WILLPOWER
If IQ is the strength of the bulb in your lighthouse, willpower is the lens that focuses it into a beam. “What’s really fundamental to performance is the ability to control the objects of our attention. To choose what information our mind is going to work on and buffer it from sources of distraction. It’s the ability to keep some things in mind and keep other information out,” says Temple University neuroscientist Jason Chein.
Willpower is also the subject of a very good book of the same name by New York Times columnist John Tierney and his collaborator, famed psychologist Roy Baumeister. Their storyline of a finite pool of willpower explains, for example, why less financially secure shoppers are more likely to buy candy in the checkout line. See, the grocery store is filled with temptations and trade-offs in which you spend not only money but your reserve of willpower. While using willpower to inhibit the urge to splurge on delicious unhealthy treats like cream-filled doughnuts and Ruffles potato chips, you’re also making difficult financial decisions like whether it’s worth $4.29 for a loaf of bakery multigrain bread when you can get a long loaf of store-brand wheat bread for $1.99, or weighing the cost/benefit of genuine Vermont maple syrup. The less money you have, the more important and difficult these financial decisions are. The more difficult these decisions are, the more willpower you burn while making them—and the less you have remaining to fend off Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at the checkout stand. Voilà: poor people spend more on checkout candy.
Tierney and Baumeister point to a biological cause of this wearing down of our inhibitory powers: willpower costs glucose, and eventually we run low. In a 2007 review for the journal Personality and Social Psychology, Baumeister wrote that “numerous self-control behaviors fit this pattern [of glucose-dependent willpower], including controlling attention, regulating emotions, quitting smoking, coping with stress, resisting impulsivity, and refraining from criminal and aggressive behavior.” In the lab, Baumeister showed that as you make decisions, your brain glucose decreases, that people with lower blood glucose show less willpower, and that when you hit people with the sugary lab equivalent of a Slurpee, you can reinvigorate willpower.
But there’s another theory of willpower endurance that doesn’t depend on simple sugars. Carol Dweck and Greg Walton believe it’s, well, all in your head. They put subjects through a brain-draining regimen similar to the Baumeister tests—asking half of their subjects to do something automatic like cross off all the e’s (and E’s) in a page of text and the other half to cross off e’s according to a tricky set of willpower-sucking rules. Then everyone did another test. As you’d expect, on the whole the fresh group did better on this second test than the drained group. But there was a split in the drained group, with some of these depleted subjects doing just as well as the fresh ones. It turned out the secret of these willpower-endurance champions was something very simple: they believed that their well of willpower was bottomless. In their minds, willpower wasn’t a limited resource but rather something you could call upon endlessly, if you just dug a little deeper. And like the Baumeister experiments, Dweck’s work jumps the lab. She followed 153 college students through final exam week and found that the students who saw willpower as an unlimited resource ate less junk food, procrastinated less, and, as you might expect, ultimately earned better grades than students who believed their willpower could simply run out. Then, like giving subjects a sugar drink, when Dweck and her colleagues helped students believe in unlimited willpower, they saw willpower itself increase. Writing in the New York Times, Dweck explained her work, saying, “People who think that willpower is limited are on the lookout for signs of fatigue. When they detect fatigue, they slack off. People who get the message that willpower is not so limited may feel tired, but for them this is no sign to give up—it’s a sign to dig deeper and find more resources.”
To Dweck, it’s not necessarily sugar we need but a swift kick in the cerebral pants. Believe that you always have more willpower in the tank and you will have more willpower in the tank.
So there it is—an overview of the two major schools of thought on willpower, along with two compelling ways to boost it: a sugary drink, or belief there’s more to be found. Following are a couple more tips that can help you find the willpower you need.
NEURAL REPROCESSING
University of Minnesota psychologist Philip Zelazo uses the famous marshmallow experiment to describe another way to boost willpower—do you eat one marshmallow now or can you inhibit that urge for twenty minutes in order to earn a second? “You have the urge to eat,” Zelazo says, “and then the information is fed forward into parts of the prefrontal cortex, which returns it back into the system for another iteration of processing.”
Elsewhere we’ve looked at decisions as a want/should teeter-totter, but in Zelazo’s model it’s more like a tennis match—the urge serves, the prefrontal cortex returns, and then the two rally. The more attention you give to the prefrontal side of the court, the more chance willpower will eventually win.
“Your reprocessing might look like ‘Wow, that marshmallow sure looks tasty, but now I’m starting to pay attention to the long-term reward of waiting.’ Next time through processing, you can amplify attention to that long-term reward even more,” Zelazo says. He calls this state of intentional reprocessing mindfulness, though other researchers might call it expressing high willpower.
“The more you engage in that practice of stopping and reflecting, the easier it gets. You’re literally growing your prefrontal cortex,” Zelazo says.
He also describes this mindful reprocessing as allowing a deeper experience of the present, not only in terms of noticing more, but also in noticing your own reactions to situations. For example, you might think, “I find this feature interesting, I wonder why? You can elaborate your cognitive processing of this situation so that you not only respond directly to the environment but modulate and modify your own subjective and cognitive experiences. If you practice being mindful in a range of situations through the day, then that becomes your mode of experiencing,” Zelazo says.
So try being mindful. You can do it now or you can practice in your cognitive downtime. Notice your surroundings. This part is hard enough: does your attention slide to your e-mail or your shopping list or other things outside the present? Once you’re successfully centered, also notice what you’re noticing. Why does your attention rest where it rests? What does the natural center of your attention make you feel? And then, importantly, shift around this attention and experiment with multiple interpretations of where it rests.
“Simply by the act of neural reprocessing, you become better at neural reprocessing,” Zelazo says.
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GRAMMATICAL REASONING
In 1968, famed psychologist Alan Baddeley showed that you could measure scuba divers’ cognitive function (and thus diagnose nitrogen narcosis) with a three-minute test of grammatical reasoning. His test has since been used to explore cognitive effects of, for example, sleep deprivation, altitude, a good breakfast, and the unawareness of one’s own incompetence. The many neat effects found with the grammatical reasoning test include the finding that a quick pass through the test primes subjects to apply reason to situations in their own lives—right away, you can use a couple of the following slips to prime your brain for reason! But too much of the test results in cognitive fatigue and worse performance on life tasks—that is, unless you build up your tolerance. It takes willpower to conquer cognitive fatigue.
First copy and cut out the following slips. As you can see, they’re in the form of, for example, “A precedes B—AB.” Unless you’ve been more than thirty meters underwater for quite some time, you can tell this example is true. But many sentences are false. Your job is to distinguish true from false as quickly as possible. Stack the slips, shuffle them, and flip them one at a time—despite the fact that every slip is easy, it takes disciplined reason to pass through the entire deck without error. (If you like, write “true” or “false” on the back of each slip for easy checking.) Write down your time, adding ten seconds for each error. Then come back to the grammatical reasoning test to periodically check for improvement. As you practice, your ability to make it through this grammatical reasoning test without error should increase.
| A precedes B—AB | A precedes B—BA |
| B precedes A—AB | B precedes A—BA |
| A does not precede B—AB | A does not precede B—BA |
| B does not precede A—AB | B does not precede A—BA |
| A follows B—AB | A follows B—BA |
| B follows A—AB | B follows A—BA |
| A does not follow B—AB | A does not follow B—BA |
| B does not follow A—AB | B does not follow A—BA |
| A comes after B—AB | A comes after B—BA |
| B comes after A—AB | B comes after A—BA |
| A does not come after B—AB | A does not come after B—BA |
| B does not come after A—AB | B does not come after A—BA |
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PAIRED ASSOCIATES
Along with working memory and task switching, willpower is an important component of executive function—our ability to control our attention and plan with intention. This version of the paired associates task trains working memory, along with the willpower needed to inhibit the distraction of a previous rule (don’t worry: this will make sense in a second). Virginia Rosen of the National Institute of Mental Health showed that once you struggle to cram a rule into your working memory, it takes considerable willpower to rewrite that rule in later trials. Rosen also shows that people who train this skill experience fewer unwanted intrusions on their thoughts—in other words, this exercise trains the focus and inhibition components of the willpower you bring to life.
Here’s a version of her exercise:
Shuffle a deck of playing cards. Draw two cards. These “associates” are now “paired.” Remember the pairing. Write each card under the A and B columns of the TRAIN section of the first chart on this page. For example, if you’d drawn Queen of Spades and the 7 of Clubs, you would write Q-Spade and 7-Clubs under TRAIN. Set aside the card from the A column—you’ll use it later. Make four total pairs of associates this way, recording their letters in the A/B TRAIN columns as you did for the first pair. Each time, set aside the “A column” card as you did for the first pair, so that once you’re done you have four “A column” cards remaining.
Now cover the TRAIN column of the chart and switch to the TEST column. Pick a card from your short deck of A’s. List the card and then try to remember the associate card you paired with it. For example, if you drew the Queen of Spades, the proper response would be 7 of Clubs. One at a time, flip over all cards from your little A deck and remember/list their associates. Then reveal the TRAIN column to check your answers.
This should be relatively easy. Don’t worry: it gets harder.
So far, this has been a working-memory exercise. Now it becomes a test of willpower. Pick new associates for your “A” cards—on the second chart, list the same cards in the A column and draw new cards to list in the C column. You now have new responses (C) for your stimuli (A). Now when you test your recall of these paired associates as before, not only must you flex your working memory to recall the pairings, but you must flex your willpower to inhibit the previous pairings.
Check your answers. If you got any wrong, repeat the exercise from the beginning with completely new pairs of associates. If you were perfect, boost the difficulty by sketching your own TRAIN/TEST chart with five blank rows and adding a fifth pair of associates. You can also run further trials with the same “A” cards—you paired A-B and A-C, now continue to pair A with D, and even A with E, choosing ever-evolving responses to pair with your stimuli cards. Adding more pairs or continuing to pair stimuli with new responses will train your ability to keep in mind the information you want and push aside the information you don’t.
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COUNT TO TEN
“One of the oldest ways to describe mindfulness is not just intending to do what you do, but super-intending it,” Philip Zelazo says. “When you’re walking, don’t just walk and multitask, but experience that walking. Be present. Be where you are and be absorbed.” Here’s an exercise to practice this super-intention: Count to ten. Really, do it now. But as you count, don’t think about anything other than counting. For me it goes something like this: “One, two … I wonder what’s in the fridge?” or “One, two, three … gosh, I’m really doing it! D’oh!” Though seemingly simple, this may be the book’s most difficult exercise—the willpower to inhibit distraction when not otherwise blunting it with a consuming task is horrifically difficult.
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AVOID TEMPTATION (SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO RESIST IT)
Roy Baumeister and his colleagues did a nifty experiment: they gave subjects smartphones that beeped seven times a day. Each time one of the 205 participants’ smartphones beeped, he or she noted whether they were feeling a desire, the nature and strength of the desire, whether the desire created internal conflict, and whether the subject was subsequently successful at resisting the desire. About half the time, subjects reported feeling desires, which included hunger (28 percent), sleep (10 percent), thirst (9 percent), sex (5 percent), and coffee (3 percent). When people attempted to resist desire, the desire won 17 percent of the time; when they didn’t try to resist desire, they fulfilled it 70 percent of the time. It also turned out that some people were wildly more successful at resisting desire than others. What was it about these people? Was it Conan the Barbarian–esque willpower? No, in this study, it turned out the secret to resisting temptation was lack of opportunity to consummate the desire—it wasn’t that people successfully inhibited the urge to drink a fourth cup of coffee, it was that the fourth cup of coffee didn’t exist.
One powerful secret to resisting a temptation is to avoid situations where that temptation can easily be consummated. It’s easy to see how you can put this to use in breaking yourself of bad habits in your own life. If you hate how much time you waste on the Internet when you should be working, don’t just try to resist the urge to surf—instead consider using a program that stops you from going online during certain hours. If you’re trying to break a videogame addiction, don’t try to resist the siren call of your Xbox; instead unplug it from the TV, stick it in a box, and relegate it to the back of your coat closet.
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THE WELL OF WILLPOWER
Here’s a version of the Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton task from this chapter that measures and trains willpower. As in the Paired Associates exercise, it consists of learning a rule and then using willpower to break it. Pick a text-heavy page in this book (or any other book you have lying around) and time yourself as you cross off every letter e (or letter E). Now flip to a similar text-heavy page and this time, cross off every e, except those that are followed by another vowel. Finally, flip to another page and again time yourself, this time crossing off every e except those that are preceded by another vowel. Now you’ve made one pass through this exercise—keep a log of your times. Tomorrow, do the same thing. As the difference in the times it takes you to apply these three e-crossing rules shrinks, your ability to inhibit distraction and maintain focus grows!
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