Indulge now and pay the price later? Or wait a little and reap bigger rewards in the future? Many of life's biggest challenges come down to a simple trade off. Self-control isn't easy. But it is possible to make it easier. In this guide, I've teamed up with cognitive science PhD student Jakub Jilek for another complete guide to understand the science of willpower and discipline. Like research-based complete guides like this one? Be sure to check out our other complete guides.

Indulge now and pay the price later? Or wait a little and reap bigger rewards in the future? Many of life's biggest challenges come down to a simple trade off. Self-control isn't easy. But it is possible to make it easier. In this guide, I've teamed up with cognitive science PhD student Jakub Jilek for ...

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Indulge now and pay the price later? Or wait a little and reap bigger rewards in the future? Many of life's biggest challenges come down to a simple trade off. Self-control isn't easy. But it is possible to make it easier. In this guide, I've teamed up with cognitive science PhD student Jakub Jilek for another complete guide to understand the science of willpower and discipline. Two common terms from the psychological literature are self-regulation and self-control.

What is self-control? It's your ability to resolve conflicts between your short-term desires and your long-term goals. Shall I order a hamburger or a salad? Shall I revise for an exam or go to a party? Shall I watch my favorite TV show or go for a run? Why should you care about self-control? Name anything important to your life and self-control plays a major role. In an extensive longitudinal study spanning across three decades, researchers from Duke university followed 1,000 children. At the beginning, they assessed their self-control skills, intelligence and social class, and examined what impact these characteristics had on their life success. Can you guess which of these factors was most important?

Unsurprisingly, children who were born to richer parents and who were more intelligent enjoyed greater physical health and a higher income. What's striking though is that self-control had an equally powerful effect on success in life as intelligence and social class. The more the children improved their self-control skills during adolescence, the more successful they became 30 years later.

In general, people with better self-control eat more healthily, do more exercise, sleep better, drink less alcohol, smoke fewer cigarettes, achieve higher grades at university, have more peaceful relationships, are more financially secure, and enjoy stronger physical and mental health.,

Self-control clearly matters for your long-term health and success in life. But can it also make you happy? You may be thinking that sacrificing a bit of long-term health and wealth is sometimes worth it. After all, indulging in a bit of chocolate cake makes us happy and helps us enjoy our lives to the fullest. If we became too strict and never indulged in anything, we might deprive ourselves of life's greatest delights.

You wake up, the alarm blares and you drag yourself out of bed. Work is exhausting. Your boss piles on more deadlines and the stress ratchets higher. You planned to exercise and read a book when you got home, but now all you can think about is opening a beer and watching Netflix.

Experiences like this one seem to say that our self-control depends on a limited resource. Run out of fuel, and it's no longer possible to ignore temptation. But is it true? In summary, the ego-depletion model is too simplistic and doesn't capture the richness of psychological processes which all play an important role in self-control. However, does this mean that our self-control has no limits?

Therefore, another reason why self-control feels exhausting could be that after demanding mental activity our brain needs to do some housekeeping to stay healthy and functional. Do you remember your first commute to work? You probably had to pay a lot of attention on the way not to get lost. After taking the same route many times, however, the commute became automatic. Now you can listen to music, speak on the phone, rehearse your speech, or plan your day, all while driving and navigating automatically.

As this example shows, automatic behaviour can be extremely useful. Because it doesn't require attention or effort, it frees our cognitive capacity, which allows us to do more things at the same time. Over millennia, natural selection has built us with many automatic behaviours and drives which helped us survive and reproduce. Although these behaviours served us well in the past, they were designed for the environments our ancestors lived in, which are completely different from the ones we live in today.

You may wonder now - if self-control is exhausting, why do some people seem to have an iron will? The main takeaway from research is that self-control is ultimately limited by our biology. We can't exercise effortful self-control indefinitely - the brain has to do regular maintenance to remain functional. The reason why some people are good at self-control nonetheless is not because they make more effort . Instead, these people avoid effortful strategies (such as suppression and resistance) and use easier strategies (such as re-appraisal). Instead of effortfully inhibiting their automatic drives, they bypass them. In this way, they don't tax their brains, which then don't have to do housekeeping so quickly. As a result, they are free to invest their effort into pursuing their goals, instead of fighting with themselves., , , ,

Which Self-Discipline Strategies Don't Work?

In this guide, we'll show you various strategies you can use to tweak your self-control in ways that aren't as tiring. Before, however, let's talk about some of the lousy strategies people use instead. It's the second day of your diet. But Susan, the office manager, is having her birthday and they've bought a big chocolate cake. What do you do?

Do you try to suppress the thoughts of that delicious, mouth-watering chocolate icing? Do you white-knuckle your way through the happy birthday song, and flat-out refuse a bite? Do you try to train yourself by going to the bakery every day to build the "muscle" of avoiding temptation?

Thought Suppression: Don't Even Think About It

Unfortunately, research shows all of these approaches don't work very well. The first step to improving self-control is to stop using the strategies that don't actually work. Thought suppression is when you consciously attempt not to think about something. You can try it right now: Don't think about polar bears. How long did it take you to think of one? You probably failed before you even finished reading the sentence.

To directly test the effect of thought suppression on self-control, scientists asked participants to either suppress or verbalize thinking about chocolate for five minutes. After that, they could eat as much chocolate as they liked. The suppression group ended up consuming twice as much chocolate at the end of the experiment .

In another study, researchers asked smokers to either think about smoking as much as they could (expressing thoughts), to suppress all thoughts about smoking for 3 weeks, or to do nothing in particular (control group). Which group do you think ended up consuming most cigarettes during the third week?

Don't try to suppress your thoughts. Although it can be effective in the short-run, it's more effortful than other self-control strategies and it will make your desires come back stronger in the long-run. An effective alternative to thought suppression is re-appraisal and mindfulness, which we'll discuss shortly.,

When you're resisting temptations, you're not trying to stop thinking about them. Instead, you're actively inhibiting your urge to act on them (such as stopping yourself from putting a candy into your mouth). One would expect that the students who put in more effort into resisting temptations would be more successful in achieving their goals. Surprisingly, no such relationship was found. Regardless of how hard the students tried to resist, it had no positive effect whatsoever on their goals.

On the face of it, this result seems contradictory to what we said at the beginning. Didn't we establish that self-control is essential for life success? The important thing to realize is that resisting temptations is only one of many self-control strategies. Because it's one of the most effortful strategies, it's likely to fail when applied over a longer period of time. Crucially, the study also showed that it wasn't the amount of self-control that students exercised, but the number of temptations they faced in total, which predicted their goal success. The students who experienced more temptations were always deciding whether they should indulge in immediate pleasures or work on their long-term goals. The fact that they had to constantly make effortful decisions left them tired and unable to direct their efforts to their goals.

Self-Control Training: Is Willpower a Muscle?

In addition to the energy metaphor, Baumeister has also used the 'muscle' metaphor to describe the ego-depletion model. In essence, practicing acts of self-control should make our self-control muscle stronger. The way to build strong self-control, the logic goes, is to train it regularly as we exercise our muscles in the gym.

The answer can be found in the theory of transfer-appropriate processing (for a full explanation, see our <a href="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/02/15/memory/#transfer">Complete Guide on Memory </a>). In brief, the skills that you learn when practicing self-control in one area are not the same skills which you need for self-control in other areas. In particular, practicing any single act of self-control (such as squeezing a handgrip, maintaining a good posture or using a non-dominant hand) probably cannot teach you the skills you need to change your diet or start doing more exercise.

Therefore, there's probably no such thing as a single self-control muscle. Self-control doesn't seem to be reducible to one underlying skill that can be trained with one kind of practice. The reality is again more complicated than that. This is the same principle behind the chapter on Directness in my book, <a href="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/">Ultralearning </a>. Although "learning" and "self-control" may seem distantly related, they both operate on the same principles of cognitive science! In summary, you should avoid these three self-control strategies:

<ul><li>suppressing thoughts about temptations <ul>if you suppress thoughts then they'll come back stronger than before (in ironic rebound) </ul> </li><li>resisting temptations <ul>this takes a lot of effort and it's ineffective </ul> </li> </ul>What is your understanding of self-control? How do you think it works? Do you think your self-control capacity is limited or unlimited? Do you believe that after strenuous activity you run out of energy and you need to rest to get it refueled? If this is the case, then you have a limited theory of self-control.

Do Your Beliefs About Self-Control, Change Your Ability to Avoid Temptation?

Do you think that demanding activities don't easily deplete your energy? In that case you have a non-limited theory. Most people have a limited theory. Theories about self-control become a self-fulfilling prophecy . If you think that self-control is limited, then you will succumb to temptations more easily and find it harder to pursue your goals. On the other hand, if you have a non-limited theory, you will be more successful with your goals.

Why does endorsing a 'limited' theory make it more difficult to pursue your goals? Scientists believe that people with limited theories are motivated to conserve their resources. When they are low on energy, they believe that they've run out of their self-control resources and they feel they have to replenish them by sleeping or eating before they can make new effort.

It seems that there's a clear benefit to having the 'right' beliefs about self-control. How can you change your self-control theory? Interestingly, the participants who did the more effortful task shifted their beliefs toward the 'limited' theory by the end of the experiment. As a result, they made less effort in the final self-control task. This study shows that when we experience a lot of effort, it may act as a signal telling us that our self-control capacity is limited. This in turn makes it more difficult for us to exercise self-control in the future. Therefore, if you use the more effortless strategies, which we describe in the rest of this guide, you can automatically shape your self-control theory to be more non-limited, naturally improving your self-control.

In summary: <ul>you can gradually change your beliefs to become more unlimited (thus strengthen your actual willpower) by adopting effortless self-control strategies described in the rest of this guide </ul>Where this gets interesting is when you have a value conflict . Two values, but with opposite motivations, thus requiring self-control to make a decision.

There are two ways to do this. The first is to reduce the value of the temptation (such as with reappraisal or commitment contracts). The second is to increase your motivation for the thing you need to do. When it comes to motivation, there are two kinds recognized by researchers: have-to and want-to. Want-to motivation comes from within. The pride from finishing a task. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_physical_exercise#Euphoria(opens%20in%20a%20new%20tab)">Runners high </a>. The satisfaction of a job well done.

To answer this question, researchers carried out a series of studies where they followed students over a semester. At the start, students listed 3-4 most important personal goals and indicated their motivations for these. Students mentioned goals such as finding a job, losing weight or getting a specific GPA, and motivations such as personal importance, enjoyment (want-to) or pressure from parents (have-to).

Which goals do you think the students put more effort it? The want-to goals or have-to goals? Despite this, at the end of the semester, students made significantly less progress towards their have-to goals than their want-to goals. Can you guess why? Although students made more effort towards their have-to goals, the extra effort was cancelled out by increased subjective perception of obstacles and temptations. In contrast, the more want-to motivations the students had for their goals, the fewer obstacles and temptations they perceived (less self-control conflict). For this reason, students were more successful in achieving their want-to goals without having to make extra effort.

This study shows that it's much better to bolster your want-to rather than have-to motivations. If you only have have-to motivations, then you'll experience self-control conflict. You'll know you should choose the option with the delayed reward, but you'll want the option with the immediate reward.

On the other hand, if you have strong want-to motivations for your goals, you will automatically experience fewer obstacles and temptations. If your goal does not reflect your deepest values and wishes, then you'll constantly be fighting with yourself. If you don't have any want-to motivations for your goal, then it's a good idea to reconsider whether it's worth wasting your time and effort on something you don't really want to do in the first place.

However, sometimes you don't have a choice - your job may require you to learn new skills, you need to get good grades to graduate from university, or you have housework to do. Also, sometimes you may have some want-to motivations for your goal, but not enough so self-control is still difficult. What can you do in such situations?

Do you dislike healthy food? You have to find something that that'll please your tongue. Do you hate running? Try something fun like team sports, dancing or hiking. Do you hate your French class? Maybe you'd enjoy Chinese more. Experiment and find activities that help your goals but are more enjoyable to do.

If you can't find any activity that would promote your goals and be enjoyable at the same time, then you need to look for an aspect within your activity that's immediately rewarding. Do you have to attend a French class? Maybe you'll have fun watching films without subtitles. Do you have a programming assignment? Maybe you'll enjoy coding simple games as a way of practicing. Do you need to improve your presentation skills? Telling jokes in front of your friends might be a fun way to do that.

If it's impossible to find any immediately rewarding aspect in your goal-promoting activity, you can use a technique called 'temptation bundling' (also called reward substitution). In essence, temptation bundling means that you pair an indulgence with a goal-promoting activity. Apart from going to the gym, temptation bundling is suitable for doing housework. You could, for instance, play your favorite songs or watch your favorite series while ironing or washing up. Since temptation bundling is a form of multi-tasking, we don't recommend using it when concentration is needed (during study or work) because it places a load on your working memory (read more here <a href="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/04/24/working-memory/#04">why listening to music while studying is not a good idea </a>).

However, the iPod study showed that after a Thanksgiving break, students' gym attendance returned back to normal despite the intervention. Although the researchers didn't look into this, a plausible explanation is that the students 'cheated' and finished the audio books at home on their own devices, removing the motivation to return to the gym.

Therefore, for temptation bundling to work, it's crucial that you restrict yourself from enjoying the pleasurable activity outside of the goal-promoting activity. You shouldn't be able to watch the series when not exercising. If you cheat, temptation bundling won't work. To make sure you don't cheat, you can use app blocks to limit your app use to only specific times of the day. Alternatively, password-protect your series / audio books and give your password to a friend or spouse.

A good friend of Scott's restricts access to his television and devices on his computer outside of certain hours of the day, and then gives Scott the password so he can't decide to change it without first contacting (and possibly annoying his friend). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_(mythology)#Odyssey">Tying yourself to the mast </a>is an important step in making self-control techniques like this work long-term.

There's another strategy that people use to bolster their want-to motivation: self-rewarding. Self-rewarding means that you do an intrinsically enjoyable activity only after completing your goal. Scott's gym has a hot-tub that he goes to after working out. Sometimes the motivation to exercise comes mainly from wanting to soak after the work out!

Instead of boosting the want-to motivations, you can also devalue the immediately rewarding option. One technique for this is by reappraisal and we'll cover it later in the guide. Another technique is a 'commitment contract'. Commitment contracts impose costs on self-control failure. Typically, you sign a contract with a friend or a company and place a financial deposit. You only get your deposit back if you meet certain criteria after an agreed-on period of time. For instance, you need to cut down your smoking to a few cigarettes a day. If you don't satisfy the criteria, then you lose your deposit.

In general, temptation bundling, self-rewarding and commitment contracts are a kind of 'trick' you play on yourself - you sweeten the goal-promoting activity with a few perks (or you punish yourself for failure), but the core activity remains as unpleasant as ever. Although these techniques may work to in the short run, we wouldn't completely rely on them in the long run. You should always aim to find some want-to reasons for your goals. This is the only way to persist in them in the long run.

In summary, you can avoid having to use your willpower by doing the following: <ul><li>choose 'want-to' goals (for which you have intrinsic motivations) rather than 'have-to' goals (for which you have extrinsic motivations) </li><li>if you can't choose want-to goals, increase your want-to motivation for the thing you have to do <ul>find activities that promote your goals and which are enjoyable at the same time </ul> </li><li>if you can't find enjoyable goal-promoting activities, <ul><li>look for aspects within the activities you have to do which are immediately rewarding, </li><li>use temptation bundling (pairing an activity you have to do with an indulgence), </li><li>or decrease the value of indulgence with commitment contracts (agreeing to incur costs if you fail) </li> </ul> </li><li>be careful not to self-reward with indulgence and don't rely on temptation bundling and commitment contracts only </li> </ul>

Imagine the following situation: You're standing in a queue at the supermarket. Next to you, there's a rack with a wide selection of snacks. Without giving it too much thought, you grab a chocolate bar and head on to the cash desk. Or think of this: You've set out to go jogging three times a week. You've come back from work and you're feeling really tired. You say to yourself - well, I'm going to skip it today, but tomorrow I'll definitely go.

The reasons we sometimes fail in similar self-control situations is not because we don't know what's good for us. We all know that chocolate bars aren't particularly healthy and that regular exercise is key to long-term health. Because we don't feel the negative effects immediately, we often don't even notice that our decision is a self-control problem. We simply indulge mindlessly. Scientists have a fancy term for this - epsilon-cost temptation . In math, the symbol epsilon is often used to represent a minuscule amount, which may be huge though when it's added up.

To counteract epsilon-cost temptations and correctly identify a self-control conflict, you need to group the decisions together. To do that, use one of these three techniques: broad bracketing, connectedness and self-diagnosticity. For example, when thinking about whether to buy a chocolate bar, you can bracket this choice narrowly - compare the pleasure of eating this delicious sweet with the costs to your health. If you do that, your decision-making system will likely give you a green light to indulge because this single decision bears zero costs in the long run. (see 'Motivation' for value-based self-control)

On the other hand, you can also bracket this choice broadly - instead of eating a single chocolate bar, you're considering the rule of eating like this all the time. If you ate a chocolate bar like this every time you're at the checkout counter, you'll quickly be overweight. Now, your epsilon cost just got a lot bigger.

Researchers have successfully used simple broad-bracketing cues to help people cut down on junk food. In one study, they placed carrots and chocolate on a table and invited the participants to help themselves. In addition, there was a sign above the table, which either read 'April 12 th Stand' (narrow bracket), or 'Spring Food Stand' (broad bracket).

It's very useful to get into the habit of broad-bracketing all of your decisions. Whenever you're making a choice regarding food, exercise, expenses, ask yourself: What are the costs and benefits of this decision if I make it every time from now on? Another way is to reframe your behaviors from independent choices into rules or habits. Instead of asking yourself, "What's the harm in doing this once?" You ask yourself, "Suppose this were to be my habit for this behavior, would it still be okay?" Although broad-bracketing is helpful, it can fail when applied on its own. Broad-bracketing won't work if you don't care about your future self or if you think that your future self will be different.

Psychological Connectedness: Today is Yesterday's Tomorrow

Let's replay the scenario from above, now equipped with a fresh new strategy. You're at the checkout counter again but this time you don't automatically grab the chocolate bar. You're aware that if you eat lots of these bars, you won't stay slim or lose weight. However, you may also think - "OK, today I'll get one but tomorrow, I won't". So you end up eating the chocolate bar like before.

To see how connectedness affects financial decision-making, researchers had students read passages of text which either argued that they would change a lot after graduation, or that their core identity would stay fixed. Students could then choose between lotteries that yielded $120 in a week, or up to $240 a year later. In the 'high-connectedness' condition, students were more likely to choose a lottery that fetched a higher sum later.

The way you can boost your connectedness is by reflecting on how much your character changes over time. Although people's personalities naturally change, the changes are gradual and span over decades. Moreover, some of our core personality remains constant across the lifespan., Imagine yourself vividly as a person who's 5, 10, 20 and 50 years older. Will you be a completely different person? Or will you have similar tastes and preferences? If you connect to your future self this way, then you'll realize that what you find tempting today, you'll also likely find tempting tomorrow (and next month, next week and next year). Therefore, if you indulge today, you're probably going to indulge tomorrow.

Whenever you're deciding how much to exercise, what food to eat, or how much to save for retirement, vividly imagine yourself as an old person. Does your older self also want to enjoy quality food, holiday stays, concerts, massages, as much as you do? If so, what would she kindly ask you to do better now so that you are in good health and have the financial means to live your life to the fullest when you're old?

Adjusting Your Identity to Prevent Self-Control Failures

Let's say that you're again standing at the cash desk pondering the chocolate bar. Now you're equipped with two strategies - you know it's not a good idea to indulge because if you do it now, you'll most likely fail every time. But what do you do if broad-bracketing and connectedness still don't cut it?

Fortunately, there's another strategy that can help you tip the scales in the right direction. Scientists have shown that people who have developed a self-image around virtuous activities are more likely to identify and resolve self-control conflicts. For these people, indulging incurs a cost to their self-image - it contradicts the beliefs they have about themselves. On the other hand, avoiding the temptation and choosing the option with delayed rewards protects their self-image.,

James Clear, author of <a href="https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits">Atomic Habits </a>, has a useful way of framing these issues of identity, "Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you wish to become." Do you want to take up running? Start thinking of yourself as a runner. Try to emulate the way a runner thinks, how they feel, how they overcome obstacles and how strong their willpower is. Whenever you're faced with a self-control dilemma (staying home or going for a run in bad weather), imagine what a strong-willed runner would do.

Therefore, to successfully avoid buying the chocolate bar, you need to firstly identify yourself with the image of a strong-willed healthy-eating person. Secondly, you need to construe the act of buying or not buying as diagnostic of this self-identity. In this way, you'll be motivated not to buy it in order to preserve a positive self-image.

Self-Affirmation: Facing Self-Control Conflict

In summary, we recommend the following techniques to identify self-control conflicts: Imagine your mother has been smoking for a long time, eats junk food and doesn't do any exercise. Since you care about her well-being, you bring up to her the risks of leading such an unhealthy lifestyle. You recommend that she should attend a medical check-up. How will that conversation go?

Maybe she'll say something like this: 'Well, we all have to die of something', 'You're exaggerating'. 'I hate doctors', 'I'm fine, I don't need a check-up', Fortunately, there's an alternative to defensive processing - self-affirmation. Staring at a mirror and repeating nice-sounding things about yourself has become somewhat of a joke in popular culture: But beyond this cliché of repeating bland affirmations to yourself, the process of self-affirmation is a nuanced and successful strategy for avoiding defensive processing and the self-control traps it creates.

Researchers have shown that when people self-affirm, they are more likely to expose themselves to information about their health.. Importantly, self-affirmation has real-life consequences. People who self-affirm before reading health-related information later consume more healthy food, reduce their alcohol consumption and exercise more compared to control groups.,

One of the ways you can self-affirm is by taking <a href="http://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register">this online test </a>. The test is free and takes about 15 minutes. In the test you'll answer a series of questions designed to assess your core strengths. The test result will provide your with a sorted list of your biggest strengths.

When you've finished the test, choose one of your greatest strengths. Alternatively, you can choose a value that's personally important to you without taking the test (this could be relationships, religion, humor, kindness, etc.). Once you've picked your strength/value, write a short essay (or journal note) about why it's important to you and when is it important. If you need some inspiration, then have a look at essay excerpts which you can find on the sixth page of <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7fe3/234bd35d814caed6e3cf43a3f3ed76ecd6e2.pdf">this article </a>.

By self-affirming, you'll program yourself to be more accepting of information about your health without the need to defend yourself. The more information you accept, the more you'll boost your motivation, which will help resolve future self-control conflicts. There's another way you can enhance your self-integrity with self-affirmation - by repeating positive statements about important areas in your life. These can include: 'I am capable of change, even if it's difficult'

'My financial situation is slowly getting better' 'I'm gradually improving my grades' You can repeat these statements throughout the day - as many times as you like. The point of these self-affirmations is not to lie to yourself but to shift your thinking more towards the possibility of positive change. If you're interested in learning more about positive self-affirmations, then you can find lots of resources in <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/daily-affirmations/">this article </a>.

In summary: <ul><li>when people receive information about the risks of their current lifestyle, they tend to avoid, downplay, or derogate such information (this is called defensive processing) </li><li>you can overcome your own defensive processing with self-affirmation <ul><li>one way to self-affirm is by reflecting on your most cherished personal values and strengths (see an <a href="http://viacharacter.org/survey/account/register">online test </a>) </li><li>another way is to repeat positive statements about possible change in important areas in your life (e.g. "I'm capable of gradually improving my diet") - these need to be grounded in reality </li> </ul> </li><li>self-affirmation helps you realize that you're a competent and adequate person, even though you may not always have perfect self-control. </li> </ul>

Construal and Reappraisal: Reframing Self-Control Conflict

Imagine that Peter and John are best friends and frequently have lunch together. Peter usually orders a hamburger with French fries and a chocolate cake. John is trying to lose weight but the food is very tempting so he thinks to himself "OK, I'll have French fries today. But tomorrow, I'll get back to my diet".

As we already know, this pattern of thinking is deceptive because today is yesterday's tomorrow. Since John meets Peter often, if he indulges today then the chances are that he'll also indulge tomorrow. How can John avoid the temptation without suppressing or resisting his urges?

Construal: Adopting an Abstract or Concrete Mindset

If you find yourself in a similar situation, then your best chance is to down-regulate the self-control conflict. A powerful way to do that is by changing the way you think about it, in other words, 'reframing' it. There's two broad ways you can think about any situation - you can adopt a high-level or a low-level construal. If you're in a low-level construal, you're thinking more concretely - you're focusing on the particular details of the situation, ignoring the bigger picture.

Side note: In other articles, Scott has followed <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html">Robin Hanson </a>'s use of near (=low) and far (=high) modes of construal thinking. We have decided to follow the terminology from the literature here, but wanted to point out the connection with Scott's other writing. In an intriguing study, researchers brought participants into either high-level or low-level construal. One group had to answer 'how' (low-level) and another group 'why' (high-level) questions about their work/study goals. The first question was always either 'why is achieving your goal important?' or 'how can you achieve your goal?'.

The Complete Guide to Self-Control | Scott H Young

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