Willpower – Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Took a two day trip to Dublin and started this book to read on the side. Wasn’t actively making notes so will just be mentioning the absolute basics of this one. 30% through it as I start writing so very briefly;

The book suggests that willpower post-Victorian era was mostly laughed at and ill-considered, however, Baumeister and co conducted numerous interesting studies. The suggestion is that willpower works very much like a muscle.. It can be fatigued and also strengthened. It seems that, the more you have to exert willpower in your day-to-day, the easier you can fall victim to your instincts and/or instant gratification. It mentions that, if you were to try to quit smoking AND try to lose weight simultaneously, you’re likely to fail at both because your willpower will be depleted twice as fast… You should do one thing at a time.

It goes on to talk about how prisoners requesting parole were more likely to have it granted if their hearing was right after breakfast or lunch as opposed to right before lunch or later on in the day. The study mentions that you like to keep your options open. If you deny parole, you can grant it at a later date, but denying it keeps your options open. If your willpower is depleted (you’ve made many judging decisions and energy is low) you are more likely to resort to the easy option of essentially making no decision by denying or delaying parole.

The next mentioned is an experience anyone who’s tried to buy a car on the manufacturers website will know all about. You’re presented with a ridiculous number of choices. 4 types of gear-stick, 10 different tyres and rims, different configurations of gear-box, dust caps and so on. The researchers found that as you are bombarded with making these decisions, after a while you’re much more likely to settle for the path of least resistance- that is, the default option. They noticed that by manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the difference amounted to as much as $2,000. Whether customers paid a little extra for fancy tyre rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered (early or late) and how much willpower was left in the customer. Similar results were noticed when shopping for bespoke or expensive suits with multiple different fabrics etc. Sometimes shoppers get so tired of making choices that they simple stop buying, but clever marketers can often find ways to exploit decision fatigue. This is also particularly apparent in supermarkets; after you navigate the aisles and deplete your willpowe rby choosing among thousands of foods and products, what greets you as you wait in line at the cash register? Gossipy tabloids and chocolate bars. Not for nothing are they called impulse purchases. It’s no accident that the candy is presented just at the moment when your impulse control is weakest – and just when your decision-fatigued brain is desperate for a quick hit of glucose.

The following chapter is about self-awareness and what purpose it serves. What is the point in self-awareness if it only serves to make us more miserable? Well, a person might look at a table and think nothing more than, “Oh, there’s a table.” But the self was rarely noticed in such a neutral way. Whenever people focused on themselves, they seemed to compare what they saw with some sort of idea of what they should be like. A person who looked in the mirror usually didn’t stop at, “Oh, thats me.” Rather, the person was more likely to think, “My hair is a mess” or “This shirt looks good on me” or “Have I gained weight?” Self awareness always seemed to involve comparing the self to these ideas of what one might, or should, or could, be.

Self-awareness involves a process of comparing yourself to standards. This led to the conclusion that self-awareness would nearly always be unpleasant, because the self is never perfect. But that seemed odd from an evolutionary standpoint. Further research showed that people can make themselves feel good by comparing themselves to the “average person” – who we all like to think is inferior to ourselves.

Eventually the best answer came to be; Self-awareness evolved because it helps self-regulation. One of the hardest parts of a hangover is the return of self-awareness, because thats when we resume that crucial task for a social animal; comparing our behaviour with the standards set by ourselves and our neighbours.

The next chapter, The Quantified Self, talks about Anthony Trollope, one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in history. Trollope believed it unnecessary – and inadvisable – to write for more than three hours a day. He would rise at 5:30am, fortify himself with coffee and spend a half hour reading the previous day’s work to get himself in the right voice. Then he would write for two and a half hours, monitoring the time with a watch placed on the table. He forced himself to produce one page of 250 words every quarter hour. “I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went” He ke made sure each week to meet a goal, he would draw up a schedule and then keep a diary as to whether or not he met this schedule. “In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied,” “there has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.” It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules

“I have not once, through all my literary career, felt myself even in danger of being late with my task,” he wrote. “I have known no anxiety as to ‘copy.’ The needed pages far ahead—very far ahead—have almost always been in the drawer beside me. And that little diary, with its dates and ruled spaces, its record that must be seen, its daily, weekly demand upon my industry, has done all that for me.”

Esther Dyson, a famously prescient internet guru and investor says that “So far, marketers have been really effective at selling goods and other things that undermine our willpower,” “We need to apply those techniques to strengthen it.” She uses self-quantification (fitbits, sleep monitors etc) to change her behaviour on the margins. Things like walking up more stairs and taking fewer escalators, leaving a party an hour early to get more sleep etc because it gives her points on the apps. She says it frees her to do the right thing because she can blame her behaviour on the numbers.

For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.

Try not to delight too much in achieving a goal, focus instead on whats next.

Public information has more impact than private information. People care more about what other people know about them than about what they know about themselves. Failures can be swept under the carpet much easier if only you know about them. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. Other people don’t buy your excuses, and you have much more trouble selling those excuses when you expand from one person to a whole social network. By going public, you’re not just exposing yourself to potential shame. You’re also outsourcing the job of monitoring.

Can willpower be strengthened?

This chapter starts by looking at David Blaine. If we could isolate his secret for fasting forty-four days, maybe the rest of us could use it to last until dinner. David says he has a sort of OCD almost. When running in a bike lane, every time he sees the painting of the cyclist, he must step on it, and right on the bikers head. He says discipline is just repetition and practice. He forces himself to hit all sorts of silly goals to always make things more difficult.

The conducted an experiment to see which of 3 groups improved their willpower. One group was told to straighten up their posture every time they thought about it, another was told to self-monitor and write down everything they ate over a week and the last group was told to try to be happy when they felt down at any point.

That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture.

They key is to concentrate on changing a habitual behaviour such as slouching, or using your non-dominant hand for routine tasks, or refraining from cursing. All of these tasks can improve willpower and could be a good warmup for tackling a bigger challenge like quitting smoking.

Exercising self-control in one area of life like an exercise or study program seems to improve self-control in all areas of life. Willpower gets stronger the more you use it, regardless of the area in which you use it, so it is less readily depleted.

Outsmarting yourself in the heart of darkness Self-control is more indispensable than gunpower – Henry Morton Stanley

In setting rules for how to behave in the future, you’re often in a calm, cool state, so you make unrealistic commitments. “It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused.

Pre-commitment: Henry used this. The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible—or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful—to leave the path.

A modern Odysseus can try lashing himself to his browser with software that prevents him from hearing or seeing certain Web sites. A modern Stanley can use the Web in the same way that the explorer used the social media of his day. In Stanley’s private letters, newspaper dispatches, and public declarations, he repeatedly promised to reach his goals and to behave honorably—and he knew, once he became famous, that any failure would make headlines. Having piously lectured his men about the perils of drunkenness and the need to shun sexual temptations in Africa, he knew how conspicuous his own lapses would be. By creating the public persona of himself as Bula Matari, the unyielding Breaker of Rocks, he forced himself to live up to it. As a result of his oaths and his image, Jeal said, “Stanley made it impossible in advance to fail through weakness of will.”

At this point in the book (page 131) there is a heavy focus on habits and very reminiscent of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. They both assert the same thing. Self control turned out to be most effective when people used it to establish good habits and break bad ones. It took willpower to establish patterns of healthy behaviour – which was why the people with more willpower were better about to do it – but once the habits were established, life could proceed smoothly, particularly some aspects of life.

Self control was particularly helpful for performance in work and school, while the weakest effects were involved with eating and dieting. – Students and workers tend to rely on good habits. Valedictorians are generally not the sort who stay up studying all night just before the big exam – instead, they keep up with the work all semester long. Workers who produce steadily over a long period of time tend to be most successful in the long run.

A narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it.

Religion seems to have a similar effect. Similar to making a goal public, religious followers are aware they’re being watched. Either by a higher power or by members of their religious community. This improves self-regulation. A lot of religions also improve self-control through interrupting what you are doing to pray, or through having to eat certain foods or abstain from things altogether. It was concluded that believers’ self-control comes not merely from a fear of God’s wrath but from the system of values they’ve absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness. Agnostics are advised to look for their own set of hallowed values. That might be a devout commitment to helping others. It might be a commitment to improve others healthy.

We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals. As we approach a short-term temptation, our tendency to discount the future follows the steep curve of a hyperbola, which is why this tendency is called hyperbolic discounting. As you devalue the future (like heroin addicts who couldn’t think beyond the next hour) you lose your concern about a hangover tomorrow, and you’re not focused on your vow to go through the rest of your life sober. Those future benefits now seem trivial in relation to the immediate pleasure at the pub.

If you can’t just have one, you need the help of “bright lines”. These are clear simple unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately”, that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. In contrast, zero-tolerance is a bright line; total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems – a dieter cannot stop eating all food – but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it too.

The next part of the book talks about Tiger Moms and how they focus on the concept “to train, to govern and to love” their children. They seem to have higher dreams for their children and higher regard for their children in the sense of knowing how much they can take. Chinese-American and Japanese-American parents also don’t really rate self-esteem. They set clear goals, enforce rules, punish failure and reward excellence. The lesson from Chinese parents, Super-Nanny’s and the Association for Psychological Science’s review panel is the same: Forget about self-esteem. Work on self-control.

The Perfect Storm of Dieting

It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.

This chapter basically says two things; one is that when dieters over-step their calorie limit, the day is classed as a failure and so they eat even more after that. Virtue won’t be resumed until the next day. The second thing is that in order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat. Its a catch-22 and there doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet. Instead of squandering your willpower on a strict diet, you may want to eat enough glucose to conserve willpower and use your self-control for more promising long-term strategies.

Once you have a decent amount of glucose (and willpower) you can use some of the classic self-control strategies like precommitment. Keep unhealthy/high calorie foods out of the house, or at the very least, out of sight. Brush your teeth early in the evening before snacking temptation sets in. Brushing your teeth is an ingrained pre-bedtime habit and it unconsciously cues you not to eat anymore. On a conscious level it also makes snacking seem less attractive. You have to balance your greedy impulse for sugar against your lazy impulse to avoid having to brush your teeth again.

The chapter also mentions implementation intention (the if x then y strategy in Atomic Habits). This is a way to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend controlling your thoughts. Habit forming, basically. “When you get a craving, perform an action.” “if there is a buffet, I will eat only vegetables and lean meat” etc. Conventional wisdom also says you shouldn’t weigh yourself every day- perhaps once a week. But Baumeister thought this was odd as self-monitoring usually improves self-control and his experiment supported this. More regular weighing was associated with more weight loss. – The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you’ll control yourself.

Lastly, never say never. Telling yourself you can have the snack/food later than not at all seemed to reduce the urge to eat and also reduced the amount ate! ‘Later’ seemed to satisfy the cravings to some degree. So when it comes to food, never say never. When the dessert cart arrives, don’t gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. ‘Tomorrow is another taste.’

Conclusion: The Future of Willpower

People with strong self-control usually spend less time resisting desires than others. They have less need to use willpower because they’re beset by fewer temptations and inner conflicts. They’re better at arranging their lives so that they avoid problem situations. You need to go on the offense rather than the defense. Don’t keep putting it off.

Impulsiveness effects procrastination. Men, and particularly young men have more hard-to-control impulses. They give in to the urge to improve their mood by doing something else. They go for the immediate reward, video-games etc, and try to ignore the long term consequences.

No matter what you want to achieve, playing offense begins by recognizing the two basic lessons from chapter 1; Your supply of willpoewr is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things. Beware of symptoms that you’re running low on willpower because you’ll tend to favour options with short-term gains and delayed costs. Your capacity for fairness and balanced judgement will suffer. You’ll be more inclined to stick with the status quo and less inclined to compromise, particularly if the trade-offs involve much mental work. You’ll be inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else. Being aware of these effects can help you resist some of the dangers of the depleted state.

Pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Always try to have at least a vague five-year objective along with more specific intermediate goals, like monthly plans. Have an idea of what you want to accomplish in a month and how to get there. Leave some flexibility and anticipate setbacks. When you check each goal at months end, you don’t have to have succeeded every time. What matters is that your life gradually improves from month to month. You don’t need to aim for huge and quick transformations. If you can’t bring yourself to quit smoking altogether, try cutting down to two or three cigarettes a day. If you drink too much but won’t swear off alcohol, perhaps you can live with a weekly plan that limits alcohol to the weekends, or that specifies several nights each week of no drinking. Can you interrupt an evening of drinking to have no alcohol for an hour, to see where you are, and then make a good decision about whether to resume drinking?

Make a to-do list or a to-don’t list; a catalog of things that you don’t have to worry about once you write them down. As we saw, due to the Zeigarnik effect, when you try to ignore unfinished tasks, your unconscious keeps fretting about them in the same way that an ear worm keeps playing an unfinished song. Make a specific plan of specific next steps; what to do, whom to contact, how to do it (in person? phone? email?) Plan specifically when and and where if you can. As long as you’ve decided what to do and put it on the list, your unconscious can relax.

Another simple old-fashioned way to boost your willpower is to expend a little of it on neatness. People exert less self-control after seeing a messy desk than after seeing a clean desk, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat and well-organized website. You may not care about whether your bed is made and your desk is clean, but these environmental cues subtly influence your brain and your behaviour, making it ultimately less of a strain to maintain self-discipline. Order seems to be contagious.

Self monitor. Weigh yourself every day if you need to. Recording it is better still.

Reward yourself often. When you set a goal, set a reward for reaching it. Trophies for genuine accomplishments are fine.