Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister Read Free Book Online Page B

struggle to ignore the pain.
    We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories, starting with the control of thoughts. Sometimes it’s a losing struggle, whether you’re fruitlessly trying to ignore something serious (“Out, damn’d spot!”) or can’t get rid of an annoying ear worm (“I got you babe, I got you babe”) . But you can also learn to focus, particularly when the motivation is strong. People often conserve their willpower by seeking not the fullest or best answer but rather a predetermined conclusion. Theologians and believers filter the world to remain consistent with the nonnegotiable principles of their faith. The best salesmen often succeed by first deceiving themselves. Bankers packaging subprime loans convinced themselves that there was no problem giving mortgages to the class of unverified borrowers classified as NINA, as in “no income, no assets.” Tiger Woods convinced himself that the rules of monogamy didn’t apply to him—and that somehow nobody would notice the dalliances of the world’s most famous athlete.
    Another broad category is the control of emotions, which psychologists call affect regulation when it’s focused specifically on mood. Most commonly, we’re trying to escape from bad moods and unpleasant thoughts, although we occasionally try to avoid cheeriness (like when we’re getting ready for a funeral, or preparing to deliver bad news), and we occasionally try to hang on to feelings of anger (so that we’re in the right state to lodge a complaint). Emotional control is uniquely difficult because you generally can’t alter your mood by an act of will. You can change what you think about or how you behave, but you can’t force yourself to be happy. You can treat your in-laws politely, but you can’t make yourself rejoice over their month-long visit. To ward off sadness and anger, people use indirect strategies, like trying to distract themselves with other thoughts, or working out at the gym, or meditating. They lose themselves in TV shows and treat themselves to chocolate binges and shopping sprees. Or they get drunk.
    A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses. Strictly speaking, “impulse control” is a misnomer. You don’t really control the impulses. Even someone as preternaturally disciplined as Barack Obama can’t avoid stray impulses to smoke a cigarette. What he can control is how he reacts: Does he ignore the impulse, or chew a Nicorette, or sneak out for a smoke? (He has usually avoided lighting up, according to the White House, but there have been slips.)
    Finally, there’s the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, persevering when you feel like quitting. In the rest of the book, we’ll discuss strategies for improving performance at work and at home, and we’ll look at techniques for improving self-control in all the other categories, too—thoughts, emotions, impulses.
    But before we get into specific advice, we can offer one general bit of guidance based on the ego-depletion studies, and it’s the same approach taken by Amanda Palmer: Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.
    When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes as well. People who are trying to quit smoking, for example, will have their best shot at succeeding if they aren’t changing other behaviors at the same time. Those who try to quit smoking while also restricting their eating or cutting back on alcohol tend to fail at all