Excerpt from THE NATIONAL POST
Roy F. Baumeister And John Tierney, National Post · Nov. 29, 2011 | Last Updated: Nov. 29, 2011 3:19 AM ET
However you define success - a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions - it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven't learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control.
Hence this book. We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology's best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favour, with some 20th-century psychologists and philosophers doubting it even existed. Even Roy Baumeister, one of this book's authors, started out as something of a skeptic. But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose selfcontrol as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fuelled by the glucose in the body's bloodstream. He and his collaborators discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise.
Since Baumeister's experiments first demonstrated the existence of willpower, it has become one of the most intensively studied topics in social science (and those experiments now rank among the most-cited research in psychology). He and colleagues around the world have found that improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.
They've come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, centre on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison. It can cost you the U.S. Open, as Serena Williams's tantrum in 2009 demonstrated; it can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering. It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed (along with their political leaders) to set aside enough money for their old age.
Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they'll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery, and other virtues - even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than a million people around the world. Of the two dozen "character strengths" listed in the researchers' questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves. Conversely, when people were asked about their failings, a lack of self-control was at the top of the list.
People feel overwhelmed because there are more temptations than ever. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant through the click of a mouse or a phone. You can put off any job by checking e-mail or Facebook, surfing gossip sites, or playing a video game. A typical computer user checks out more than three dozen websites a day. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year. Temptations never cease.
We often think of willpower as an extraordinary force to be summoned to deal with emergencies, but that's not what Baumeister and his colleagues found when they recently monitored a group of more than 200 men and women in central Germany. These Germans wore beepers that went off at random intervals seven times a day, prompting them to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt such a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.
Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. About half the time, people were feeling some desire at the moment their beepers went off, and another quarter said a desire had just been felt in the past few minutes. Many of these desires were ones they were trying to resist. The researchers concluded that people spend more than a fifth of their waking hours resisting desires - between three and four hours per day. Put another way, if you tapped five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. And that doesn't even include all the instances in which willpower is exercised, because people use it for other things, too, such as making decisions.
The most commonly resisted desire in the beeper study was the urge to eat, followed by the urge to sleep, and then by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking email and social-networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it.
Overall, they succumbed to about a sixth of the temptations. They were relatively good at avoiding sex, and the urge to spend money, but only mediocre at passing up food and soft drinks. When they tried resisting the lure of television, the web, and other media sirens, they failed nearly half the time.
That track record sounds discouraging, and the rate of failure may well be pretty high by historical standards. We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before beepers and experimental psychologists, but it seems likely that they were under less strain. During the Middle Ages, most people were peasants who put in long, dull days in the fields, frequently accompanied by prodigious amounts of ale. They weren't angling for promotions at work or trying to climb the social ladder, so there wasn't a premium on diligence (or a great need for sobriety). Their villages didn't offer many obvious temptations beyond alcohol, sex, or plain old sloth. Virtue was generally enforced by a desire to avoid public disgrace rather than by any zeal to achieve human perfection. In the medieval Catholic Church, salvation depended more on being part of the group and keeping up with the standard rituals than on heroic acts of willpower.
But as farmers moved into industrial cities during the 19th century, they were no longer constrained by village churches and social pressures and universal beliefs. The Protestant Reformation had made religion more individualistic, and the Enlightenment had weakened faith in any kind of dogma. Victorians saw themselves as living in a time of transition as the moral certainties and rigid institutions of medieval Europe died away. A popular topic of debate was whether morality could survive without religion. Many Victorians came to doubt religious principles on theoretical grounds, but they kept pretending to be faithful believers because they considered it their public duty to preserve morality.
Today it's easy to mock their hypocrisy and prudery, like the little skirts they put on table legs - no bare ankles! Mustn't excite anyone! If you read their earnest sermons on God and duty, or their battier theories on sex, you can understand why people of that era turned for relief to Oscar Wilde's philosophy: "I can resist everything except temptation." But considering all the new temptations available, it was hardly neurotic to be searching for new sources of strength. As Victorians fretted over moral decay and the social pathologies concentrated in cities, they looked for something more tangible than divine grace, some internal strength that could protect even an atheist.
They began using the term "willpower" because of the folk notion that some kind of force was involved - some inner equivalent to the steam powering the Industrial Revolution. People sought to increase their store of it by following the exhortations of the Englishman Samuel Smiles in Self-Help, one of the most popular books of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Genius is patience," he reminded readers, explaining the success of everyone from Isaac Newton to Stonewall Jackson as the result of "self-denial" and "untiring perseverance." Another Victorian-era guru, the American minister Frank Channing Haddock, published an international bestseller titled simply The Power of Will. He tried to sound scientific by calling it "an energy which is susceptible of increase in quantity and of development in quality," but he had no idea - much less any evidence - of what it might be. A similar notion occurred to someone with better credentials, Sigmund Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy.
But Freud's energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. It wasn't until recently, in Baumeister's laboratory, that scientists began systematically looking for this source of energy.
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From Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, 2011.
