Top Quotes: “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength” — Roy Baumeister
“Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and theyll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery, and other virtues — even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than one million people around the world. Of the two dozen “character strengths” listed in the researchers’ questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves. Conversely, when people were asked about their failings, a lack of self-control was at the top of the list.”
“He’d seen many marriages suffer because the two-career couples fought over seemingly trivial issues every evening. He sometimes advised them to go home from work early, which might sound like odd advice — why give them more time to fight with each other? But he suspected that the long hours at work were draining them. When they got home after a long, hard day, they had nothing left to help them overlook their partner’s annoying habits, or to be kind and considerate out of the blue, or to hold their tongue when their partner said something that made them want to respond in a mean, sarcastic manner. Baucom recognized that they needed to leave work while they still had some energy. He saw why marriages were going bad just when stress at work was at its worst: People were using up all their willpower on the job. They gave at the office — and their home suffered the consequences.”
“Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.
The problem can be particularly acute for people struggling with addiction. Researchers have long noticed that cravings are especially strong during withdrawal. More recently they’ve noticed that lots of other feelings intensify during withdrawal. During withdrawal, the recovering addict is using so much willpower to break the habit that it’s likely to be a time of intense, prolonged ego depletion, and that very state will make the person feel the desire for the drug all the more strongly. Moreover, other events will also have an unusually strong impact, causing extra distress and creating further yearnings for the cigarette or drink or drug. It’s no wonder relapses are so common and addicts feel so weird when they quit.”
“Other experiments have shown that chronic physical pain leaves people with a perpetual shortage of willpower because their minds are so depleted by the struggle to ignore the pain.”
“Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.”
“When you’re relatively healthy, your immune system may use only a relatively small amount of glucose. But when your body is fighting off a cold, it may consume gobs of it. That’s why sick people sleep so much: The body uses all the energy it can to fight the disease, and it can’t spare much for exercising, making love, or arguing. It can’t even do much thinking, a process that requires plentiful glucose in the bloodstream.”
“Other defense attorneys actually did argue, with limited success, that their clients’ blood-sugar problems should be taken into account. Whatever the legal or moral merits of that argument, there certainly was scientific data showing a correlation between blood sugar and criminal behavior. One study found below-average glucose levels in 90 percent of the juvenile delinquents recently taken into custody. Other studies reported that people with hypoglycemia were more likely to be convicted of a wide variety of offenses: traffic violations, public profanity, shoplifting, destruction of property, exhibitionism, public masturbation, embezzlement, arson, spouse abuse, and child abuse.
In one remarkable study, researchers in Finland went into a prison to measure the glucose tolerance of convicts who were about to be released. Then the scientists kept track of which ones went on to commit new crimes. Obviously there are many factors that can influence whether an ex-con goes straight: peer pressure, marriage, employment prospects, drug use. Yet just by looking at the response to the glucose test, the researchers were able to predict with greater than 80 percent accuracy which convicts would go on to commit violent crimes. These men apparently had less self-control because of their impaired glucose tolerance, a condition in which the body has trouble converting food into usable energy. The food gets converted into glucose, but the glucose in the bloodstream doesn’t get absorbed as it circulates. The result is often a surplus of glucose in the bloodstream, which might sound beneficial, but it’s like having plenty of firewood and no matches. The glucose remains there uselessly, rather than being converted into brain and muscle activity. If the excess glucose reaches a sufficiently high level, the condition is labeled diabetes.”
“There’s now a solid physiological explanation for PMS that doesn’t involve any mysterious alien impulses. During this premenstrual part of the cycle, which is called the luteal phase, the female body starts channeling a high amount of its energy to the ovaries and to related activities, like producing extra quantities of female hormones. As more energy and glucose are diverted to the reproductive system, there’s less available for the rest of the body, which responds by craving more fuel. Chocolate and other sweets are immediately appealing because they provide instant glucose, but any kind of food can help, which is why women report more food cravings and tend to eat more.”
“Most women still aren’t getting enough extra calories. The typical woman in a modern thin-conscious society like America does not take in enough extra food to supply the body’s increased demands for glucose during these few days each month. When there isn’t enough energy to go around, the body has to ration it, and the reproductive system takes priority, leaving less glucose available for willpower. As a general rule, women are less likely than men to suffer from lapses of self-control, but their self-control problems do worsen during the luteal phase, as studies have repeatedly shown.
During this phase, women spend more money and make more impulsive purchases than at other times. They smoke more cigarettes. They drink more alcohol, and not just because they enjoy drinks more. The increase is especially likely for women who have a drinking problem or a family history of alcoholism. During this luteal phase, women are more liable to go on drinking binges or abuse cocaine and other drugs. PMS is not a matter of one specific behavior problem cropping up. Instead, self-control seems to fail across the board, letting all sorts of problems increase.”
“When you’re sick, save your glucose for your immune system. The next time you’re preparing to drag your aching body to work, here’s something to consider: Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated. That’s because your immune system is using so much of your glucose to fight the cold that there’s not enough left for the brain.
If you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office (assuming you make it there safely)? Sometimes the job has to be muddled through, but don’t trust the glucose-deprived brain for anything important. If you simply can’t miss a meeting at work, try to avoid any topics that will strain your self-control. If there’s a make-or-break project under your supervision, don’t make any irrevocable decisions. And don’t expect peak performance from others who are under the weather. If your child has a cold the day of the SAT test, reschedule.”
“To reach a goal, how specific should your plans be? In one carefully controlled experiment, researchers monitored college students taking part in a program to improve their skills at studying. In addition to receiving the usual instructions on how to use time effectively, the students were randomly assigned among three planning conditions. One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans.
The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones, monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise.
Why? Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans than a broad plan for the month without any daily details. Another drawback of daily plans is that they lack flexibility. They deprive the person of the chance to make choices along the way, so the person feels locked into a rigid and grinding sequence of tasks. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, and so the daily plans can be demoralizing as soon as you fall off schedule. With a monthly plan, you can make adjustments. If a delay arises one day, your plan is still intact.”
“The to-do list was not supposed to have items like “Birthday gift for Mom” or “Do taxes.” It had to specify the very next action, like “Drive to jewelry store” or “Call accountant.”
“If your list has “Write thank-you notes, that’s a fine Next Action, as long as you have a pen and cards,” Allen says. “But if you don’t have the cards, you’ll know subliminally that you can’t write the notes, so you’ll avoid the list and procrastinate.” That distinction might sound easy enough to learn, but people get it wrong all the time.”
“This research, and many studies in the following decades, confirmed what became known as the Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.
A good way to appreciate the Zeigarnik effect is to listen to a randomly chosen song and shut it off halfway through. The song is then likely to run through your mind on its own, at odd intervals. If you get to the end of the song, the mind checks it off, so to speak. If you stop it in the middle, however, the mind treats the song as unfinished business. As if to keep reminding you that there is a job to be done, the mind keeps inserting bits of the song into your stream of thought. That’s why when Bill Murray in Groundhog Day keeps shutting off “I Got You Babe” on his clock radio, the tune keeps going through our minds (and keeps driving him crazy). And that’s why this kind of ear worm is so often an awful tune rather than a pleasant one. We’re more likely to turn off the bad one in midsong, so it’s the one that returns to haunt us.”
“Masicampo found that these words popped more often into the minds of some people: the ones who had been reminded of the exam but hadn’t made plans to study for it. But no such effect was observed among the students who’d made a study plan. Even though they, too, had been reminded of the exam, their minds had apparently been cleared by the act of writing down a plan.
In another experiment, participants were asked to reflect on important projects in their lives. Some were told to write about some tasks they had recently completed. Others were told to write about tasks that were unfulfilled and needed to be done soon. A third group was also told to write about unfulfilled tasks, but also to make specific plans for how they would get these done. Then everyone went on to what they were told was a separate and unrelated experiment. They were assigned to read the first ten pages of a novel. As they read, they were checked periodically to ascertain whether their minds were wandering from the novel. Afterward, they were asked how well they had focused and where, if anywhere, their minds had wandered. They also were tested on how well they understood what they’d read.
Once again, making a plan made a difference. Those who’d written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel, unless they’d made a plan.”
“It turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”
“When Spitzer hired a hooker, when the governor of South Carolina snuck off to Buenos Aires to see his girlfriend, when Bill Clinton took up with an intern, they were all subject to the occupational hazard that comes with being, as President George W. Bush once described himself, “the decider.” The problem of decision fatigue affects everything from the careers of CEOs to the prison sentences of felons appearing before weary judges. It influences the behavior of everyone, executive and non-executive, every day. Yet few people are even aware of it. When asked whether making decisions would deplete their willpower and make them vulnerable to temptation, most people say no. They don’t realize that decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can’t resist the car dealer’s offer to rustproof their new sedan.”
“Some students choose double majors in college not because theyre trying to prove something or because they have some grand plan for a career integrating, say, political science and biology. Rather, they just can’t bring themselves to say no to either option. To choose a single major is to pronounce judgment on the other and kill it off, and there’s abundant research showing that people have a hard time giving up options, even when the options aren’t doing them any good. This reluctance to give up options becomes more pronounced when willpower is low. It takes willpower to make decisions, and so the depleted state makes people look for ways to postpone or evade decisions.”
“Above a certain point, increases in price are not worth the gains in quality. Choosing that point is the optimal decision. But it requires the difficult task of figuring out just where that point is.
When your willpower is low, you’re less able to make these trade-offs. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser,” hoarding your energy by avoiding compromises. You’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: Just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying).”
“By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than fifteen hundred euros per car (about two thousand dollars at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy tire 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 found in the experiment with custom-made suits: Once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the one hundred fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less than if they started off with easier decisions before moving on to the tough ones.”
“The researchers measured activity in the brain’s insula region as people contemplated spending money on gadgets, books, and assorted tchotchkes. This brain region ordinarily lights up when you see or hear something distasteful, and that’s just what happened when the tightwads in the study saw the prices of the items. But when a typical spendthrift went shopping for the same items, the insula didn’t register the same sort of disgust — not even when the brain considered spending a good chunk of hard-earned money on a color-changing “mood clock.””
“Better yet is to put your name on the list of people (maintained by casinos in some states) who are not allowed to collect any money if they place winning bets.”
“You could sign a “Commitment Contract” with stickK.com, a company founded by two Yale economists, lan Ayres and Dean Karlan, and a graduate student, Jordan Goldberg. It allows you to pick any goal you want — lose weight, stop biting your nails, use fewer fossil fuels, stop calling an ex — along with a penalty that will be imposed automatically if you don’t reach it. You can monitor yourself or pick a referee to report on your success or failure. The penalty might simply be a round of e-mails from stickK.com to your designated list of sup-porters-friends and relatives.”
“In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory room, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “Clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower in self-control on many measures, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty.
In a similar experiment conducted online, some participants answered questions on a clean, well-designed Web site on which everything was correctly positioned and properly spelled. Others were asked the same questions on a sloppy Web site with spelling errors and other problems. On the messy site, people were more likely to say that they would gamble rather than take a sure thing, that they would curse and swear, and that they would take an immediate but small reward rather than waiting for a larger but delayed reward. The messy Web site also elicited lower donations to charity. Charity and generosity have been linked to self-control, partly because self-control is needed to overcome our natural animal selfishness, and partly because, as we’ll see later, thinking about others can increase our own self-discipline. The orderly Web sites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people unconsciously toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others.
By shaving every day, Stanley could benefit from this same sort of orderly cue without having to expend much mental energy. He didn’t have to make a conscious decision every morning to shave. Once he had expended the willpower to make it his custom, it became a relatively automatic mental process requiring little or no further willpower.”
“The less-inspiring explanation is “warehousing,” to borrow a term used by some skeptical sociologists to explain what high school does. They see school as a kind of warehouse that stores kids during the day, keeping them out of trouble, so that its benefits come less from what happens in the classroom than from what doesn’t happen elsewhere. By a similar logic, evenings spent attending AA meetings are spent not drinking.”
“In nineteenth-century America, for example, there was a social convention called the “barbecue law,” which meant that all the men who gathered for a barbecue were expected to drink until they were soused. To refuse a drink entailed a serious insult to the host and the rest of the party.”
“When they reached the checkout counter, before the girls had a chance to beg, Mrs. Kim would preempt them by announcing that if they each read a book the following week, she would buy them a candy bar on the next shopping trip.”
“Many people associate strict discipline with severe penalties, but that’s actually the least important facet. Researchers have found that severity seems to matter remarkably little and can even be counterproductive: Instead of encouraging virtue, harsh punishments teach the child that life is cruel and that aggression is appropriate. The speed of the punishment is much more important, as researchers have found in working with children as well as with animals. For lab rats to learn from their mistakes, the punishment generally has to occur almost immediately, preferably within a second of the misbehavior. Punishment doesn’t have to be that quick with children, but the longer the delay, the more chance that they’ll have forgotten the infraction and the mental processes that led to it.
By far the most important facet of punishment — and the most difficult one for parents — is consistency. Ideally, a parent should quickly discipline the child every single time he or she misbehaves, but in a restrained, even mild manner. A stern word or two is often enough as long as it’s done carefully and regularly. This approach can initially be more of a strain on the parents than on the child. They’re tempted to overlook or forgive some misdeed, if only because they’re tired or because it may spoil the pleasant time everyone else is having. Parents may rationalize that they want to be kind; they may even tell each other to be nice and let this one go. But the more vigilant they are early on, the less effort is required in the long run. Consistent discipline tends to produce well-behaved children.
While parents like Cyndi Paul find it heartbreaking to start imposing discipline, children react well when reprimands are delivered briefly, calmly, and consistently, according to Susan O’Leary, a psychologist who has spent long hours observing toddlers and parents. When parents are inconsistent, when they let an infraction slide, they sometimes try to compensate with an extra-strict punishment for the next one. This requires less self-control on the parents’ part: They can be nice when they feel like it, and then punish severely if they’re feeling angry or the misbehavior is egregious. But imagine how this looks from the child’s point of view. Some days you make a smart remark and the grown-ups all laugh. Other days a similar remark brings a smack or the loss of treasured privileges. Seemingly tiny or even random differences in your own behavior or in the situation seem to spell the difference between no punishment at all and a highly upsetting one. Besides resenting the unfairness, you learn that the most important thing is not how you behave but whether or not you get caught, and whether your parents are in the mood to punish. You might learn, for instance, that table manners can be dispensed with at restaurants, because the grown-ups are too embarrassed to discipline you in public.”
“Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it’s hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But once a child learns to ask for food without going into a crying frenzy, both child and parent end up calmer and happier. The children are learning that they have some power over themselves, that certain kinds of behavior are expected, and that actions have consequences — lessons that will become more and more important as they get older.
Nearly all experts agree that children need and want clear rules, and that being held accountable for obeying the rules is a vital feature of healthy development. But rules are helpful only if children know them and understand them, so the brighter the line, the better. Nanny Debs likes to call a special meeting to go over her “house rules,” and then she posts a chore list in each child’s bedroom along with a wooden pole that’s used for keeping score. When children make the bed or clean their rooms or wash the dishes, they get to put a colored ring around the pole. Each ring entitles them to fifteen minutes of watching television or playing a video game, up to a total of an hour per day. If they misbehave, they first get a warning, and if they persist, the parent removes one of the rings.
To keep the rules consistent, parents need to coordinate with each other and with caretakers so that everyone knows what’s expected. When your children are still toddlers, establish a system of rewards and punishments in advance, and when you’re giving either one to a child, explain exactly why. As they get older, it becomes more useful to ask them what goals they have for themselves. Once you hear their ambitions, you can help get there with the right incentives, like making allowance payments contingent on doing chores, or promising bonuses for doing extra work.”
“To encourage this orientation toward the future, parents can help children open savings accounts, keep track of the bank statements, and set goals and rewards. Research has shown that children who open bank accounts are more likely than others to grow up to be savers. So are children who grow up discussing money with their parents.”
“Tell yourself that you can have a small sweet dessert later if you still want it. Meanwhile, eat something else. Remember, your body is craving energy because it has used up some of its supply with self-control. The body feels a desire for sweet foods, but that is only because that is a familiar and effective way to restore energy. Healthy foods will also provide the energy it needs.”
“Diners can be so oblivious that they’ll go on sipping soup from a bowl that is continuously (and surreptitiously) refilled, as Brian Wansink demonstrated in a famous experiment at Cornell using soup bowls attached to hidden tubes. The people just went on sipping from the bottomless bowl because they were so used to eating whatever was put in front of them.”
“The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree — and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat. During that final part of the experiment, when all the people were left alone with a bowl of M&M’s, the ones who’d postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.”
“The procrastinators — as measured both on the questionnaire and by how late they turned in their papers — did worse by every academic measure: lower grades on their papers, lower scores on their midterm and final exams.”
“He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”
This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen: “Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.””
