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The Complete Guide to Self-Control | Scott H Young
Self-control and mindfulness
Many studies have shown that mindfulness is an effective way for boosting our self-control.
Mindfulness doesn’t suppress or resist your thoughts and emotions. It just changes your perspective on them. You don’t judge your inner experiences (don’t evaluate whether your desires are good or bad).
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Self-control
It’s your ability to resolve conflicts between your short-term desires and your long-term goals.
For example, successful self-control means sacrificing immediate pleasure (cookies and cakes) and choosing the delayed reward (healthy weight).
Why self-control matters
People who have high self-control aren’t missing out on enjoyment. Not being able to resist temptation and enjoying life are not the same things.
They tend to eat in a healthily way, exercise more, sleep better, drink less alcohol, smoke fewer cigarettes, achieve higher grades at university, have more peaceful relationships, and are more financially secure.
Biological limits to self-control
Research showed 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.
Achieving great self-control
People that are great at self-control don't have to make more effort. Instead, they avoid effortful strategies and use easier ones.
In this way, they don’t tax and overwork their brains, and thus they are free to invest their effort into pursuing their goals, instead of fighting with themselves
Bad self-discipline strategies
- Thought suppression: when you consciously attempt not to think about something. It can have some benefits in the short term, but it takes a lot more effort than other strategies and it will make your desire even stronger in the long-run.
- Resisting temptations: it when you’re actively inhibiting your urge to act on them. Because it’s one of the most effortful strategies, it’s likely to fail when applied over a longer period of time.
Make temptation less fun
Use a ‘commitment contract’. This is a way to impose costs on self-control failure.
For example, 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.
Adjusting your identity
... to prevent self-control failures. Research has 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.
Self-control and mindfulness
Many studies have shown that mindfulness is an effective way for boosting our self-control.
Mindfulness doesn’t suppress or resist your thoughts and emotions. It just changes your perspective on them. You don’t judge your inner experiences (don’t evaluate whether your desires are good or bad).
Removing distractions
Distractions cause cognitive load: they fill up your working memory. As a result, there’s less space for your long-term goals.
A distraction can be anything such as chatting with friends, listening to the radio or watching television.
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Self-Control
... is the ability to regulate and alter responses in order to avoid undesirable behaviors, increase desirable ones, and achieve long-term goals.
Research on Self-Control
- A 2011 survey found that 27 % of respondents identified a lack of willpower as the primary factor keeping them from reaching their goals.
- One study found that students who exhibited greater self-discipline had better grades, higher test scores, and were more likely to be admitted to a competitive academic program.
- The study also found that when it came to academic success, self-control was a more important factor than IQ scores.
- A health study found that people who were rated as having high levels of self-control during childhood continued to have high levels of physical and mental health in adulthood.
- Research has found that self-control is a limited resource. In the long-term, exercising self-control tends to strengthen it.
Motivation and Monitoring
A lack of willpower is not the only factor that affects goal attainment.
- There needs to be a clear goal and the motivation to change. Having an unclear or overly general goal and insufficient motivation can lead to failure.
- You need to monitor your actions daily towards the achievement of the goal.
- You need to have willpower.
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Brute willpower doesn't work
So we should stop worshiping self-control and start thinking about diluting the power of temptation. Because resisting temptation either only has short-term gains or can be an outright failu...
Willpower is not the lucky ticket to success
Studies have shown that people that are really good at achieving their goals are not the ones that put more effort into exerting self-control in the face of temptations, but the ones that experience fewer temptations to start with.
People who are good at self-control
- They actually enjoy the activities some of us resist (eating healthy, studying, exercising)
- They have better decision-making habits
- Some people just experience fewer temptations
- It’s easier to have self-control when you’re wealthy - when you’re poor, the future is less certain.
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Self-Control
Self-control is a key component of emotional intelligence, yet in a study where two million people were asked to rank order their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up in t...
Strategies for self-control
- Meditate.
- Eat. If your blood sugar is low, you are far more likely to succumb to destructive impulses.
- Exercise releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that makes your brain feel soothed and keeps you in control of your impulses.
- Sleep. When you are tired, your brain cells’ ability to absorb glucose is highly diminished.
- Ride the Wave. Desire has a strong tendency to ebb and flow like the tide. Waiting out this wave of desire is usually enough to keep yourself in control.
- Forgive Yourself when you slip up. Focus on what you’re going to do to improve yourself in the future.
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Avoid willpower depletion
Building willpower is similar to building muscle. Continually exercising without giving yourself a break is not the best way to increase your strength or performance.
Use your imagination
If you imagine lying on a peaceful beach, your body will respond by relaxing. If you imagine being late for an important meeting, your body will tense in response. Use this to your advantage in building willpower.
Think about something else
Every time that unwanted thought occupies your mind, consciously think about something pleasant instead.
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Willpower is like a muscle
Just like going to the gym and building up strength, the more you train your willpower by accomplishing tasks on a consistent basis
Self-Discipline - a series of healthy habits
Long term change is better served by building better habits, than by forcing your willpower.
You will choose the apple over the cake for a number of times ... and then give up. Building a habit to start the day by going to the gym will work better.
Habits = “automatic” responses...
...to familiar environmental cues.
They form when you engage in a behavior repeatedly in the presence of consistent stimuli.
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Self-control
It's the ability to do something that helps you in the long-term, instead of something that might satisfy your immediate desires.
But for most of the people, immediate...
What tempts us
We vary widely in terms of what tempts us.
If you take the time to look into your habits and biases, you can recognize the problems that you need to work on. Once you understand the sources of your self-control issues, you can begin directing the right resources toward fixing them.
Improve self-control at work
Take a future-oriented approach to your day, such as planning breaks and the time slots for checking emails in advance.
If you can refrain from resigning to your urges before the time you’ve assigned for yourself, you may achieve a greater hold on your overall self-control.
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The reasons we crave junk food
- The sensation of eating the food: what it tastes like, what it smells like and how it feels in your mouth.
- The blend of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates t...
How craving are stimulated artificially
- Salivary response: the more a food causes you to salivate, the more it will cover your taste buds.
- Rapid food meltdown: this tells your brain that you’re not full, even though you’re eating a lot of calories.
- Calorie density. junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting nutrition, but to not fill you up.
- Memories of past eating experiences: When you eat something tasty, your brain registers that feeling and will bring it up in the future.
Building better habits means changing your environment
Most people think that building better habits or changing your actions is all about willpower or motivation. But your environment has an incredible ability to shape your behavior.
Nowhere is this more true than with food.
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Self-Control Components
Self-control has two components:
- Our ability to resist temptations
- Our ability to exercise control over our behaviour and emotions. ...
Self Control and Eating Healthy
While it’s obvious we need to exhibit a certain amount of self-control while choosing what we put in our bodies, that is not the whole story.
If we educate our bodies and learn about nutrition, longevity and how our individual bodies function, we could be eating a lot healthier.
The Pleasures Of Life
There is a lot of stuff available for us to do that makes us feel better instantly. Watching TV, going to the beach, drinking alcohol, smoking, and almost every other activity that seems pleasurable to us, giving us temporary pleasure in a jiffy. When we keep doing that, the long term effects are bad, and we feel older, weaker, sicker, while not having any achievement in our lives.
This is a natural process of a slow movement towards disorder, is also the second law of thermodynamics, called Entropy.
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Master Self-Discipline
- Know your weaknesses. You can’t overcome them until you know them.
- Remove temptations. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
- Set clear goals and have an execution ...
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Food cues
When we are hungry, the hormone ghrelin stimulates the brain. Our brains pay more attention to cues for unhealthy foods—those which are high in sugar and fat—than healthy foods when we are hungry.&...
Forbidden foods are more tempting
Dieting often involves “giving up” more pleasurable foods in an attempt to reduce calorie intake. But if we are asked to avoid eating the food we enjoy, researchers have found that we will crave it.
The behavioral and cognitive response to deprivation may inadvertently be creating more temptation.
The “what-the-hell” effect
A problem with dieting rules is that only a small violation—a sneaky slice of cake, for example—is enough to derail the whole diet. Researchers call this the “what-the-hell effect”.
Diets that require the dieter to follow rigid rules or forbid them from consuming foods they enjoy appear to be problematic, as they paradoxically increase the risk of overeating.