos in a fashion magazine, or chat with a flirtatious co-worker.
Taking part in most of these dopamine-fueled activities is completely harmless, and they can make our lives fun and interesting. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally indulging in a freshly baked apple pie, buying something frivolous at the mall, or flipping through beautiful magazines. But too often dopamine can lead to addiction since it makes the brain crave a reward, but it never satisfies that craving. Dopamine tells us to keep wanting more, making us susceptible to temptations of all kinds. If we let dopamine rule our decision-making, we fail at self-control.
It's worth considering which of your willpower failures are related to dopamine traps found in your everyday environment. If you find yourself heading to the nearest chic furniture or home-goods store whenever you're bored, it might be because your brain knows it's a reliable place to get a dopamine rush. This doesn’t mean you should never let yourself browse the beautifully displayed housewares. Life is better with rewards, and our brains’ reward system keeps life interesting and fun. The key is to figure out the difference between our real rewards—those that actually make us happy and give our life meaning—and false rewards that only serve to distract us (and wind up making us feel bad).
For example, let’s say you turn to TikTok when you’re bored or unhappy. Maybe watching a few funny dog videos makes you laugh, and you quickly feel better. But do you turn it off after enjoying 10 minutes of laughter, or do you keep watching until two hours have passed, the videos don’t seem funny any more, and you feel like you’ve wasted a beautiful afternoon?
It's human nature to be filled with desire, and if we have long-term goals we want to achieve, we need to spend a lot of time and energy reining in that desire. But willpower has a tendency to sag when our lives aren't going perfectly. After a terrible day at the office and an argument with your boss, accessing your willpower can seem impossible. When we're stressed, we are far more vulnerable to temptation.
Nothing weakens our willpower more than stress. It makes us give in to short-term impulses without any thought for the future. By reducing our daily stress, we can put ourselves in the best position to stop giving in and start having more control over our actions.
According to the American Psychological Association, the best ways to relieve stress are exercising or playing a sport, praying, reading, listening to music, getting a massage, meditating or doing yoga, spending time outdoors, or spending time with friends or family. These methods actually boost the "happy chemicals" in your brain and diminish the stress response.
The worst ways to relieve stress are the strategies that promise a reward but don't actually deliver it—smoking, drinking, gambling, eating, shopping, playing video games, binge-watching movies or TV, and surfing the Internet.
We often create our own stress as we sabotage our good intentions with ill-chosen behaviors. For example, we vow that we'll stop stretching our credit limits in online shopping sprees, but then we get an irresistible email from a favorite store offering 40 percent off if we shop before midnight. So we give in and buy that gadget we've been wanting. We feel great about our purchase for two seconds, but then we feel terrible because we’ve committed yet another willpower failure. To soothe our bad feelings, we check out a bunch of other shopping sites to see what's on sale, and we buy more stuff we don't need.
This cycle is known as the "what-the-hell" effect. It’s a way of telling yourself: "I already blew my diet, so I might as well eat this entire chocolate cake." To break the cycle, you must stop believing that one small setback means you're a dismal failure. When you criticize yourself this way, you wind up giving yourself an excuse to indulge more. Your brain feels the sting of your self-hate, and it wants to find immediate comfort, which drives you straight toward whatever temptation soothes you—food, alcohol, cigarettes, shopping, and so on. It's a downward spiral that's hard to stop.
Researchers believe that instead of beating ourselves up, we should actually forgive ourselves for giving in. Encouraging words like "don't be so hard on yourself" can stop a full-on binge before it gets started.
Humans have amazingly complex brains, but all too often, we use them for rationalizing, not for making good decisions. Our brains did not evolve to respond to future rewards; they evolved to respond to what's good right now. As a result, we’re experts at inventing mental tricks to convince ourselves that right now matters a lot more than tomorrow or next month.
This is what economists call “delay discounting”—we’re hooked on instant gratification and not willing to wait for future gratification. The longer we have to wait for something good, the less we want it.
When you're trying to stay focused on your long-term goals, you need to stop discounting the future—or at least lower the rate at which you discount it. You have to wrap your mind around the idea that the future is just as important as the present—maybe even more so. Here's a two-step plan that can help:
1) Imagine that a long-term goal that you've been working toward is already yours. Maybe you've finished writing your novel and sent it off to be published, or you've completely given up alcohol, or you've been attending yoga class steadily for a year. Picture your future self enjoying the benefits of having achieved your willpower goal.
2) Ask yourself if you're willing to give up that image of “happy-future-you” for the fleeting impulse that's tempting you right now.
We tend to think of our future selves as different people than we are today—like strangers or sometimes even like superheroes. The extent to which we see our future selves as separate from our present selves varies from person to person, but we all do it to some degree.
For some, the future self is basically a stranger—and why would anyone invest their energies in a stranger? If you’re disconnected in this way from your future self, you will be more interested in immediate gratification and satisfying fleeting impulses. For others, the present and future self are more closely paired. These people tend to have a stronger future orientation. They save more for retirement, take better care of their health, and invest in long-lasting relationships.
Immediate gratification is alluring, so make it hard to access. Give your willpower a window of opportunity by making temptation a little more difficult to achieve.
For example, if you have to walk downstairs and down the hall to stick your hand in the candy jar, you'll be less likely to indulge than if you merely have to reach across your desk. Similarly, if you don’t carry your credit cards when you go downtown, you won’t return home with purchases you can’t afford. And you’ll be less likely to procrastinate on writing your novel if you invest in software programs like MacFreedom, Anti-Social, or ProcrasDonate, which limit your access to email, social networks, or even the entire Internet.
We think our behaviors are under our own self-control, but we're social animals, so we’re also subject to social control. No matter how independent we may think we are, we're influenced by the people around us. Studies show that obesity spreads through social networks—if your close friend becomes obese, your odds of becoming obese increase by 170%.
“Everyone else is doing it” is one of the strongest marketing messages in the world (even though most of us believe it doesn’t apply to us). We may brag about our independent thinking, but the truth is that the human social instinct is overpowering—and our brains are wired to find a way to fit in, which means doing what others do and liking what others like.
Fortunately the social influence also works in a positive direction. If your close friend quits smoking, you're much more likely to quit smoking, too. Willpower—and the lack of it—is contagious. Hang out with the right people, and your willpower will increase; hang out with the wrong people, and you'll give in to temptation more frequently.
It may sound like humans are merely lemmings, but our strong social instinct can be an advantage. Think about whether there’s someone in your social circle who has struggled with a willpower challenge and succeeded. It might serve you well to spend more time in their company.
Similarly, if you know someone who is currently working hard at a willpower challenge, do your best to support them. Your encouragement could help them succeed—and it might help you succeed as well.
It’s tough to be under the influence of others, but this can also help us boost our self-control. If you imagine yourself being evaluated by others—especially people you admire—you may decide to make less impulsive choices. For example, if you know your eight-year-old wants you to quit smoking, imagine his disappointed face when he catches you sneaking a cigarette in the backyard. Or imagine how proud he will be to celebrate with you when you reach your one-year no-smoking anniversary.
Willpower works great for controlling our outward behaviors, but it can't control our inner thoughts and desires. If you try to suppress your thoughts or cravings, you'll be faced with "ironic rebound," a syndrome in which you'll become obsessed with the thing you're trying not to think about.
This concept is especially important for dieters who forbid themselves certain foods. Telling yourself that you can never eat carbohydrates is a sure way to spend your time day-dreaming about loaves of bread.
It's much more effective to graciously acknowledge a thought or a craving without giving in to it. Let your desires wander freely through your mind while realizing you don't have to act on them. If the brain is allowed to express a thought or feeling that it was previously trying to suppress, it stops obsessing over it.
Try this four-step plan the next time you’re craving chocolate, video games, or more time scrolling through Facebook:
Ask people if they'd like to have more willpower, and you'll almost always hear a resounding yes. It’s a critical commodity for anyone with goals to attain. You need willpower whether you want to start a business, train for a marathon, overcome procrastination, reduce your stress, give up sugar, eat more vegetables, write a novel, break up with your social media accounts, or achieve any other major goal.
Even if you're not looking to start a new habit or break an old one, your ability to activate your willpower on an everyday basis has a direct impact on your health, relationships, career, and financial security—and also how you feel about yourself.
The Willpower Instinct by Stanford University psychology professor Kelly McGonigal explains how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep, not enough exercise, and other external factors. Utilizing scientific research, McGonigal provides a framework for how to increase our willpower and access strategies for developing more self-control.
(Shortform note: The author uses the words “willpower” and “self-control” interchangeably, so this summary does the same.)
To get the most from this summary, choose a specific willpower challenge that you'd like to tackle. We'll refer to it as your Personal Willpower Challenge. Throughout this summary, you’ll find willpower exercises that you can apply to your specific challenge.
As you choose a challenge, keep in mind that self-control consists of three separate functions—I will, I won't, and I want. Your challenge will fall into one of these categories:
We’d all like to believe that we have control over our emotions, appetites, and behaviors, but the truth is that accessing our willpower is often a struggle. We’re at odds with ourselves—we want to achieve our long-term goals, but we also want to do what feels good right now.
Traditional self-help strategies for gaining more self-control are not effective for most people. For example, goal-setting seems like a great strategy, but identifying what we want to achieve is only the tip of the iceberg. Each of us can name dozens of things that we know we should do, but we still don't do them.
Instead, take some time to figure out what causes you to give in to temptation and give up on progressing toward your goals. The foundation of all willpower is understanding your own self-control traps and pitfalls. Self-knowledge about how and why you fail at willpower helps you create strategies to succeed.
Each of this book’s chapters describes various reasons for willpower failures and proposes methods to circumvent those failures. Not all of these reasons will apply to you, and not all of these methods will work for you. Make yourself the subject of your own science experiment, collect your data, and draw your own conclusions about what works best.
(Shortform note: If you want to skip the background information and go directly to strategies for increasing your willpower, look for the sections denoted as “Willpower Hacks.”)
Most people think of willpower or self-control as the ability to resist temptation. When we say, "I have no willpower" we mean we can't say no to ourselves. We believe we can't eat just one potato chip; we will eat the entire bag. We believe we can't pull ourselves away from the couch and Netflix even when we know it’s time to go to the gym.
Saying "no" to our impulses is just half of the willpower equation. We need to be able to say "no" to some things (perhaps that third glass of wine or second cupcake) and "yes" to others (maybe working out, going to bed earlier, or eating more broccoli). Whether it's a "yes" or a "no," willpower usually involves choosing the more difficult of two options. Accessing your willpower means opting for the harder choice instead of giving in to what seems alluring in the present moment.
You might think the need for willpower is a modern invention, but even our Stone Age ancestors required it. Not only were they tasked with finding food and avoiding large predators, they also had to cultivate the skills to live successfully in tight-knit tribes. Since they weren’t well equipped to survive on their own, they had to be good neighbors, parents, and mates—which meant they required willpower to control their impulses. Possessing strong self-control allowed them to share food, cooperate, and collaborate with each other for hunting and protection. It also helped them choose suitable mates for reproduction.
As time went on, human societies became larger and more complex, and self-control became even more important. Our brains had to develop a more sophisticated self-control system to adapt to more complicated social circumstances. The brain’s prefrontal cortex began to evolve, growing larger and more closely connected to other brain regions.
Today, humans have a larger prefrontal cortex—relative to our brain size—than any other species. It controls much of what we pay attention to, think about, feel, and do.
As with other human traits, some people have a bigger, better developed prefrontal cortex than others, which makes a difference in their behaviors. When people with a larger prefrontal cortex think of saying yes to a second helping of dessert, their brains remind them that this is a bad idea, and they say no instead. When they want to go to the beach instead of studying for final exams, their prefrontal cortex reminds them that only A-plus grades will get them into medical school.
It may not seem fair, but people with larger prefrontal cortexes usually have more willpower, and as a result, they lead easier lives.
The research: Studies have shown that self-control is more important than IQ scores in predicting academic success. And the benefits don't stop there: People with a larger prefrontal cortex tend to make more money, go further in their careers, have longer lasting relationships, and so on.
The prefrontal cortex has different regions that perform the three functions of willpower. You considered these three functions—I will, I won't, and I want—when you chose your Personal Willpower Challenge. Each region plays a role in protecting us from our impulsive desires. The left side handles "I will." The right side handles "I won't." The lower middle portion keeps a record of long-term goals and desires. The faster and more efficiently each region functions, the more reliable your willpower will be.
To illustrate how critical the prefrontal cortex is, consider the story of Phineas Gage, an American railroad foreman in 1848. Gage was involved in a terrible explosion that shattered his skull and blew out parts of his brain, but somehow he survived. Doctors patched up his head, and in a few months the outer skin healed. But because Gage's prefrontal cortex was missing, his personality was completely altered. Before the accident, he was quiet, gentle, respectful, and “possessing an iron will.” After the accident, he was mean, impulsive, and behaved “with animal propensities.”
Most of us will never suffer this kind of disability, but we’ve all put ourselves in situations where our prefrontal cortexes are compromised. If we’re tired, drunk, or even just distracted, the prefrontal cortex can't do its job efficiently. That means we won't be able to access our willpower, and we’ll be more likely to give in to impulse.
Some scientists say we have “one brain but two minds.” One mind caters to immediate gratification. The other mind delays gratification in the interest of long-term goals. We’re conflicted because we want two competing rewards—the 30-second happiness of eating a cupcake and the longer term happiness of a healthy, trim physique. We know we can’t have both, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting both.
So if our brains are pulled between opposing interests, what can we do about it? Start paying attention to tiny decisions—especially those you make without even realizing it.
Most of the millions of choices you make every day occur on autopilot, but if you want to improve your willpower, you need to choose smarter. Learn to pay attention when you’re making a choice that’s related to willpower. The goal of shining a spotlight on these small decisions is avoiding blind distraction. The choices we make while distracted are almost always founded on impulse, not long-term goals.
Marketers learned long ago to take advantage of our tendency for distraction. They figured out they could tempt consumers with "impulse buys" by installing candy displays near the cash registers and putting up loud, garish merchandise exhibits. When we're distracted, we just grab a candy bar off the rack and throw it into our cart. We're not making a decision; we're answering to an impulse.
The research: When asked how many food-related decisions people make in one day, most people guessed an average of 14. But when they actually recorded each food-related decision they made in a day, they found it was more like 210. This shows how many of our decisions are “unconscious” decisions.
Example: People who work at home often notice they feel urges to snack more often than when they work in an office or public space. At home, the kitchen is right there in your peripheral vision all day, so it's easy to gravitate toward the refrigerator without considering whether or not you're hungry.
We need to train our minds to be self-aware and recognize when we’re making choices. That means realizing what we're doing at the moment we're doing it.
No matter what your age, your brain is trainable. For example, if you play memory games, your short-term memory improves. Play the piano and your brain gets faster at reading music. You can also train your brain to get better at self-awareness, which gives you more willpower. One training method that's particularly effective is meditation.
Meditation—a practice of quieting the mind and focusing on the act of breathing—is like a shortcut to willpower. When you develop a meditation practice and stick with it, your brain gets better at impulse control. And it only takes five minutes a day.
The research: Studies show that people who meditate regularly actually have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Meditation increases blood flow to that part of the brain, which makes it grow and get more efficient at processing. A larger prefrontal cortex makes it easier to handle distractions and make good decisions.
If you've tried meditation before and believe you're “bad” at it, now’s the time to try again. Consider it an experiment in building willpower. People who believe they are hopeless at meditation are the ones who benefit the most from it. Here are simple instructions for a five-minute daily meditation practice:
Pro tips: When you're meditating, the goal is not to eliminate your thoughts; the goal is to not let your thoughts rule you. As your mind starts wandering and you lose your focus on your breath, simply bring your focus back. Your brain's training occurs in the practice of coming back to the breath—not necessarily in staying there.
After a few weeks, you may want to increase your meditation time to 10 or 15 minutes a day, but if it starts to feel like a burden or obligation, go back to five minutes. Some people find it’s easier to pick a certain time of day for meditation, like first thing in the morning or right before bed, while others prefer to keep their schedules flexible. See what works best for you.
Since increasing your willpower requires that you understand your own traps and pitfalls, think about the Personal Willpower Challenge you've decided to tackle. Imagine you're facing your challenge.
What makes this particular challenge hard for you to attain? Name the biggest obstacle that might lure you away from accomplishing your goal.
You’ve chosen this Personal Willpower Challenge because you know what you desire in the long term. But our brains want right-now rewards, too, which may be at odds with our long-term goals. Ask yourself, “What does my most impulsive self want?” Name two or three of the things that you seek for immediate gratification.
It’s important to get to know the part of you that’s seeking immediate gratification over long-term goals, so consider giving a name to your impulse-oriented self. What would you call him or her? (Examples: The Procrastinator? The Candy Fiend?)
Part of empowering our willpower instinct is training our minds to recognize when we’re making choices related to our big goals.
Make a list of three choices or actions that you make in a typical day that affect your Personal Willpower Challenge either positively or negatively. (For example, if your goal is to work out more often, ask yourself what choices you make related to working out. Do you wear your sneakers to work so you don't have to change shoes? Do you check your email just before yoga class starts, then wind up missing the class because you're responding to a client?)
Next, analyze your data. Can you think of two more daily choices you could start making to support your goal?
The brain has a lot of control over willpower, but it doesn’t do all the heavy lifting. Your body also “feels” when your willpower is being challenged. The urge that pulls you toward a cigarette, a pizza parlor, a cocktail bar, or an Internet shopping deal is both physiological and psychological.
But there's good news: In the moment of temptation, you can find the power to resist by adjusting your physiology. To do that, you need to turn off your brain's fight-or-flight response, and turn on its pause-and-plan response.
Thanks to our evolution, our bodies respond to external threats with a fight-or-flight response. Back in our cave-dwelling days, if we spotted a giant human-eating predator, we had to act fast. The amygdala—the part of our brain that responds to alarms—would send emergency signals to the rest of the brain and all parts of the body. The adrenal glands would release stress hormones. The liver would flood energy into the bloodstream. The heart and lungs would start pumping faster to supply the body with extra oxygen. And so on.
Meanwhile, the rest of the brain—everything except the amygdala—would basically shut down so the body could do its important life-saving work without interference. All higher functions were dismantled. All energy was diverted to fast, impulsive action.
The fight-or-flight response allows your brain and body to act instinctively in crucial life-or-death moments. It’s brilliant engineering, but the problem is that we’re not living in the Stone Age any more, so most of us don't often encounter life-or-death situations. But we still have a brain that's always looking for exciting stimuli and always ready to jump into action.
External Versus Internal Threats
The kind of “emergency” our brain is likely to encounter in today’s world looks something like this: You walk by a French bakery window and smell freshly baked Napoleons. Your brain responds to that stimulus by setting off an alarm. It sends dopamine neurotransmitters to alert other parts of your brain that something exciting is happening. Reasoning and analysis functions shut down because your brain says you must act immediately. Your body responds to the drama occurring in your brain: You feel a shot of energy run through you. Your blood sugar drops in anticipation of the sugary reward to come. Your heart rate increases.
Our fight-or-flight response was designed to prepare us for external threats, and although this French pastry may be a threat to your diet, it's certainly not a threat to your life. But your brain has gone into overdrive and is sending multiple messages to your body that you must act—purchase and eat these delicious treats!—right now.
We often view temptation as something that exists outside of us. We talk about sinful desserts, enticing cocktails, or seductive click-bait ads, but the real temptation lies within our own brains—our desires, impulses, and dopamine transmitters.
The opposite of the fight-or-flight mode is the "pause-and-plan" response, named by Suzanne Segerstrom, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. While the fight-or-flight response takes on external threats, the pause-and-plan response handles internal threats.
As discussed earlier, when fight-or-flight is activated, the brain and body prepare for immediate action. Higher-order functions shut down so impulse can reign. But when pause-and-plan is activated, the opposite occurs. The brain slows down for deliberate, careful analysis. It engages higher-order thinking to weigh and balance your options.
The pause-and-plan response is essentially your way of protecting you from yourself. It’s a sophisticated monitoring system that checks for warning signs and then acts accordingly. For example, if pause-and-plan senses you’re getting angry and might start yelling at your boss, it alerts the prefrontal cortex to get busy restraining your anger. Or at lunchtime, instead of grabbing whatever food is within arm’s length, pause-and-plan lets you carefully consider your options: Should I have a double cheeseburger or a kale smoothie?
Obviously when your brain slows down your decision-making, it’s much easier to control your impulses.
While the fight-or-flight response starts in the reptilian amygdala—the oldest part of the brain—the pause-and-plan response comes from parts of the brain that evolved much later. Pause-and-plan connects the prefrontal cortex, where self-control is located, to other regions that handle body sensations, thoughts, and emotions.
The fight-or-flight response floods your body with energy, whereas the pause-and-plan response floods your brain—specifically the prefrontal cortex, the self-control center—with energy. It slows down your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. It tells your muscles to relax, not tense up.
So if we all have this pause-and-plan response, why doesn't it kick in more often? Why don't we utilize pause-and-plan to increase our willpower and make better decisions all the time? Because turning it on isn’t as simple as flicking a switch. There’s another big factor involved, and it’s heart rate variability, or HRV—the variance in time between each heartbeat.
To understand heart rate variability, you need to know that even when you're sitting still, your heart rate isn't completely steady. When a doctor tells you your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, she doesn’t necessarily mean it’s beating once every second. She’s giving you an average. In actuality, there may be 0.9 seconds between two beats, then 1.1 seconds between the next two beats. Greater variability is highly desirable—the higher the variability, the more relaxed and adaptable your body is to stress. That means your brain isn’t in a panicky rush, and it can activate your pause-and-plan response instead of defaulting to fight-or-flight.
Two branches of the nervous system control heart rate variability—the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. When you're under stress—as in "Oh no, the house is on fire"—your heart rate goes up and stays up. That's the sympathetic nervous system taking over, and its weapon of choice is the fight-or-flight mechanism (very helpful in a house fire).
The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, controls your body’s relaxation response. It handles tortoise-speed jobs like digestion, growing your hair, or slowing down your heart.
Your heart is constantly receiving mixed messages—it’s being told to beat slower by your parasympathetic system and beat faster by your sympathetic system—which causes the fluctuation of heart rate variability. When you have high heart rate variability, it means that your body is responsive to both sets of inputs. It’s an indicator that your nervous system is balanced and your brain is much more likely to invoke the pause-and-plan response.
However, your nervous system’s balance is easily disrupted by stress, poor sleep, an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, and other lifestyle factors. When that happens, the variation between heartbeats is low, and your brain and body are on constant lookout for threats. Your fight-or-flight response wins out over pause-and-plan even if there are no true external threats.
Given all this, it’s no surprise that heart rate variability is considered the best physiological index of willpower. The prime state for accessing willpower is when your heart rate slows but its variability goes up. This makes you feel steady and focused, and your pause-and-plan response takes charge. People with higher heart rate variability are better at delaying gratification, dealing with stress, ignoring distractions, and exercising self-control.
The research: Heart rate variability can be used to predict who will or won't be able to resist temptation. For example, when researchers placed a cocktail in front of a recovering alcoholic, they could predict with high accuracy the subject’s ability to resist drinking it based on his or her heart rate variability. (High HRV = strong resistance to temptation.)
Heart rate variability can change according to environmental factors. The food you eat, the air you breathe, and the stress you deal with on a daily basis all affect your heart rate variability. Chronic pain and illnesses negatively impact HRV. Poor sleep and lack of exercise don’t help, either.
Some of these conditions may not be in your control. If you live in a smoggy city, you may not be able to pack up and move. But there are proactive steps you can take to increase your HRV. Practicing the five-minute meditation you learned in the last chapter is one way. Sleeping more, eating less junk food, and generally taking better care of yourself can also help. If you’d like to track your own heart rate variability, you can invest in a high-tech heart rate variability monitor.
The research: A 2010 study by the American Psychological Association found that 75 percent of Americans say they experience high levels of stress. Numerous studies have shown that significant national events, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 or the 2008 mortgage crisis, have a direct negative impact on heart rate variability. They're also catalysts for increases in alcohol and drug use and other addictions.
In short, when we get stressed, our efforts at self-improvement fly out the window. Fortunately, even in the most stressful times we have a few physiological “willpower hacks” to fall back on.
If you need to boost your willpower immediately, slow down your breathing. This activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, shifting your mindset from stress to self-control. Your goal is to breathe only four to six times per minute, which takes some practice (most of us typically breathe about 12 times per minute).
To do it, don't hold your breath—that increases stress—but rather slow down your exhalation. Focus on exhaling fully and deeply. Any decrease in your normal number of breaths per minute will increase your heart rate variability (and increase your willpower reserve).
It takes only one or two minutes of slower breathing to decrease stress and boost willpower. If you want help learning how to do this, download an app like Breath Pacer or Breathe Easy.
Exercise is another quick-fix for failing willpower. Exercise has an immediate positive effect on willpower as well as long-term impacts. Even small amounts of exercise (like five minutes of walking) increase willpower and reduce cravings. Long-term, habitual exercise increases both gray matter and white matter in the brain—making your brain bigger and more efficient—and enhances heart rate variability.
The research: A 2010 study showed that five-minute exercise sessions were actually more effective at stress reduction and mood-boosting than hour-long sessions.
For many non-exercisers, the key is to understand that exercise recharges your energy and willpower. Unlike many other activities, it does not drain it. What type of exercise you do doesn't seem to matter. Any kind of movement is good—swimming, yoga, dancing, hiking, gardening, or even just playing with your dog. As long as you aren't being sedentary, you're building up your willpower reserve. Outdoor exercise (a.k.a. “green exercise”) has particularly good benefits for mood-boosting and increasing self-control.
Feeling fatigued depletes your willpower and makes it difficult to focus your attention, control your emotions, and ignore cravings. Being sleep deprived is roughly equivalent to being mildly intoxicated—your prefrontal cortex is impaired, and you can’t make good choices. Many Americans are chronically sleep deprived, which leads to willpower failure, which then cascades into depression, shame, or guilt.
The research: According to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, in 2008 Americans got an average two hours less sleep each night than they did in 1960. Some scientists correlate lack of sleep with a propensity for obesity—people who sleep fewer than six hours per night tend to have a higher obesity rate. (Again, lack of sleep interferes with how the brain and body use energy.)
A few studies suggest that what matters the most is the number of hours you are awake. In other words, if you've had a bad night's sleep, break up your day with a nap in the middle, and your brain will function better.
One way to recharge your willpower batteries is to relax. Kicking back for even a few minutes increases heart rate variability and shifts the body into fix-it mode. Stress hormones decrease and the immune system works better. (Athletes who rest and relax after intense workouts recover more quickly, and it's because they’re reducing stress hormones.)
What does it mean to relax? It's not mellowing out with a glass of cabernet. Instead, you want to slow down your breathing, release tension from your muscles, and “turn off” your brain. Try this simple relaxation exercise:
Working toward stronger willpower is good, but it’s possible to overdo it. Your goal should not be to achieve 100 percent willpower 100 percent of the time. When your brain exercises willpower, it focuses your attention, diminishes stress, and pushes away cravings, but that's a lot of work. People who push themselves to have too much self-control can actually make themselves sick.
Living under the auspices of unrelenting self-control is like living under chronic stress—it’s too much for the brain and body to handle. Sometimes it's important to spend your brain energy elsewhere. In other words, be selective about when to utilize willpower.
Science informs us that stress depletes our self-control. Stress also blinds us. When we’re stressed, we become distracted and stop attending closely to the choices we’re making. Pay attention to any stressing situations that come up in the next day or two and see what you can learn.
Make a list of three situations or times when you felt worried, overworked, tired, angry, lonely, hungry, or distracted.
In any of these situations, did you need or want to exercise willpower? If so, did your willpower feel depleted or diminished?
When that stressful situation occurred, did you give in to a craving or impulse, or did you maintain your self-control? Describe your actions as they relate to willpower or lack of it.
Every time you use your willpower, it's a lot like doing a bicep curl with a heavy dumbbell. You can only do so many reps before your arm muscles fatigue completely and you can't lift the weight one more time. Your willpower reserve is just like that. The willpower "muscle" has limited strength, and once that's depleted, your best intentions can backslide.
The research: Studies have shown that if a smoker gives up cigarettes for 24 hours, he or she is more likely to binge on candy. People who are on a restrictive diet are more likely to cheat on their spouses. And people who try to engage in too many self-improvement projects at once—say, giving up sugar and sticking to a budget at the same time—are less successful than those who choose just one project.
Any time you have to make yourself do something difficult—whether it's making a presentation at work or choosing between 50 brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store, you're using up willpower. If your brain is utilizing the pause-and-plan response, it’s going to get weary.
It’s not surprising that for most people, self-control is highest in the morning and diminishes as the day progresses. Our daily mental challenges use up that precious resource.
But that doesn't mean we're doomed to fail at exercising willpower. It’s possible to find ways to overcome willpower exhaustion. Just like we train the muscles in our body, we can train our "willpower muscle" to become stronger so our stamina lasts longer.
Part of the reason our self-control system tires out easily is that the brain likes to hoard its energy. The brain is dependent on a steady stream of glucose to function, and it's constantly checking the bloodstream to make sure there's enough glucose floating around. If it detects a slight shortage, it may decide to stop spending energy and start hoarding it. It cuts out any activities that are energy-expensive, and one of the first to go is self-control. Suddenly you feel like you can't focus your attention, can't modulate your emotions, and can't resist temptation. You're a victim of the "energy budget" model of how willpower works.
When your glucose level drops, your brain does the easiest thing: It chooses short-term thinking and impulsive acts. And while it's true that a shot of candy or a sweet drink can give you a brief willpower and mood-brightening boost, it won't last long.
The research: Tempting as it may be to keep your brain energized with a big bowl of M&Ms, studies show you’ll have more consistent energy if you fuel your body with a low-glycemic diet, which keeps your blood sugar steady over longer periods of time. Try a hard-boiled egg or a few bites of cheese instead.
If willpower depletes so easily, what can you do to restore it? Challenge your willpower muscles with a non-taxing exercise regime designed to train your brain for self-control: Start by committing to doing something every day just for the practice of building a habit. It could be as simple as walking around the block before you have coffee in the morning, or doing 10 pushups before you go to bed at night. Since it’s something you aren’t used to doing, your brain will have to make an effort to remember to do it and then carry it out. Small challenges are best because you can strengthen your willpower without exhausting it.
Devote yourself fully to any small, consistent act of willpower, and you'll be surprised to find you have more self-control in other areas of your life. By taking on tiny, low-stakes willpower challenges, the brain gets in the habit of pausing before acting. You’re developing the habit of paying attention to your actions and choosing to do the harder thing, not the automatic thing.
Pausing before acting is key to strengthening your willpower. Another way to build up your willpower muscles is to keep a written (or digital) record of something you don't usually pay attention to. You could track your daily spending, or your snacking habits, or how much time you spend texting your friends. The key is to be consistent about tracking it. You’re developing your ability to pay attention to small actions and not behave absent-mindedly.
Inevitably, our willpower gets overtaxed (and some days are a lot more taxing than others). But you don’t have to trust your brain every time it tells you that your willpower reserve is empty. You may have more self-control remaining than you realize.
The research: Endurance athletes know that it's possible to push past the point of exhaustion. Exercise and sports science studies have shown that the brain actually deceives the body into quitting by telling it “you're completely worn out and you're in pain—you better stop now before you die.” The brain sends this message long before the body actually needs to quit. The body feels fatigued, but this is really just a ruse invented by the brain for self-protection—it’s trying to hoard its energy supply.
Many scientists believe the same may be true for willpower. Consider this scenario: You've had a long, hard day. All you want at 7 o’clock is a glass of wine (or three) and a delicious, calorie-rich dinner. You consider soda water and a veggie plate instead, but your willpower is depleted, so this option doesn’t sound appealing. Before you give in to the big splurge, understand that it still may be possible to muster up your self-control.
The research: Stanford University psychologists have discovered that some people simply do not believe in feelings of mental fatigue when they experience them. They push on. In a lab setting, most people’s self-control begins to deteriorate after making a series of willpower choices. But not everybody. Some subjects simply refuse to give in, much like the marathoner who refuses to stop when she feels exhausted.
Research is still in preliminary stages, but it appears it is possible that we have more willpower than we think we do, or that at least it’s possible to push past willpower exhaustion.
When you’re in need of willpower, you can access your reasoning skills to help you stay on track. For example, think about your Personal Willpower Challenge, then focus on the motivation behind that challenge. Why is it so important to succeed at this challenge?
When you're feeling weak, see if you can summon up that motivation in your mind—and then cling to it to maintain your self-control. Here are a few possibilities that may motivate you:
Your willpower doesn’t maintain a constant, steady state throughout the day. Gaining knowledge about the highs and lows of your willpower stamina helps you to plan your day around achieving long-term goals. If there are things you’d like to accomplish that you never seem to have time or energy for, work on them during your highest willpower hours.
Pay attention to when you feel like your willpower is strong and when you feel like you want to just give in and give up. Do you notice any certain time of day when you’re more capable of pushing yourself to accomplish tasks that aren’t especially fun? Record the exact hours of the day.
On the flip side, do you notice that you lose willpower stamina at any other time of day? Make a note of those hours.
You can train your willpower muscles by cultivating a small new habit. Instead of tackling some huge, difficult willpower goal, decide to control one small thing that you don't ordinarily control. (This exercise teaches your brain to break out of autopilot mode and to do a harder thing when it’s accustomed to doing an easier thing.)
Make a list of two small new habits you could cultivate. It can be something inconsequential like making your bed as soon as you get out of it, using your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, or eliminating the slang interjection “like” from your conversation (as in “I want to stop, but like, I can't.”). Then try injecting those new behaviors into your day.
Too often we frame our willpower struggles in terms of morality. We give ourselves credit for our perceived willpower successes, and we beat ourselves up for our perceived failures. But applying the labels of virtue and vice to our self-control choices sets us up to fall into four common willpower-failure traps:
Moral licensing is a way of telling ourselves that being "good" gives us moral permission to be "bad." Sometimes if we just convince ourselves that we’re making progress toward our Personal Willpower Challenge, we'll fall off the wagon. We take a few steps in the right direction—for example, we might stop smoking or drinking alcohol for several days—and then we tell ourselves we deserve a little "treat." But by choosing indulgence as a reward for good behavior, we're actually sabotaging what we really want—our bigger, long-term goal.
The research: It seems illogical, but many of us indulge in this kind of fuzzy thinking. Studies have shown that when people merely considered donating money to charity—without actually doing it—it made them more likely to buy something for themselves. Chronic dieters often find that exercise actually derails their diet programs because after they work out for an hour, they believe they deserve a food reward.
The research: When subjects in studies are asked to talk about a recent time when they resisted temptation, they will describe an incident of “good behavior.” When they finish talking, researchers give them the opportunity to indulge in something that’s contrary to their long-term goals. They typically seize the opportunity, and researchers believe it’s because they’re feeling good about themselves. Describing their “good behavior” leads them toward moral licensing.
But when subjects are asked to describe why they recently resisted temptation, they don't usually follow up their response by indulging. Remembering the “why” is key to self-control. People remember they resisted temptation because they wanted to—and that makes them continue to want to.
If you want to lose weight, breaking your diet by eating five donuts—after a week of noshing on hard-boiled eggs and carrot sticks—isn't a reward. It's a derailment. Telling ourselves we've been good and we deserve a treat for good behavior may not matter in some scenarios, but when we apply this thinking to our big willpower goals, it's sabotage.
Moral licensing deceives us into making poor decisions and acting against our best interests. You set your own willpower challenge, right? So why would you act against your own interests? To avoid the perils of moral licensing, your brain needs to carefully separate true moral dilemmas from merely challenging problems. When we view our willpower challenges in moral terms, we fall into the moral licensing trap. But when we realize that our Personal Willpower Challenges are not moral issues—they're merely personal goals—then it’s illogical to reward ourselves for "being good" or punish ourselves for "being bad."
By definition, a willpower challenge involves two competing interests: Your long-term goals versus your short-term impulses. When your willpower is firing on all four cylinders, you'll act in the interest of your long-term goals. But after making a certain amount of progress, you might feel a little too proud of yourself and decide to give yourself a break.
Example: If you want to start your own at-home business, you might spend two days setting up a home office. You feel empowered by this achievement—look at how much you've accomplished!—so now you binge-watch your favorite show instead of working on your business plan. Even writing a to-do list can backfire on you—you may feel so much relief at having transcribed all your tasks into one list that you don't actually do any of them.
Instead of patting yourself on the back for your perceived progress, you need to use that progress as motivation. Examine your achievements so far—setting up that office, writing that to-do list—and realize they're evidence of how much your goals matter to you. That should motivate you to forge ahead, not take a break.
Start paying attention to times when you give yourself permission to procrastinate, or when you use good behavior to justify self-indulgence. The key question is not “How much progress have I made toward my goal?” The key question is “How committed am I toward my goal?” If you focus on commitment instead of progress, you'll keep the progress going.
In addition to giving ourselves credit for past behavior, we also tend to give ourselves credit for future behavior—which is even less logical. For example, if we tell ourselves we are going to exercise after work, we may grant ourselves a calorie-rich lunch. We reward ourselves on the mere potential of future good behavior.
This is the optimism trap. We tell ourselves little white lies: “I'll spend money at the mall today, but I won't go shopping for the next two weeks,” or “I'll eat this dessert today, but there will be no more dessert for the next month.”
The research: Psychologists were intrigued by the idea that when McDonald's added several healthy-eating options to its menu, sales of Big Macs went through the roof. Studies showed that consumers’ brains got a cheap thrill just knowing that they had the potential to act on their goal of eating healthier—even though they didn't follow through with it. By telling themselves they would order a salad as soon as they got to McDonald's, their brains received all the pleasure signals of believing they were satisfying their long-term goals. With that out of the way, they were free to satisfy more immediate impulses for juicy burgers and greasy fries.
Why is this type of self-deception so rampant? One hypothesis is that consumers were confident that the next time they visited McDonald’s, they would order the healthy options, so it was fine to go with the unhealthy choices this time.
You might think that you would never be this foolish in your decision-making, but when these studies were replicated, the subjects who believed they had the most self-control were those who consistently ordered the menu's most unhealthy foods.
Part of the reason we can deceive ourselves this way is because we wrongly predict that our circumstances will be different in the future than they are today. We can't fathom that most likely tomorrow will be a lot like today—with the same impulses, desires, and temptations.
Instead of paying yourself today for the work you will supposedly do tomorrow, create a future-based framework for yourself that actually serves your long-term goals.
If your Personal Willpower Challenge is to give up candy bars, reframe the way you think of candy bars in the present and future. Don't ask: "Should I have a candy bar this afternoon?" Instead ask: "Should I have a candy bar every afternoon for the next month?"
Similarly, if your challenge is to have better work habits, don't ask: "Should I watch Netflix this afternoon instead of working on that project?" Instead ask: "Should I watch Netflix every afternoon for the next year?"
Example: Jeff wants to be a vegetarian but he loves eating meat and can't seem to stop himself. At some meals, he eats nothing but vegetables, but at the next meal, he's chomping down on a burger. He's especially prone to eating a burger at lunchtime, but then telling himself he'll make up for it by having only broccoli for dinner.
To combat this behavior, Jeff develops a framework that eliminates his ability to reward himself for future behavior: He eats only vegetarian food until 6 p.m. Then he eats whatever he wants for dinner—meat or no meat. His plan is non-negotiable. The "reward" of meat has to come after an entire day of eating no meat. And the plan has a catch: If Jeff breaks his own rule by eating meat at lunchtime, he has to break it every day for the rest of the week.
Even if Jeff is tempted by a meat entree at lunch, the prospect of having to break his diet plan for the entire next week seems too depressing. The plan works: He decides to wait until dinner for that cheese-steak sandwich.
We tend to see our "virtuous" choices as canceling out our "bad" choices. Think of the classic fast-food restaurant order: double cheeseburger, fries, and a diet soda. We've all heard the words that often accompany that order: "Oh, no milkshake for me. I'm on a diet."
The research: Researchers have found that if you put a cheeseburger and a salad in front of someone, they'll think that meal has fewer calories than a cheeseburger alone. This is known as the halo effect—when something that seems “virtuous” is paired with something that doesn’t, somehow the combination still seems virtuous.
The halo effect explains why people who shop for others at Christmastime almost always buy a few things for themselves. And it's also why people who buy chocolate to support a charity feel perfectly justified eating that chocolate, even if they wouldn't normally buy and eat chocolate.
Marketers are keen on the halo effect. They make liberal use of virtuous-sounding words and phrases like "organic" or "all natural" or "good for the planet" to make people more inclined to buy.
Example: In 1992, a company called SnackWells produced hugely popular fat-free cookies. They were loaded with sugar and calories, but not fat—and people somehow thought the virtue of being fat-free canceled out everything else. Not surprisingly, people gained weight eating these cookies. This phenomenon came to be named "SnackWell Syndrome."
Think about the four willpower traps described in this chapter: Utilizing moral licensing, we tell ourselves we deserve an indulgent treat because we’ve been good. With “I’m Making Progress,” we tell ourselves we’ve already taken a few steps toward our goal, so why not take a break? With “Too Much Optimism,” we reward ourselves for our potential good behavior in the future. And under the halo effect, we believe that virtuous choices cancel out bad ones.
Now consider your Personal Willpower Challenge, and ask yourself if you’ve ever fallen into any of those traps while trying to achieve your challenge. Which trap applies to you most often?
Now develop a framework to help you work around that trap (like Jeff’s plan to avoid rewarding himself for future behavior by eating only vegetarian food during the day). Write down your plan:
We know that the brain’s prefrontal cortex handles the important task of self-control. But that sector of the brain is often at odds with another sector—the part that’s responsible for desire (a.k.a. craving, temptation, and sometimes addiction). If you want to achieve more willpower, you need to understand how these two brain sectors compete with each other, and why satisfying short-term cravings often wins out over working toward long-term goals.
At the root of every craving or desire is a brain neurotransmitter called dopamine. When the brain senses the opportunity for a reward, it releases dopamine, which causes a form of arousal. It alerts the rest of the brain to get ready for a reward that will soon arrive. A dopamine rush makes us feel alert and excited.
But dopamine has major limitations. It sets us up to chase the promise of happiness without ever delivering on that promise. Dopamine delivers only the excitement of possibility—a hint that something good is coming soon—but not a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction. That’s true not just for humans but also for animals. To a lab rat, nothing is more compelling than the tickle of electrodes wired to its head. When researchers use electric current to stimulate the pleasure center in a rat's brain, the rat quickly learns to prefer brain stimulation over its basic bodily needs of food and water.
As incredible as it seems, researchers in the 1960s tried a similar experiment on people. The brains of human subjects were implanted with electrodes, and the humans were allowed to give themselves pleasure-stimulating shocks. They responded exactly like the rats—they quickly learned to prefer these shocks over food.
But unlike the rats, humans could answer researchers’ questions after the experiment was over. Their reasons for continually shocking themselves were complicated. They reported that the shocks were not making them happy. Each stimulation made them seek out more stimulation. Because they never achieved satisfaction, they grew increasingly anxious.
The world around us mimics this experiment. If you're a teenager, you may believe that happiness will be yours if you can just buy a certain pair of sneakers. You see the sneakers in a store window and you feel a little thrill. But then you buy the sneakers, and although you feel a momentary flush of pleasure, you quickly realize that happiness will only be yours if you get the matching trucker hat.
Dopamine doesn’t exist just to make us fall victim to desire. Its evolutionary function is to make us act. Back in our cave-people days, if we saw some juicy, ripe berries growing in a field, our brains would release dopamine so we would feel compelled to go pick those berries and eat them. That act helped to ensure our survival. Dopamine motivated us to do what was necessary for hunting, gathering, and finding mates.
Today, we get that same anticipatory excitement—dopamine's promise of good things to come—when we smell food cooking, see a sign in a shop window proclaiming “50 percent off," or chat with that flirtatious co-worker. Your brain can get hopped up on dopamine when you smell coffee beans roasting at your local coffee shop or when you browse through magazines with gorgeous high-fashion images.
Many dopamine-fueled activities are completely harmless, and they make our lives fun and interesting. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally indulging in chocolate cake, buying something frivolous at the mall, or streaming adorable cat videos. But unlike in our cavepeople days, these dopamine-stimulating activities don’t ward off starvation or keep our tribe strong, so we need to pay attention to our reasons for participating in them. Will our actions serve us well, or will they lead us into an addiction cycle?
It wasn't very long ago when most people used the word “addiction” only in terms of alcohol or drug use. Now we understand that addiction can take all manner of strange, deadly forms. For example, in 2005 a 28-year-old Korean man made headlines when he died from a heart attack after playing a video game for 50 hours straight. He was so hooked on dopamine that he refused to eat or sleep; he just wanted to keep playing.
Some researchers believe our array of digital technology may be more addicting than anything we could smoke, drink, or inject. Many of us are at least mildly addicted to our email accounts or some form of social media. We check our devices compulsively, sometimes even from the first moment we're awake. If it seems like our behavior is out of control, it’s because dopamine is calling the shots—it’s holding us hostage in a state of suspended anticipation.
We know that dopamine makes the brain crave reward. But since the reward never arrives, we keep longing for fulfillment. And that makes us more impulsive and more inclined toward risk-taking than we would be if we hadn’t gotten the dopamine hit. It's a vicious circle.
The research: When your brain is hopped up on dopamine, it's more susceptible to temptations of all kinds. Studies have proven this susceptibility—for example, men who look at pornographic images are more likely to take financial risks, and people who watch commercials about winning the lottery tend to overeat.
Even worse, dopamine doesn't just make you want things. It also makes you anxious because you're not getting what you want. For example, when people who love chocolate are shown photos of chocolate, they exhibit a “reflex response”—a mix of alarm and arousal. When asked to describe their feelings, they describe a mixed bag of pleasure, anxiety, and lack of control. The object of their desire—chocolate—is simultaneously causing both pleasure and discomfort.
Since dopamine makes you keen on immediate gratification, it's not surprising that so many people today suffer from obsessions and compulsions. And it's also not surprising that the field known as "neuromarketing" has skyrocketed. Marketing experts use brain research to find out what they can do to make you want more and buy more.
Marketing tactics based on dopamine traps are ubiquitous. Businesses understand that our brains are attracted to sales, and especially sales under time pressure (as in “act fast for these one-day doorbusters!”). Our brains are also lured by evocative scents like cinnamon in the fall and winter and coconut in the summer.
Every chain restaurant knows they need to keep adding new products—as in “I'd like a lavender chai latte infused with nitrogen gas, please”—because dopamine loves novelty. The old brain rewards eventually become dull, but the promise of a novel reward reignites the spark.
If you find yourself heading to the nearest gourmet grocery store whenever you're bored, it might be because your brain knows it's a reliable place to get a dopamine rush. Everything smells so good, looks so pretty, and tastes delicious. Even the piped-in music is appealing. And it's all engineered to hook you.
This doesn’t mean you should never let yourself browse your favorite upscale market. Life is better with rewards—and even sometimes with only the promise of reward. Our brains’ reward system keeps life interesting and fun. The key is to know the difference between real rewards—those that actually make us happy and give our life meaning—and false rewards that only serve to distract us (and wind up making us feel bad).
Example: Jane drives to the mall whenever she's bored or unhappy, convinced that shopping is the quick fix she needs. But when Jane turns off her default mode and analyzes her feelings, she realizes that she's always happier on the way to the mall than she is when she's shopping or driving home afterward. She realizes that she feels impatient and anxious when she's inside the stores, and she doesn't enjoy making purchases.
For Jane, going to the mall delivers the promise of feeling good, but being there and buying stuff doesn’t feel good. She decides to make dopamine work for her rather than against her: Now when she needs cheering up, she still goes to the mall, but she only walks around and window-shops. She doesn’t bring her credit cards, she doesn’t buy anything, and she doesn’t leave feeling bad.
Since dopamine triggers are all around us, it's worth considering which of your willpower failures are related to traps found in your everyday environment. We all have different triggers depending on what stimulates our individual brains.
For example, let’s say you turn to TikTok when you’re bored or unhappy. Maybe watching a few funny dog videos makes you laugh, and you quickly feel better. But do you turn it off after enjoying 10 minutes of laughter, or do you keep watching until two hours have passed, the videos don’t seem funny anymore, and you feel like you’ve wasted a beautiful afternoon?
The promise of reward doesn't equal happiness. When we constantly answer to dopamine’s promise of reward, we fail at self-control. And sometimes we don’t even get to enjoy immediate gratification.
Example: If you're hooked on chocolate, you may find yourself binging on chocolate bars without really tasting them. Every time you peel the wrapper off a chocolate bar, your brain is wired to expect a certain reward. Even if the chocolate is 10 years old and made with waxy artificial ingredients, your dopamine transmitters try to convince you that the next bite will be much more delicious. Just keep eating, they say, the reward is coming soon.
But if you slow down chewing and swallowing long enough, you'll face the truth. No matter what your brain is trying to tell you, this chocolate bar is awful.
The promise of a future reward is often much more compelling than the reward itself. We stand in line at the grocery and salivate at the sight of all those yummy chocolate bars lined up right next to the register. But we also feel the anxiety of trying to decide whether or not we should give in and buy one. We know we don’t “need” one, but we think we might want one. Should we or shouldn’t we? If we should, then which one should we choose? Suddenly a three-minute wait in line becomes a brain workout and a stressful event. Instead of acting on impulse, ask yourself, “If I give in and buy a chocolate bar, am I just relieving the stress that has been brought on by the sight of these chocolate bars, or do I really want one?”
It may seem like dopamine causes us nothing but trouble, but we can also make it work in our favor. When you have tasks to complete that you’ve been dreading, mix in a hit of dopamine. If you know that the scent of cinnamon makes you feel good, try putting some cinnamon sticks in a pot of boiling water the next time you need to balance your monthly budget or answer a bunch of emails. If 1980s dance music makes your brain feel good, play The Pointer Sisters’ greatest hits the next time you have to clean out the garage. If you’re a fan of fancy coffee drinks, tell yourself you can stop for a triple chocolate turmeric mocha after you go to the dermatologist’s office for your annual checkup.
Although dopamine serves an evolutionary purpose, it can often derail you from your long-term goals. The promise of reward can leave you repeating the same behaviors without ever achieving deep satisfaction. Once you understand the impact of dopamine on your brain and your actions, you can mitigate this impact.
Keep a list of the little "thrills" that make you feel excitement or anticipation, like some kind of reward is waiting just around the bend. Is it logging on to your Instagram account to see what your friends are up to? Playing the lottery? Smelling the coffee beans roasting at your favorite coffee shop? Shopping online, even if you don't buy anything?
Next, ask yourself if indulging in those triggers is actually satisfying. Do you feel truly satisfied after you check your Instagram account, order a $6 latté, or shop online, or do you feel like something is lacking?
Dopamine doesn’t have to derail you—it can work in your favor. If you can find a way to add a dopamine rush to your least favorite chore, it will become a lot easier and more fun.
Make a list of two or three tasks you've been putting off (perhaps raking the leaves, cleaning out the garage, or planning out next year’s budget).
Now ask yourself how you can make at least one of those tasks more fun by adding a dopamine hit—something that will tickle your brain with pleasure while you’re doing that unpleasant task. (You might consider playing your favorite music, lighting scented candles, or doing the task while drinking a mug of hot chocolate at your local cafe.)
When we want to access the willpower to work toward long-term goals, we need a positive state of mind. After all, it takes a certain amount of optimism to be willing to focus on the future. But even for the best of us, it’s impossible to stay upbeat all the time, so it’s key to understand what happens when our moods turn sour or we’ve had a rough day.
Our brains don’t like feeling bad, so they automatically start hunting for something to make us feel good. Unfortunately, the things we turn to when we want to feel good are often the things that make us feel bad. Ask any drug addict, food addict, or any other kind of addict—most will say that indulging in their addiction usually winds up making them feel worse, not better. Clearly we need to find a way to improve our moods that’s more consistent with our long-term goals.
It’s not surprising that the brain is more susceptible to temptation when we're stressed. In Chapter 2, we saw that stress engages our fight-or-flight response—the opposite of the pause-and-plan response that helps us make solid, carefully thought-out decisions. When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, any temptations that cross your path are suddenly more tempting than ever before. But instead of giving in, try relieving the stress that's making you susceptible to temptation.
According to the American Psychological Association, the best ways to relieve stress are exercising or playing a sport, praying, reading, listening to music, getting a massage, meditating or doing yoga, spending time outdoors, or spending time with friends or family. These methods actually boost the "happy chemicals" in your brain and diminish the stress response.
The worst ways to relieve stress are the strategies that promise a reward but don't actually deliver it—smoking, drinking, gambling, eating, shopping, playing video games, binge-watching movies or TV, and surfing the Internet.
And yet time and time again, we often choose the worst strategies over the best strategies. That's because when we're stressed, our brains point us toward the wrong activities.
When you're feeling bad, your brain will likely point you in the wrong direction, so you need something to steer you the right way. Develop a reminder strategy that tells you what to do—and what not to do—when you're stressed. Here’s an example: Jane has a demanding job, and each day after work she comes home, opens a bottle of wine, and scrolls the Internet until her brain goes numb. Jane knows that she used to enjoy going to a yoga class after work, but her days are so challenging now that she can't resist the siren call of chardonnay and solo online time.
One day, Jane finally forces herself to go to yoga class, and it's even better than she remembered. She feels great and wants to make this a habit, but she’s afraid the habit won’t stick. So she makes a voice recording in which she talks about how great she feels after yoga class. Every time her brain points her toward wine and Wi-Fi, she listens to this recording, which motivates her to go to yoga.
One of the reasons we lose our self-control is because our brains are engaged in "terror management." Whether we watch television, read the newspapers, or check our Facebook newsfeeds, we are constantly being reminded of terrible things happening in the world. We turn to temptation for comfort—and paying excessive attention to the news will certainly make us crave comfort.
Many people feel like it's a moral obligation to pay attention as the world's crises unravel. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but it’s worth considering how your behavior might change if you diminish your news consumption. When you’re being bombarded with messages about terror and uncertainty, you probably won’t be motivated toward future-oriented goals like starting a new business or improving your fitness level.
It’s a vicious cycle: We vow that we're going to stop stretching our credit limits in online shopping sprees, but then we get one of those irresistible emails from a favorite store offering 40 percent off if we shop before midnight. So we give in and buy that gadget we've been wanting. We feel great about our purchase for about two seconds, but then we feel terrible because we’ve committed another willpower failure. To assuage our regret, we check out a bunch of other shopping sites to see if those stores have any sales, and we buy more stuff we don't need.
That behavior makes no sense, right? Why not minimize the harm by stopping at one purchase? This is what researchers call the "what-the-hell effect." We go off our diets by eating one slice of pizza, and then we assuage our guilt and shame by eating three more slices. We know it's stupid even while we're doing it, but we can't stop. Giving in a little makes us feel bad about ourselves, so we give in completely.
To break the cycle, stop telling yourself that one small setback means you're a dismal failure. When you criticize yourself in this way, you wind up giving yourself an excuse to indulge more. Your brain feels the sting of your self-hate, and it immediately wants to soothe those feelings, which drives you straight toward whatever temptation comforts you—food, alcohol, cigarettes, shopping, and so on. It's a downward spiral that's hard to stop.
In fact, researchers believe we should try the opposite approach—instead of beating ourselves up, we should actually forgive ourselves for giving in. Encouraging words like "don't be so hard on yourself" can stop a full-on binge before it gets started.
Punishing yourself for failures doesn't work well with adult brains. Self-criticism is one of the fastest routes to poor motivation and self-control, and it's also a slippery slope that leads to depression. Self-compassion and forgiveness, on the other hand, are the pathways to greater motivation and improved self-control.
Willpower Hack: Shush Your Inner Critic How you handle your mistakes is far more important than the fact that you made the mistake in the first place. You need to find a compassionate way to respond to perceived failures. This exercise can help you silence your inner critic:
Think about how great it feels when we set New Year’s resolutions. When we vow to change our habits, our brains get a rush of happiness. We are filled with hope, and hope feels wonderful. After all, it's obvious how great our lives will be after we put those resolutions into place.
Creating hope is a great strategy for feeling better—it's instant gratification—but the bad news is that the hard work is about to start. Actually making the changes you've proposed is a lot harder (and less fun) than making those resolutions was.
It’s easy to get charged up and tell ourselves that because we created a great plan, we're in control. But promising to change our ways only deceives us into feeling good; it doesn't actually change our behaviors.
Announcing your goals can also offer a sense of false hope. If you tell your friends you're going to accomplish a goal—say, go to yoga class three times a week—your brain feels the pleasure of this accomplishment even as you speak the words. You don't actually have to go to yoga class to feel good—just the idea feels good. But since your brain has already registered this pleasure, you lose the motivation to go do it. To eliminate this possibility, many scientists believe it's actually more productive to keep your goals to yourself until after you've already carried them out.
Here’s some good news: Optimism mixed with a sprinkling of pessimism may make it possible to keep those New Year’s resolutions. If you plan ahead for potential scenarios that could derail you, you can be the hero or heroine who saves yourself from a willpower failure. Here’s a scheme to add some stark realism to your plans:
Humans have amazingly complex brains, but all too often, we use them for rationalizing, not for making solid long-term decisions. Our brains did not evolve to respond to rewards in the far-off future; they evolved to respond to what's good right now.
We want to sit down and write a business plan for our latest million-dollar idea, but we also want to go on a beach vacation and not open our laptops for a week. After all, we’ve been working so hard lately, and we have all those free airline points, and we are just craving those swaying palm trees and lingering sunsets.
So we tell ourselves that if we go to the beach and ponder that business plan, we’re actually getting something done. Or we tell ourselves that if we go to the beach now, we’ll have more energy to write that business plan later.
In short, we’re experts at inventing mental tricks to convince ourselves we can do tomorrow what we're not doing today. As we learned in Chapter 4, we even give ourselves advance credit for the good behavior we will surely display in the future.
This is what economists call “delay discounting”—we’re hooked on instant gratification and not willing to wait for future gratification. The longer we have to wait for something good, the less appealing it seems.
The good news is that there's a tiny gap between now and the future, and you can use it to your advantage. Give your willpower a window of opportunity by making temptation a little harder to access.
For example, you won’t return home with purchases you can’t afford if you don’t carry your credit cards when you go downtown. If you have to walk downstairs and down the hall to stick your hand in the candy jar, you'll be less likely to indulge than if you merely have to reach across your desk. And you’ll be less likely to procrastinate on writing your novel if you invest in software programs like MacFreedom, Anti-Social, or ProcrasDonate, which limit your access to email, social networks, or even the entire Internet.
Another trick worth trying is using a time delay to your advantage. When you start thinking that your work is boring and perhaps you should switch over to your favorite Internet shopping site, set a 10-minute timer and make yourself wait. During those 10 minutes, recall your long-term goals and why they matter to you. After the time is up, if you still want to distract yourself by shopping, then fine, go ahead. When you take the “immediate” out of immediate gratification, that thing you’re craving seems less appealing.
If your willpower struggle involves procrastination, you can use the 10-minute rule in a different way. Maybe you don't want to study for that exam or write that term paper. Tell yourself you only have to work on it for 10 minutes, and then you can quit. Once you get started, there’s a good chance you’ll just keep going long past 10 minutes.
You’ve probably heard of the Stanford University study involving four-year-olds and marshmallows (the experiment ran throughout the 1960s and was published in 1972). Each kid was placed in a room with a single marshmallow and told that they could go ahead and eat it now, but if they waited 15 minutes, they could eat two marshmallows.
The kids were left alone in the room as cameras filmed their decision-making processes. Some kids invented all manner of strategies to avoid eating the marshmallow (like turning their backs on the treat or distracting themselves by singing songs or talking to themselves); others just gobbled it up immediately.
The researchers then tracked these kids' lives for the next 40 years. Not surprisingly, the four-year-olds who were best at delaying gratification—not eating the first marshmallow—wound up having an easier time in life than the others, as determined by higher SAT scores, healthier body mass index, lower incidence of substance abuse, better social skills, and various other life measures.
(Shortform note: Over time this study has lost a bit of its luster. Some psychologists now believe that the children’s success or failure at delaying gratification had more to do with their families’ socioeconomic status than an innate propensity for self-control, and this advantage also helped them later in life. To learn more about these findings, read our summary of The Atlantic article “Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test.”)
Remember the Willpower Hack from Chapter 3, “Cultivate One Small Habit”? That hack is designed to get your brain focused on paying attention to your behaviors. But the same hack can also be used to train your ability to delay gratification. Just as the four-year-olds received two marshmallows if they waited, you can promise yourself a small treat if you delay gratification.
Example: Tell yourself that if you stay focused on your work for the next two hours, you can treat yourself to XX (fill in that blank with whatever you like). And then follow through on that promise.
Keep giving yourself these little challenges over and over, and soon your brain will learn that yes, it's worth it to wait, and yes, you are capable of exerting willpower.
The marshmallow study is related to what economists call future-reward discount rates—how much more is this moment's happiness worth than future happiness? In other words, how much does the future matter to you?
When you're trying to avoid instant gratification and stay focused on your long-term goals, you need to stop discounting the future—or at least lower the rate at which you discount it. The problem is that it’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea that the future is just as important as the present, and maybe even more so. Here's a two-step plan:
1) Imagine that a long-term reward like your Personal Willpower Challenge is already yours. Picture your future self enjoying the benefits of having achieved your willpower goal.
2) Ask yourself if you're willing to give up that image of happy-future-you for the fleeting impulse that's tempting you right now.
Example: A student was addicted to Facebook. She spent so much time on the site that she missed out on study sessions and didn't hear half of what went on in her classes. She knew it was a big problem. So she thought about her long-term goal: to become a doctor. Whenever she was tempted to waste time on Facebook, she asked herself: "Is logging on to Facebook right now worth not becoming a doctor?" When she framed the question that way, the future seemed much more real, and she could overcome her temptation.
Another method that can help you slam the door on instant gratification is to pre-commit. For example, if you pack a healthy lunch to take to work, you'll be more likely to forego the greasy food truck. Or if you prepay for your twice-yearly dental checkups, you'll be more likely to go.
We tend to think of our future selves as different people than we are today—like strangers or sometimes even like superheroes. Most of us see our future selves in a much better light than we see our present selves. We believe our future self will not struggle with procrastination the way our present self does, or our future self will not want to eat that cupcake like our present self does.
Why do we deceive ourselves this way? Because our future self's feelings and emotions aren't as real and present as what we're feeling right now. For example, when we commit to doing 20 hours of volunteer work next month instead of this month, we don't realize we'll probably be just as busy next month as we are right now. Thirty days from now, it’s going to be just as tough to squeeze in those 20 volunteer hours as it is right now.
The research: Brain-imaging studies show that when we imagine our future selves, we actually utilize a different region of the brain than we use to think about our present selves. The future-self region is the same region we use to think about other people. In other words, we see our future self as someone completely outside of who we are right now. It’s no wonder we place more emphasis on pleasing ourselves right now.
How much we see our future selves as separate from our present selves varies from person to person. For some, the future self is basically a stranger—and why would anyone invest their energies in a stranger? If you’re disconnected in this way from your future self, you will be more interested in immediate gratification and satisfying fleeting impulses.
For others, the present and future self are more closely paired. These people tend to have a stronger future orientation. They save more for retirement, take better care of their health, and invest in long-lasting relationships.
Not surprisingly, strengthening your relationship with your future self can help shore up your willpower. If you make a close connection between who you are now and who you will be later, you'll be more willing to shun short-term impulses and work toward being the best version of yourself.
Here are two ways to make the future feel less abstract:
Some people have the opposite of a willpower problem. Instead of choosing instant gratification, they consistently put off pleasure. People who have this condition, known as hyperopia, never feel like it's time to celebrate or indulge. They choose work over almost any other activity, and they focus so much on the future that they miss out on a lot of present-tense good stuff.
These kinds of people probably won't read this summary (or the book, for that matter), but they could still utilize these willpower strategies by turning them into strategies for self-indulgence.
We think our behaviors are under our own self-control, but we're social animals, so we’re also subject to social control. No matter how independent we may think we are, we're influenced by the people around us. Hang out with the right people and your willpower will increase; hang out with the wrong people and you'll give in to temptation more frequently.
The research: A 2010 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that one out-of-shape Air Force Academy cadet in a squadron of brand new cadets could bring down the fitness levels of the entire squadron. In other words, physical fitness is contagious—and so is the lack of it. In a much larger study, two scientists examined 32 years of health data from more than 12,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. Specifically, they looked at weight gain, and what they discovered was an epidemic. Over time, obesity was spreading within families and groups of friends at an alarming rate. If your friend became obese, your risk of becoming obese increased by 171 percent.
Further analysis revealed that not just weight gain but also excessive alcohol consumption spread through social connections. But there was good news—self-control was also contagious. If a family member gave up cigarettes, their relatives had a much higher chance of doing the same.
Whether we like it or not, both good habits and bad habits spread within social and family circles. Our brains have specialized cells, called mirror neurons, that keep track of what others around us do, say, think, feel, and want. When we see someone trip and fall, we wince and “feel their pain” for a moment. It’s because our mirror neurons are creating a theater in which a trip-and-fall play is unfolding, and for a moment, we’re starring in the play. It almost seems like it’s happening to us. Mirror neurons are the basis of our empathy instinct, which makes us understand other people’s feelings.
Our mirror neurons can respond to other’s pain and also to their emotions. This is also why television shows utilize laugh tracks—your mirror neurons will think the show is funnier because we hear other people laughing. But this mimicry of emotions also comes into play when we see others indulging. If you watch your spouse eat a giant bowl of ice cream because he or she has had a hard day, your brain starts craving a reward, too—even if you don’t particularly like ice cream. Your brain is empathizing with the emotional craving that’s occurring in his or her brain—“I had a hard day, so I deserve to eat something delicious.”
It’s also why if you go out to lunch with a friend who orders a glass of wine, you’re more likely to order a glass of wine, too—even if your willpower goal is no alcohol before 6 p.m.
The research: Studies have examined what happens in a smoker’s brain when they watch actors in movies smoke cigarettes. The regions of the brain that control hand movements actually light up—the brain is preparing the hands to pull out a cigarette and light up. Studies have also shown that gamblers will bet more money after seeing someone else win, and most of us will spend more money when shopping with others and eat more calories when eating with others.
The oddest part of this self-control epidemic is that it isn’t activity-specific. Any time we see people behaving badly—whether it’s breaking rules, disobeying laws, or just indulging in unhealthy habits—it lowers our self-control. If your friend cheats on their taxes, you may be more likely to cheat on your spouse. If someone paints graffiti on your street, you may be more inclined to litter.
Not surprisingly, the people you know and love are bigger influences on your behavior than strangers. Social epidemics spread most aggressively through friend and family networks. In other words, you probably won’t “catch” a behavior from your neighbor or co-worker, but you might from a close friend or a sibling. That’s because our brains view people whom we love and cherish as not entirely separate from us. When our brains consider who we are, we include our friends and family in that picture. In a way, they’re part of our sense of self.
Since we can’t give up all of our social interactions, we must learn to dispel or at least diminish others’ influence on our behavior. Here’s one technique to help you stay focused on your goals: At the start of each day, spend a few minutes focusing on your goals. Consider the various temptations you face—especially social influences—that can dissuade you from pursuing them. Use this focusing time to become more self-aware and reinforce your resolve.
It seems reasonable that our families and close friends influence our behavior, but we should also consider how much complete strangers influence our choices. For example, do you ever look to see what movies are popular or what the bestselling books are? Do you look at customer reviews for products you’re thinking about buying?
Our brains trust the tribe of humanity—we believe that what others enjoy must be good. The theory known as “social proof” sounds a lot like what your mother used to say: “Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends did?” Indeed you might. Humans are wired to do what others around them do.
“Everyone else is doing it” is one of the strongest marketing messages in the world (even though most of us believe it doesn’t apply to us). We may brag about our independent thinking, but the truth is that the human social instinct is overpowering—and our brains are wired to find a way to fit in, which means doing what others do and liking what others like.
The research: Poll takers went door to door asking people about their energy use, and handing out door hang-tags that encouraged energy-saving activities like turning off unnecessary lights. Each door tag included a motivational message like “It’s good for the planet” or “Save money on energy bills” or “Save energy for future generations.” But the message that had the biggest impact on people’s behavior was founded in social proof: “99 percent of people in your community turned off unnecessary lights to save energy.” In other words, “everyone else is doing it” was the most influential message.
It’s tough to be under the influence of others, but this can also help us boost our self-control. If you imagine yourself being evaluated by others—especially people you admire—you may decide to make less impulsive choices. For example, if you know your eight-year-old wants you to quit smoking, imagine his disappointed face when he catches you sneaking a cigarette in the backyard. Or imagine how proud he’ll feel when you reach your one-year no-smoking anniversary.
Most of us want to secure a spot in the tribes that matter most to us. Media statistics about American health are grim: The average adult consumes 100 pounds of sugar each year. Forty percent of Americans never exercise at all. Only 11 percent of Americans get vigorous exercise five times a week. If you’re in the other 79 percent, you may find yourself thinking something along the lines of: “It’s okay that I rarely exercise because that’s normal—I’m in a very big club.” These kinds of statistics may help you normalize or justify your behavior—even if your behavior is contrary to your goals.
Example: Many people overestimate the number of people who cheat on their tax returns, and this makes them more inclined to cheat on their taxes. But when they find out that the number of tax cheaters is actually very small, they are more likely to file an honest return.
Telling some people that God wants them to eat healthier is enough to get them swearing off corn dogs and cooking broccoli-kale casseroles. When devout Christians are asked to consider Bible passages that condemn certain behaviors or praise others (like “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat”) and apply them to their own behaviors, they’re often motivated to change. People who consider themselves religious don’t like seeing a disconnect between God’s will and their actions.
In Chapter 6, we saw that feeling bad about ourselves is more likely to lead to self-sabotage than self-control. When we feel bad, our desire to make ourselves feel better right now is overwhelming. Because of this, shaming ourselves for willpower failures isn’t an effective way to increase our willpower. (It usually leads to worse failures.) But pride has the opposite effect of shame. Feeling proud of yourself actually increases your heart rate variability, a.k.a. your willpower reserve (discussed in Chapter 2).
To make pride work for us, we have to play into our need for social approval. We must believe that others are witnessing our “good” behavior, or that we’ll have a chance to tell others about the five miles we ran or the 200 pounds we bench-pressed.
The research: People are much more likely to buy green, good-for-the-planet products in a brick-and-mortar store than when shopping privately online. We want the gratification of knowing other people saw us make our earth-friendly purchases. It helps us to feel good about ourselves.
By now it should be clear that if you want help with your willpower challenge, you should look around at your tribe—what they do or don’t do will affect your chances of success. It’s also important to remember that you’re involved in other people’s willpower challenges—and your behavior can help them or hurt them. Willpower failures are often impossible to hide—think of bankruptcy, obesity, or addiction—and they often have a stigma attached. Sometimes people with these problems are socially rejected, and that only further decreases their willpower.
You’ve probably heard the quote: “If shame worked, there would be no fat people.” The best thing you can do for others who are struggling with willpower issues is offer your full support. Just checking in and encouraging each other can make a big difference in someone’s life.
Social influences play a big role in willpower challenges. It’s worth taking some time to think about the habits and behaviors you may have adopted from people in your family or social circle. Sometimes common behaviors are the basis of relationships—and those behaviors may be ones you want to keep or ones you want to discard.
Can you think of any behaviors—virtuous or not—that you’ve mirrored from people close to you? If so, what was the habit, and who were you mirroring?
Why do you think this person had such a strong influence on your behavior?
Are there people in your life who you are more likely to indulge with? (Perhaps someone who shares your willpower challenge—food, cigarettes, alcohol, and so on.) How can you both support each other’s willpower goals more?
Do you know anyone who has tackled a willpower challenge that’s similar to yours and succeeded? What can you learn from their experience?
Willpower does a good job of controlling our outer actions, but it’s useless when applied to our interior world of thoughts and feelings. Have you ever deliberately tried not to think about elephants? As soon as you set your mind on this task, all you can think about is elephants.
This is a result of what psychologists call “ironic rebound.” It’s the reason why dieters who completely cut out carbohydrates start to think of nothing but loaves of bread.
As soon as we try to eliminate something from our minds, ironic rebound kicks in. When depressed people try to block out sad thoughts, they get more depressed. When parents try to not to worry about their children’s behavior, they wind up worrying more. The harder you try to push away a thought, the more likely it will come back even stronger.
Scientists aren’t exactly sure how this works, but the general idea is that one part of the brain decides it must stay alert at all times for the “forbidden” thing—carbohydrates, elephants, sad thoughts, worries. As a result, it’s constantly focused on their possible existence, and that makes them show up everywhere.
The research: James Erskine, a psychologist at St. George’s University of London, believes that attempts to suppress our thoughts actually lead us to act upon our thoughts. He conducted an experiment in which he brought women into his lab to taste-test chocolate candies. Some of the women were instructed to express their thoughts about chocolate before tasting the candies. Others were told to suppress their thoughts about chocolate. A control group received no instructions.
Each woman was then given a bowl of 20 chocolate candies and told to eat as many as they wanted to. Sure enough, those who had suppressed thoughts of chocolate ate almost twice as many as the others.
The conclusion? Dieters who tell themselves not to think about food wind up having the least control over their eating habits—and that’s one big reason why diets don’t work. Studies have shown that dieting more often leads to weight gain instead of weight loss. When we “outlaw” or restrict certain foods, our cravings for them automatically increase.
A program at Laval University in Quebec is studying what happens when dieters are told what they should eat, not what they shouldn’t eat. Essentially, they’re taking an “I won’t” willpower challenge and converting it into an “I will” challenge. This spin—focusing on positive steps that study participants can take as opposed to dictating a list of forbidden foods, seems to be working. At a 16-month follow-up check-in, two-thirds of the participants had lost weight and maintained that weight loss, and they reported a greater sense of control over cravings.
Those Canadian dieters started focusing on positive action (eating foods that would make them healthier and slimmer) instead of prohibition (giving up foods they adored). It’s possible to translate this idea into almost any kind of willpower challenge.
Most “bad” habits or behaviors are an attempt to satisfy some kind of need—it might be a need to have fun, reduce stress, or gain approval. Think about one of your “bad” behaviors and the need it satisfies. Instead of banning that behavior, see if you can come up with an alternate behavior that will satisfy the same need. Ask yourself:
If you really want to stop thinking about elephants, science says your best bet is to grant yourself permission to think about elephants. Let your thoughts come and go freely, and they’ll stop hijacking your mind. If the brain is allowed to express a thought or feeling that it was previously trying to suppress, it stops obsessing over it.
You don’t have to act on your thoughts; you just have to let them wander through your mind. Instead of thinking of certain foods, substances, or activities as “forbidden,” try accepting your cravings without acting on them, a process known as “surfing the urge.”
Try this four-step plan the next time you’re craving chocolate, video games, or more time scrolling through Facebook: