Cliff Notes of the book: Willpower – Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney

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Willpower: Merged

Introduction & Chapter 1: Is Willpower More than a Metaphor?

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  • When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control.
  • Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant through the click of a mouse or a phone.
  • Humans are the primates who have the largest frontal lobes because we have the largest social groups, and that’s apparently why we have the most need for self-control. Primates are social beings who have to control themselves in order to get along with the rest of the group.
  • Willpower looked like much more than a metaphor. It seemed to be like a muscle that could be fatigued through use.
  • We like to think we control our thoughts, but we don’t. First-time meditators are typically shocked at how their minds wander over and over, despite earnest attempts to focus and concentrate. At best, we have partial control over our streams of thought, as Wegner, who is now at Harvard, demonstrated by asking people to ring a bell whenever a white bear intruded on their thoughts. Some tricks and distraction techniques and incentives could briefly keep the creature at bay, he found, but eventually the bell tolled for everyone.
  • The results showed that ego depletion causes a slowdown in the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain area that’s crucial to self-control. As the brain slows down and its error-detection ability deteriorates, people have trouble controlling their reactions. They must struggle to accomplish tasks that would get done much more easily if the ego weren’t depleted.
  • People in depleted condition reported more fatigue and tiredness and negative emotions, but even those differences weren’t large. The results made ego depletion seem like an illness with no symptoms, a condition that didn’t “feel” like anything.
  • But now it turns out that there are signals of ego depletion, thanks to some new experiments by Baumeister and a team headed by his longtime collaborator, Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. In these experiments, while depleted persons (once again) didn’t show any single telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier, and disturbing pictures made them more frightened and upset. Ice-cold water felt more painful to them than it did to people who were not ego-depleted. Desires intensified along with feelings. After eating a cookie, the people reported a stronger craving to eat another cookie—and they did in fact eat more cookies when given a chance. When looking at a gift-wrapped package, they felt an especially strong desire to open it.
  • Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.
  • Long before psychologists identified ego depletion, the British humorist Sir A. P. Herbert nicely described the conflicting set of symptoms: “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again!” he announced. “God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”
  • In the 1970s, the psychologist Daryl Bem set about trying to distinguish conscientious people from others by making up a list of behaviors. He assumed he’d find a positive correlation between “turns in school assignments on time” and “wears clean socks,” because both would stem from the underlying trait of conscientiousness. But when he collected data from students at Stanford, where he taught, he was surprised to find a hefty negative correlation.
  • “Apparently,” he joked, “the students could either get their homework done or change their socks every day, but not both.”
  • He didn’t give it much further thought, but decades later other researchers wondered if there was something to the joke. Two Australian psychologists, Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, considered the possibility that the students were suffering from the sort of ego depletion revealed in the radish experiment. These psychologists started by administering laboratory self-control tests to the students at different times during the semester. As hypothesized, the students performed relatively badly near the end of the term, apparently because their willpower had been depleted by the strain of studying for exams and turning in assignments. But the deterioration wasn’t limited to arcane laboratory tests. When asked about other aspects of their lives, it became clear that Bem’s dirty-sock finding hadn’t been a fluke. All sorts of good habits were forsaken as the students’ self-control waned during exam period.
  • What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.
  • The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: 1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.
  • We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts.
  • Another broad category is the control of emotions, which psychologists call affect regulation when it’s focused specifically on mood.
  • A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses. Strictly speaking, “impulse control” is a misnomer. You don’t really control the impulses. Even someone as preternaturally disciplined as Barack Obama can’t avoid stray impulses to smoke a cigarette. What he can control is how he reacts: Does he ignore the impulse, or chew a Nicorette, or sneak out for a smoke? (He has usually avoided lighting up, according to the White House, but there have been slips.)
  • Finally, there’s the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, persevering when you feel like quitting.
  • Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.
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Chapter 2: Where Does The Power in the Willpower Come From

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  • The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked. Overall, they tended to be more anxious and less happy than average.
  • In everyday life, stressful conditions seem to be harder on diabetics. Coping with stress typically takes self-control, and that’s difficult if your body isn’t providing your brain with enough fuel.
  • No glucose, no willpower: The pattern showed up time and again as researchers tested more people in more situations.
  • Apparently ego depletion shifts activity from one part of the brain to another. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. That may help explain why depleted people feel things more intensely than normal: Certain parts of the brain go into high gear just as others taper off.
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Chapter 3: A Brief History of the To-Do list, from God to Drew Carey

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  • The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action. The three main consequences of conflicting goals are: (1) you worry a lot, (2) you get less done, (3) your health suffers, physically as well as mentally.
  • The more competing the demands you face, he more time you spend contemplating these demands. You’re beset by rumination: repetitive thoughts that are largely involuntary and especially pleasant.
  • It might seem that people who think more about their goals would also take more steps to reach them, but instead they replace action with rumination. Those who have clear, unconflicting goals, tend to forge ahead and make progress, but the rest were so busy worrying that they got stuck.
  • Your health suffers, physically as well as mentally. People with conflicting goals report fewer positive emotions, more negative emotions, and more depression and anxiety. They had more psychosomatic complaints and symptoms. Even just plain physical sickness, measured both by the number of visits to the doctor and by the number of self-reported illnesses over the course of a year, was higher among the people with conflicting goals. The more the goals conflicted, the more the people got stuck, and the more unhappy and unhealthy they became. They paid the price for too much brooding—in the most common modern use of the word, not the one in Genesis. The old term for incubation would eventually come to be associated with mental distress, no doubt because so many people could see the same problems later measured by psychologists. A hen might brood contentedly, but humans suffer when their conflicting goals leave them sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t resolve those conflicts until they decide which kinds of goals will do them the most good.
  • “First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”
  • “Most people have never tasted what it’s like to have nothing on their mind except whatever they’re doing,”
  • Allen’s tickler file—thirty-one folders for each day of the current month, twelve folders for each of the months—would become so widely copied that his followers used it for the name of a popular lifehacker Web site: 43folders.com. – 43 Folders | Time, Attention, and Creative Work
  • Besides getting paperwork off the desk, the tickler file also removed a source of worry: Once something was filed there, you knew you’d be reminded to deal with it on the appropriate day. You weren’t nagged by the fear that you’d lose it or forget about it. Allen looked for other ways to eliminate that mental nagging by closing the “open loops” in the mind. “One piece I took from the personal-growth world was the importance of the agreements you make with yourself,” he recalls. “When you make an agreement and you don’t keep it, you undermine your own self-trust. You can fool everybody but yourself, and you’re going to pay for that, so you should be aware of the agreements you make. We developed a workshop for writing down those agreements.”
  • Allen has come to appreciate why decide has the same etymological root as homicide: the Latin word caedere, meaning “to cut down” or “to kill.”
  • “When we’re trying to decide what to do with our stuff or what movie to see,” Allen says, “we don’t think to ourselves, Look at all these cool choices. There’s a powerful thing inside that says, If I decide to do that movie, I kill all the other movies. You can pretend all the way up to that point that you know the right thing to do, but once you’re faced with a choice, you have to deal with this open loop in your head: You’re wrong, you’re right, you’re wrong, you’re right. Every single time you make a choice, you’re stepping into an existential void.”

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Chapter 4: Decision Fatigue

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  • What kinds of decisions deplete the most willpower? Which choices are the hardest?
  • Difficult mathematical calculations, like other logical reasoning, require willpower as you follow a set of systematic rules to get from one set of information to something new. You often go through steps like these in making a decision, through a process that psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to bring his legions across the Rubicon. He realized that crossing it with his army would start a civil war. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated his goals and possibilities along with the potential costs and benefits. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”
  • The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which part is most fatiguing? Could the depletion be due mainly to all the calculations before the decision?
  • “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we’re so eager to keep options open that we don’t see the long-term price that we’re paying—or that others are paying. When you won’t settle for less than a perfect mate, you end up with no one. When parents can never say no to projects at the office, their children suffer at home. When a judge can’t bring himself to make a hard decision about parole, he’s quite literally closing the door on the prisoner’s cell.
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Chapter 5: Where Have All the Dollars Gone?

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  • Self-awareness is a most peculiar trait among animals. Dogs will bark angrily at a mirror because they don’t realize they’re looking at themselves, and most other animals are similarly clueless when they’re subjected to a formal procedure called the mirror test. First the animal is dabbed with a spot of odorless dye, then it’s put in front of a mirror to contemplate this strange-colored spot. The test is to see whether the animal touches the spot or indicates in some other way that it realizes the spot is on its own body (such as turning the body to get a better view of the spot). Chimpanzees and the other apes can pass the test, and so can dolphins, elephants, and a few more, but most animals flunk. If they want to touch the spot, they reach for the mirror instead of their own body. Human infants also flunk this test, but by their second birthday most of them can pass it. Even if these two-year-olds didn’t notice the spot being applied, as soon as they see the mirror image they reach up to touch their own forehead, often with a startled reaction. And that’s just the beginning stage of self-awareness. Before long this trait will turn into the curse of adolescence. Somehow the carefree confidence of childhood is smothered by embarrassment and shame as teenagers become exquisitely sensitive to their own imperfections. They look in the mirror and ask the same question that psychologists have been studying for decades: Why? What’s the point of self-awareness if it makes you feel miserable?
  • One pattern in particular stood out. A person might notice a table and think nothing more than, Oh, there’s a table. But the self was rarely noticed in such a neutral way. Whenever people focused on themselves, they seemed to compare what they saw with some sort of idea of what they should be like. A person who looked in the mirror usually didn’t stop at, Oh, that’s me. Rather, the person was more likely to think, My hair is a mess, or This shirt looks good on me, or I should remember to stand up straight, or, inevitably, Have I gained weight? Self-awareness always seemed to involve comparing the self to these ideas of what one might, or should, or could, be.
  • The link between self-awareness and self-control was also demonstrated in experiments involving adults and alcohol. Researchers found that one of the chief effects of drinking was to reduce people’s ability to monitor their own behavior. As drinkers’ self-awareness declines, they lose self-control, so they get into more fights, smoke more, eat more, make more sexual blunders, and wake up the next day with many more regrets. One of the hardest parts of a hangover is the return of self-awareness, because that’s when we resume that crucial task for a social animal: comparing our behavior with the standards set by ourselves and our neighbors.
  • Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man. That’s why self-awareness evolved as an innate trait among our early ancestors on the savanna—and why it has kept developing recently in more treacherous social environs.
  • Anthony Trollope believed it unnecessary—and inadvisable—to write for more than three hours a day. He became one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in history while holding a full-time job with the British Post Office. He would rise at five-thirty, fortify himself with coffee, and spend a half hour reading the previous day’s work to get himself in the right voice. Then he would write for two and a half hours, monitoring the time with a watch placed on the table. He forced himself to produce one page of 250 words every quarter hour. Just to be sure, he counted the words. “I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went,” he reported. At this rate he could produce 2,500 words by breakfast. He didn’t expect to do so every single day—sometimes there were business obligations or fox hunts—but he made sure each week to meet a goal. For each of his novels, he would draw up a working schedule, typically planning for 10,000 words a week, and then keep a diary.
  • “In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied,” he explained. “There has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”
  • For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.
  • Homepage – Quantified Self

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Chapter 6: Can Willpower Be Strengthened?

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  • Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. The improvement was most pronounced among the students who had followed the advice most diligently (as measured by the daily logs the students kept of how often they’d forced themselves to sit up or stand up straight). The experiment also revealed an important distinction in self-control between two kinds of strength: power and stamina. At the first lab session, participants began by squeezing a spring-loaded handgrip for as long as they could (which had been shown in other experiments to be a good measure of willpower, not just physical strength). Then, after expending mental energy through the classic try-not-to-think-of-a-white-bear task, they did a second handgrip task to assess how they fared when willpower was depleted. Two weeks later, when they returned to the lab after working on their posture, their scores on the initial handgrip tests didn’t show much improvement, meaning that the willpower muscle hadn’t gotten more powerful. But they had much more stamina, as evidenced by their improved performance on the subsequent handgrip test administered after the researchers tried to fatigue them. Thanks to the students’ posture exercises, their willpower didn’t get depleted as quickly as before, so they had more stamina for other tasks. You could try the two-week posture experiment to improve your own willpower, or you could try other exercises. There’s nothing magical about sitting up straight, as researchers subsequently discovered when they tested other regimens and found similar benefits. You can pick and choose from the techniques they studied, or extrapolate to create your own system. The key is to concentrate on changing a habitual behavior.
  • One simple way to start is by using a different hand for routine tasks. Many habits are linked to your dominant hand. Right-handed people, in particular, tend to use their right hands for all sorts of things without giving the matter the slightest thought. Making yourself switch to your left hand is thus an exercise in self-control. You can resolve to use your left hand instead of your habitual right hand for brushing your teeth, using a computer mouse, opening doors, or lifting a cup to your lips. If it seems too onerous to do this all day, try it for a set period.
  • Another training strategy is to change your speech habits, which are also deeply ingrained and therefore require effort to modify.
  • Then the researchers had the participants in the study perform willpower exercises for two weeks, except for a control group. After the two weeks, the ones who did the exercises reported fewer tendencies to behave violently when provoked by a loved one, both in comparison with their own pre-exercise baseline and in comparison with the controls who did not exercise. (For ethical and practical reasons, researchers have to be content with having people report their inclinations to behave violently, as opposed to trying to measure how often people actually hit, assault, or otherwise harm their loved ones.) Improved self-control predicted less domestic violence.
  • All in all, these findings point toward the remarkable benefits of exercising willpower. Without realizing it, people gained a wide array of benefits in areas of their lives that had nothing to do with the specific exercises they were performing. And the lab tests provided an explanation: Their willpower gradually got stronger, so it was less readily depleted. Focusing on one specific form of self-control could yield much larger benefits, just as self-experimenters from Ben Franklin to David Blaine had maintained. The experiments showed that you didn’t have to start off with the exceptional self-control of a Franklin or a Blaine to benefit: As long as you were motivated to do some kind of exercise, your overall willpower could improve, at least over the course of the experiment.
  • But what about afterward? As remarkable as the results were, the experiments had lasted only a few weeks or months. How hard would it be to keep up the self-discipline indefinitely?
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Chapter 7: Outsmarting Yourself in the Hour of Darkness

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  • Stanley was describing what the economist George Loewenstein calls the “hot-cold empathy gap”: the inability, during a cool, rational, peaceful moment, to appreciate how we’ll behave during the heat of passion and temptation. At home in England, the men may have coolly intended to behave in a virtuous manner, but they couldn’t imagine how different their feelings would be in the jungle. The hot-cold empathy gap is still one of the most common challenges to self-control, albeit in less extreme versions.
  • The cookies had to be hidden because the grown-ups suffered from the hot-cold empathy gap. They denounced junk food by day without realizing how much they’d want those evil cookies once they were tired and stoned.
  • In setting rules for how to behave in the future, you’re often in a calm, cool state, so you make unrealistic commitments. “It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused, as Loewenstein and Dan Ariely found by asking young heterosexual adult men some personal questions.
  • Turn up the heat, and the unthinkable becomes surprisingly thinkable. We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As Stanley discovered, there are mental tricks that enable you to conserve willpower for those moments when it’s indispensable. Paradoxically, these techniques require willpower to implement, but in the long run they leave you less depleted for those moments when it takes a strong core to survive.
  • Charity and generosity have been linked to self-control, partly because self-control is needed to overcome our natural animal selfishness, and partly because, as we’ll see later, thinking about others can increase our own self-discipline. The orderly Web sites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people unconsciously toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others.
  • By shaving every day, Stanley could benefit from this same sort of orderly cue without having to expend much mental energy. He didn’t have to make a conscious decision every morning to shave. Once he had expended the willpower to make it his custom, it became a relatively automatic mental process requiring little or no further willpower.
  • The researchers assumed, logically enough, that people with high self-control would tend to exercise it most noticeably in the behavior they controlled the most. Yet when the results were totaled up in a meta-analysis, just the opposite pattern appeared. The people with high self-control were distinguished by their behaviors that took place more or less automatically.
  • At first the researchers were baffled. Their results suggested that we don’t use self-control on controllable behaviors. How could that be? They checked and rechecked their codings and calculations, but that was indeed the finding. Only when they went back to the original studies did they begin to understand what this result meant. And it meant a serious change in how to think about self-control.
  • The behaviors they had coded as automatic tended to be linked to habits, whereas the more controlled sorts of behaviors tended to be unusual or one-time-only actions. Self-control turned out to be most effective when people used it to establish good habits and break bad ones.
  • The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
  • Those who kept looking at the marshmallow quickly depleted their willpower and gave in to the temptation to eat it right away; those who distracted themselves by looking around the room (or sometimes just covering their eyes) managed to hold out. Similarly, paramedics distract patients from their pain by talking to them about anything except their condition, and midwives try to keep women in labor from closing their eyes (which would enable them to focus on the pain). They recognize the benefits of what Stanley called “self-forgetfulness.”
  • Stanley summarized after his last expedition: I have learnt by actual stress of imminent danger, in the first place, that self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder, and, in the second place, that persistent self-control under the provocation of African travel is impossible without real, heartfelt sympathy for the natives with whom one has to deal.
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Chapter 8: Did a Higher Power Help Eric Clapton and Mary Karr Stop Drinking

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  • Contrary to popular stereotype, alcohol doesn’t increase your impulse to do stupid or destructive things; instead, it simply removes restraints. It lessens self-control in two ways: by lowering blood glucose and by reducing self-awareness. Therefore, it mainly affects behaviors marked by inner conflict, as when part of you wants to do something and part of you does not, like having sex with the wrong person, spending too much money, getting into a fight—or ordering another drink, and then another. This is the sort of inner conflict that cartoonists used to illustrate with the good angel on one shoulder and the bad angel on the other, but it’s not much of a contest after a few drinks. The good angel is out of commission. You need to intervene earlier, to stop the binge before it begins, which is no problem when there’s a staff at a place like Hazelden to do the job for you. But what would suddenly give you the strength to do it on your own? Why did Clapton’s decision to “surrender” leave him with more self-control?
  • “An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude,” he says, “and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that.”
  • When two things go together and researchers want to know which one causes the other, they sometimes try to track them over time and see which comes first—assuming that causation moves forward across time, so the cause precedes the effect.
  • As we noted earlier, conflicting goals impede self-regulation, so it appears that religion reduces such problems by providing believers with clearer priorities.
  • More important, religion affects two central mechanisms for self-control: building willpower and improving monitoring.
  • “It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,” says McCullough, who suggests that prayers and meditation rituals are “a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.” Religious believers build self-control by regularly forcing themselves to interrupt their daily routines in order to pray. Some religions, like Islam, require prayers at fixed times every day. Many religions prescribe periods of fasting, like the day of Yom Kippur, the month of Ramadan, and the forty days of Lent. Religions mandate specific patterns of eating, like kosher food or vegetarianism. Some services and meditations require the believer to adopt and hold specific poses (like kneeling, or sitting cross-legged in the lotus position) so long that they become uncomfortable and require discipline to maintain them.
  • Religion also improves the monitoring of behavior, another of the central steps to self-control. Religious people tend to feel that someone important is watching them. That monitor might be God, a supernatural being who pays attention to what you do and think, often even knowing your innermost thoughts and reasons, and can’t be easily fooled if you do something apparently good for the wrong reason.
  • Psychologists have found hat those who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don’t have the same high level of self-control as the true believers. The believers self-control comes to merely from a fear of God’s wrath but from the system of values they’ve absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He advises agnostics to look for their own set of hallowed values.
  • That’s the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.
  • Ainslie found that as we approach a short-term temptation, our tendency to discount the future follows the steep curve of a hyperbola, which is why this tendency is called hyperbolic discounting. As you devalue the future (like those heroin addicts in Vermont who couldn’t think beyond the next hour), you lose your concern about a hangover tomorrow, and you’re not focused on your vow to go through the rest of your life sober. Those future benefits now seem trivial in relation to the immediate pleasure at the pub. What’s the harm in stopping by for one drink?
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Chapter 9: Raising Strong Children: Self-Esteem Versus Self-Control

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  • The theory of self-esteem was a well-intentioned attempt to use psychology for the public good, and it did indeed seem promising at first. Baumeister spent much of his early career on the self-esteem bandwagon. He was impressed by research showing that students with high self-esteem had high grades, while students with low-self esteem tended to struggle in school.
  • There seem to be only two clearly demonstrated benefits of high self-esteem, according to the review panel. First, it increases initiative, probably because it lends confidence. People with high self-esteem are more willing to act on their beliefs, to stand up for what they believe in, to approach others, to risk new undertakings. (This unfortunately includes being extra willing to do stupid or destructive things, even when everyone else advises against them.) Second, it feels good. High self-esteem seems to operate like a bank of positive emotions, which furnish a general sense of well-being and can be useful when you need an extra dose of confidence to cope with misfortune, ward off depression, or bounce back from failure. These benefits might be useful to people in some jobs, like sales, by enabling them to recover from frequent rejections, but this sort of persistence is a mixed blessing. It can also lead people to ignore sensible advice as they stubbornly keep wasting time and money on hopeless causes.
  • On the whole, benefits of high self-esteem accrue to the self while its costs are borne by others, who must deal with side effects like arrogance and conceit. At worst, self-esteem becomes narcissism, the self-absorbed conviction of personal superiority. Narcissists are legends in their own mind and addicted to their grandiose images. They have a deep craving to be admired by other people (but don’t feel a special need to be liked—it’s adulation they require). They expect to be treated as special beings and will turn nasty when criticized. They tend to make very good first impressions but don’t wear well. When the psychologist Delroy Paulhus asked people in groups to rate one another, the narcissists seemed to be everyone’s favorite person, but only during the first few meetings. After a few months, they usually slipped to the bottom of the rankings. God’s gift to the world can be hard to live with.
  • Long before children can read rules or do chores, they can start learning self-control. Ask any parent who has survived the ordeal of Ferberization, which is based on a technique found in a Victorian child-rearing manual. It requires the parents, against all instinct, to ignore their infants’ cries when they’re left alone at bedtime. Instead of rushing to the infant’s side, the parents let the infant cry for a fixed interval of time, then go offer some comfort, then withdraw for another fixed interval. The process is repeated until the child learns to control the crying and go to sleep without any help from the parents. It requires great self-control by the parents to ignore the heart-rending screams, but the infants usually learn quickly to put themselves to sleep without any crying. Once an infant acquires this self-control, everyone wins: The infant is no longer anxious at bedtime or when he or she wakes up alone in the middle of the night, and the parents don’t have to spend their nights hovering by the crib.
  • As they strengthen their willpower, children also need to learn when not to rely on it. In Mischel’s marshmallow experiments near Stanford, many children tried to resist temptation by staring right at the marshmallow and willing themselves to be strong. It didn’t work. Staring at the forbidden marshmallow kept reminding them of its allure, and as soon as willpower slackened for a moment, they gave in and ate it. By contrast, the children who managed to hold out—who waited fifteen minutes in order to get two marshmallows—typically succeeded by distracting themselves. They covered their eyes, turned their backs, fiddled with their shoelaces. That marshmallow experiment caused some researchers to conclude that controlling attention is what matters, not building willpower, but we disagree. Yes, controlling attention is important. But you need willpower to control attention.
  • Success is conditional—but it’s within your reach as long as you have the discipline to try, try again.
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Chapter 10: The Perfect Storm of Dieting

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  • If you’re serious about controlling your weight, you need the discipline to follow these three rules: 1. Never go on a diet. 2. Never vow to give up chocolate or any other food. 3. Whether you’re judging yourself or judging others, never equate being overweight with having weak willpower.
  • That’s what we call the Oprah Paradox: Even people with excellent self-control can have a hard time consistently controlling their weight. They can use their willpower to thrive in many ways—at school and work, in personal relationships, in their inner emotional lives—but they’re not that much more successful than other people at staying slim.

The What-the-Hell Effect

  • The researchers gave it a formal scientific term, counterregulatory eating, but in their lab and among colleagues it was known simply as the what-the-hell effect. Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow. So they think, What the hell, I might as well enjoy myself today—and the resulting binge often puts on far more weight than the original lapse. It’s not rational, but dieters don’t even seem to be aware of how much damage these binges do, as demonstrated in a follow-up experiment by Janet Polivy, Herman’s longtime collaborator.
  • As long as the diet wasn’t busted for the day, the dieters tracked what they were eating. But once they broke the diet and succumbed to the what-the-hell effect, they stopped counting and became even less aware than nondieters of what they were eating. As we know, monitoring is the next step in self-control after setting a goal, but how can dieters do that if they stop keeping track of what they eat? One possible alternative would be to heed the body’s signals that it’s had enough sustenance. But for dieters, that turns out to be yet another losing strategy.

The Dieter’s Catch–22

  • Humans are born with an innate gift for eating just the right amount. When an infant’s body needs food, it sends a signal through hunger pangs. When the body has had enough food, the infant doesn’t want to eat any more. Unfortunately, children start to lose this ability by the time they enter school, and it continues to decline later in life for some people—often the ones who need it the most. Why this occurs has been puzzling scientists for decades, starting with some research in the 1960s that revolutionized the study of eating.
  • In one experiment, researchers rigged a clock on the wall of a room where people could munch on snacks during the afternoon as they filled out stacks of questionnaires. When the clock ran fast, the obese people ate more than others, because the clock signaled to them that it must be getting close to dinnertime and therefore they must be hungry. Instead of heeding their body’s internal signals, they ate according to external cues from the clock. In another study, researchers varied the kinds of snacks that were offered, sometimes offering shelled peanuts and sometimes whole peanuts. It didn’t seem to matter to the normal-weight people, who ate about the same number of nuts either way. But the obese people ate far more when they were offered the shelled nuts, which apparently sent a stronger come-and-get-it message. Once again, the obese people responded more strongly to external cues, and researchers initially hypothesized it was the cause of their problem: They became obese because they ignored their body’s internal signals of being full.
  • It was a reasonable theory, but eventually researchers realized that they were confusing cause and effect. Yes, obese people ignored their inner cues, but that’s not why they became obese. It worked the other way: Their obesity made them likely to go on diets, and their diets caused them to rely on external instead of internal cues. For what is a diet but a plan imposing external rules? Dieters learn to eat according to a plan, not to their inner feelings and cravings. Dieting means being hungry a lot of the time (even if the marketers of diets are always promising otherwise).
  • More precisely, dieting means learning not to eat when you are hungry, preferably by learning to ignore those feelings of hunger. You mainly try to tune out the start-eating signal, but the start and stop signals are intertwined, so you typically lose touch with the stop-eating signal, too, particularly if the diet tells you exactly how much to eat. You eat by the rules, which works fine as long as you stick to them. But once you deviate from the rules, as just about everyone does, you have nothing left to guide you. That’s why, even after downing a couple of big milkshakes, dieters and obese people not only continue but increase their eating. The milkshakes filled them up, but they still don’t feel full. They have only the one bright line, and once they have passed it, there are no more limits.
  • To continue resisting temptation, they need to replenish the willpower they’ve lost. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch–22: 1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower. 2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.
  • Faced with this dilemma of whether to eat or not, a dieter might try telling herself that the best option is to slightly relax the diet. She might reason that it’s best to consume a little food and try to salve her conscience: Look, I had to break the diet in order to save it. But once she strays from the diet, we know what she’s liable to tell herself: What the hell. And then: Let the binge begin.
  • There is no magical solution to the dieter’s catch–22. No matter how much willpower you start off with, if you’re a dieter and spend enough time sitting near the dessert buffet telling yourself no, eventually no will probably change to yes. You need to avoid the dessert cart—or, better yet, avoid going on a diet in the first place. Instead of squandering your willpower on a strict diet, eat enough glucose to conserve willpower, and use your self-control for more promising long-term strategies.

Planning for battle

  • When you’re not starving, when you have glucose, you can prepare for the battle of the bulge with some of the classic self-control strategies, starting with precommitment. The ultimate surefire form of precommitment—the true equivalent of Odysseus tying himself to the mast—would be gastric bypass surgery, which would physically prevent you from eating, but there are lots of more modest forms. You can begin by simply keeping fattening food out of reach and out of sight. You’ll conserve willpower (as the women in the experiment did when the M&M’s were moved out of reach) at the same time that you’re avoiding calories. In one experiment, office workers ate a third less candy when it was kept inside a drawer rather than on top of their desks. A simple commitment strategy for avoiding late-night snacking is to brush your teeth early in the evening, while you’re still full from dinner and before the late-night-snacking temptation sets in. Although it won’t physically prevent you from eating, brushing your teeth is such an ingrained pre-bedtime habit that it unconsciously cues you not to eat anymore. On a conscious level, moreover, it makes snacking seem less attractive: You have to balance your greedy impulse for sugar against your lazy impulse to avoid having to brush your teeth again.
  • You can also try a strategy that psychologists call an “implementation intention,” which is a way to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend controlling your thoughts. Instead of making general plans to reduce calories, you make highly specific plans for automatic behavior in certain situations, like what to do when you’re tempted by fattening food at a party. An implementation intention takes the form of if-then: If x happens, I will do y. The more you use this technique to transfer the control of your behavior to automatic processes, the less effort you will expend. This was demonstrated in some experiments involving the classic Stroop test of mental effort that was described in chapter 1: identifying mislabeled colors. If you see the word green printed in green ink, you can quickly identify the color of the ink, but it takes longer if the green ink is being used to form the word blue. And it takes still longer if your willpower has been depleted beforehand, as English researchers did with the people in one experiment. But they found it was possible to compensate for this weaker willpower by training people to ease the strain on their minds. Before the ink-color-identifying task began, the people would form an implementation plan: If I see a word, I will ignore its meaning and look only at the second letter and the color of the ink. This specific if-then plan made their task more automatic, requiring less conscious mental effort, and therefore doable even when their willpower was already weakened.
  • So before you get tempted by the food at a party, you can prepare yourself with a plan like: If they serve chips, I will refuse them all. Or: If there is a buffet, I will eat only vegetables and lean meat. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective way to gain self-control. By making the decision to pass up the chips an automatic process, you can do it fairly effortlessly even late in the day, when your supply of willpower is low. And because it’s relatively effortless, you can pass up the chips and still have enough willpower to deal with the next temptation at the party.

Let me Count the Weighs (and the Calories)

  • The people who weighed themselves every day were much more successful at keeping their weight from creeping back up. They were less likely to go on eating binges, and they didn’t show any signs of disillusion or other distress from their daily confrontation with the scale. For all the peculiar challenges to losing weight, one of the usual strategies is still effective: The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself. If it seems like too much of a chore to write down your weight every day, you can outsource some of the drudgery by using a scale that keeps an electronic record of your weight. Some models will transmit each day’s reading to your computer or smartphone, which can then produce a chart for your monitoring pleasure (or displeasure).
  • Besides monitoring your body, you can monitor what food you put into it. If you conscientiously keep a record of all the food you eat, you’ll probably consume fewer calories. In one study, those who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as those who used other techniques. It also helps to record how many calories are in the food, although that’s notoriously tricky to estimate.

Never Say Never

  • The results of dieting research tend to be depressing, but every now and then there’s an exception, and we’ve saved our favorite cheery finding for last. It’s from a dessert-cart experiment conducted by marketing researchers trying to figure out the central problem of self-control: Why is self-denial so difficult? As Mark Twain put it in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of the human psyche, but the researchers, Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick, looked for relief by considering different kinds of self-denial.
  • The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree—and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat.
  • It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never. In the long run, you end up wanting less and also consuming less. Plus, you may derive more pleasure because of another effect that was demonstrated in a different sort of experiment: asking people how much they’d be willing to pay to kiss their favorite movie star today, and how much they’d pay for a kiss three days from now. Ordinarily, people will pay more for an immediate pleasure, but in this case they were willing to spend extra money to postpone the kiss, because it would let them spend three days savoring the prospect. Similarly, delaying the gratification of crème brûlée or molten chocolate cake gives time to enjoy the anticipation. As a result of that advance pleasure, when you ultimately do indulge, you may find less of a need to binge and more of an inclination to eat moderately. In contrast, when you swear off something altogether and then finally give in, you say, What the hell, and gorge yourself.
  • So when it comes to food, never say never. When the dessert cart arrives, don’t gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. In the spirit of Scarlett O’Hara, tell yourself: Tomorrow is another taste.
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Conclusion: The Future of Willpower – More Gain, Less Strain

< [[Willpower: Table of Contents]]

  • In this closing chapter we’ll review the strategy for going on offense, starting with one of the most obvious yet widely ignored rules: Don’t keep putting it off. Procrastination is an almost universal vice. Cicero called procrastinators “hateful”; Jonathan Edwards preached an entire sermon against the “sin and folly of depending on future time.”
  • The trait that does seem to matter is impulsiveness, which shows up over and over in studies of procrastinators. This connection helps explain recent evidence that procrastination is more of a problem for men than it is for women, and especially for young men: Men have more hard-to-control impulses.

Willpower 101, First Lesson: Know Your Limits

    1. Know your Limits: No matter what you want to achieve, playing offense begins by recognizing the two basic lessons from chapter 1: Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things.
    1. Watch for Symptoms: There’s no obvious “feeling” of depletion. Hence you need to watch yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Do things seem to bother you more than they should?
    1. Pick Your Battles: When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better? What can you do about it?
  • When you’re budgeting your time, don’t give drudgery more than its necessary share. Remember Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
    1. Make a To-Do List – or at least a To-Don’t List: If so, try thinking of it as a todon’t list: a catalog of things that you don’t have to worry about once you write them down.
    1. Beware the Planning Fallacy: Whenever you set a goal, beware of what psychologists call the planning fallacy. It affects everyone from young students to veteran executives. When was the last time you heard of a highway or building being completed six months early? Late and over budget is the norm.
  • “We simply ask our managers and other workers to set their top goals for the week,” Patzer says. “You can’t have more than three goals, and it’s fine if you have less than three. Each week we go over what we did last week and whether we met those goals or not, and then each person sets the top three goals for this week. If you only get goals one and two done, but not three, that’s fine, but you can’t go off working on other goals until you’ve done the top three. That’s it—that’s how we manage. It’s simple, but it forces you to prioritize, and it’s rigorous.”
    1. Don’t Forget the Basics: Self-control will be most effective if you take good basic care of your body, starting with diet and sleep. You can indulge yourself in rich desserts, but be sure to get enough healthy food on a regular basis so that your mind has adequate energy. Sleep is probably even more important than food: The more that researchers study sleep deprivation, the more nasty effects they keep discovering. A big mug of coffee in the morning is not an adequate substitute for sleeping until your body wakes up on its own because it has gotten enough rest. The old advice that things will seem better in the morning has nothing to do with daylight, and everything to do with depletion. A rested will is a stronger will.
  • Another simple old-fashioned way to boost your willpower is to expend a little of it on neatness. As we described in chapter 7, people exert less self-control after seeing a messy desk than after seeing a clean desk, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat and wellorganized Web site. You may not care about whether your bed is made and your desk is clean, but these environmental cues subtly influence your brain and your behavior, making it ultimately less of a strain to maintain self-discipline. Order seems to be contagious.
    1. The Power of Positive Procrastination: Procrastination is usually a vice, but occasionally—very occasionally—there is such a thing as positive procrastination.
  • “The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” Benchley wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
  • Benchley recognized a phenomenon that Baumeister and Tice also documented in their term-paper study: Procrastinators typically avoid one task by doing something else, and rarely do they sit there doing nothing at all. But there’s a better way to exploit that tendency, as Raymond Chandler recognized.
    1. The Nothing Alternative: Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”
  • This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen:
  • “Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”
  • The rest comes of itself. That’s the seeming effortlessness that comes from playing offense. Chandler was incorporating several of the techniques we discussed earlier. The Nothing Alternative is a bright-line rule: a clear, unmistakable boundary, like the no-drinking vow taken by Eric Clapton and Mary Karr. Chandler’s particular rule—If I can’t write, I will do nothing—is also an example of an implementation plan, that specific if-x-then-y strategy that has been shown to reduce the demands on willpower. It’s easier to resist the temptation to go into debt if you enter the store with a firm implementation plan, like, If I shop for clothes, I will buy only what I can pay for with the cash in my wallet. Every time you follow this kind of rule, it becomes more routine, until eventually it seems to happen automatically and you have a lasting technique for conserving willpower: a habit.
  • Precommitment helps you avoid the hot-cold empathy gap we discussed earlier: the common failure to appreciate, in moments of cool deliberation, how different you’ll feel in the heat of later moments. One of the most common reasons for the self-control problem is overconfidence in willpower.
    1. Keep Track
    1. Reward Often

The Future of Self Control

  • Of all the benefits that have been demonstrated in Baumeister’s experiments, one of the most heartening is this: People with stronger willpower are more altruistic. They’re more likely to donate to charity, to do volunteer work, and to offer their own homes as shelter to someone with no place to go. Willpower evolved because it was crucial for our ancestors to get along with the rest of the clan, and it’s still serving that purpose today. Inner discipline still leads to outer kindness.