For thousands of years, we were special, as special as special could be. Not only the earth, but the entire universe revolved around us. In Western thought, the earth was the center of the universe, and human beings were the center of the earth. It was all created and existed solely for our benefit. And our conscious mind was at the core—our soul, the center of each of us, our supernatural link to God and eternity.
Then began hundreds of years of relentless dethronement. First came Copernicus and Galileo, with the theory and then, when the telescope was invented, the evidence that the earth was not in fact the center of the universe. It was not even the center of the solar system, since we revolved around the sun, not the other way around. Then came an even more devastating blow. Darwin showed that humans were not the center of life on earth—that all creatures great and small were not created in the form we saw them today, but became so only gradually over eons of time and through entirely natural processes, and this applied to us as well. Reading the writing on the wall, Nietzsche famously declared that God was dead. Whatever we were, we were all alone in the cosmos. But at least we still had our conscious mind, our superpower, our free will. At least within our own bodies, we were still the masters of ourselves, in control of what we did and what we thought.
Then came Freud and Skinner to deliver the final blows. Not only is your planet, the big rock you sit on, just a speck in a remote corner of the universe, and not only are you not especially different from all the other plants and animals in being shaped and molded by natural forces over great spans of time—you are not even in control of your own mind, your own feelings, or your own actions. Hidden forces operating inside you are in control, said Freud; you just don’t realize it. And then Skinner took away even that modicum of agency. Nothing inside you matters at all, he insisted. Your environment, the outside world, is playing you like a violin—but you think you’re Mozart.
The earth was no longer the center of the universe. Human beings were no longer the center of the earth, and our conscious minds were no longer the center of us. We’ve certainly been put in our place. In Greek mythology, the concept of hubris applied to mortals who believed they had godlike traits and abilities. Nemesis was the Greek god who punished such hubris, who put mortals in their place. We enjoyed our long period of hubris, up to the time of Copernicus, but then Nemesis showed up with the bill. This book has probably not helped matters in that regard, but my aim has been to reveal the true nature of the human mind, so that we can reclaim real agency.
Over and over again, deep influences from our past, present, and future have been shown to influence our behavior, our choices, our likes and dislikes, before we know it. Life lingers—experiences carry over from one situation to the next, and influence us later without our realizing it. We naturally mimic and imitate what others are doing and “catch” like a common cold their emotions and behaviors, even smoking and drinking more just because we see people do so on TV. Temporary goals and needs color what and whom we like and dislike, what we pay attention to and later remember, and affect what and how much we buy at a store. We are cocksure we have the true measure of a person just by looking at her face, but we don’t. So many different unconscious influences operating just below the surface—how do I control them? Or am I at their mercy?
Do I have free will?
In this final chapter we will describe the most effective ways to control these influences—when they are unwanted—and to use these unconscious processes—when they are helpful—to your advantage. This is a two-way street: you can use conscious and intentional processes to counter or control unwanted unconscious influences, but you can also use unconscious mechanisms to help you where the usual conscious methods have not been enough to get the job done. I will make three main points that I hope you will take with you, to apply to your life outside the pages of this book.
Point #1: Your conscious thoughts matter. This means, according to what psychologists mean by the term, you have “free will.” But it is not as complete and all-powerful as you might have believed.
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If you’ve read up to this point in the book, you know about the many influences on us of which we are not generally aware, and thus do not control. As the legendary Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller said of his fastball, “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” So seeing—being more aware of—these hidden influences is the first step to controlling them, or using them for your benefit. Pretending they don’t exist, and insisting that yes, you do have complete free will and control, will cause you to miss out.
Point #2: Acknowledging that you do not have complete free will, or complete conscious control, actually increases the amount of free will and control you truly have.
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How can this be? People who insist that advertising or persuasive attempts by other people do not influence them are the ones who are most susceptible to being controlled by other people; insisting that what others do plays no role in what they do leaves them open to contagion effects; they are also more likely to bring their work life home with them. As it turns out, they will be less able to effectively control themselves, too, because they believe they can do it all through acts of conscious willpower, and so won’t make use of unconscious means of self-control, which turn out to be the most effective (see Point 3).
We are captains of our souls, certainly, and it sounds great to be a captain, but as in any other path of life, there are bad captains as well as good ones. The wise captain takes the winds and currents into account, adjusts for them when they go against the ship’s course, and takes advantage of them when they are heading the same way. The bad captain insists that only the steering wheel matters, and so crashes into the rocks, or ends up adrift at sea.
By acknowledging the operation of these hidden influences, you now have the chance to do something about them, to regain real control where you actually did not have it before. That’s a net gain. But it gets even better. By delegating control to these unconscious forces, you become better able to accomplish your conscious and intentional goals. You put them in service of working on those important goals when your conscious mind is elsewhere and take advantage of their problem-solving and creative abilities. You put them to work for you. That’s an even bigger gain.
Point #3: The most effective self-control is not through willpower and exerting effort to stifle impulses and unwanted behaviors. It comes from effectively harnessing the unconscious powers of the mind to much more easily do the self-control for you.
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Now that turns the old wisdom on its head, doesn’t it?
As it happens, people who are better able to self-control—who get better grades, are healthier and exercise more, are less overweight, don’t smoke, make more money, have happier personal relationships—are not the ones who exert willpower more than the rest of us do. It is just the opposite. Those sainted, seemingly blessed individuals who regulate their lives so well are the ones who do the good things less consciously, more automatically, and more habitually. And you can certainly do the same.
So that is what we will cover in this final chapter. For now, put your mind at ease about all the things we’ve talked about in this book that are going on “upstairs” without your consciously guiding and monitoring them 24/7. Think of yourself as a CEO with a great staff. They all work for You Inc. and are dedicated and committed to your happiness and achievement. Relax and let them do their jobs.
Your conscious thoughts matter. They are causal, meaning that they have the power to change how you feel and what you do. This may seem rather obvious to you, but in fact, one hundred years ago mainstream scientific psychology declared exactly the opposite. At the start of the book, I noted how in 1913, the American psychologist John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, published a landmark paper that shook and transformed the nascent field of scientific psychology—especially the study of the mind. It was the psychological equivalent of Nietzsche’s shattering announcement of God’s death. Watson wrote and argued, in effect, “Consciousness is dead.” Why? Because at the time he wrote, there were no reliable methods to measure or study conscious thought. This was well before the advent of computers and electronic timers and monitor screens that contemporary cognitive psychology uses to perform controlled studies of perception, attention, and judgment. All Watson had were the introspective reports of volunteer participants about what they were seeing and thinking, and these did not prove very reliable. The different participants didn’t agree with each other on what they were seeing, even though they were looking at and judging the same things; they were thinking and feeling in different ways about those same things, and the same person didn’t even see or think the same way at different points in time. Psychology was just getting started back then, and researchers were doing the best they could with the tools they did have, like pioneers out in the wild country on their own. But it was a mess. In modern phraseology, the results did not replicate. This bothered scientists deeply. Where were the generalizable conclusions? Where was the certainty?
Because the method of introspection did not produce reliable results, Watson concluded that a scientific psychology should not use introspection or study consciousness at all. Rather, research should focus only on the external Stimulus properties, and the organism’s actual behavioral Responses, and not bother with such notions as internal thoughts and experiences. This came to be known as S-R psychology. What’s more, because consciousness did not matter anymore, animals could be studied instead, as if they were nearly equivalent to humans in behavior. They did not have consciousness like we did, but consciousness no longer mattered. Watson and the behaviorists thus effectively banned the study of human consciousness from the realm of scientific psychology. Of course, this now seems absurd—what is more central to human experience than consciousness?
Watson held that consciousness should not be part of scientific psychology because there were no reliable methods to assess it, but his successor B. F. Skinner and his fellow “neobehaviorists” took this hard-line stance even further: because they could not measure it, and thus it could not be included in their laboratory models of animal (including human) behavior, Skinner and company concluded that consciousness played no causal role in real life, either. Because they were not able to study it as rigorously as they might want to, and because it did not exist as a variable to study in their lab, human consciousness therefore must not exist in the world outside the lab, either. Instead it was said to be an epiphenomenon, which simply means a spurious side effect of some other phenomenon, but not important or causal in its own right. Somehow, the lack of reliable methods to study conscious thought at that time was transmuted into the principle that conscious thought did not exist as an influential force in people’s lives.
Behaviorists were focused on the present environment only, to the exclusion of the other time zones our minds live in—influences of our deep and recent pasts, and of our future goals and aspirations. To them it was as if we were all Lhermitte’s patients, controlled only by the cues in the outside environment and nothing more. But this was only because the behaviorists themselves, at this point in the history of psychology, could only see the outside environment; they could not see the inner workings of the mind. Their logic was that if they could not see it, then it didn’t exist. This attitude reminds me of nothing so much as two-year-olds playing hide-and-seek by covering their own eyes.
Once again, hubris was showing its arrogant head. The behaviorists went far beyond the reasonable desire for reliable methods; they assumed that because there were no reliable methods yet to study internal thought and judgment, there never would be. As far as the science of psychology went, they believed that they were the end of history—that the current state of their science was the pinnacle that could never be surpassed and improved upon by new technology or methods. But as we know, soon came transistors and computers and television monitors and electronic measurement devices, which did enable the scientific study of the mind. The resulting cognitive revolution, which was driven by these new methods, ousted behaviorism for good.
Psychology’s version of the free will argument dates back to Watson’s 1913 paper. The question was not about free will per se, but about whether conscious thought mattered, whether it played a causal role or not. Skinner and the behaviorists contended it did not, and based on his studies of pigeons and rats, Skinner wrote several popular books arguing human free will was an illusion. This is what most of us want to know when we ask, Does free will exist? We are asking, Are my own private thoughts and decisions vital and effective, does what I think about and decide change what I do, and do I thus have control over my judgments and decisions and, by extension, my life? And the answer to that question, based on decades of psychological research is a resounding yes.
Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, wrote about how he did not eat meat, or “animals,” including fish, because they hadn’t done anything to us to “deserve the slaughter.” But he used to love fish and also thought “they smelt very good coming hot out of the pan.”
I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomach; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do. (My emphasis)
Franklin had used his conscious reasoning to justify the change in his principles about eating animals that he had wanted all along. We call this a rationalization, and in his case, this conscious reasoning was causal. It effected a change in his behavior (and moral stance regarding eating fish). The conscious mind is very good at spinning whatever we do, or want to do, in some positive way, or at least making it more justified and defensible. We mentally transform the setbacks and tragedies in our lives to make them seem lesser, in order to better cope with them emotionally. One of our favorite tricks is called downward social comparison, and we all do it. Discontented with something in our lives, we remind ourselves that there is always someone worse off, in worse shape than we are, and we count our blessings that at least our situation is better than theirs. Again, our conscious thoughts are causal here, because they have effectively changed (reduced) our level of emotional distress. Mentally transforming the situation into something different, and easier to handle, is a major way we control both our emotions and our impulses—thinking of the double chocolate cake as five zillion calories instead of how yummy it will taste.
One theme of this book has been how you can use unconscious mechanisms to help reach your conscious goals. Want to make friends and bond with a new acquaintance? Look at them, pay attention to them, and let the natural, unconscious mimicry effect happen on its own, with the nice consequence of increasing liking and bonding between you. Have a difficult or time-consuming task ahead? Start working on that goal earlier than usual so unconscious goal pursuit processes naturally help to solve the problem, come up with creative outside-the-box solutions, alert you to relevant and helpful information, and work on the problem during your mind’s downtime.
Likewise, it turns out that the best way to effectively exert self-control is to turn as much of the workload over to unconscious, automatic mechanisms as you can. There are two main forms of unconscious self-control that research has shown to be tremendously helpful in everyday life. One is short-term and tactical, the other is long term and strategic.
In the short term (think: remembering to do something you keep forgetting to do, or starting to exercise), the most effective way to carry out your difficult intentions is through the use of implementation intentions. My longtime colleague Peter Gollwitzer discovered and developed the powerful technique of implementation intentions as the most effective way of carrying out difficult intentions and desired behavior. These are concrete plans you make as to when, where, and how you will carry out the intention. Using them, you can overpower many of the unconscious influences we’ve described in this book.
In the long term as well (think: dieting, exercising, or studying on a regular basis), the best way to keep on track and avoid temptations and get your goals accomplished is not by exerting willpower in some titanic struggle of mind over matter, but by establishing good habits through regular routines of place and time.
Both of these methods of self-control are more effective than conscious and effortful methods because they make use of the natural and automatic ways that our environment cues our behavior. Implementation intentions work by specifying a precise future place and time at which you will perform the intended behavior. Habits work also by specifying a routine, daily place and time that you will carry out the desired behavior. This removes the need for remembering to perform that behavior, which we often have trouble doing with so much else going on in our lives; it also removes the chance for us to weasel our way out of it (as in the case of exercise or dieting, or cutting down on drinking), which, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, our conscious powers of reason are quite adept at doing. In both cases, doing the useful, needed thing without thinking makes a more reliable and effective self-control method.
Skinner, like Freud, was not completely wrong. It is definitely true that stimulus events in our environment can often automatically trigger behavioral responses. As we saw with Lhermitte’s patients, and Roger Barker’s research on the power of settings on our behavior, cues in our environment can be direct and powerful determinants of what we do and how we do it. In one of his early studies, Gollwitzer and his students asked students at a Munich university what they wanted to accomplish while they were home on Christmas vacation. For example, did they want to finish an important course assignment, or perform an important personal task such as, for the male students especially, telling their father they loved him? All of the students wanted to get these goals accomplished. The researchers instructed some of them to make firm and strong goal commitments, such as “I will tell my father I love him!” But another group was instructed to make a concrete plan as to where, when, and how they would actually do this, such as: “When my father picks me up at the train station, and I get into the car, I will tell him I love him!” When the students came back after vacation, the researchers asked if they had completed their vacation-time goals. This early study showed that the students who made the implementation intention—the time and place they would actually carry out the desired behavior—were far more successful in carrying out their intentions than the other students, even the ones who had committed themselves to completing their goals.
Soon after learning about implementation intentions, I decided to try it out myself, because I’d borrowed a book from a colleague at NYU and kept forgetting to bring it into work, like the typical absentminded professor. My colleague was getting a bit impatient since he really needed his book for a paper he was working on. So after yet another failure and unpleasant scene in my office, I told myself, When I walk in my apartment door this evening, I will go straight to my desk and put that book in my briefcase! Later on, when I got home, I found myself walking to my bedroom instead of the kitchen as I usually did, in the dark, before even turning on any lights. I remember being puzzled a bit by where my legs were taking me, until I found myself at my desk and looking right at that book. As I still had my briefcase in my hand it was an easy matter to put the book inside, and I didn’t have to give it another moment’s thought. Done: intention implemented.
Brain imaging studies have shown how these implementation intentions work. Basically, when an implementation intention is formed, control over behavior shifts from one brain region to another. When you have the goal and desire to do something, a region associated with self-initiated actions, part of what is known as the Brodmann area, becomes active. This would be the case for a goal such as “I want to go to the store today to pick up milk and something for dinner.” But when implementation intentions are formed, such as “When I finish typing up this report, I will get up from my desk and head out to the store,” a different part of that region becomes active, the part that is associated with environmentally driven behavior. So the brain scanning studies have shown that intentions in general are controlled by internal thought (remembering to do something you want to do) but implementation intentions—which are more reliable and effective—shift the control of behavior from your self-generated internal thoughts to a stimulus from the outside environment, so that when X happens, you will do Y, without having to remember or stop and think about it at the time. It will happen before you know it.
Once implementation intentions began gaining scientific currency, health psychologists applied the technique to cases where people were having trouble following complex medication regimens, when missing a medication might mean the difference between life and death. In one early study, Pascal Sheeran and Susan Orbell had elderly nursing home patients form implementation intentions for when, where, and how they would take each of their several daily pills. This was not as easy as it sounds for them, because some pills need to be taken with food and others on an empty stomach, some in the morning and some in the evening, and each time they would have to remember to take the pill, which was itself problematic. In the control condition, over a several-month period, the elderly patients were successful only 25 percent of the time in taking their pills at the right time each day. But a separate group of patients formed implementation intentions. Here the patient would say, “Right after I finish breakfast and get back to my room I will take Pill 1.” And: “At bedtime right before I turn the light out I will take Pill 4.” The key is to specify future events that are highly likely to happen, on a routine basis. This group, over a several-month period, had a remarkable 100 percent adherence rate. Of course, not all studies find such perfect outcomes, but it was pretty clear that these elderly patients were helped greatly by delegating the control over taking their medications away from their conscious willpower and to regular routine environmental events.
A major reason why people don’t carry through on their good intentions is that they simply forget to do what they intended. In a survey of women who wanted to but had not performed breast self-examinations, 70 percent reported that they’d just forgotten to. Making implementation intentions to perform the self-exam or to make a doctor’s appointment for routine screening would help not only the individual reduce their chances of serious illness, but also society at large in reducing the cost of health care for everyone. A health insurance company sent mailings to twelve thousand employees who were overdue for a regular colonoscopy, asking them to make an implementation intention—a specific plan—for where, when, and how they would make the appointment for the procedure. The rate of making the appointment increased from 6.2 percent for those who got the reminder only, to 7.2 percent for those who got the reminder plus the instructions to make a concrete plan. This increase of 1 percent may sound small, but researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center report that increasing the rate of routine colonoscopies by just this amount saves 271 years of life for every 100,000 people in the at-risk group.
As we have seen in several very close U.S. presidential elections in the twenty-first century, the total number of people who vote affects the outcome. Political scientists have started using implementation intentions to increase voter turnout at primary and regular elections. For example, in a field study conducted during the 2008 Pennsylvania Democratic primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, nearly 300,000 voters were contacted by phone by a professional company that placed millions of calls that year for the various campaigns. There were two groups in the study. In one the potential voters were asked to make an implementation intention regarding where, when, and how they would vote on Election Day, and the other group received just the standard encouragement-to-vote message. Election Days are often on Tuesdays, when people have be at work, get their kids to school, and pick them up—in other words a regular busy day on which it can be hard to find the time to go vote. Often people do not know in advance even where their polling place is, so figuring this out ahead of time and making a concrete plan can make a big difference. And indeed, in this large study of an actual state primary election, there was a 4 percent higher turnout in the implementation intention group than in the standard encouragement call group. Political campaigns spend millions of dollars (on mailings, door-to-door canvassing, TV advertisements) for even a 1 percent increase in turnout, so to them this is a very large effect.
Implementation intentions don’t just help us do things; they help us not do things—like give in to unwanted unconscious impulses and influences. For example, if we truly want to not be racist, our unconscious will help us express this desire not just in thoughts but acts. In one of Gollwitzer’s early studies, students committed to equality were more likely to effectively jump into a fast-moving conversation and disagree with racist comments than were students who didn’t have the same active goal of not being racist. In other studies on racism, participants were instructed to assume the role of police officer, and to shoot as soon as they could when a photograph appeared on the screen of a person holding a gun. The person in the photograph was always holding something, and half the time he was unarmed and holding something else entirely, such as his wallet. Half the time the person in the photo was white and the other times they were black. In the control condition as in several previous studies, white participants were more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black person than unarmed white person, and less likely to correctly shoot an armed white than an armed black person. But in the implementation intention condition, where participants first told themselves, “If I see a person, then I will ignore his race!,” this bias was significantly reduced. The implications here for law enforcement are obvious.
We saw in Chapter 6 that mimicking another person increases bonding and liking in a very natural way. In a French department store study, salespeople who mimicked their customers were more successful at persuading those customers to buy expensive electronic devices compared to salespeople who did not mimic. Can implementation intentions shield you from these unconscious influences? Recently Gollwitzer and his colleagues showed that implementation intentions to be thrifty were able to block these subtle effects of being mimicked by someone else. Participants first told themselves, “If I am tempted to buy something, then I will tell myself I will save my money for important investments!” Later, when the study seemed to be over, the experimenter tried to get the participants to take their payments for being in the experiment in the form of chocolates or coffee, instead of in cash. The experimenter mimicked some of the participants’ body language, as we had done in one of our chameleon studies. In a control condition the participants had the same goal of being thrifty but did not form specific implementation intentions about saving money. Those who did not form the intention were more susceptible to the mimicking and accepted more chocolates and coffee—three times more, in fact. But not those in the implementation intention condition. They showed no increase in acceptance of chocolate or coffee caused by the mimicry. Implementation intentions—delegating control over your future behavior to reliable cues—appear to be a very practical way to avoid sales pressure and the tendency to buy more than you want to, causing later regret.
Temptations come in many forms, and you can apply this simple formula to your own particular weaknesses: “If I am tempted to [eat a big dessert/go out with my friends/talk back to my boss/buy more new clothes] then I will tell myself [I need to eat healthy/I must finish my class assignment/be polite and respectful/ save my money for the future].” In one Dutch study of more than two hundred unsuccessful dieters, those who used implementation intentions to avoid yielding to their particular temptations (chocolate, pizza, or french fries) were then successful in decreasing how much unhealthy food they ate over the following two weeks. For example, dieters who wanted to stop eating so much chocolate, they would tell themselves, “The next time I am tempted to eat chocolate, I will think of dieting!” This worked better than the “don’t do it” or “don’t eat it” (“The next time I am tempted to eat chocolate, I will not eat it!”) intention conditions, which only served to keep the dieters’ attention focused on the temptation.
I have used this technique myself to block the carryover effects of the day at work to the evening at home. The reliable situation on which I pin my implementation intention is “when I get out of my car in the driveway.” I can pretty much count on that happening each day after work, unless I want to sit in my car in the driveway all night. The problem that provoked this desire for change was finding out the hard way that bad moods from work were lingering over and affecting how I acted at home. So when I was having a rough time at the office several years ago—as a result of the common pressures of too much to do, with too little time to do it—my mood and stresses and feelings about people there would carry over to how I interpreted and reacted to quite benign events at home. I would come inside, very tired, and my little girl, about three at the time, would come running to the door, excited to see me. I would sit down and she would naturally want all of my attention, to look at something she had drawn or want to play. On several occasions I found myself being impatient with her as if she were someone at work—yet another person wanting something from me, wanting my time when I just wanted to relax and do something that I wanted to do. But seeing her disappointed face caused me great remorse and I resolved to take steps to stop that from ever happening again. I needed a way to control this unconscious carryover effect—to prevent my automatic interpretation of my daughter’s wish to do things with me as “yet another person demanding my time.”
Because I already knew about the power of implementation intentions, I hit on this strategy. It was to link (a) my intention to show happiness at seeing my family and talk with them when I got home, to appreciate their being glad I was there and wanting to be with me, to (b) a routine and reliable environmental cue—getting out of my car and standing in my driveway, before going into the house. So I made an implementation intention, something like: “When I get out of my car and stand in the driveway, I will be happy to be home and greet my family warmly!” And I did this often enough for it to become a regular habit, cued by the regular situation of getting out of my car. There may have been a few lapses over the years since, but not many, and this tactic has been effective for me in blocking unwanted carryover effects from work to home.
Implementation intentions are not magic spells, though. You need to do your part—to be really committed to this new goal and intention, and honestly want to carry it out. Too many times our good intentions fail because down deep, we really don’t want to change—we really want to keep smoking, drinking, and being lazy. Implementation intentions, like any goal you might have, only work if you are truly committed to carrying them out.
The power of using external cues to help you control unwanted impulses and behavior extends beyond once-in-a-while occasions and can drive significant lifestyle changes. Actually, research is demonstrating that forming good habits that delegate control of your behavior to routine daily situations and events is the most effective way we can regulate ourselves in the long run—to get better grades, better jobs, and healthier diets and ways of living. This is great news, but you still have to develop those good habits to begin with. And that can be hard. So here is another occasion where implementation intentions can get you started on the better path. Maybe a heart patient takes a walk each day as soon as she returns home from work, as soon as she get out of her car in the driveway, before even going into the house. Or maybe she goes upstairs to change out of her work clothes and immediately puts on exercise clothes, like shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. Those small steps will lead to bigger and better things.
Once this new desired behavior is in place, after several successful days of using the implementation intentions, then it will become the new habit, your new routine, and situational cues (arriving in one’s driveway, undressing after work in one’s bedroom) become the unconscious triggers of this new complex behavior. The first few weeks are the hardest, but then it just becomes part of your routine and something you do without thinking. Even something you want to do. When I was doing a lot of long-distance running, training for the New York City Marathon back in the 1990s, I relied on a great guidebook many runners use, Galloway’s Book on Running. In it, the pioneer running guru Dr. George Sheehan is quoted as saying that “the body wants to do what it did yesterday. If you ran yesterday, it wants to run today. If you didn’t, then it doesn’t want to.” So the important thing is to stick to your routine and not take days off if you can avoid it, because that will just make it harder to get going again and you will lose the momentum you worked so hard to gain.
If you think about it, habits already “run” your life. Roger Barker showed back in the 1950s that by far the main cause of how we behave is the particular situation or setting we are in. We are quiet and respectful in church, relaxed and conversational when we go out to dinner, louder and more boisterous when out among tens of thousands of fellow fans at a college football game. And we know what to do and how to behave appropriately in each of these situations, without a moment’s thought. In a fast-food restaurant, for example, we first order the food and then wait for it, and then take it, sit down, and eat. But in a fancy restaurant we would never order the food first. We instead wait to be seated, wait for our menus, place our order, then wait for the food to be brought out. It all feels very simple because it is familiar. Imagine if we were from somewhere with no fast-food restaurants, only the fancier sit-down type—we would go into McDonald’s, sit down at a table, and wait a very long time for someone to come take our order!
We all experience this kind of “culture shock” when we travel to a new country. There, many of our assumptions are wrong and we don’t know so easily what is the right thing to do. Even the simplest of activities can require a lot of conscious effort: translating the signs, learning the local norms and customs of behavior, and trying not to do anything offensive out of one’s ignorance. It can be very tiring! Or worse, it can be dangerous—many people from the United States get hit by cars when walking in London because they are looking the wrong way, without thinking, when they cross a street. Visiting a place where the norms and rules are different shows us how much of our daily lives back home are actually under the control of unconscious habitual processes that relieve these constant, draining demands on our conscious mind to such a great extent.
The good news is that we can exploit this mechanism of habit to change our lives for the better. Many if not most of us believe it takes a lot of willpower and internal strength to stifle and suppress strong temptations and impulses—that doing so is a titanic, ongoing struggle that can last throughout the day or throughout one’s life. But new research shows it is actually the opposite. People who effectively self-control are less beset by temptations and spend less effort stifling impulses than do people with lower self-control.
Yes, you read that right. People with good self-control manage their lives in advance. By using unconscious means to self-regulate, making “necessary evils” such as healthy eating and exercising and studying a routine part of their lives, they make the positive activities a routine habit so that they don’t need to fight to get started, or overcome the disinclination to do them. Conscious and effortful self-control is too taxing and too unreliable, and as we know, vulnerable to rationalizations (“just one piece of cake won’t hurt anything”) and excuses (“I’ve had a hard day and just need to relax tonight”).
In a series of studies, Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania looked at people who scored high on a standard measure of self-control ability. They used a ten-item questionnaire with statements such as “I am good at resisting temptation,” “I do things that feel good in the moment but regret later on,” and “Sometimes I can’t stop myself from doing something, even if I know it is wrong,” and asked participants to agree or disagree on a 1–5 scale. In their first study, they found that people who scored highly on that scale were more likely than other people to report that they did a beneficial behavior, such as exercise, “without having to consciously remember”; it was “something I do automatically.” They were more likely than others to exercise at the same regular time and place every day—linking that place and time, the external cues, to their desired behavior. And they made the behavior routine and habitual by being more likely to do it every day than occasionally. As a result, the effective self-regulators reported needing less effort and struggle to do the activities and reported having less difficulty in doing them, compared to people with less self-control. In other words, actual and effective self-control was associated with using less willpower and effort to do the desired activity, not more.
Galla and Duckworth performed a number of studies to confirm this basic principle. In one, for example, people with high self-control were more likely to report being able to study under difficult circumstances, such as when they just did not feel like it, when they were in a bad mood, when they were stressed out, and when they were tempted to do something else. The regular routine of studying helped them to overcome these obstacles but did not help those low in self-control.
Recent studies of people who are good at self-control have revealed that they experience fewer temptations than the rest of us and less often need to control themselves at all. In one German study, more than two hundred people were tracked throughout each day for one week, using BlackBerrys that would beep them at random intervals and ask questions about their experiences at that moment—about their temptations, desires, and about the self-control they were exerting. And those who were the best at self-control, measured by a standard questionnaire with questions such as “I am good at resisting temptations,” reported having fewer of those temptations during that week. In a different study done at McGill University in Montreal, students who reported exerting more self-control over temptations and impulses were not the ones who were the most successful at attaining their important goals. Instead, when the researchers checked back on them at the end of the semester, those who had the most success at achieving their goals were the ones who experienced fewer temptations in the first place. The researchers concluded that “in the long term exerting self-control is not beneficial.”
You might gather from this that people who are good at self-control just don’t have the same strong desires as the rest of us—the poet William Blake certainly thought so, when he said, “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” But it appears Blake was wrong about this. What is really going on is that effective self-controllers set up their environment so that those tempting cues and opportunities are not present in the first place. When they go to the store, they do not buy the unhealthy snacks, and if they want to cut down on how much they drink, they don’t stock their liquor cabinet. This is the other side of the coin of using external cues to promote desired behavior (which is how implementation intentions and good habits operate); here the trick is to remove the unwanted external cues instead. Kentaro Fujita, a self-control and motivation researcher at Ohio State University, explains that “the really good dieter wouldn’t buy a cupcake. They wouldn’t have passed in front of a bakery; when they saw the cupcake, they would have figured out a way to say yuck instead of yum.”
Wendy Wood, of the University of Southern California, a leading expert on habits and self-control, told me that over the past twenty-five years, “the successful campaign to reduce smoking was achieved mainly by changing the environments in which people live. Smoking has been reduced largely due to smoking bans, taxes, eliminating cigarette and tobacco ads from television and magazines, and removing cigarette displays and ads in stores. These were environmental changes that made it more difficult to smoke and thus helped to break the habitual behavioral patterns.” Wood’s own research program has shown that habitual behaviors are grounded in a person’s regular daily environment—they are cued and maintained automatically and unconsciously by it. In short, we are learning that the best way to change a behavior is to change the person’s environment. In the case of the good habits you desire to have, tie them to a regular place and time; for the bad habits you want to get rid of, remove from your surroundings the cues and opportunities that support them.
The unconscious mind powerfully and often invisibly affects our behavior, sometimes even frighteningly so. It shapes not only the people we are in the moment, but also the people we become and the goals we will—or won’t—achieve. Yet, as we have seen in this chapter, our conscious mind can also be an instrument we play—a Fender Stratocaster, say, or a Gibson Les Paul (Jimmy Page’s favorite), iconic guitars of the era of classic rock. Science has revealed that our unconscious mind evolved to respond to our conscious messages as long as we know how to effectively communicate those messages. By tuning the strings of our mind with our intentions, we can radically improve our health, our mental peace, our career, and our relationships. We can exercise and even increase the free will we do have, and enjoy the ways in which our species is indeed so very special.