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Why Willpower Can't Be Overrated
I was scrolling around on twitter and ran across an article titled “Why Willpower is overrated”. Since I’m obsessed with the concepts of self-control, willpower, and discipline, the article’s headline, “Why Willpower is overrated”, caught my attention. I have long believed that strong willpower is one of the most important things a human can possess. I think it’s hard to overstate how important of a concept it is to me. The claim “Willpower is overrated” runs directly counter that belief, so I was interested to see what I could learn.
These types of articles are always accompanied with a flashy graphic that abstractly represents the point that the author is making. This particular article depicts two guys in suits. Why is it always fucking guys in suits? Neurotic rants aside (although now that I come to think of it, this whole post is one neurotic rant), one of the guys is slouched over, obviously walking at a snail’s pace, and seems to be expending a great amount of effort reaching for a carrot in front of him. The other guy though, oh man, he is sprinting and reaching out toward some ice-cream while breaking a new personal speed record. The visual metaphor is obvious. The carrot is less appealing than the ice-cream so the slouching-man has to exercise more effortful control to pursue the carrot and that results in him expending all his motivation so he has no energy to run. The running-man is happy to pursue the ice-cream so running after it is easy for him. He’s chasing what he wants impulsively. Underneath the picture lies a tag-line with the assertion:
Relying on willpower is a recipe for failure.
Define "Willpower"
First of all, I want to establish a clear idea of what we're talking about when we use a word like "willpower", since this idea is referenced heavily in the article. Let's take a careful look at the definition. There are a great many definitions from various sources that we could use and we could argue all day about which definition is the proper one but, frankly, that's a waste of time. We're going to boil this concept down into something we can understand at a deeper level. Here's the definition that I'm working from, pulled straight from google:
willpower
control exerted to do something or restrain impulses
Let's analyze this carefully and see what we can understand. Usually, when I see an or in a sentence, I like to break up that sentence on the or because logically, or means that we are saying something or we are saying something else. So if we inspect the first part of the sentence, the control exerted to do something part, we will see that the word control is there. Now, to me, control is referring to the conscious part of our brains. We are not controlling our heart-rates but we are controlling whether or not we choose to work out. The word exert is also there. To me, exertion means to expend effort. So the way this first part of the definition translates in my mind is like this:
willpower
conscious effort expended by our minds to do something or restrain impulses
Now let's go down the rabbit hole further. If I think really hard about this definition, I can see there's an assumption hidden within it. Embedded within this definition is the assumption that some amount of effort or work has to be performed by our minds in order for us to do something or to restrain impulses. Seems reasonable right? But there's one more thing I'd like to tweak before landing on a final understanding. This or word in the definition is bothering me. When a normal person speaks of willpower are they really referring to doing something or to restrain impulses? I think when people use the word "willpower" they usually place more emphasis on the "restraining impulses" part of the meaning. So, I'm going to get rid of or. The hard-boiled idea of willpower that I'm working with now looks like this:
willpower
conscious work performed by the mind to act against impulses
If we look now, I think this definition of willpower makes the most sense. Let's think of an example where this definition of willpower applies. Let's say it's a scorchingly hot day and you're walking past an ice-cream truck. Let's also say you're on a diet to lose weight and one of the tenants of the diet is to cut down on dairy consumption. One impulse you might have in this situation is to buy an ice-cream cone from the truck at the expense of following your diet. If, however, you wanted to stay on the path to your goal of losing weight, you would HAVE to make your mind perform some work. Your inner dialogue might look something like, "no mind, I know that ice-cream looks excellent in this blazingly sticky weather but I've made a commitment to follow my new diet."
The article is written by a gentleman of the name Brian Resnick. Instead of referring to "the author" throughout this piece, I'm just going to use his name.
The article establishes it's central claim within the fourth paragraph.
But this idea, that people have self-control because they’re good at willpower, is looking more and more like a myth. It turns out that self-control, and all the benefits from it, may not be related to inhibiting impulses at all. And once we cast aside the idea of willpower, we can better understand what actually works to accomplish goals, and hit those New Year’s resolutions.
The claim, restated, is this: Impulse control, or willpower, is not an effective means by which we can accomplish goals. Brian is going to use the sharpened sword of science to slice through our precious and deeply held misconception that willpower is at the root of all the beneficial changes that we make in our lives and show us what the real key to success is.
Or will he?
Sciencing the Shit Outta 'Dis Bitch
The article introduces us to two scientific tests. One test is focused on self-control. It's a test where the user rates themselves on a scale of 1-5 on how well their personal character fits a series of statements. This test is called the "self-control scale". Brian made sure to link out to it in his article and I will do the same here just for completeness's sake. You can even take the test here if you'd like. Answer each statement by selecting one of the options labeled 1-5. Answer with a 1 if your strongly disagree with the statement or answer with a 5 if you strongly agree with the statement or answer with some number in-between depending on your degree of agreement with the statement:
| Statement | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I am good at resisting temptation. | |||||
| 2 | I have a hard time breaking bad habits. | |||||
| 3 | I am lazy. | |||||
| 4 | I say inappropriate things. | |||||
| 5 | I never allow myself to lose control. | |||||
| 6 | I do certain things that are bad for me, if they are fun. | |||||
| 7 | People can count on me to keep on schedule. | |||||
| 8 | Getting up in the morning is hard for me. | |||||
| 9 | I have trouble saying no. | |||||
| 10 | I change my mind fairly often. | |||||
| 11 | I blurt out whatever is on my mind. | |||||
| 12 | People would describe me as impulsive. | |||||
| 13 | I refuse things that are bad for me. | |||||
| 14 | I spend too much money. | |||||
| 15 | I keep everything neat. | |||||
| 16 | I am self-indulgent at times. | |||||
| 17 | I wish I had more self-discipline. | |||||
| 18 | I am reliable. | |||||
| 19 | I get carried away by my feelings. | |||||
| 20 | I do many things on the spur of the moment. | |||||
| 21 | I don’t keep secrets very well. | |||||
| 22 | People would say that I have iron self-discipline. | |||||
| 23 | I have worked or studied all night at the last minute. | |||||
| 24 | I’m not easily discouraged. | |||||
| 25 | I’d be better off if I stopped to think before acting. | |||||
| 26 | I engage in healthy practices. | |||||
| 27 | I eat healthy foods. | |||||
| 28 | Pleasure and fun sometimes keep me from getting work done. | |||||
| 29 | I have trouble concentrating. | |||||
| 30 | I am able to work effectively toward long-term goals. | |||||
| 31 | Sometimes I can’t stop myself from doing something, even if I know it is wrong. | |||||
| 32 | I often act without thinking through all the alternatives. | |||||
| 33 | I lose my temper too easily. | |||||
| 34 | I often interrupt people. | |||||
| 35 | I sometimes drink or use drugs to excess. | |||||
| 36 | I am always on time. |
Score:
How'd you do? I scored a 88. What researchers have found is that if you score high on this scale, then you are likely to have success in various aspects of your life. I'm not disputing that result.
The other test is called the Stroop task. It's notorious for being a pain in the brain. The task is to speak the color of a word, not the word itself. You can try it here by choosing the number of words you'd like to generate and clicking the button:
How'd you do? What researchers found is that almost everyone sucks at the Stroop task. Why is it so hard? I can tell you why. When you see the word "red" but the word itself is colored blue, you want to read out loud the word "red". The reason your brain wants to read the word "red" when you know the task is to say the color of the word, which is blue in this case, is because your mind has been trained your whole life to READ WORDS when they appear. You haven't been practicing for years to say the color that a word has when you see it. Tell me, how am I supposed to complete the Stroop task if I don't perform conscious work to act against my impulse to read the word instead of the color!? If willpower wasn't useful in accomplishing the task of reading out the color, then I wouldn't be able to complete the Stroop task.
I fail to see how the results from these two tests show that willpower isn't a useful concept. In fact, I maintain my view that willpower is the basis for any meaningful change that we'd like to make in our lives. You'll see what I mean.
Alright, so with those two gems of evidence that willpower is overrated out of the way, let's see what other scientific findings are going to expose the "myth" of willpower. Researchers monitored some students and how often they experienced temptations at a university over the course of a week. Here's what they found:
The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.
Yes, students who find themselves fighting off various temptations like partying, video games, and participating in social clubs where no work ever gets done, are going to be mentally exhausted and feel stressed as they attempt to use their willpower to try and focus on other things that they probably should be doing, like their homework. Those students who don't experience a lot of temptation are going to be more successful since they don't spend a lot of energy thinking about if they should be doing a keg-stand or studying for an upcoming final. I don't dispute this result either. What I'm having trouble understanding is how this result diminishes the utility of willpower. I can tell you that if you want to experience less temptations in your life, willpower is going to be the key. Let's imagine that you are one of these really unfocused students. You go to parties and take any opportunity you can to socialize and find that, as a result, you're falling behind on your assignments. Maybe your goal is to get an A in some math class but with the way you're currently operating, you won't get there. What other option besides using your mind to resist the temptation of drinking beer with your friends on Friday night do you really have? If you're successful at using your willpower to resist that one night, which does take a lot of effort, you might be able to establish a routine where you study for 2 hours on Friday nights instead of hanging with the bros. And once you have a routine established and see your grades improve, the temptation of going out drinking with your buddies will diminish greatly. Now when a researcher comes along to your university to do one of these studies, you'll be amongst those students who experience fewer temptations. If that researcher were to come to your university at a earlier point, before you established your good study habit, you would have been amongst those students in the study who experienced more temptation.
The Golden Ones
The next section of the article looks at the features and behaviors of people who are good at self-control.
- People who are better at self-control actually enjoy the activities some of us resist — like eating healthy, studying, or exercising.
Hmmm. I wonder how those people came to enjoy these activities? Did they, perhaps, not enjoy these tasks at one point but then changed their perspective on them later? If that change in perspective took place, how did those folks MAKE that change? Willpower. They overcame the aversion they once had to, let's say, working out, and found a way to look forward to it. That is willpower.
- People who are good at self-control have learned better habits.
Roger that. How do you develop better habits? Let's say you want to avoid hitting the snooze button in the morning. Here's one strategy for accomplishing that goal.
A trick to wake up more quickly in the morning is to set the alarm on the other side of the room. That’s not in-the-moment willpower at play; it’s planning.
But that IS willpower at play. You used willpower to overcome the resistance you felt about planning when you came up with a plan to place your alarm in a spot where you'll need to rise out of bed in order to shut it off.
- Some people just experience fewer temptations. Our dispositions are determined in part by our genetics. Some people are hungrier than others. Some people love gambling and shopping. People high in conscientiousness — a personality trait largely set by genetics — tend to be healthier and more vigilant students. When it comes to self-control, they won the genetic lottery.
Yup. Genetics determine how much temptation you're going to experience when you come off of the production line. I won't argue with the fact that people are born with differing levels of self-discipline. What I will argue against is this idea that you can blame your genetics for your lack of willpower. Willpower can be developed over time just like any other skill. Let's imagine a person who's born with a litany of temptations. They like smoking, drinking excessively, eating junk food, and watch too much donkey porn. They were born to be a failure. Brian, please let me know if you find out how that person is going to turn their lives around without exercising willpower.
- It’s easier to have self-control when you’re wealthy.
Yup. So what's your point? What if you're not born into a wealthy family and you have weak willpower due to genetics. Is that an acceptable excuse for being lazy and unmotivated? No. If you're a normal human then you are capable of developing self-discipline. Here's how you do that. When the moment comes for you to get out of bed and go to the gym, you have to summon the willpower to ignore the part of your mind telling you to go back to sleep or wait for 5 minutes longer. That is willpower. That is the only way you are going to get out of bed that morning and it is the only way to start a new habit that will become easier to execute over time.
The Point
Now here's part of the article that really pisses me off:
We blame willpower failings for weight gain, even though it’s genetics and our calorie-laden environments conspiring against out waistlines.
I'm really trying hard to understand Brian's perspective here and this is what I'm gathering:
If you're otherwise healthy but overweight, it's not your willpower that's the problem. No no, that would be burdening yourself with too much accountability. It's your genetics and your environment. If you work in a fast-food restaurant while going to school part-time, you're going to be fat because your environment is too stressful. Very few people are going to naturally possess a strong enough willpower to resist eating that Big Mac during their lunch break working for McDonalds. The fact that you don't have enough willpower to stop yourself from indulging isn't your fault though! It's the way you were born and the place you're working in.
I'll tell you one thing I know for certain. A person who believes that they're fat because of where they work and how they're born and doesn't believe their fatness has anything to do with their lack of willpower will never take the steps to develop good habits that will help them lose weight. They will reason that they can't develop more willpower because they weren't born with the self-discipline that some people have. They will also reason that, until their environment changes to be less tempting, they will stay fat. So they will wait for something to change in their environment. If you work for McDonalds, I'll let you know that nothing in your work environment is going to change any time soon. So that person will be stuck being fat. It's really that simple. Until that person chooses to jump on the exercise bike after an exhausting shift at McDonalds, they will stay fat. They will stay fat until they decide to work on, develop, and USE their willpower.
Brian even acknowledges the usefulness of willpower.
In a specific situation, sure, you can muster willpower to save yourself from falling back into a bad habit.
I'm having a hard time understanding how willpower is overrated if it's useful at saving yourself from having that drink at a friend's birthday party and falling back into the pit of alcoholism after being an alcoholic for 20 years.
Brian quotes some woman named Saunders. She's a university psychologist who says this:
“You should focus on things that drive you toward your goals rather than stopping things that are in your way.”
This advice seems sound on the surface. Let's say I want to move up in the hierarchy at work. Saunders says we should focus on things that drive us toward the goal. So if we want to move up at work, we should focus on accepting more responsibility, becoming reliable and productive, and being a good listener. Those are good things to focus on for sure. But what if your personality is getting in the way of becoming a good listener? What if you're naturally impatient and don't take the time to understand what people are trying to say to you on the job? According to Saunders, we shouldn't focus on your personality "being a thing in your way." This advice creates an insolvable dilemma. How can you improve your listening ability if you know that your personality is getting in the way of understanding others at your work place but you can't focus on stopping the bad behaviors, like cutting people of mid-sentence, that are preventing you from becoming a good listener? If you haven't guessed it already, the answer is, you can't. You cannot become a good listener if you don't view your bad habit of interrupting people as a thing that is in the way of becoming a good listener.
Brian goes on to say:
What’s more, the human “emergency brake” that is willpower is bound to fail in some instances, causing you to crash.
Yes. You will fail to ignore the cookie jar sitting out on the team-space table at work. Your willpower will fail. Maybe you'll "crash" and go on a cookie eating spree and consume the whole jar. Does that mean the whole concept of willpower is unreliable and needs to be done away with? No. It means YOUR willpower is unreliable. You need to develop the ability to view the cookies as poison. That requires willpower.
The article concludes like this:
Focusing on failures of willpower leads to shame, both public and private, and holds back our curiosity from finding and enacting solutions that actually work.
Shame or guilt is talked about here as if it's a bad thing preventing us from finding ways to achieve our goals. Perceiving guilt negatively is non-sense. I've written a piece that explains why here, but I'll give a brief explanation: Shame is a feeling telling you that you've done something wrong and that feeling FORCES you to think about the wrong thing that you did. Once you experience shame, you can try to understand why you're feeling that way and once you figure that out, you can change your behavior so you don't experience it again. If you feel shameful about not waking up when your alarm goes off, and as a result you move your alarm across the room so you have to get up to turn it off, wasn't your desire to avoid shame the thing that made you think to do that in the first place?
The Path to Hell
Now, I've been trying to figure out why Mr. Resnick would want to cast doubt on the idea of willpower as a powerful tool to leverage in the pursuit of achieving goals. I think the answer is hard to accept but ultimately simple. If we say willpower, the ability to resist our urges to stay in bed, to hide at home, to stop ourselves from ordering the large fries and soda, is overrated, we can feel better about our failings because then it doesn't matter how much willpower we have. There's all this research to suggest willpower doesn't work, right? So if I don't have any willpower then what does it matter? Even if I had it, it's not going to actually help me accomplish anything, the thinking goes. What matters is our genetics, and how many temptations our environment presents to us. This perspective on willpower shifts the responsibility for failure off of the individual and onto other factors. That perspective will make us feel better about ourselves. But it's WEAK. I think the heart of Brian's issue with the idea of willpower lies here in his statement:
...failures of inhibition are too often confused for a moral failing.
Failures of inhibition ARE moral failings. If you fail to resist the temptation of punching your boss in the face when he's saying things that don't make sense, that's a moral failing because instead of resolving the issue through conversation you used violence. If we "confuse failures of inhibition for moral failing" then all of a sudden, we have to accept that we FAIL MORALLY when we FAIL TO REFUSE TO SMOKE THE CIGARETTE. If the goal is to quit smoking then not having the strength of willpower to refuse your work buddy's cigarette is indeed a moral failing because you are not living up to the goal you have set for yourself. GOOD. Now how are you going to make sure the next time he asks if you want a cigarette, that you're going to say "no"? By casting aside the concept of willpower?
Here's some advice I've received from a very wise man who has written some very good books:
The people who are successful decide they are going to be successful. They make that choice. And they make other choices. They decide to study hard. They decide to work hard. They decide to be the first person to get to work and the last to go home. They decide they are going to take on the hard jobs. Take on the challenges. They decide they are going to lead when no one else will. They choose who they are going to hang around and they choose who they will emulate. They choose to become who they want to become--they aren't inhibited by nature or nurture. They overcome both. And I will tell you something else: It is never too late to make that choice.
You are never too old to decide where you are going to focus your efforts and push to make the most out of every situation.
So. Think not about what you've been through and where you were.
Think about where you are going, and choose.
Choose to make yourself smarter and stronger and healthier.
Choose to work out and study and eat good food and keep your mind clean.
Don't let nature or nurture make you.
Choose to MAKE. YOUR. SELF.
- Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom
If you want to discard willpower as a useful concept, be my guest. I want you to leave willpower behind. I take great pleasure in knowing that you have the mindset that all this talk of self-discipline and willpower is "overrated" and a "myth". Why do I enjoy knowing that you think this way? That you think willpower is an ailing concept. Why do I relish the fact that you continue to believe that people can't form a diamond out of themselves if they aren't born wealthy or are born to experience more temptations than the average person or aren't situated in the right environment? Why do I hope you've managed to convince yourself and others that willpower belongs on top of the smelly pile of bad ideas like the flat earth theory? Because, by thinking this way, you are removing yourself from the battlefield of life and that's making it easier for ME to dominate.
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