The Willpower Instinct notes

Highlights
According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals.
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I believe that the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control.
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For example, smokers who are the most optimistic about their ability to resist temptation are the most likely to relapse four months later, and overoptimistic dieters are the least likely to lose weight. Why? They fail to predict when, where, and why they will give in.
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Self-knowledge—especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble—is the foundation of self-control.
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Your willpower challenge could be something you’ve been avoiding (what we’ll call an “I will” power challenge) or a habit you want to break (an “I won’t” power challenge).
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You could also choose an important goal in your life that you’d like to give more energy and focus to (an “I want” power challenge)—whether it’s improving your health, managing stress, honing your parenting skills, or furthering your career.
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Because distraction, temptation, impulse control, and procrastination are such universal human challenges, the strategies in this book will be helpful for any goal you choose.
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For most of us, the classic test of willpower is resisting temptation, whether the temptress is a doughnut, a cigarette, a clearance sale, or a one-night stand.
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When people say, “I have no willpower,” what they usually mean is, “I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or (fill in your anatomical part) wants to say yes.” Think of it as “I won’t” power.
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But saying no is just one part of what willpower is, and what it requires. After all, “Just say no” are the three favorite words of procrastinators and couch potatoes worldwide. At times, it’s more important to say yes.
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All those things you put off for tomorrow (or forever)? Willpower helps you put them on today’s to-do list, even when anxiety, distractions, or a reality TV show marathon threaten to talk you out of it. Think of it as “I will” power—the ability to do what you need to do, even if part of you doesn’t want to.
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“I will” and “I won’t” power are the two sides of self-control, but they alone don’t constitute willpower.
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To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want.
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To exert self-control, you need to find your motivation when it matters. This is “I want” power.
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Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t, and I want to help you achieve your goals (and stay out of trouble).
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People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it.
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Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut).
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As the prefrontal cortex grew, it took on new control functions: controlling what you pay attention to, what you think about, even how you feel. This made it even better at controlling what you do.
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Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has argued that the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain—and therefore, you—toward doing “the harder thing.” When it’s easier to stay on the couch, your prefrontal cortex makes you want to get up and exercise.
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The prefrontal cortex is not one unified blob of gray matter; it has three key regions that divvy up the jobs of I will, I won’t, and I want.
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One region, near the upper left side of the prefrontal cortex, specializes in “I will” power. It helps you start and stick to boring, difficult, or stressful tasks, like staying on the treadmill when you’d rather hit the shower.
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The right side, in contrast, handles “I won’t” power, holding you back from following every impulse or craving. You can thank this region for the last time you were tempted to read a text message while driving, but kept your eyes on the road instead.
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Together, these two areas control what you do.
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The third region, just a bit lower and in the middle of the prefrontal cortex, keeps track of your goals and your desires. It decides what you want.
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The prefrontal cortex is not always as reliable as we’d like. Many temporary states—like being drunk, sleep-deprived, or even just distracted—inhibit the prefrontal cortex,
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This leaves us less able to control our impulses, even though our gray matter is still safe in our skulls.
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Evolution prefers to add on to what it’s created, rather than start from scratch.
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Take, for example, our taste buds’ delight in the foods most likely to make us fat. An insatiable sweet tooth once helped humans survive when food was scarce and extra body fat was life insurance. Fast-forward to our modern environment of fast food, junk food, and Whole Foods, and there is more than enough to go around. Extra weight has become a health risk, not an insurance policy, and the ability to resist tempting foods is more important for long-term survival. But because it paid off for our ancestors, our modern brains still come equipped with a well-preserved instinct to crave fat and sweets.
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Fortunately, we can use the brain’s more recently evolved self-control system to override those cravings and keep our hands out of the candy bowl.
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Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind. There’s the version of us that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and the version of us that controls our impulses and delays gratification to protect our long-term goals.
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Sometimes we identify with the person who wants to lose weight, and sometimes we identify with the person who just wants the cookie. This is what defines a willpower challenge: Part of you wants one thing, and another part of you wants something else.
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Or your present self wants one thing, but your future self would be better off if you did something else.
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Some people find it useful to give a name to the impulsive mind, like “the cookie monster” to the part of you that always wants instant gratification,
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“the critic” to the part of you that likes to complain about everyone and everything,
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or “the procrastinator” to the person who never wants to get started.
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Giving a name to this version of yourself can help you recognize when it is taking over, and also help you call in your wiser self for some willpower support.
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Part of succeeding at your willpower challenges will be finding a way to take advantage of, and not fight, such primitive instincts.
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Neuroeconomists—scientists who study what the brain does when we make decisions—have discovered that the self-control system and our survival instincts don’t always conflict. In some cases, they cooperate to help us make good decisions.
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the brain can treat a hefty price tag like a physical punch to the gut. That instinctive shock is going to make the job easy for your prefrontal cortex, and you’ll barely need to exert any “I won’t” power. As we aim to improve our willpower, we’ll look for ways to use every bit of what it means to be human—including our most primitive instincts, from the desire for pleasure to the need to fit in—to support our goals.
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Self-control is one of mankind’s most fabulous upgrades, but it’s not our only distinction.
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We also possess self-awareness: the ability to realize what we are doing as we do it, and understand why we are doing it.
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You need to recognize when you’re making a choice that requires willpower; otherwise, the brain always defaults to what is easiest.
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Consider a smoker who wants to quit. She needs to recognize the first sign of a craving,
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She also needs to realize that if she gives in to the craving this time, she’s more likely to smoke again tomorrow.
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psychologists know that most of our choices are made on autopilot,
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most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re making a choice.
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Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has shown that people who are distracted are more likely to give in to temptations.
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When your mind is preoccupied, your impulses—not your long-term goals—will guide your choices.
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That observation was fascinating to Michele; she had never thought of checking e-mail as a way to relieve tension.
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Michele realized that checking her e-mail was as ineffective as scratching an itch—it just made her itch more.
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like an eager student, the brain is remarkably responsive to experience. Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating.
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What does willpower training for your brain look like? Well, you could challenge your “I won’t” power by planting temptation traps around your home—a chocolate bar in your sock drawer, a martini station by your exercise bike, the photo of your very married high school sweetheart taped to the fridge.
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Or you could build your own “I will” power obstacle course, with stations that require you to drink wheat grass juice, do twenty jumping jacks, and file your taxes early.
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Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness.
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This practice of coming back to the breath, again and again, kicks the prefrontal cortex into high gear and quiets the stress and craving centers of your brain
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Most new meditators make this mistake, but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective.
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He also realized that what he was doing in meditation was exactly what he needed to do in real life: catch himself moving away from a goal and then point himself back at the goal (in this case, focusing on the breath).
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The meditation was perfect practice for when he was just about to order something salty and deep-fried for lunch, and needed to stop and order something healthier.
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Meditation is not about getting rid of all your thoughts; it’s learning not to get so lost in them that you forget what your goal is. Don’t worry if your focus isn’t perfect when meditating. Just practice coming back to the breath, again and again.
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What’s going on in the brain and body now? A few things. First, your brain is temporarily taken over by the promise of reward. At the sight of that strawberry cheesecake, your brain launches a neurotransmitter called dopamine from the middle of your brain into areas of the brain that control your attention, motivation, and action. Those little dopamine messengers tell your brain, “Must get cheesecake NOW, or suffer a fate worse than death.”
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This might explain the near-automatic movement of your feet and hands into the bakery.
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The need for self-control sets into motion a coordinated set of changes in the brain and body that help you resist temptation and override self-destructive urges. Segerstrom calls those changes the pause-and-plan response, which couldn’t look more different from the fight-or-flight response.
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The pause-and-plan response differs in one very crucial way: It starts with the perception of an internal conflict, not an external threat.
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For self-control, you don’t need legs ready to run or arms ready to punch, but a well-fueled brain ready to flex its power.
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The single best physiological measurement of the pause-and-plan response is something called heart rate variability—a measurement most people have never heard of, but one that provides an amazing window into the body’s state of stress or calm.
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When people are under stress, the sympathetic nervous system takes over, which is part of the basic biology that helps you fight or flee.
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when people successfully exert self-control, the parasympathetic nervous system steps in to calm stress and control impulsive action.
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Heart rate goes down, but variability goes up.
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Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in.
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For example, recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability goes up when they see a drink are more likely to stay sober.
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psychologists to call heart rate variability the body’s “reserve” of willpower—a physiological measure of your capacity for self-control.
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Many factors influence your willpower reserve, from what you eat (plant-based, unprocessed foods help; junk food doesn’t) to where you live (poor air quality decreases heart rate variability—yes, L.A.’s smog may be contributing to the high percentage of movie stars in rehab).
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Anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can interfere with the physiology of self-control, and by extension, sabotage your willpower.
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Anxiety, anger, depression, and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control.
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Chronic pain and illness can also drain your body and brain’s willpower reserve.
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The focus meditation you learned in the last chapter is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the biological basis of willpower.
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It not only trains the brain, but also increases heart rate variability.
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Anything else that you do to reduce stress and take care of your health—exercise, get a good night’s sleep, eat better, spend quality time with friends and family, participate in a religious or spiritual practice—will improve your body’s willpower reserve.
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You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That’s ten to fifteen seconds per breath—slower than you normally breathe, but not difficult with a little bit of practice and patience.
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Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode.
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A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges.
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Start by timing yourself to see how many breaths you normally take in one minute.
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begin to slow the breath down without holding your breath (that will only increase stress).
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For most people, it’s easier to slow down the exhalation, so focus on exhaling slowly and completely
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Exhaling fully will help you breathe in more fully and deeply without struggling.
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If you don’t quite get down to four breaths a minute, don’t worry.
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Heart rate variability steadily increases as your breathing rate drops below twelve per minute.
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Research shows that regular practice of this technique can make you more resilient to stress and build your willpower reserve.
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because it takes only one to two minutes of breathing at this pace to boost your willpower reserve, it’s something you can do whenever you face a willpower challenge.
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Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered.
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Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes.
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Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain.
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Green exercise is any physical activity that gets you outdoors and in the presence of Mama Nature.
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The best news is that when it comes to green exercise, a quick fix really is enough.
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Shorter bursts have a more powerful effect on your mood than longer workouts.
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You also don’t have to break a sweat or push yourself to exhaustion. Lower-intensity exercise, like walking, has stronger immediate effects than high-intensity exercise.
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He turned his treadmill into a willpower generator by taping a “Willpower” label over the machine’s calorie tracker
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As he walked and burned more calories, the “Willpower” number ticked up and he felt stronger.
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you are surviving on less than six hours of sleep a night, there’s a good chance you don’t even remember what it’s like to have your full willpower.
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Being mildly but chronically sleep deprived makes you more susceptible to stress, cravings, and temptation.
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Why does poor sleep sap willpower? For starters, sleep deprivation impairs how the body and brain use glucose, their main form of energy.
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When you’re tired, your cells have trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream.
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With your body and brain desperate for energy, you’ll start to crave sweets or caffeine.
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This is bad news for self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks your brain can spend its limited fuel on.
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In one study, five minutes of breath-focus meditation a day helped recovering addicts fall asleep.
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Thanks to the brain’s hard work and the cooperation of your body, your choices can be driven by long-term goals, not panic or the need for instant gratification.
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But self-control doesn’t come cheap. All of these mental tasks—focusing your attention, weighing competing goals, and quieting stress and cravings—require energy, real physical energy from your body, in the same way that your muscles require energy to fight or flee in an emergency.
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Because self-control also demands high levels of energy, some scientists speculate that chronic self-control—like chronic stress—can increase your chances of getting sick by diverting resources from the immune system.
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Too much willpower can actually be bad for your health. You may be thinking: What about all that stuff in the first chapter about how important willpower is for health? Now you’re telling me self-control is going to make me sick? Well, maybe.
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We need time to recover from the exertion of self-control, and we sometimes need to spend our mental and physical resources elsewhere. To preserve both your health and happiness, you need to give up the pursuit of willpower perfection.
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Even as you strengthen your self-control, you cannot control everything you think, feel, say, and do. You will have to choose your willpower battles wisely.
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One of the best ways to recover from stress and the daily self-control demands of your life is relaxation.
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Relaxing—even for just a few minutes—increases heart rate variability by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and quieting the sympathetic nervous system.
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It also shifts the body into a state of repair and healing, enhancing your immune function and lowering stress hormones.
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We’re not talking about zoning out with television or “relaxing” with a glass of wine and a huge meal.
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The kind of relaxation that boosts willpower is true physical and mental rest that triggers what Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson calls the physiological relaxation response
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Your heart rate and breathing slow down, your blood pressure drops, and your muscles release held tension.
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Your brain takes a break from planning the future or analyzing the past.
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To trigger this relaxation response, lie down on your back, and slightly elevate your legs with a pillow under the knees (or come into whatever is the most comfortable position for you to rest in).
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Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, allowing your belly to rise and fall.
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Stay here for five to ten minutes, enjoying the fact that there is nothing to do but breathe.
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If you’re worried about falling asleep, set an alarm.
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Make this a daily practice, especially when you’re dealing with high levels of stress or willpower demands. Relaxation will help your body recover from the physiological effects of chronic stress or heroic self-control.
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Science also points us to a critical insight: Stress is the enemy of willpower.
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So often we believe that stress is the only way to get things done, and we even look for ways to increase stress—such as waiting until the last minute, or criticizing ourselves for being lazy or out of control—to motivate ourselves.
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This may seem to work in the short term, but in the long term, nothing drains willpower faster than stress.
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Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.
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According to a 2008 study by the National Sleep Foundation, American adults now get two hours less sleep per night than the average in 1960.
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Our nation’s sleeping habits may be creating an epidemic of poor self-control and focus.
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Notice when stress strikes throughout the day or week.
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The five-minute green willpower fill-up. Get active outdoors—even just a walk around the block—to reduce stress, improve your mood, and boost motivation. •
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Perhaps most disturbingly, people who are on a diet are more likely to cheat on their spouse.
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Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day.
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It was as if every act of willpower was drawing from the same source of strength, leaving people weaker with each successful act of self-control.
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These observations led Baumeister to an intriguing hypothesis: that self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely, like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion.
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And because every act of willpower depletes willpower, using self-control can lead to losing control.
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Many things you wouldn’t typically think of as requiring willpower also rely on—and exhaust—this limited well of strength. Trying to impress a date or fit into a corporate culture that doesn’t share your values.
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Navigating a stressful commute, or sitting through another boring meeting.
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Anytime you have to fight an impulse, filter out distractions, weigh competing goals, or make yourself do something difficult, you use a little more of your willpower strength.
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This even includes trivial decisions, like choosing between the twenty brands of laundry detergent at the market.
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If your brain and body need to pause and plan, you’re flexing the metaphorical muscle of self-control.
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Luckily there are things you can do to both overcome willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control strength.
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When Susan analyzed how she was spending her willpower, it was obvious that her job was getting a hundred percent,
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If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength.
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We do, however, have something like a self-control muscle in our brain. Even though the brain is an organ, not a muscle, it does get tired from repeated acts of self-control. Neuroscientists have found that with each use of willpower, the self-control system of the brain becomes less active.
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Matthew Gailliot, a young psychologist working with Roy Baumeister, wondered whether a tired brain was essentially a problem of energy.
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Self-control is an energy-expensive task for the brain, and our internal energy supply is limited—after all, it’s not like we have an intravenous sugar drip into our prefrontal cortex.
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He brought people into the laboratory to perform a wide range of self-control tasks, from ignoring distractions to controlling their emotions. Before and after each task, he measured their blood sugar levels. The more a person’s blood sugar dropped after a self-control task, the worse his performance on the next task. It appeared as if self-control was draining the body of energy, and this energy loss was weakening self-control.
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Gailliot then gave the willpower-drained participants a glass of lemonade. Half of them received sugar-sweetened lemonade to restore blood sugar; the other half received a placebo drink that was artificially sweetened and would not supply any usable energy.
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Amazingly, boosting blood sugar restored willpower.
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Low blood sugar levels turn out to predict a wide range of willpower failures, from giving up on a difficult test to lashing out at others when you’re angry.
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In contrast, giving participants a sugar boost turns them back into the best versions of themselves: more persistent and less impulsive; more thoughtful and less selfish.
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Robert Kurzban has argued that the actual amount of energy your brain needs to exert self-control is less than half a Tic Tac per minute.
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The human brain has, at any given time, a very small supply of energy. It can store some energy in its cells, but it is mostly dependent on a steady stream of glucose circulating in the body’s bloodstream.
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Special glucose-detecting brain cells are constantly monitoring the availability of energy.
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When the brain detects a drop in available energy, it gets a little nervous. What if it runs out of energy? Like the banks, it may decide to stop spending and save what resources it has.
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It will keep itself on a tight energy budget, unwilling to spend its full supply of energy. The first expense to be cut? Self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks the brain performs.
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University of South Dakota researchers X. T. Wang, a behavioral economist, and Robert Dvorak, a psychologist, have proposed an “energy budget” model of self-control. They argue that the brain treats energy like money.
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It will spend energy when resources are high, but save energy when resources are dropping.
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In the long run, though, mainlining sugar is not a good strategy for self-control. During stressful times, it’s especially tempting to turn to highly processed, high-fat, and high-sugar “comfort” food. Doing so, however, will lead to a self-control crash and burn. In the long term, blood sugar spikes and crashes can interfere with the body’s and brain’s ability to use sugar—meaning that you could end up with high blood sugar, but low energy (as is the case for the millions of Americans with type 2 diabetes
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A better plan is to make sure that your body is well-fueled with food that gives you lasting energy.
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Most psychologists and nutritionists recommend a low-glycemic diet—that is, one that helps you keep your blood sugar steady.
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Low-glycemic foods include lean proteins, nuts and beans, high-fiber grains and cereals, and most fruits and vegetables—basically, food that looks like its natural state and doesn’t have a ton of added sugar, fat, and chemicals.
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As with physical exercise, using your self-control muscle may be tiring, but over time, the workout should make it stronger.
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Other studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower.
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Most of us interpret exhaustion as an objective indicator that we cannot continue. This theory says it is just a feeling generated by the brain to motivate us to stop, in much the same way that the feeling of anxiety can stop us from doing something dangerous, and the feeling of disgust can stop us from eating something that will make us sick.
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But because fatigue is only an early warning system, extreme athletes can routinely push past what seems to the rest of us like the natural physical limits of the body.
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These athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit, and with sufficient motivation, they can transcend it.
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Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body—we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are.
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Our beliefs about what we are capable of may determine whether we give up or soldier on.
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the possibility that we can, like athletes, push past the feeling of willpower exhaustion to make it to the finish line of our own willpower challenges.
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All too often, we use the first feeling of fatigue as a reason to skip exercise, snap at our spouses, procrastinate a little longer, or order a pizza instead of cooking a healthy meal.
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The next time you find yourself “too tired” to exert self-control, challenge yourself to go beyond that first feeling of fatigue.
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It turns out that the metaphorical “muscle” of willpower can also be coaxed into persevering longer with the right inspiration.
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University at Albany psychologists Mark Muraven and Elisaveta Slessareva have tested a number of motivations on willpower-drained students.
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Finally, the mere promise that practice would improve performance on a difficult task helped the students push past willpower exhaustion.
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When your willpower is running low, find renewed strength by tapping into your want power. For your biggest willpower challenge, consider the following motivations:
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How will you benefit from succeeding at this challenge? What is the payoff for you personally? Greater health, happiness, freedom, financial security, or success?
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Who else will benefit if you succeed at this challenge?
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When you find your biggest want power—the thing that gives you strength when you feel weak—bring it to mind whenever you find yourself most tempted to give in or give up.
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the only way to increase our self-control is to stretch our limits. Like a muscle, our willpower follows the rule of “Use it or lose it.”
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we need to rethink the assumption that every willpower failure is caused by weakness. In some cases, we are the victims of our own self-control success.
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We’ll consider how progress can paradoxically undermine our motivation, how optimism can give us a license to indulge, and why feeling good about our virtue is the fastest path to vice.
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When it comes to right and wrong, most of us are not striving for moral perfection. We just want to feel good enough—which then gives us permission to do whatever we want.
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The students who had rejected obviously sexist or racist statements felt they had established their moral credentials. They had proven to themselves that they were not sexist or racist, but this left them vulnerable to what psychologists call moral licensing
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When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad.
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For example, people who first remember a time when they acted generously give 60 percent less money to a charitable request than people who have not just recalled a past good deed.
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Because what is a willpower challenge if not a battle between virtue and vice?
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If you tell yourself that you’re “good” when you exercise and “bad” when you don’t, then you’re more likely to skip the gym tomorrow if you work out today.
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they report feeling proud of themselves for earning a reward. They offer the justification, “I was so good, I deserve a little treat.” This sense of entitlement too often becomes our downfall.
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Because we’re quick to view self-indulgence as the best reward for virtue, we forget our real goals and give in to temptation.
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Shoppers who restrain themselves from buying something tempting are more likely to go home and eat something tempting.
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Even though they weren’t signing up for any actual service, just imagining the choice increased their desire to splurge on a pair of designer jeans.
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We have a gut response, and we only look to logic if we are forced to explain our feelings.
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If we don’t get an inner ick, a sharp pang of guilt, or a twinge of anxiety when we think about something, it doesn’t feel wrong.
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like having another slice of birthday cake or putting one more little thing on our credit cards—doesn’t trigger that instinctive feeling of “wrongness,” we don’t tend to question our impulses.
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This is how feeling good about ourselves for past good behavior helps us justify future indulgences. When you feel like a saint, the idea of self-indulgence doesn’t feel wrong.
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It feels right. Like you earned it.
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And if the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself.
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It convinces us that self-sabotaging behavior—whether breaking your diet, blowing your budget, or sneaking a smoke—is a “treat.”
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When you define a willpower challenge as something you should do to be a better person, you will automatically start to come up with arguments for why you shouldn’t have to do it.
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And so when you tell yourself that exercising, saving money, or giving up smoking is the right thing to do—not something that will help you meet your goals—you’re less likely to do it consistently.
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psychologists know we are all too quick to use progress as an excuse for taking it easy.
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When you make progress toward your long-term goal, your brain—with its mental checklist of many goals—turns off the mental processes that were driving you to pursue your long-term goal. It will then turn its attention to the goal that has not yet been satisfied—the voice of self-indulgence. Psychologists call this goal liberation.
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The goal you’ve been suppressing with your self-control is going to become stronger, and any temptation will become more tempting.
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In practical terms, this means that one step forward gives you permission to take two steps back.
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Although it runs counter to everything we believe about achieving our goals, focusing on progress can hold us back from success.
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The problem with progress is how it makes us feel—and even then, it’s only a problem if we listen to the feeling instead of sticking to our goals.
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When people who have taken a positive step toward meeting a goal—for example, exercising, studying, or saving money—are asked, “How much progress do you feel you have made on your goal?” they are more likely to then do something that conflicts with that goal, like skip the gym the next day, hang out with friends instead of studying, or buy something expensive.
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In contrast, people who are asked, “How committed do you feel to your goal?” are not tempted by the conflicting behavior.
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Chicago provides one strategy. When they asked students to remember a time they turned down a temptation, moral licensing ensued, and 70 percent took the next opportunity to indulge.
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But when they also asked the participants to remember why they had resisted, the licensing effect disappeared—69 percent resisted temptation.
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Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence.
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The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and remember the why.
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Sometimes the mind gets so excited about the opportunity to act on a goal, it mistakes that opportunity with the satisfaction of having actually accomplished the goal.
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Perhaps they were so confident that they would order the healthy item in the future, they felt comfortable ordering the french fries today.
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This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.
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I’ll smoke this one cigarette, but starting tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll skip the gym today, but I’m sure I’ll go tomorrow.
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For example, researchers at Yale University gave students the choice between a fat-free yogurt and a large Mrs. Fields cookie. When the students were told they would have the same options the following week, 83 percent chose the cookie, compared with only 57 percent of students who thought the snacks were a one-time opportunity.
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In fact, 67 percent of students who were told they’d have the same choice the following week predicted that they would choose the more virtuous option.
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But when the experimenters actually brought them back to the lab for a second choice, only 36 percent made a different choice.
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As you go about making decisions related to your willpower challenge, notice if the promise of future good behavior comes up in your thinking.
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Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behavior tomorrow?
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Psychologists have shown that we wrongly predict we will have much more free time in the future than we do today.
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We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for it.
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This psychological tendency is difficult to shake.
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The experimenters tried to prompt more realistic self-predictions by giving some people the explicit instructions, “Please do not provide an idealistic prediction, but rather the most realistic prediction of your behavior that you can.”
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People who received these instructions showed even more optimism about their behavior, reporting the highest estimates yet.
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It’s as if they took their original predicted average seriously, and were assigning their future selves extra exercise to make up for their “unusually poor” performance. Rather than view the past two weeks as reality, and their original estimates as an unrealistic ideal, they viewed the past two weeks as an anomaly.
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When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself.
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He has shown that smokers asked to try to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day gradually decrease their overall smoking—even when they are explicitly told not to try to smoke less.
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Rachlin argues that this works because the smokers are deprived of the usual cognitive crutch of pretending that tomorrow will be different.
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Every cigarette becomes not just one more smoked today, but one more smoked tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after
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Aim to reduce the variability of your behavior day to day. View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?”
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he decided to take the challenge of reducing the variability in his behavior. He settled on the strategy of “vegetarian before dinner.”
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This approach is a great way to end the endless internal debate about whether you’ve earned a reward.
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Using a daily rule also helps you see through the illusion that what you do tomorrow will be totally different from what you do today.
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Is there a rule you can live with that will help you end the kind of inner debate that talks you right out of your goals?
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There’s one last licensing trap we must learn to avoid, and unlike all of the traps we’ve seen so far, it has nothing to do with our own virtuous behavior. It has to do with our deep desire to convince ourselves that what we want isn’t so bad.
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Congratulations: You have just met, and fallen for, the halo effect. This form of moral licensing looks for any reason to say “yes” to temptation. When we want permission to indulge, we’ll take any hint of virtue as a justification to give in.
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Dieting researchers call this a health halo. We feel so good about ordering something healthy, our next indulgence doesn’t feel sinful at all.
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Halo effects pop up all over the place, whenever something indulgent is paired with something more virtuous.
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For example, studies also show that shoppers who buy chocolate for a charity will reward their good deed by eating more chocolate.
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and gift-givers may feel so generous that they decide they, too, deserve a gift. (This may explain why women’s shoes and clothing make up the largest percentage of early holiday shopping.)
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To find her way out of this trap, she redefined what it meant to save. No longer would getting a good deal qualify—she had to stay under a set spending limit and get a good deal.
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When a halo effect is getting in the way of your willpower challenge, look for a the most concrete measure (e.g., calories, cost, time spent or wasted) of whether a choice is consistent with your goals.
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Just browsing a website that sells green products, like rechargeable batteries and organic yogurt, makes people feel good about themselves.
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The study found that people who actually chose to purchase an eco-friendly product were more likely to then cheat on a test that paid them for each correct answer.
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University of Melbourne economists have found that a licensing effect is most likely when people pay a “penance” for bad behavior—for example, paying an extra $2.50 to plant a tree to make up for the carbon costs of your home electricity use.
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For example, daycare centers that charge parents a fine for picking up their children late find that the policy actually increases late pickups.
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However, when people are given a chance to pay for something that replaces a harmful act with something good for the environment—for example, paying 10 percent more on your electricity bill to use green sources of energy—no such licensing effect is seen.
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Why not? Economists speculate that this kind of green act doesn’t so much reduce guilt as it strengthens the consumer’s sense of commitment to the environment. When
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we pay that extra money to use wind or solar energy, we think, I’m the kind of person who does good things for the planet! And then we carry that identity with us, looking for more ways to live our values and achieve our goals.
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If we want to motivate green behavior in others, we would be wise to focus more on strengthening a person’s identity as someone who cares about the environment, and less on giving people the opportunity to buy the right to melt the polar ice caps.
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Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis.
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We only reward ourselves for good behavior if we believe that who we really are is the self that wants to be bad.
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When you think about your willpower challenge, which part of you feels more like the “real” you—the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled?
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Thinking in terms of “right” and “wrong” instead of remembering what we really want will trigger competing impulses and license self-sabotaging behavior.
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For change to stick, we need to identify with the goal itself, not the halo glow we get from being good.
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Despite his “frequent, sometimes frantic pushing of the button,” he was never able to achieve the sense of satisfaction he felt he was close to experiencing. The self-stimulation left him anxious, not happy. His behavior looked more like compulsion than a man experiencing pleasure.
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Olds and Milner hadn’t discovered the pleasure center—they had discovered what neuroscientists now call the reward system.
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The area they were stimulating was part of the brain’s most primitive motivational system, one that evolved to propel us toward action and consumption.
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Our whole world is full of stimuli—from restaurant menus and catalogs to lottery tickets and television ads—that can turn us into the human version of Olds and Milner’s rat chasing the promise of happiness.
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How does the reward system compel us to act? When the brain recognizes an opportunity for reward, it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
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Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what to pay attention to and what to get our greedy little hands on. A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself—the feeling is more like arousal.
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We feel alert, awake, and captivated. We recognize the possibility of feeling good and are willing to work for that feeling.
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In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire.
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But one thing is clear: It is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure, or actual reward.
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Studies show that you can annihilate the entire dopamine system in a rat’s brain, and it will still get a goofy grin on its face if you feed it sugar. What it won’t do is work for the treat. It likes the sugar; it just doesn’t want it before it has it.
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Knutson had proven that dopamine is for action, not happiness.
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What they were feeling when the reward system lit up was anticipation, not pleasure.
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Anything we think is going to make us feel good will trigger the reward system—the sight of tempting food, the smell of coffee brewing, the 50-percent-off sign in a store window, a smile from a sexy stranger, the infomercial that promises to make you rich.
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When dopamine hijacks your attention, the mind becomes fixated on obtaining or repeating whatever triggered it.
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Evolution doesn’t give a damn about happiness itself, but will use the promise of happiness to keep us struggling to stay alive.
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Of course, as with many of our primitive instincts, we find ourselves in a very different environment now than the one the human brain evolved in. Take, for example, the flood of dopamine we experience whenever we see, smell, or taste high-fat or high-sugar food.
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That dopamine release guarantees we will want to stuff ourselves silly. This is a great instinct if you live in an environment where food is scarce. But when you live in a world where food is not only widely available but also specifically engineered to maximize your dopamine response, following every burst of dopamine is a recipe for obesity, not longevity.
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When we add the instant gratification of modern technology to this primitive motivation system, we end up with dopamine-delivery devices that are damn near impossible to put down.
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Well, now we have Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and text messaging—the modern equivalent of psychiatrist Robert Heath’s self-stimulating devices.
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Because we know there’s a chance we’ll have a new message, or because the very next You Tube video may be the one that makes us laugh, we keep hitting refresh, clicking the next link, and checking our devices compulsively.
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There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology.
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Cell phones, the Internet, and other social media may have accidentally exploited our reward system, but computer and video game designers intentionally manipulate the reward system to keep players hooked.
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One study found that playing a video game led to dopamine increases equivalent to amphetamine use—and it’s this dopamine rush that makes both so addictive.
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The unpredictability of scoring or advancing keeps your dopamine neurons firing, and you glued to your seat.
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While not everyone who picks up an Xbox controller gets hooked, for those who are vulnerable, games can be as addictive as any drug.
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Do you know what your own dopamine triggers are? Food? Alcohol? Shopping? Facebook? Something else? This week, pay attention to what captures your attention.
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While these cases are extreme, they aren’t so different from what happens in your brain whenever you get hooked by the promise of reward.
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We are driven to chase pleasure, but often at the cost of our well-being.
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When dopamine puts our brains on a reward-seeking mission, we become the most risk-taking, impulsive, and out-of-control version of ourselves.
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Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward—combined with a growing sense of anxiety when we think about stopping—is enough to keep us hooked.
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When dopamine is released by one promise of reward, it also makes you more susceptible to any other kind of temptation.
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For example, erotic images make men more likely to take financial risks, and fantasizing about winning the lottery leads people to overeat—two ways daydreaming about unattainable rewards can get you into trouble.
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High levels of dopamine amplify the lure of immediate gratification, while making you less concerned about long-term consequences.
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big food companies packing their recipes with just the right combination of sugar, salt, and fat to drive your dopamine neurons crazy to lotto commercials that encourage you to imagine what you would do with a million dollars if you hit the jackpot.
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They start to see how many of their willpower failures are hastened by dopamine triggers in their everyday environments.
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Another student canceled her catalog subscriptions when she recognized that she was essentially getting a dopamine delivery in the mail, each colorful page creating desires that could only be filled by that company’s products.
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We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks. An unpleasant chore can be made more appealing by introducing a reward.
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And when the rewards of our actions are far off in the future, we can try to squeeze a little extra dopamine out of neurons by fantasizing about the eventual payoff (not unlike those lotto commercials).
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One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20.
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Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100.
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Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win.
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Dopamine can be a great motivator,
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If we pause and notice what’s really going on in our brains and bodies when we’re in that state of wanting, we will find that the promise of reward can be as stressful as it is delightful.
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dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy.
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It doesn’t mind putting a little pressure on us—even if that means making us unhappy in the process.
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To motivate you to seek the object of your craving, the reward system actually has two weapons: a carrot and a stick. The first weapon is, of course, the promise of reward.
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Dopamine-releasing neurons create this feeling by talking to the areas of your brain that anticipate pleasure and plan action.
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When these areas are bathed in dopamine, the result is desire—the carrot that makes the horse run forward.
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But the reward system has a second weapon that functions more like the proverbial stick. When your reward center releases dopamine, it also sends a message to the brain’s stress center. In this area of the brain, dopamine triggers the release of stress hormones. The result: You feel anxious as you anticipate your object of desire.
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The need to get what you want starts to feel like a life-or-death emergency, a matter of survival.
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She discovered that she was most happy on the way to the mall.
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Driving there, she felt hopeful and excited. Once she arrived, as long as she was window-shopping from the center of the mall, she felt good. But when she was in a store, the feelings shifted. She felt tense, especially if the store was crowded.
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Getting to the register and handing over her credit card felt like a relief, not like the happiness she had felt before the purchase.
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We humans find it nearly impossible to distinguish the promise of reward from whatever pleasure or payoff we are seeking.
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The promise of reward is so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy, and consume things that bring us more misery than satisfaction.
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Because the pursuit of reward is dopamine’s main goal, it is never going to give you a “stop” signal—even when the experience does not live up to the promise.
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There is growing evidence that when people pay close attention to the experience of their false rewards, the magical spell wears off.
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When we free ourselves from the false promise of reward, we often find that the thing we were seeking happiness from was the main source of our misery.
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Test the promise of reward with a temptation that you regularly indulge in because your brain tells you it will make you happy.
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The most common choices in my class are snack foods, shopping, television, and online time-wasters from e-mail to poker.
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Mindfully indulge, but don’t rush through the experience. Notice what the promise of reward feels like: the anticipation, the hope, the excitement, the anxiety, the salivation—whatever is going on in your brain and body.
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Then give yourself permission to give in.
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How does the experience compare with the expectation? Does the feeling of the promise of reward ever go away—or does it continue to drive you to eat more, spend more, or stay longer?
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Others find that the experience is completely unsatisfying, revealing a huge gap between the promise of reward and the reality of their experience.
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In fact, neuroscientists now suspect that an underactive reward system contributes to the biological basis of depression.
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If we are to have any self-control, we need to separate the real rewards that give our lives meaning from the false rewards that keep us distracted and addicted.
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Learning to make this distinction may be the best we can do.
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This isn’t always easy, but understanding what’s happening in the brain can make it a little easier.
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Desire is the brain’s strategy for action.
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When dopamine points us to temptation, we must distinguish wanting from happiness.
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Neuromarketing and environmental triggers. Look for how retailers and marketers try to trigger the promise of reward.
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The stress of desire. Notice when wanting triggers stress and anxiety.
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Dopaminize your “I will” power challenge. If there’s something you’ve been putting off, motivate yourself by linking it with something that gets your dopamine neurons firing.
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Test the promise of reward. Mindfully indulge in something your brain tells you will make you happy but that never seems to satisfy (e.g., snack food, shopping, television, and online time-wasters).
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When you’re feeling down, what do you do to feel better? If you’re like most people, you turn to the promise of reward.
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the most commonly used strategies for dealing with stress are those that activate the brain’s reward system: eating, drinking, shopping, watching television, surfing the Web, and playing video games.
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And why not? Dopamine promises us that we’re going to feel good.
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The promise of reward—as we’ve seen—does not always mean that we will feel good. More often, the things we turn to for relief end up turning on us.
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only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them.
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The brain, it turns out, is especially susceptible to temptation when we’re feeling bad.
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But your brain isn’t just motivated to protect your life—it wants to protect your mood, too. So whenever you are under stress, your brain is going to point you toward whatever it thinks will make you happy.
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For example, when a cocaine addict remembers a fight with a family member or being criticized at work, his brain’s reward system becomes activated, and he experiences intense cravings for cocaine.
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For example, one economic survey found that women worried about their finances shop to cope with their anxiety and depression.
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Binge-eaters who feel ashamed of their weight and lack of control around food turn to—what else?—more food to fix their feelings.
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What do you turn to when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or down? Are you more susceptible to temptation when you are upset?
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While many of the most popular stress-relief strategies fail to make us feel better, some strategies really work.
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According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby.
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(The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)
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The main difference between the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t? Rather than releasing dopamine and relying on the promise of reward, the real stress relievers boost mood-enhancing brain chemicals like serotonin and GABA, as well as the feel-good hormone oxytocin.
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They also help shut down the brain’s stress response, reduce stress hormones in the body, and induce the healing relaxation response.
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Because they aren’t exciting like the dopamine releasers, we tend to underestimate how good they will make us feel.
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Knowing that she was likely to forget again and fall into her old routine, she made a voice memo on her phone after class one evening, describing how good she felt after doing yoga.
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Studies show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief.
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Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight.
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The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. The guilt was driving them back to the bottle.
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Welcome to one of the biggest threats to willpower worldwide: the “what-the-hell effect.”
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the what-the-hell effect describes a cycle of indulgence, regret, and greater indulgence.
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These researchers noticed that many dieters would feel so bad about any lapse—a piece of pizza, a bite of cake 21—that they felt as if their whole diet was blown.
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Instead of minimizing the harm by not taking another bite, they would say, “What the hell, I already blew my diet. I might as well eat the whole thing.”
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Any setback can create the same downward spiral.
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Giving in makes you feel bad about yourself, which motivates you to do something to feel better.
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You say to yourself, “I’ve already broken my [diet, budget, sobriety, resolution], so what the hell. I might as well really enjoy myself.”
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Crucially, it’s not the first giving-in that guarantees the bigger relapse. It’s the feelings of shame, guilt, loss of control, and loss of hope that follow the first relapse.
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The self-forgiveness intervention was a clear success: The women who received the special message ate only 28 grams of candy, compared with almost 70 grams by women who were not encouraged to forgive themselves.
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To many people, self-forgiveness sounds like excuse-making that will only lead to greater self-indulgence.
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The brain’s self-control system does not fully develop until young adulthood, and kids need some external support while their prefrontal cortices fill out.
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However, many people treat themselves like they are still children—and frankly, they act more like abusive parents than supportive caregivers.
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Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control.
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It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power.
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In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control.
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Forgiveness—not guilt—helped them get back on track.
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One reason forgiveness helps people recover from mistakes is that it takes away the shame and pain of thinking about what happened.
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The what-the-hell effect is an attempt to escape the bad feelings that follow a setback. Without the guilt and self-criticism, there’s nothing to escape.
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This means it’s easier to reflect on how the failure happened, and less tempting to repeat it.
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Everybody makes mistakes and experiences setbacks. How we handle these setbacks matters more than the fact that they happened.
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Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge. Bring to mind a specific time when you gave in to temptation or procrastination, and experiment with taking the following three points of view on that failure. When you experience a setback, you can bring these perspectives to mind to help you avoid a downward spiral of guilt, shame, and giving in again.
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1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that? Notice if self-criticism comes up, and if it does, what you say to yourself. The perspective of mindfulness allows you to see what you are feeling without rushing to escape.
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2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you.
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   Can you think of other people you respect and care about who have experienced similar struggles and setbacks? This perspective can soften the usual voice of self-criticism and self-doubt.
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3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback.
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   How would you encourage them to continue pursuing their goal? This perspective will point the way to getting back on track.
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   discovered that we are most likely to decide to change when we are at a low point: feeling guilty about a binge, staring at a credit card bill, waking up hung over, or worried about our health.
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   Setting a resolution offers an immediate sense of relief and control.
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   We don’t have to believe that we are the person who made that mistake; we can become a completely different person.
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   As we face our first setbacks, the initial feel-good rush of deciding to change is replaced with disappointment and frustration. Failing to meet our expectations triggers the same old guilt, depression, and self-doubt, and the emotional payoff of vowing to change is gone.
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   At this point, most people will abandon their efforts altogether.
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   It’s only when we are feeling out of control and in need of another hit of hope that we’ll once again vow to change—and start the cycle all over.
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   Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.”
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   There is a fine line between the motivation we need to make a change, and the kind of unrealistic optimism that can sabotage our goals.
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   Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution.
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   Optimistic pessimism for successful resolutions. Predict how and when you might be tempted to break your vow, and imagine a specific plan of action for not giving in.
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   That’s because a big prefrontal cortex is good at more than self-control. It can also rationalize bad decisions and promise we’ll be better tomorrow.
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   Economists call this delay discounting—the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you. Even small delays can dramatically lower the perceived value.
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   We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming.
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   One reason we’re so susceptible to immediate gratification is that our brain’s reward system did not evolve to respond to future rewards.
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   When dopamine was first perfecting its effects in the human brain, a reward that was far off—whether by sixty miles or sixty days—was irrelevant to daily survival.
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   The immediate reward triggers the older, more primitive reward system and its dopamine-induced desire. Future rewards don’t interest this reward system so much.
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   To delay gratification, the prefrontal cortex has to cool off the promise of reward. It’s not an impossible feat—after all, that’s what the prefrontal cortex is there for.
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   The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and—for maximum effect—you need to see it.
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   When you know your own triggers, putting them out of sight can keep them from tempting your mind.
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   WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: WAIT TEN MINUTES
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   Ten minutes might not seem like much time to wait for something you want, but neuroscientists have discovered that it makes a big difference in how the brain processes a reward.
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   When immediate gratification comes with a mandatory ten-minute delay, the brain treats it like a future reward.
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   For a cooler, wiser brain, institute a mandatory ten-minute wait for any temptation. If, in ten minutes, you still want it, you can have it—but before the ten minutes are up, bring to mind the competing long-term reward that will come with resisting temptation.
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   If your willpower challenge requires “I will” power, you can still use the ten-minute rule to help you overcome the temptation to procrastinate. Flip the rule to “Do ten minutes, then you can quit.” When your ten minutes are up, give yourself permission to stop—although you may find that once you get started, you’ll want to keep going.
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   While it’s human nature to discount future rewards, everyone has a different discount rate.
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   Others have a very high discount rate. They cannot resist the promise of immediate gratification,
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   How big your discount rate is turns out to be a major determinant of your long-term health and success.
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   The first study to look at the long-term consequences of a person’s discount rate was a classic psychology experiment best known as “The Marshmallow Test.”
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   People with higher future-reward discount rates are more susceptible to a wide range of self-control problems. They are more likely to smoke and drink to excess, and they have a greater risk of drug use, gambling, and other addictions.
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   They are less likely to save for retirement, and more likely to drive drunk and have unprotected sex.
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   One reason is that most people are loss-averse—that is, we really don’t like to lose something we already have.
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   Losing $50 makes people more unhappy than getting $50 makes them happy. When
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   Future-reward discounting drops dramatically when people think about the future reward first.
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   You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is.
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4. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: Are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now?
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   PRECOMMIT YOUR FUTURE SELF
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   Create a new default. Make choices in advance and from a clear distance, before your future self is blinded by temptation.
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   You can schedule and prepay for anything from personal training sessions to dental visits.
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   Make it more difficult to reverse your preferences. Like Cortés sinking his ships, find a way to eliminate the easiest route to giving in.
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   Motivate your future self. There is no shame in using a carrot or a stick to nudge yourself toward long-term health and happiness.
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   donating money to a charity if you don’t meet your predetermined goals, you can add a “tax” to the immediate reward.
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   Future you always has more time, more energy, and more willpower than present you. At least, that’s the story we tell ourselves when we think about our future selves.
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   Could fund-raisers exploit the future-self bias by asking people to pledge their future selves’ money instead of giving money now?
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   when it comes to getting other people to commit their money, time, or effort, you can take advantage of the future-self bias by asking them to commit far in advance.
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   High future-self continuity seems to propel people to be the best version of themselves now.
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   Neuroscientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany have shown that imagining the future helps people delay gratification.
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   For your willpower challenge, ask yourself what future rewards you put on sale each time you give in to temptation or procrastination.
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   Institute a mandatory ten-minute wait for any temptation. Before the time is up, bring to mind the competing long-term reward of resisting temptation.
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   (One reason salespeople, managers, and politicians are trained to intentionally mimic other people’s postures is that they know it will make it easier to influence the person they are mirroring.)
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   For example, in one study, students caught the goal to make money just from reading a story about another student who worked over spring break. These students then worked harder and faster to earn money in a laboratory task.
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   The best way to strengthen your immune response to other people’s goals is to spend a few minutes at the beginning of your day thinking about your own goals, and how you could be tempted to ignore them.
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   Research shows that thinking about someone with good self-control can increase your own willpower.
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   (In my class, the most frequently nominated willpower role models are accomplished athletes, spiritual leaders, and politicians, though family members and friends may provide even more motivation, as you’ll see in a little bit.)
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   When you need a little extra willpower, bring your role model to mind. Ask yourself: What would this willpower wonder do?
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   Social epidemics—like the spread of obesity or smoking—follow a pattern of complex contagion
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   It is not enough to come into contact with a person who is a “carrier” of the behavior. Your relationship to that person matters.
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   The brain regions activated by self and mom are almost identical, showing that who we think we are includes the people we care about.
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   social proof. When the rest of our tribe does something, we tend to think it’s a smart thing to do.
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   “One night of heavy drinking can impair your ability to think abstractly for thirty days.”
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   this study suggests a new strategy for discouraging unhealthy behavior: Just convince people it’s the habit of a group they would never want to be a member of.
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   The best predictor of whether a student cheats is whether he believes other students cheat, not the severity of penalties or whether he thinks he will be caught.
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   Look for a new “tribe” you could join. It could be a support group, a class, a local club, an online community, or even subscribing to a magazine that supports your goals. Surrounding yourself with people who share your commitment to your goals will make it feel like the norm.
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   When contemplating a choice, we often imagine ourselves the object of other people’s evaluations.
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   Studies show that this can provide a powerful boost to self-control.
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   People who imagine how proud they will feel when they accomplish a goal—from quitting smoking to donating blood—are more likely to follow through and succeed.
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   Anticipated disapproval works too: People are more likely to use condoms when they imagine feeling ashamed if others knew that they had unprotected sex.
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   David Desteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, argues that social emotions like pride and shame have a quicker and more direct influence over our choices than rational arguments about long-term costs and benefits.
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   Desteno calls this hot self-control.
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   Usually we think of self-control as the triumph of cool reason over hot impulses, but pride and shame rely on the emotional brain, not the logical prefrontal cortex.
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   Having their photo or name printed in the local paper was rated as the strongest deterrent for buying sex (87 percent of the men interviewed said it would make them think twice). This trumped jail time, having their driver’s license suspended, and having to pay a fine of $1,000 or more.
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   For pride to work, we need to believe that others are watching, or that we will have the opportunity to report our success to others.
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   This research points to a helpful strategy for making resolutions stick: Go public with your willpower challenges. If you believe that others are rooting for your success and keeping an eye on your behavior, you’ll be more motivated to do the right thing.
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   Anytime we feel excluded or disrespected, we are at greater risk for giving in to our worst impulses.
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   One good example is a weight-loss intervention at the University of Pittsburgh that requires people to enroll with a friend or family member.
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   An impressive 66 percent of participants in this program had maintained their weight loss at a ten-month follow-up, compared with only 24 percent of participants in a control group who did not join with friends or family.
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   The student who e-mailed me months later said that the sole thing that kept her going that first week after the class ended was knowing she was going to have to tell this stranger whether or not she had kept her word. But then it turned into a true buddy system of support.
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   They kept the weekly check-ins going for some time, despite the fact that they had no relationship outside of the class.
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   Why does trying to eliminate a thought or emotion trigger a rebound? Wegner’s hunch is that it has something to do with how the brain handles the command not to think about something.
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   It splits the task into two parts, achieved by two different systems of the brain. One part of your mind will take on the job of directing your attention toward anything other than the forbidden thought.
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   The operator relies on the brain’s system of self-control and—like all forms of effortful self-control—requires a good deal of mental resources and energy.
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   Another part of your mind takes on the job of looking for any evidence that you are thinking, feeling, or doing whatever you don’t want to think, feel, or do.
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   Wegner calls this process the monitor. Unlike the operator, the monitor runs automatically and without much mental effort.
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   If, for any reason, the operator runs out of steam, the monitor is going to become a self-control nightmare.
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   Neuroscientists have shown that the brain is constantly processing the forbidden content just outside of conscious awareness.
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   Trying not to think about something guarantees that it is never far from your mind.
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   Wegner, the psychologist who discovered ironic rebound, once received a phone call from a distraught student who couldn’t stop thinking about killing herself.
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   He told her about his experiments, and explained that the more you try to push away a thought, the more likely it is to fight its way back into consciousness.
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   This doesn’t mean the thought is true or important.
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   The student was relieved to realize that how she reacted to the thought of suicide had strengthened it—but this did not mean she really wanted to kill herself.
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   If you panic and push the thought out of your mind, it is going to come back. And when it does, it will return with more authority.
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   Because you are trying not to think about it, its reappearance seems even more meaningful. As a result, you’re more likely to believe it is true.
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   Wegner suggests an antidote to ironic rebound that is, itself, ironic: Give up. When you stop trying to control unwanted thoughts and emotions, they stop controlling you.
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   Studies of brain activation confirm that as soon as you give participants permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress, that thought becomes less primed and less likely to intrude into conscious awareness.
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   Paradoxically, permission to think a thought reduces the likelihood of thinking it.
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   This solution turns out to be useful for a surprisingly wide range of unwanted inner experiences. The willingness to think what you think and feel what you feel—without necessarily believing that it is true, and without feeling compelled to act on it—is an effective strategy for treating anxiety, depression, food cravings, and addiction.
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   When people are stressed out or distracted, trying not to think sad thoughts makes them even sadder than when they are trying to feel sad.
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   Another experiment found that when people try to push away self-critical thoughts (“I’m such a loser,” “People think I’m stupid”), their self-esteem and mood plummet faster than when people openly contemplate such thoughts.
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   This is true even when people think they have succeeded at pushing the negative thoughts away.
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   People who try to suppress their fear before giving a public speech not only feel more anxious, but also have higher heart rates (and are therefore more likely to blow the big talk).
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   studies show that thought suppression increases the symptoms of serious anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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   But as we’ll see, if we want to save ourselves from mental suffering, we need to make peace with those thoughts, not push them away.
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   Philippe Goldin is one of the most outgoing neuroscientists you’ll ever meet.
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   He has found that people with social anxiety are worse at controlling their thoughts than the average person, and it shows in their brains.
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   When confronted with a worry—say, imagining themselves being criticized—the stress center overreacts.
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   When Goldin asks them to change what they’re thinking, the system of attention control is underactivated.
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   Borrowing from Wegner’s theory of thought control, it’s as if their “operator” is exhausted and cannot point their minds away from the worry.
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   This would explain why people with anxiety disorders are so consumed by their fears—their attempts to push the thoughts away are especially ineffective.
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   Goldin takes a very different approach. He teaches social anxiety sufferers to observe and accept their thoughts and feelings—even the scary ones.
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   The goal is not to get rid of the anxiety and self-doubt, but to develop a trust that they can handle these difficult thoughts and feelings.
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   If they learn that there is no inner experience that they need to protect themselves from, they can find more freedom in the outer world.
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   When a worry comes up, he instructs the anxiety sufferers to notice what they are thinking, feel the anxiety in their body, and then turn their attention to their breathing.
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   If the anxiety persists, he encourages them to imagine their thoughts and emotions dissolving with the breath. He teaches them that if they don’t fight the anxiety, it will naturally run its course.
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   When he compared each person’s brain scan from before and after the training, he found an intriguing change. After the intervention, there was much more activity in the brain network associated with visual information processing.
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   The social anxiety sufferers were paying more attention to the self-critical statements than they had before the training.
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   There was also a major decrease in the stress center’s activity.
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   Even as the anxiety sufferers gave the negative thoughts their full attention, they were less upset by them.
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   This change in the brain came with big benefits in everyday life. After the intervention, the anxiety sufferers felt less anxious overall, and they were spending less time criticizing themselves and worrying.
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   When they stopped fighting their thoughts and emotions, they found more freedom from them.
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   When an upsetting thought comes to mind, try the technique that Goldin teaches his subjects. Instead of instantly trying to distract yourself from it, let yourself notice the thought.
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   Let yourself notice whether the upsetting thought is an old, familiar tune—that’s your first clue that it is not critically important information you need to believe.
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   Then shift your attention to what you are feeling in your body. Notice if there is any tension present, or changes to your heart rate or breathing.
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   Notice how it feels to breathe in and breathe out. Sometimes the upsetting thought and feelings naturally dissipate when you do this.
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   Other times, they will keep interrupting your attention to your breath. If this happens, imagine the thought and feelings like clouds passing through your mind and body. Keep breathing, and imagine the clouds dissolving or floating by. Imagine your breath as a wind that dissolves and moves the clouds effortlessly. You don’t need to make the thought go away; just stay with the feeling of your breath.
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   The opposite of thought suppression is accepting the presence of the thought—not believing it.
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   Trying to avoid unwanted feelings often leads to self-destructive behavior, whether it’s a procrastinator trying to avoid anxiety, or a drinker trying to avoid feeling alone.
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   Our eventual failure to control our thoughts and behavior is interpreted as evidence that we didn’t try hard enough to suppress—not that suppression doesn’t work. This leads us to try harder, setting ourselves up for an even stronger rebound.
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   Instead, they should notice when they were craving chocolate, accept whatever thoughts or feelings they had about the chocolate, but also remember that they didn’t have to act on those thoughts and feelings. While not controlling their thoughts, they still had to control their behavior.
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   She could look right at the chocolates on a coworker’s desk, even lean down and inhale the scent, and not give in.
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   It also asks participants to think about what they can do to improve their health—like exercise—instead of thinking in terms of what they shouldn’t do or eat. In essence, the program turns an “I won’t” power challenge into an “I will” power challenge.
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   Can you redefine the “I won’t” challenge so that it becomes an “I will” challenge?
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   When they felt a strong craving, they should imagine the urge as a wave in the ocean. It would build in intensity, but ultimately crash and dissolve.
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   Keep track of how many cigarettes they smoked each day for the following week, along with their daily mood and the intensity of urges to smoke.
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   This is one of the best side effects of surfing the urge: You learn how to accept and handle all your difficult inner experiences, and no longer need to turn to unhealthy rewards for comfort.
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   Whatever your drug of choice, surfing the urge can help you ride out cravings without giving in.
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   When the urge takes hold, pause for a moment to sense your body. What does the urge feel like? Is it hot or cold? Do you feel tension anywhere in your body? What’s happening with your heart rate, your breathing, or your gut? Stay with the sensations for at least one minute.
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   Notice whether the feelings fluctuate in intensity or quality. Not acting on an urge can sometimes increase its intensity—like an attention-seeking child throwing a temper tantrum.
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   You can get a good sense of the technique just by sitting still and waiting for the urge to scratch your nose, cross your legs, or shift your weight. Apply the same principles of surfing the urge to this impulse—feel it, but don’t automatically give in.
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   SURFING THE URGE TO COMPLAIN
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   Then she imagined her irritation as a wave and rode out the feelings.
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   Surfing the urge is not just for addiction; it can help you handle any destructive impulse.
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   accepting anxiety and cravings, ending restrictive dieting, and surfing the urge—teach people to give up a rigid attempt to control their inner experiences.
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   If we truly want peace of mind and better self-control, we need to accept that it is impossible to control what comes into our mind.
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   All we can do is choose what we believe and what we act on.
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   Trying to suppress thoughts, emotions, and cravings backfires and makes you more likely to think, feel, or do the thing you most want to avoid.
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   Investigate ironic rebound. Is there something you try to avoid thinking about? Does suppression work, or does trying to push something out of your mind make it come back stronger?
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   Feel what you feel, but don’t believe everything you think.
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   When an upsetting thought comes to mind, notice it and how it feels in your body. Then turn your attention to your breathing, and imagine the thought dissolving or passing by.
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   Accept those cravings—just don’t act on them. When a craving hits, notice it and don’t try to immediately distract yourself or argue with it. Remind yourself of the white-bear rebound effect, and remember your goal to resist.
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   Surf the urge. When an urge takes hold, stay with the physical sensations and ride them like a wave, neither pushing them away nor acting on them.
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   If there is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention. It’s training the mind to recognize when you’re making a choice, rather than running on autopilot.
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   It’s remembering what you really want, and knowing what really makes you feel better.
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   Self-awareness is the one “self ” you can always count on to help you do what is difficult, and what matters most. And that is the best definition of willpower I can think of.
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   As you move forward, keep the mind-set of a scientist. Try new things, collect your own data, and listen to the evidence. Stay open to surprising ideas, and learn from both your failures and your successes.