Control Yourself, People

Roy F. Baumeister on Reaping the Benefits of Willpower in an Age of Indulgence

In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five probing questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Roy F. Baumeister, co-author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

In a world full of distraction and temptation, self-control can seem like a lost virtue. Baumeister and co-author John Tierney argue that we can take control of our schedules, money, weight, habits, and more by understanding how willpower works (it’s like any other muscle in the body) and taking advantage of new tools available to us.

1) You blame the self-esteem movement for much of our loss of self-control, but isn’t a lack of willpower a much older problem than that?

While the self-esteem movement made the problems worse rather than better, it’s hardly the main culprit. Problems with self-control date back centuries and may be as old as humankind.

Compared to other species, humans have remarkable powers of self-control. But compared to our ideals and some of our expectations, we keep falling short.

I think this shows that nature struggled to create the capacity for self-control. It is biologically expensive (in terms of how much of the body’s precious energy it consumes) and generally fragile. The more we have, the better off we are. We have plenty but will always be wishing for more.

2) Do our ideals of willpower hopelessly exceed our capabilities? Could the average person time stand for hours as a “living statue” street performer?

I suppose the experiment should be tried, but my prediction would be that the average person could do that, given some training and motivation.

3) You give examples of exercises to strengthen the willpower muscle, including maintaining good posture, using the left hand for normally right-handed activities and controlling the use of “likes” and “ums” when speaking. If done correctly, don’t these exercises just eventually become routine?

Yes, exercises will eventually become routine-and thereby lose their power. Self-control is exerted (and strength exercised) by putting effort into changing oneself. The exertion of overriding one response to make way for another is what constitutes the essence of self-control, and that is what people need to do. That is why we assign these seemingly arbitrary, meaningless exercises (sort of like doing push-ups, which accomplish no real work).

To use the posture example, when you try to improve your posture, at first it requires reminding yourself to do it and then making the effort to stand or sit up straight. These exercises build self-control. After some period of time, perhaps, your good posture becomes a habit. At that point it ceases to be useful as an exercise of self-control. You have by then gained whatever willpower you are going to gain. For further exercise, you need to work on something else.

Changing one thing builds the capacity to change yourself in other ways. The more such exercises you perform, the greater your willpower, and hence the more effective you can be at other, presumably more important, things. A recent paper by Mark Muraven (who worked with me when doing his PhD in the 1990s) showed that doing such small exercises can improve willpower enough to improve subsequent success at one of the toughest self-control tasks, namely quitting smoking.

4) If we can override our responses to so many actions, even strongly addictive ones, what is different about eating? People commonly feel willpower is needed for a successful diet, yet you state that people should: 1) never go on a diet and 2) never vow to give up chocolate or any other food.

First, I don’t think we state strongly that people should neither diet nor give up particular foods. In general, however, the long-term effects of frequent dieting are unhealthy and unsuccessful. The more often people diet, the harder it gets, because the body adapts to dieting by learning to resist. We evolved under conditions of food scarcity, not abundance, and so your body mistakes a diet for a famine. It worries that there will be no food for a long time and that there is a danger of starvation, so it adapts by becoming more effective at hanging on to every calorie and pound that it can.

Second, there is what we call the “Catch-22” problem of dieting. In order to lose weight, you need to resist food; to do that, you need willpower; to keep up willpower, you need to eat. Willpower is drawn from the body’s basic energy supply, and that comes from food. Hence rather than starve yourself, the better and healthier practice is to change the way you eat, so that you get nutritious food into your system to enable it to function. Exercise is also important (and also something that requires willpower and therefore food), sometimes for losing weight but even more for keeping it off. Some dieters don’t like to exercise because exercise builds muscle mass, which is heavy, so their weight does not decline, but that’s an unfortunate way of thinking about things. A body with strong muscles is indeed heavier than one with weak muscles, but it is also healthier. Plus, muscles burn energy all day long, so that helps with the obesity problem.

Eating in a healthy manner and losing weight may well require giving up certain kinds of food. My wife (also a professor) and I have watched the various diets come and go, and we joke that there never seems to be a diet based on doughnuts! Some foods are simply quite fattening and unhealthy, and one is better off without them.

5) From decision fatigue to poor organization to bad habits and addiction, your book documents how weak willpower affects celebrities, parents, students, and just about everyone else. What forces need to change in our society to aid us all in “rediscovering the greatest human strength?”

When you ask parents what they want for their children, it seems the overwhelming answer is that they want them to be happy. This dovetails well with the recent emphasis on cultivating high self-esteem in children, because boosting people’s self-esteem makes them happy. Usually the effects are immediate. In contrast, trying to build self-control does not immediately produce a rise in happiness or pleasure, because self-control tends to involve discipline and restraint.

In the long run, however, self-control leads to a better life and more durable happiness.

Hence, one answer to your question is that we need to shift our focus. Wanting children to be strong should be a prime value. Strength enables you to handle adversity, to reach high goals, and to fulfill your potential. Self-control is all about strength.

A related point is that the focus on self-esteem as the immediate goal, or as the means toward being happy, is often counterproductive. Telling people that they are wonderful regardless of accomplishments or good behavior simply cultivates a sense of entitlement that produces conflict, disappointment, and other problems.

In a sense, I am saying self-esteem should be earned rather than claimed. The same goes for respect. And to earn self-esteem and respect, you need strength and self-control. Rather than praising children indiscriminately for everything they do, praise them when they achieve something difficult or do something morally commendable.

Ironically, building self-control is a better means toward achieving both self-esteem and happiness than is pursuing those things directly as ends in themselves. Raising self-esteem just means deciding to think that you are a good person. That’s appearance, not reality. In contrast, self-control means actually exerting yourself to become a better person. That’s reality, not just appearance, and in that sense it’s a better foundation for self-esteem and happiness.

Building self-control means setting high standards and expecting people to live up to them. It requires criticizing people who do immoral things, who slack off, who fail to perform up to their potential. Building self-control takes work. It is not as pleasant as just boosting self-esteem by telling people how great they are. However, it is the best thing in the long run. Self-control is good for the individual and good for society.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photo courtesy of ajacarr78.