How Self-Control Works, Why it Matters and What You Can Do to Get More of It
The Willpower Instinct is the first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity.
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Key Takeaways
People who have better control of their attention, emotions and actions, are better off in almost any way you look at it. They are happier in their friendships, their marriage lasts longer, they make more money and go further in their careers.
With willpower we can accomplish the list of goals we often struggle to get done. That might be something like quitting smoking, starting a business or something as simple as cleaning your room.
Willpower is a general strength that improves everything along with it. In fact, willpower is a better predictor of how well you do in school or how successful you are at work, than intelligence. If we want to improve our lives, willpower is a great place to start.
It has to be noted that willpower is like a battery. When used, it slowly gets depleted.
You can see that on college campuses, during the final exam period. Students fill their heads with facts and formulas, pull all nighters, and push themselves to study hard. However studies show that these efforts come at a cost.
- During the final exams, many students seem to lose the capacity to control anything other than their study habits. They seem to smoke more cigarettes and have more emotional outbursts. They skip showering and rarely make an effort to change clothes. They even stop flossing.
- People who use their willpower seem to run out of it.
- Trying to control your temper, stick to a budget, or refusing that slice of cake, all draw from the same source of strength. This means that if you turn down the dessert, you’ll be more likely to get angry. And if you manage to control your anger, you’re more likely to overspend and not stick to your budget.
If willpower is limited, are we doomed to fail at our goals?
There are things you can do to overcome your willpower exhaustion and increase your self control.
1. Get Quality Sleep
Willpower is the highest in the morning and slowly degrades over the course of the day, almost like your phone battery. However, if you want your willpower to be full in the morning, you need to get some quality sleep first.
If 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. Being sleep deprived makes you more susceptible to stress, cravings and giving in to temptation.
- 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night, is what you should be getting to get your willpower fully recharged.
One of the reasons sleep is critical for self-control, is because your brain requires blood glucose as a fuel. Especially the front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. This brain region has been associated in controlling behavior and decision making.
- When we don’t get enough sleep, our prefrontal cortex get sluggish and less responsive. It’s almost the same as being drunk. And if you ever had too much to drink you know you don’t make the wisest decisions.
- However, the brain scans showed that when the sleep deprived participants catch a better night’s sleep, they no longer show signs of prefrontal cortex impairment.
So while lack of sleep can impair the prefrontal cortex, there’s a way to actually increase its size and efficiency. The answer is slow breathing meditation.
2. Slow Breathing Meditation
People who meditate just 10 minutes a day, build gray matter in their prefrontal cortex and after a couple of months their brains look different.
But why slow breathing? The reason is it increases our heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is a variation in the time interval between heartbeats. To exert self control, the heart rate has to go down, but the variability needs to go up.
- Studies have shown, heart rate variability starts increasing as the breathing rate drops below 12 breaths per minute. For best results, you have to slow down breathing to 4 to 6 breaths. It’s slower than you normally breathe, but it’s not too difficult with a little bit of practice.
- Slowing the breath down helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to relaxed self control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling your challenges.
- If you’re on a diet it’s a good idea to practice slowing down your breath, before you start looking at that slice of cake.
3. Physical Exercise
In one study, where they were experimenting with a new treatment for enhancing self control, two researchers were stunned by their findings. While they had hoped for positive results, nobody predicted how effective the treatment’s effects would be.
- After just two months of treatment, the participants in the study showed improvements in attention and ability to ignore distractions. They also reduced their smoking, drinking and caffeine intake – despite the fact that nobody had asked them to.
- They were eating less junk food and more healthy food. They were spending less time watching television and more time studying. They were saving money and spending less on impulsive purchases.
- What is this miracle drug and where can I get a prescription?
The intervention wasn’t a drug at all. The willpower miracle was physical exercise.
- The participants who never exercised regularly before the intervention, were given free membership to a gym and encouraged to make good use of it. They exercised an average of just one time per week for the first month, but were up to three times per week by the end of the two month study.
- The researchers didn’t ask them to make any changes in their lives, and yet the exercise program improved self control in ALL aspects of their lives.
Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self control scientists have discovered. It also increases heart rate variability, which we talked about earlier.
If you tell yourself that you are too tired to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores your energy and willpower, not drains it.
3. After a willpower failure, it's better to encourage yourself, rather than criticize.
Let’s say you decide to quit smoking. Everything is going great for a week or so, but then you suddenly find yourself with a cigarette in your hand. Maybe you felt stressed, maybe you just weren’t thinking, who knows.
It’s best to be self critical about it, right? Feeling guilty that you lit that cigarette, will surely remind you not to do it next time. Well the problem is that guilt is driving people back to doing the very thing they want to avoid.
After all, what do you do when you feel bad? You do something that reduces the bad feeling. Usually that’s the very thing that you want to quit, so it’s no wonder alcoholics want another drink, smokers want to light a cigarette and dieters want to eat another slice of cake.
Remember, everyone is bound to fail sooner or later, so it’s important how we respond to this slight setback.
- Rather than telling yourself things like, “Why did I do that again? I’m so stupid. I’m never going to change.” Start talking to yourself in a second person, as if you were talking and giving advice to a good friend.
- Basically say to yourself, “You know what? This is the process of change. Sometimes we fall off the wagon. Everyone is imperfect.”
So after a willpower failure, it’s better to encourage yourself, rather than criticize. After all you’re only human.
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How to Have More Willpower
1. Get Adequate Amounts of Sleep
Sleep when you don’t get enough sleep, you’re prone to all kinds of stress, cravings, and temptations. Research has shown, that being sleep deprived is very similar to being mildly intoxicated, which is probably not the best time to be making decisions.
- Too little sleep has been shown to cause problems that mimic those associated with ADHD.
- Getting enough sleep is absolutely one of the most important you can do for your willpower.
2. Meditation
Meditation Just like you go to the gym to get stronger and build muscle, you can do the same thing for your brain. An activity that trains your brain is meditation. It makes your brain grow denser, packing in more grey matter just like a muscle bulking up from exercise.
- Research has shown that those who meditate really do have more grey matter in their prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the area associated with decision making and willpower. It’s the part of the brain that gets you to say no to something unhealthy and it’s the part of the brain that gets you to get up and start working on your project.
- Even after a few weeks of being consistent with it, we can already observe the brain structure physically changing.
- You don’t have to mediate for hours, even a short period is effective. You can start with 5 minutes of meditation focusing on your breath and move up to 10, 15 or however long you like. It’s much better to be consistent and only do 5 minute, then more and be inconsistent.
3. Willpower is Like a Muscle, it Gets Tired
You start out with your willpower for the day and then it just keeps getting depleted. Wake up and do the most important tasks first thing in the morning before your willpower gets depleted.
Get Yourself To Take Action
Strategy 1: Increase Heart Rate Variability
If you have high HRV, you have more willpower available for whenever temptation strikes. The more varied your heart rate intervals are, the higher your heart rate variability is.
So how can you raise your HRV and gain access to a larger willpower reserve?
- One way to immediately boost your willpower is to slow your breathing down to 4-6 breaths per minute. Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases HRV. Try whaling for 4 seconds and exhaling for 8 seconds.
Strategy 2: Self-Forgiveness
If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself…you are wrong.
- Studies show that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. Self-criticism backfires as a strategy for self-control because like other forms of stress it drives you straight to comfort coping activities like binge eating ice cream or watching TV instead of finishing a project.
The next time you are about to lose self-control, reflect and forgive.
- Reflect on a previous willpower failure or time spent procrastinating. Relive the moment and recall how horrible you felt afterwards.
- Then be a good friend and forgive yourself. Say to yourself “everyone struggles with willpower challenges and loses control from time to time”
With a dose of self-forgiveness you give yourself the ability to use your willpower muscle again.
The Science of Willpower TedTalk by Dr. Kelly McGonigal
Myths of Willpower
1. We Mistake Wanting for Happiness
We mistake the inner experience of desire to the inner experience of wanting for the experience of happiness. Everything we feel like “oh I need just one more” (potato chips, wine, cigarettes, reality t.v.) is related to a specific part of the brain.
To break free from any type of addiction is to learn to distinguish the inner experience of desire and the experience of happiness or satisfaction.
2. Measure of Our Virtue
When we are resisting temptation it is somehow because we are a good person and when giving into the temptations we are a bad person. We really think about willpower as the ability to do what really matters to us that is consistent with our long-term goals and values.
3. Idea that you can use guilt and shame as a motivation
When you feel bad about something you have done, the best way to not do it again is to beat yourself up over it (stupid, lazy what’s wrong with you) The things we tend to feel most guilt and shame about are the things we actually turn to for comfort or soothe stress.
4. We need to change what's going on inside of us before we can make a big change with behavior
How do i fix my anxiety first? I need to work on it, fix it, soothe it get rid of it and then ill be able to tackle the thing that I’m afraid of. The more you resist your inner experiences, the stronger they get.
You have to accept them and focus on changing your behavior first. The more people accept those inner experiences and focus on the outer actions, the more they are likely to change those inner experiences over time.
5. You're Not Alone
We focus on what we think is uniquely broken or wrong with us we will use our willpower challenges (addiction, procrastination, temptation) we feel like we have let down ourselves or others by not fully realizing our potential.
The science says that all of this says that you live in a human body, human brain and you have all aspects of human nature that make you want or desire. When you’re struggling, you can appreciate that it’s not just you, it’s all of us.