In 2012, Psychologists Wilheim Hoffman and Roy Baumeister wanted to better understand willpower. Specifically, they wanted to know what people were thinking and feeling at the exact moment of their decisions.
This is harder to calculate than you might think. Do you know what you’re thinking about at this exact moment? What about the emotion you feel right now? If you brought someone into a laboratory and asked them to remember how they felt at a specific moment many hours ago, they would be unlikely to reflect accurately.
Hoffman and Baumeister gave devices to 205 adults that beeped at randomly selected times to capture real-time data. When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last 30 minutes and then answer a set of questions about these desires.
After a week, the researchers gathered more than 7,500 samples, and here’s what they found: people fight desires all day long. It turned out desire is the norm, not the exception 1–you have to make the right decision more than you have to avoid the wrong one.
Consider how most of us think about willpower, distraction, and temptation. The common belief is that we go through our “normal” day and occasionally a bad choice will present itself and at that moment we hope to make the right decision. But Hoffman and Baumeister’s study flipped that idea on its head. It turns out, for most people, that life is a battlefield of bad choices, and it’s the good choices that require willpower and discipline.
Think about your typical day. You wake up, and your cell phone is sitting by your bed. Do you feel tempted to grab it and check your email, texts, or social media first thing in the morning? No. You don’t feel tempted–you just do it. It doesn’t feel like a choice–it’s just a reaction.
Or what about scrolling through social media during the day. Do you feel tempted to pull your phone out of your pocket and open an app? No. It’s not tempting–it’s normal.
Whether it’s eating dessert, thinking self-defeating thoughts, or staying in toxic relationships, the reality is discipline is not our default.
Hoffman and Baumeister discovered something else too. After studying the people who supposedly lacked willpower and self-control, they found that consistently having to make the right choice is exhausting. The people who always put themselves in positions to be tempted but made the right choice were depleted and eventually made the wrong choice because willpower is a commodity–the more you use, the less you have. Your brain gets tired when it’s put in situations where it has to keep choosing the right thing to do. It turns out the people who were the best at resisting temptation reported fewer temptations. In other words–the people who excel at self-control rarely need it.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control– make your good choices obvious and your bad choices invisible.
The Bible calls this “the straight path.” (Proverbs 4:25-27) and encourages us to walk it. Psychology and scripture both agree the best way to make good choices is to make them easier to make. Go figure.
Are you trying to do the right things while surrounded by the wrong influences? It won’t work. It’s science. Eventually, you run out of willpower. Instead, you should confess, break up, move, get a new phone number, get a roommate, or get a new roommate, get rid of your TV, or whatever it takes to make your good choices easy and your bad choices difficult. I think you’ll find the less willpower you need, the more you’ll have.
Footnotes
- Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. p. 83[↩]
