. . . you and your crew may still reach home suffering all the way, if you only have the power to curb their wild desire and curb your own
—THE ODYSSEY
So how can each of us be our own godfather? The answer is to shuck the naïveté of the untutored in favor of a more sophisticated approach to ourselves and our intentions. That means, first, relying as little as possible on willpower in the face of temptation. It’s much better, like Odysseus, to row right past the cattle of the sun god than to count on controlling the hunger that could lead to a fatal barbecue. It also means acknowledging how much we are influenced by our surroundings—and taking command of our environment so that it influences us in ways we prefer.
Most important of all, a more sophisticated approach means recognizing that we cannot honor our best intentions by ourselves. If we are to take control of our own destiny in a world of such unprecedented freedom and abundance, we have no choice but to enlist the help of others—not just family, but friends, colleagues, and community. The only hope, in short, is to do all that we can to have ourselves tied to the mast of our own intentions. Just like Betsy Keller.
Keller is a dietitian and mother in Greenwich, Connecticut, who likes to keep active, but in 2005 she tore a knee ligament in a skiing accident and found herself in a leg brace. Unable to burn up calories by exercising, she ruthlessly took matters in hand. After giving snacks to her kids, she put on slow-drying nail polish so she wouldn’t be able to stick her hand into the snack bag and get some for herself. She served her own food on smaller plates to make the portions look bigger. She brushed and flossed her teeth after meals to ward off noshing during cleanup. And, when served dessert, she promptly covered half with salt, rendering that portion inedible (a tactic she learned from her mother, who maintains a healthy weight despite her advanced age). Keller told me that she did these things for a simple reason: “Those tricks work!”
People like Keller have to cope with the ambiguous signals that their tactics sometimes broadcast. She will strike most of us as exceptionally self-disciplined, yet there are times when we might conclude that someone so dependent on precommitment actually lacks self-control. A fat person who has his jaws wired shut in order to slim down, for example, signals to all that he couldn’t control his eating without resort to artifice. Jon Elster has observed that, when it comes to booze, many societies have norms against drunkenness and abstinence. Sydney Greenstreet, pouring a drink in The Maltese Falcon, puts the point neatly: “I distrust a man who says ‘when.’ If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much, it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”
By now it should be obvious that, regardless of the signals it sends, committing yourself—irrevocably, if you can—to your best intentions is the most powerful weapon available in the war for self-command. If there are options ahead that you’d prefer not to choose, foreclose them any way you can. The one mistake you shouldn’t make is to think you can rely on willpower to do the job when the time comes.
On the Unreliability of Willpower
Willpower is usefully thought of as a muscle. You can build it up in the long run, but in the short run, like any muscle, it’s prone to exhaustion. Research has shown again and again that when our self-control is taxed, we are less resistant to temptation. Some people even think this is our essential problem: modern life imposes such a heavy self-control burden, in some quarters at least, that we’re depleted much of the time. As Michel de Montaigne said of the soul, exercising it “must be done with some respite and with moderation; it goes mad if it is too continually tense.”
Studies of what some have called ego depletion are quite straightforward. Researchers ask people to exert some self-control—perhaps by resisting a plate of chocolate chip cookies—after which a second task is presented requiring more self-control still. The depleted almost always perform worse on this second task than a control group whose members hadn’t been depleted by any preliminary exercise designed to sap self-control. People who were told to avoid thinking about a white bear subsequently found it harder to stifle their mirth while watching a funny video. People who first had to resist chocolate then gave up sooner in solving difficult problems. Depleted individuals choose crappier entertainment and foods. Depleted dieters eat more.
In one interesting study, people were asked “to read aloud a series of boring historical biographies” while theatrically exaggerating their emotions with gestures and facial expressions. A second group of people were asked to read the same material aloud without changing their reading style. Afterward all were allowed to purchase common household items at a discount. Is it any surprise that the emotionally depleted folks spent more money? By the way, depleted individuals are also willing to pay higher prices.
It’s not clear what biological processes are at work when our self-control becomes depleted, or how it gains strength over time from being exercised. Perhaps the relevant areas of the brain get better at utilizing glucose, or maybe exercising self-regulation increases the flow of key neurotransmitters. Interestingly, both self-control and decision making seem to draw on the same mysterious energy resources; perhaps we go around in a constant state of depletion as the result of all the choices we face in the modern world.
Glucose appears to play a role. In one study, people had their blood glucose measured before and after completing a self-control task. Sure enough, the level was significantly lower afterward. And the lower the glucose level after such a task, the worse the performance on a second such task. A glass of lemonade sweetened with sugar (but not Splenda) seemed to help. Think of the implications for dieters, whose struggle against food may be undermined by their own self-denial. “Willpower is more than a metaphor,” Roy Baumeister has said. “Being our better selves is biologically costly.”
What can we conclude? It would probably be hard to quit smoking at the same time you struggle to complete your master’s thesis. A chocolate bar or a bottle of Gatorade might well be a useful restorative if your will is feeling depleted, although I won’t argue with experts who recommend a diet of complex carbohydrates and lean proteins. It helps to get enough sleep, too.
And you might as well tell the truth, because it seems that lying taxes the same mental precincts as self-control. Using brain scans, psychologists at Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab have found that “individuals who behaved dishonestly exhibited increased activity in control-related regions of prefrontal cortex.” The implication here is that lying depletes psychic resources you might need for resisting temptation.
Consistent with the notion that willpower is a muscle, there is evidence that it can be made stronger by exercising it. Maybe this is the reason so many religions require that followers periodically enact rituals of self-denial, such as fasting. Religious people do seem to have more self-control, but so do others who simply work at it. In one study, college students who were given two weeks of self-control exercises (improving their posture, stamping out negative moods) showed significant improvement compared to a control group in how long they could squeeze a handgrip before giving up.
The results of this experiment (led by psychologist Mark Muraven, who has pioneered research into willpower-as-muscle) would not have surprised William James, who exhorted us with characteristic nineteenth-century brio to
keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
Yet every muscle has its limitations; even bodybuilders can’t do push-ups forever. So while it’s a good idea to follow James’s advice, it would be foolish—or rather, in self-control terms, naïve—to abandon all the tactics in the sophisticate’s self-management tool bag. If you want to avoid speeding in your car, for instance, use cruise control. If you’re thinking of having a second drink before getting into the car, recite to yourself the names of your children, and call to mind their faces, perhaps clouded by grief. Better yet, take out a picture of them before you sit down at the bar. Powerful emotions about your attachments, like laughter and good feelings generally, are known boosters of willpower. Besides, guilt is your friend, and enlisting friends is always helpful—as long as they are the right friends.
Hell Is Not Other People
Inhibition so often begins with the sense that somebody is watching; experiments have demonstrated that simply installing a mirror makes people behave more honestly when, for example, they pick up a newspaper and are supposed to leave their money on the honor system. Mirrors also seem to diminish stereotyping, promote hard work, and discourage cheating. In one study of children, the mere presence of a mirror reduced the stealing of Halloween candy by more than 70 percent.
You can think of other people as human mirrors. “Our friends and relatives,” Howard Rachlin writes, “are essential mirrors of the patterns of our behavior over long periods—mirrors of our souls. They are the magic ‘mirrors on the wall’ who can tell us whether this drink, this cigarette, this ice cream sundae, this line of cocaine, is more likely to be part of a new future or an old past. We dispense with these individuals at a terrible risk to our self-control.”
Human relationships are vital in many ways, but in the self-control arena we are as dependent on them as Odysseus was on his crew, for we simply cannot bind ourselves to our own wills without other people. Participants in some twelve-step programs have sponsors they can call upon when the will weakens, and even stickK.com, the Internet precommitment enterprise, encourages users to name a referee who can attest to whether you’ve met your goals.
We’ve seen that loneliness subverts self-control, but community can promote it in a variety of ways, not least by minimizing social isolation and establishing norms. Communities are also social information systems, and being known in one is surely a moderating force, because reputations are valuable. Communities can reward with esteem and punish by turning a cold shoulder. You can use this knowledge against yourself. If you make New Year’s resolutions, for example, you’re much better off telling everyone about them—even putting them on a blog. Once this is done, you’ll be much more likely to uphold them, since your reputation will be at stake.
Enlisting others in upholding one’s own best intentions is a wellworn technique (“For God’s sake, don’t let me order any dessert tonight!”) for a very good reason, and everyone ought to make use of it. The potential approval or disapproval of friends amounts to a free reward system you can turn to advantage, but the lack of such a system is a self-control disaster for many people. I think the single worst consequence of modern life is the erosion of its communal dimension. People relocate much too lightly, abandoning the web of friends, relations, neighbors, and colleagues that was the source of their happiness just for a little more money or sunshine or simply to try something new. The end of a marriage often has similar consequences, tearing apart networks of kinship and friendship. If we really want to take control of our desires, we should reconsider this frantic flight from one another.
Friendship in particular is overlooked, but it may be our only prospect of filling the yawning chasm opened by the decline of family. Friends are important, as Aristotle well knew, and should be chosen carefully. There is such a thing as peer pressure, after all, which influences many of the things we do—and therefore it is wise to exercise care in choosing the peers who will inevitably pressure you. “If you want to change and maintain behavior over time,” says David Holtgrave, chairman of the Health, Behavior and Society Department at the Johns Hopkins public health school, “you need people who are going to be supportive of those changes.”
You can also hire a friend by going to a therapist, but while Freud may dominate our attitudes about self-control, you’re better off avoiding psychoanalysis, the expensive and slow form of therapy practiced today by Freud’s heirs. You might instead look to Albert Ellis.
The sickly offspring of emotionally distant parents in the Bronx, Ellis overcame shyness as a nineteen-year-old by setting himself the task of speaking to every woman he found sitting by herself in the New York Botanical Garden. Eventually he spoke to about 130 of them, and although he only got one date, “nobody vomited and ran away. Nobody called the cops,” he told the New York Times years later. “I completely got over my shyness by thinking differently, feeling differently and, in particular, acting differently.”
Ellis eventually became a writer and then a Freudian therapist, but soon broke away from analytic orthodoxy to launch what is now known as cognitive behavioral therapy. Unlike psychoanalysis, which takes years and focuses on past relationships and traumas, cognitive behavioral therapy seeks to quickly change the way you think about your problems. The idea is to stop complaining, look at your situation without emotional distortions, and take the steps necessary to straighten out. It’s like Mrs. Pilletti says in the movie Marty, in the face of her sister’s histrionics, “Don’t make an opera outta this.”
Cognitive behavioral therapists owe a debt to the Stoics, who emphasized human agency and a focus on the things you can control— such as your own reaction to circumstances and events. Ellis and the Stoics both saw emotions as largely voluntary states to which we can assent or not, as we see fit. Ellis, who wrote books on dealing with alcohol, anger, procrastination, and mood regulation, stressed changing the way you think about your problems. Self-deception, “catastrophizing,” and other harmful mental activities are to be rooted out and subjected, along with other bad habits, to the merciless scrutiny of the prefrontal cortex. The idea is to acquire accurate knowledge about yourself and your environment and put it to use. Cognitive behavioral therapy is even something you can practice on yourself. Is it rational to eat just because something is bothering you? If not, then find a way to cut it out.
Use Your Environment
Don’t be naïve: your environment acts on you in ways you can’t begin to realize. So why not structure your environment to get the desired responses? All you have to do is make the default conditions of your life—the things that happen as a result of inertia—consistent with your second-order preferences. Better things are likely to happen, and you won’t waste cognitive resources on a lot of unnecessary choices. Decide in advance to row right past the cattle of the sun god.
One of the best areas for investment in environment control is attention management. Remove distractions from your desk. If you want to spend less time on the Internet, use software to block access—or at the very least, turn off e-mail and disconnect chat programs for a while. Unplug the phone, resort to earplugs the way Odysseus’s sailors did—anything to remove unwanted diversions. If you can’t remove distractions and temp- tations, try changing the way you think about them. Avoid focusing on their most seductive properties and think about who you really want to be.
With regard to your home environment, don’t buy the things you need to avoid. Shop when you aren’t hungry. Order online, far away from the sights and smells that are so tempting in a store. Take your credit cards out of your wallet and leave them at home in a drawer. Imagine about how much you have to earn pretax to pay for whatever it is you’re thinking of buying.
Another useful way of using your environment to bolster self-command is to make sure you have some exposure to nature. It pains me to write this, since the only nature that interests me is human, yet studies demonstrate that urban life, with its stress and anonymity, poses a threat to self-control. Cities are stimulating but also cognitively demanding; even a short walk in a city can undermine attention and memory. Children with attention deficit disorder suffer fewer symptoms in a more natural setting. A study of inner-city girls found that a view of green space accounted for 20 percent of variance in self-discipline scores. In a public housing project in Chicago, women whose apartments overlooked a grassy courtyard were better able to focus their attention and cope with major life challenges than neighbors lacking such views—and there was less domestic violence in the “green” apartments as well. Apparently Bruce Springsteen was onto something when he sang, “It’s so hard to be a saint in the city.”
If you’re serious about living up to your second-order preferences— and you’ve taken the trouble to formulate some, as people often do when they make New Year’s resolutions—then the truly radical approach is to treat yourself like one of B. F. Skinner’s pigeons. People often do so instinctively by promising themselves a certain reward—opening the good wine, buying a new dress, taking a vacation in Hawaii—when a certain goal is met. But self-rewards can be tricky without appointing someone else to bestow or withhold the prize. If you don’t mind treating yourself like a lab rat—and let’s face it, we’re not all that different— then friends and family members can be a big help. If I had told my wife not to let me take a drink in the evenings unless I could show her three new pages from the day’s work, this book might have been in your hands months sooner. If she had withheld sex, it would have been done in 2007.
If you want to make a difficult but enduring change, announce it (to yourself and others) well in advance; an engagement period is always useful in getting one’s intended to the altar. It’s not by chance that the military allows enlistees a period of time between signing and induction. One study of charitable giving found that it rose when a delay was permitted between pledging and giving. Another study found that the longer in advance people ordered groceries, the less they spent—and the healthier their choices.
On the other hand, since speed and proximity kill self-control, it pays to keep a buffer of time and space between you and the most dubious gratifications. Scott Jaffa, for example, a systems administrator in suburban Washington, D.C., “destroyed the online access code for his 401(k) so he could no longer have instant access to his retirement accounts. His goal was to make it ‘significantly harder’ and to require ‘human interaction’ before he could trade on his own emotions.” This act of precommitment helped him watch some stomach-churning stock market declines without taking any harmful action.
Writing a book is a great metaphor for the nature of modern work, which is unstructured, mental rather than physical, and often involves tenuous and far-off rewards. If you find yourself in this situation, the best bet is to set concrete goals, make sure they are reasonable, and monitor your performance, preferably in writing. (In keeping with the essentially adversarial nature of our relationship with ourselves, we should follow the Cold War maxim “trust, but verify.”)
Controlling your environment means structuring your work in a way that makes it easier to do. Break big projects down into well-defined “proximal goals,” which are easier to swallow and provide a daily sense of accomplishment. Your goal for today, for example, is not to write your book but just to produce two pages. Write them and you get to feel good about yourself even though the book isn’t done. It’s like melioration, except healthy; you get to choose short-term rewards, yet with each one you move closer to completion.
Controlling your food environment is especially important. Brian Wansink, the Cornell food-priming expert, suggests that you never eat cookies or anything fattening directly from the package; instead, put a handful on a plate. Serve vegetables family-style, in bowls on the table, but put small amounts of the fattening stuff on people’s plates in the kitchen. If you’re in a group, start eating last. At an all-you-can-eat buffet—and what on earth are you doing there?—establish a policy of taking only two items at a time.
One of the paradoxes about self-control is that it seems to take some to get some. Physical exercise, for instance, improves self-control. Exercise has been shown to diminish age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex, reduce the risk of dementia, and in rodents, produce a variety of other brain benefits. But for most of us, who have much more sedentary occupations than our forebears, getting exercise requires an investment of self-control. Here, too, a certain amount of sophistication can help—for instance, if you can, live someplace that makes walking unavoidable. Or enlist a workout partner who can “force” you to show up at the gym.
One way exercise may boost self-control is by raising your serotonin level. Bright light seems to help with this as well, although eating turkey and other supposed serotonin enhancers apparently does not. Serotonin affects mood, but mood apparently also affects serotonin. (Actors, it turns out, can change their serotonin levels by “doing” different moods.) If you’re in a bad mood, get out and do something active in the light of day. But leave your credit cards home.
The Advantages of Automation
Maybe the best way to uphold one’s desired desires is to form a habit. A habit is a behavior that we repeat over and over more or less on autopilot, like Dr. Evil’s habit, in the Austin Powers films, of coyly holding his pinky to the corner of his mouth. These behaviors may require conscious effort at first, but through repetition they become virtually automatic in the face of certain triggers. We all have them, because consciousness is a limited resource and human beings evolved to husband it. Thus, the conscious mind will off-load nearly anything it possibly can to the brain’s more automated precincts, moving repeated activities from the prefrontal cortex into the much deeper basal ganglia and thereby saving processing power for more important things—and perhaps reducing the chance of error. “Civilization,” said Alfred North Whitehead, “advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
In fact, many of the things we do best we do without thinking. Remember your white-knuckle grip on the wheel when you first learned to drive? Operating the family car required every ounce of attention you could muster, yet evolved over time into something you could do unthinkingly while mulling a problem from work or listening to your kids bickering in the back. I can tie a necktie while talking to my sons, but if I focus on it I get confused. My wife can knit a sweater while watching a movie or commiserating with her friends about their boring husbands.
So habits aren’t necessarily bad. What habits are is sticky. Bad ones, which seem to travel in packs, are the hardest to break because they are built from our most instinctual urges. Good ones are to be cherished; self-command can be achieved, Aristotle tell us, when “obedience to reason becomes habitual.” William James devoted an entire chapter to habit in his monumental The Principles of Psychology, observing (with his own ardent italics) that “the great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.”
James was right about the ethical significance of habits. And we seem to know that we are what we habitually do; as Mark Leary reports, “once formed, people’s self-concepts provide an important source of input to their decisions. Our behavior is often affected by our beliefs about the kind of person we are—what characteristics and abilities we possess, for example. We sometimes do certain things because we see ourselves as the kind of person who does that sort of thing, and we resist doing other things because we’re ‘not that kind of person.’ ”
So our likelihood of following through on our intentions is a function of the extent to which we habitually do so. Thomas Mann understood this when he described Thomas Buddenbrook’s struggling with exercise and smoking in middle age: “His will-power had grown flabby in these years of idleness or petty activity. He slept late in the morning, though every evening he made an angry resolve to rise early and take the prescribed walk before breakfast. Only two or three times did he actually carry out the resolve; and it was the same with everything else. And the constant effort to spur on his will, with the constant failure to do so, consumed his self-respect and made him a prey to despair. He never even tried to give up his cigarettes; he could not do without them . . .”
On the other hand, when we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness. How we spin our transgressions matters, too; if we see them as exceptions, or rationalize them as somehow intentional, they may be safely quarantined in memory without posing any danger to our resolve going forward. Pile up enough instances of intention and action and pretty soon you might push matters beyond the anxious realm of willpower into the clear skies of habit, where the autopilot can do the work. That’s an accomplishment. “Habits,” John Dewey rightly observed, “are arts.”
If you want to avoid bad habits and cultivate good ones, it’s worth bearing in mind that most depend heavily on environmental signals such as a specific time or place, certain people, a particular mood, or some actions you might repeatedly take. Behavior such as starting and driving your car along the familiar route to the office might once have been motivated by goals (getting to work) but soon becomes motivated by cues (morning, coffee, garage, etc.). We’re not just dogs, we’re Pavlovian dogs. “Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” says USC psychologist Wendy Wood. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”
If bad habits are a problem, good ones are precious because they lower the psychic cost of doing the right thing, and by eliminating the need for a conscious decision, they lower the risk that the right thing won’t get done. “Be eager to fulfill the smallest duty and flee from transgression,” the Talmud enjoins, “for one duty induces another and one transgression induces another transgression.”
Homer and Ned
In America, it sometimes seems, you are either Homer Simpson or Ned Flanders. Homer is a slave to his appetites most of the time, although his fat-clogged heart is in the right place, while Ned (his Homer and Ned Christian neighbor) is a paragon of self-control, never letting his temper get the better of him even for a moment—but only because he’s in thrall to a cultlike evangelism. Both men seem to be missing a fully functioning will.
I go back and forth when I think about which I’d rather be. Homer is selfish, shortsighted, flabby, and dumb, finding consolation in a bucket of fried chicken with extra skin; Ned is nicer, handsomer, has better-behaved kids, and runs his own business, yet there is something awful about him, too. The basis of his good life seems contrived, even prefabricated, and his relationship to choice efficient but somehow stunted.
The challenge, it seems to me, is to avoid the fate of both Homer and Ned by deciding for ourselves which of our preferences we like and then defending them against the importuning of those we do not. In Harry Frankfurt’s formulation, this is what makes you a person; the alternatives are submitting blindly to impulse, like Homer, or submitting blindly to some power outside yourself, like Ned.
Faced with these options, we find ourselves once again in the position of Odysseus, who must navigate between Scylla and Charybdis as part of his long and difficult journey home. Fortunately, the nature of his heroism means that it is available to everyone, for while we don’t have much say over the desires that we have, we certainly can decide which we prefer—and then search for ways to act on that basis.
The crux of our problem with self-control is the future and how much regard we have for it. Today the future looks scary, in part because we are so lax—about warming the planet, increasing our indebtedness, and eating ourselves into obesity. We can do better, both individually and collectively. But we should also remember that things could be much worse. If technology helped get us into this mess, it may well have the power to get us out. Can the time be far off when pills permit us to eat almost anything without gaining weight? What about when we’re finally able to manipulate the genes of our offspring? Will some of us engineer superhuman self-control? Will the law require that we do so, the way it requires immunizations and schooling?
These questions will have to wait for another day, and another book. Meanwhile, let’s look on the bright side. That self-control is the biggest problem faced by many of the world’s people is a blessing in not much of a disguise. Self-regulation will always be a challenge, but if somebody’s going to be in charge, it might as well be me.