Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available noonan welcome my name is Kirsten Wiley and I'm here today to introduce and welcome John tyranny and Roy Baumeister who are visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series John and Roy are here today to discuss their book willpower rediscovering the greatest human strength you may have noticed that eating and sleeping or lack thereof have dramatic effects on your willpower and your self-control with the right tools willpower can be built and conserved for crucial moments ROI received his PhD from Princeton and is the head of social psychology at Florida State University this year he will receive the Jack Block Award for distinguished contributions to personality psychology willpower is his 28th book john tierney writes the findings science column for the New York Times his science writing has won awards and he is a frequent guest on national radio and television programs he is the author of the best-case-scenario handbook and co-author of the comic novel God is my broker please join me in welcoming them to Microsoft thank you thank you very much I'm Jenna this is Roy and in a minute I'm gonna ask worried about his research at first I just wanted to give a brief introduction here and to thank all of you for coming here during your lunch hour it takes you know it takes willpower to come to a talk about willpower it's I don't think charlie sheen's spends his lunch hours doing this is my this is my guess but even though I though all of you obviously possess this virtue I would bet that most of you think that you don't have enough if you ask people to name their greatest strengths they'll often credit themselves with honesty was kindness humor creativity bravery and researchers have done this to more than 100 to more than million people around the world but they'll credit themselves even with modesty but not with self-control it came in dead last among the virtues that were studied in this survey and of the two dozen character strength self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves and conversely if you ask people about their failings in the survey a lack of self-control is at the top of the list now I understand this feeling completely I am a lifelong procrastinator I'm in college I spent my summers working on overdue term papers and in two decades of writing columns for magazines and newspapers I never turned one in early I know it's probably hard for you to believe in the software business that anyone doesn't meet a deadline but it actually happens in journalism sometime but the amazing thing to me about this project with worries that we turned in this manuscript to months to months ahead of time and I'm afraid that the Authors Guild is gonna throw us out for doing that now I give full credit to Roy and his research and the strategies that we drew from this he's found that it is possible to build willpower and and the building willpower is more important today than ever you know we think it's psychologies best hope for improving people's lives and for creating a better society the more the researchers study willpower the more central it becomes understanding why some people thrive and why some people don't however you define success a happy family good satisfying career robust health financial security the freedom to pursue your passions it tends to be accompanied by two qualities when psychologists isolate the factors that that predict positive outcomes in life they consistently find two traits intelligence and self-control now so far they still haven't figured out much to do with intelligence but they have discovered or at least rediscovered how to improve self-control and I say we discovered because our ancestors made some pretty shrewd guesses about this in the Victorian era that's where our notion of willpower as a muscle comes from but then during the 20th century a lot of this sense was lost people began to doubt that the willpower existed that there was even such a thing as free will and it became unfashionable was in academia and in popular culture to promote this at this old Victorian idea of willpower and I discovered this a few years ago myself I was having dinner with a friend a fellow writer Chris Buckley and the comic novelist and we were talking about the thing that serious writers always talk about when they get together which is money and why we needed more of it and we were bemoaning the fact that the bestseller list there were all these the spiritual and financial get-rich-quick books these self-help books were all at the top of the bestseller list and so we thought why don't we try to write one and we'll combine them both it'll be spiritual self-help and financial self-help and we called it God as my broker the subtitle was a monk tycoon reveals the seven and a half laws of spiritual and financial growth and it's about this monastery that becomes fabulously rich and corrupt they spend a fortune renovating the place they bring in an interior decorator from downtown Manhattan who explains the look he's after the monks he says we wanted to say poverty but we don't want it to say cheap and then along the way they discovered the seven and a half laws of spiritual and financial growth such as God loves the poor but that doesn't mean you have to fly coach or another law is simply money is God's Way of saying thanks and my favorite law is as long as God knows the truth it doesn't matter what you tell your customers now you know while writing this booth himself helpless I had to go back and read the sort of the history of this genre and I noticed this weird sort of backward evolution it seemed to me if you went back to the 19th century there was this huge international bestseller called self-help by an Englishman and it he taught the lesson the genius is patience and persistence explains success Ben Franklin has had the same thing but then in the 20th century you got into all these self-help books promoting very quick and easy ways to success - to success you know how to win friends and influence people the power of positive thinking there was a new slogan believe it achieve it now as I read them I kept wondering what Italy what's going wrong why do the old ones seem more useful than the new ones and and I didn't really quite know what to make of this in the social sciences until I started writing a science confidently other times and I had a lucky break I I started I went to the big meeting for social psychologists which that year was in Memphis and I've heard to me going to this meeting it would be fun to go out and do and have a social psychologist analyze the people going to Graceland and I asked Ben Carrie who covers social sciences for The Times you know who would you suggest who might be fun to go to Graceland with and he was kind of Graceland that you would really would need somebody with a very interesting mind for that and then he paused for about a second does Roy Baumeister as you may say no Warren I never actually got to Graceland a year where were too busy to do another set but we did start talking and and I discovered that he had gone on his own evolution tour in thinking about self control and willpower and when he started his career in the 1970s of Princeton psychologists were focusing not so much and self-control but unselfish team and was an early leader in that research and that did show that people with more self-esteem tended to be more successful but then Roy and others found out that that that's not the causative link that it turns out that self-esteem didn't lead to success rather that success leads to self-esteem and then Roy noticed something that did lead to success self-control he developed a scale and personality test for measuring self-control and it turned out that this was the only personality trait of the dozen studied that predicted a college students grade point average better than chance self-control also proved to be a better predictor of college grades than the students IQ or SAT score so Roy began trying to understand the mysteries of self-control and I'll ask you to already tell you what he found in the lab hey well one thing we found what come on oh is that self-control seems to operate like a muscle for one thing it gets tired when you use it so you think you might you know we think of it as a stable aspect of character that you have more or less self-control though no the amount you have fluctuates just like your muscular strength and it's a muscle that you're using all the time all day we've just finished a study where people wore beepers and we tracked them around during the day and they reported on were they being tempted or wanting this or that and are they acting on it and so on and yes it does it does fluctuate and indeed what seemed to happen what we found over and over in our first set of lab studies was that after exerting self-control on one thing if you go on to another demand for self-control you'll be less effective of it just like a muscle gets tired and so this this happens over and over across the across the course of the day are the things we found perhaps more recently is that that's well first of all to pursue the muscle analogy yes it gets tired when you use it but as you exercise it it gets you get stronger over time and so if John suggested their intelligence and self-control are the two traits psychology knows that really predicts success across a broad range of spheres but we haven't been able to produce lasting increases in intelligence self-control however you can produce improvements even in adulthood by exercising it regularly so so that's you know one great way for psychology to produce benefits to people through society also when you see these drop off it's not it's not that it doesn't you know take that the muscle is completely exhausted like an athlete playing a big game when you start to get a little bit tired you automatically start conserving your remaining energy so even just a few min it's of self-control or enough to produce a little bit of a of a decrement in subsequent performance one of our early studies that caught people's attention was we had people skip skip a meal before and we in psychology always have to tell them you're studying one thing and then study something else cuz if you tell him exactly what they're studying then they get kind of weird about that so we told him it was an experiment on their memory for taste they came to the experiment having skipped lunch or not eating for three or four hours so basically they're hungry and then we set up a Microsoft oven in the laboratory baked chocolate chip cookies there and you know how that blows out the the smells of the laboratory just smelled his wonderful smell of freshly baked chocolate so they come in they're hungry they smell this this delicious smell and then we see them at a table there's a stack of these cookies and chocolates and all these other things also on the table there's a bowl of radishes and the one condition experiment tell them well you've been assigned to the radish condition so your task is gonna be the radishes and taste them and basically keep your hands off the chocolates they're there for other people in the experiment and then we left him alone for a few minutes to maximize the temptation and of course we didn't trust them so we secretly observed them to seek and see what they did and yeah they were tempted lots of long and glances toward the chocolate people picked them up and sniffed them and put him back people drop them on the floor and put them back but nobody nobody ate into the bit into the forbidden food and they all managed to either eat a radish or two then we had a couple other conditions in the experiment one where the eighth of chocolates not the radishes and one where there was no food at all but the ones you're interested in are the ones who had to sit there smelling those chocolates and seeing those chocolate wanting those chocolates and cookies but instead having to make themselves eat those stupid old radishes and then barring a procedure from stress research we took into a different room and gave them difficult actually unsolvable puzzles because you see how long do they keep trying and keep going before they give up and it turns out five minutes of resisting the temptation of the the cookies took ten minutes off how long they would persevere and and keep trying they were much easier just to give up on the on the difficult puzzles now simply because they'd exerted a little bit of self-control by no means where they were they exhausted but again like a muscle that starts to get tired you start to conserve it so that's one point that it works like a muscle now another thing that we've discovered more recently is that um other things beyond self-control use it and this may be particularly interesting to this group we finding ties to creativity to decision-making to even intelligent thought we have people take intelligence tests as you probably know there there are a couple kinds of thinking the cognitive psychologists distinguish basically between the automatic and the controlled so in terms of IQ tests there'll be questions where you have to figure out a reasoning problem and there'll be other items like they ask you basic questions like how many people in the Senate or you know give them a vocabulary test you think well what does vocabulary have to do it's not hard to know a vocabulary where it is knowing what dilatory means does that mean you're smarter but in fact smart people know more words than dumb people so it works as a valid test now happens if you've exerted self-control say you resist temptation for radishes or we have all sorts of procedures you watch a funny movie and you try not to laugh at it or you squeeze a handgrip for any kind of exerting control over your behavior and then we go in after that's done take an IQ test their vocabularies intact all the the simple the automatic thinking is intact but on their reasoning on their ability to think in a fluid intelligent logical way that's significantly compromised and even by a fairly small amount so there may be so understanding that these these things are tied together how smart you are will fluctuate too as a function of how much willpower that you have then we found making decisions making choices also depletes the same resource and in one study we had people look at consumer products either in control condition they just rated how have you used this product in the last six months and does it look good to you and a few things like that in the crucial condition however we gave them two at a time so which one would you rather have a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt vanilla scented candle or an almond scented candle and make a bunch of these choices and then we gave them one of the classic tests of self-control which is how long can you hold your hand in ice water is 1 degree 33 or 34 degrees Fahrenheit so you know it's unpleasant and your hand wants to pull out and so you have to use self-control to do it and and their their persistence in holding their hand and water dropped by half as a result of making choices as opposed to looking at all the same products and thinking about the same products so making decisions will use up that that segment you know sometimes I think people have an intuitive sense that you have a limited amount of self-control and you're resist temptations and maybe you get you get fried or maybe you study and you get tired of something good they don't seem to have any idea intuitively that making choices and making decisions is going to deplete and interfere with their willpower you know and it sort of sheds a new light on all these political scandals where you see people as well how could they throw away their career you know as a you know an important politician with a great leadership role in society or in the world I think jeopardize it on you know tweeting pictures of their genitals or whatever well you have to understand though the making decisions is going to use up their willpower and so there will be moments when their self-control is lower than it normal is is not that you know we somehow elect all these degenerates to office but there they may be we do but but but in general these are perhaps ordinary people and you're not particularly better or worse than anybody else but yes their self-control will be depleted there was a study you know that came out just while we were finishing the book on judge is making parole decisions and you know the easy thing for the judge to do is just to send them back to prison because there's a risk for the judge if he releases the the convict out and in commits another crime it reflects badly on the judge and you're looking at the odds of the guy getting parole well if it comes up to the parole board when the judges are fresh early in the morning and rested them so and they have a pretty good chance of getting parole but as the day wears on and the judges get tired making one decision after another they're more likely to say just send them back to the slammer and you know huge drops in in the likelihood and it's just the luck of the draw of when you when you come up there so you know understand that all these things are tied tied in together and then by accident we discovered - that this is this is not just a metaphor this this energy that you use this strength that you have it's really tied in to the basic body's energy we were doing an experiment where people sometimes ask well if if if a resisting temptation depletes your willpower does giving in to temptation will this make you stronger mothers very appealing theory we call it the Mardi Gras theory because you know liking you go to Mardi Gras and get ready for Lent I know this would be cool if it worked and then grad student brother I said well I I don't really see how that would work but go ahead and try it to him and so he tried it and he had people first exert self-control and then give him a second task unrelated to it and in between some of them were given a nice dish of ice cream tea and we thought well we get to indulge and will this improve it actually did improve their their self-control afterwards the cash flow is that one of the control conditions we gave them something else to eat that didn't taste good at all it was instead of ice cream I was mixed a milkshake mixed with half and half so it was this kind of this large blob of yuck dairy you know milky stuff and and people didn't like it you know they they rated it worse than the other control condition where their sports sitting around reading out-of-date technical magazines so they didn't like that but that also improved their self-control so my grants didn't came into my office in the study didn't work there was a control condition messed it up myself wait a minute something's happenin here and and we started to think you know it looked like eating really restored their energy and their their ability to exert self-control and we as I said we've talked about this as a metaphor but could it really just be no energy and the basic biological sense this is the calories that your body uses so we start reading reading up about these things and I learned about glucose which is a chemical in your bloodstream that takes the energy from the food you take in and carries it around to your muscles into your organs and also also to your brain I mean the neurotransmitters that allow the the brain cells to to work and fire and communicate with each other these are made from from glucose so we learned about glucose and nutritionists had collected all kinds of data without much of a theory or showing yes there all kinds of effects that really looked like self-control deficits when people either experimentally or through health problems or whatever have have in disruptions in glucose they they found things like their studies of juvenile delinquents have just been arrested and their glucose was exceptionally low and well I think maybe their glucose happened to be low that's why they had a lots in self-control and did committed some crime and got caught and that's why they got into trouble or their nicely controlled studies with children and having breakfast whether they tell the whole class nobody eat breakfast and they come in and randomly assign half the kids to get breakfast and the other half not well the ones who got breakfast then they learn more and they behave better than the others and then at 10:30 when everybody gets a snack then the differences disappear and there all sorts of other things tied into diabetis and diabetus and other sorts of things looking at glucose so what we started doing lab studies and yeah the blue coast in your bloodstream seems first of all exerting self-control produced drops in the blood glucose things like we have people talk about affirmative action and racial profiling or sensitive topics either with a member of their own race or a member of different race because talking about these topics remember the other race study sort that uses self-control as a kind of sense of you got to watch what you say and worry about giving offense well talking about them with someone your own race your glucoses are the same after as before but talking about them as somebody of a different race glucose was significantly lower afterwards so something was going on the brain was working a lot harder using up a lot more of the fuel exerting self-control to make sure you just didn't say the wrong thing and then glucose levels predicted self-control performance and then we tried manipulating things we have we have one manipulation where we give people a glass of lemonade either diet or a regular we mix it either with sugar or Splenda now you can do it a nice double-blind so you know the person comes in and the experimenter doesn't know what's in the lemonade and the subject doesn't know either they just get a glass of lemonade it's very nice we're in the south and it's hot and people who glad and they suck it right down and it tastes perfectly well that's the either way but the one gives you a big replenishment of glucose and the other doesn't and then we deplete their energy and then give them a test of self-control well the who got sugar they're suddenly doing well again the ones who got Splenda in their lemonade they're still doing badly now I'm not unmindful of the irony of giving people sugar to improve their self-control those people want to use self-control there is this sugar I certainly don't try this at home it actually will work just fine with with other kinds of food you know lean protein or whatever lean meat but we use sugar in the laboratory because it's fast-acting and you know you got a you know people for a short time in the laboratory but yes it seems that keeping your glucose up will help compensate after you've made a lot of choices or exerted self-control and so your performance would tend to slip you can improve it so much anything going back to that study with the the judges or they found that if you come up for parole just before lunch your chances were I think 15% that's what when I was six or seven whereas right after lunch oh you next in the queue right after lunch it's 2/3 of them got parole it's just some how the judges got got their their glucose restored and suddenly we're willing to think harder and take a look and you know basically the same the same resume in terms of record in prison and the crime and everything but just they're much more willing to take a chance and do the more that's difficult for you know for having the cobbler right here in fact I had some right before we came in but but there are lots of other strategies that don't involve quick you know intake of sugar for dealing with self-control and we talked about these in the book you know and it's based on studies that Roy has done some of them are involved from you know one of the really surprising studies was when they sent college student they did a self control test in the lab and then and then were sent them home for the week and said just sit up straight practice to the interest rate whenever you think of it work on your posture and they would come back a week later and they and they and their self-control improved not just in their posture but in all these other things they had strengthen that muscle yeah that's a key point John that that it's one resource and it's used for everything so any kind of exercise you do will improve it for anything else and in our has found that and other labs have found that to that you know working on one thing so you work on your posture and yeah your posture will be better after a while but it's not just that it improves your capacity to change yourself it makes you a stronger person and so on lab tests that have nothing to do with posture you do better and we talk about other strategies in voice and lots of other experiments but we've been talking for a while and I think you know we'd be glad to take questions from folks about the research or but strategies or anything via that you'd like any questions about willpower or self-control or how to get software projects done a time yes the reasoning would dream someone's ability to exercise self-control does that also help them develop their self-control yes okay that's just like a muscle that the short-term effect is it will get tired and end to worse so you're spending a hard day thinking really hard well maybe that night should go home you'll be a little more crabby with your your partner or a little more likely to eat all the M&Ms or something like that but as you do this over and over again in the long run you will you will get stronger and improve your capability at it are all forms of self-control against all impulse is the same or does it vary by the type of impulse whether it's aggression versus trying to stay awake it's the same capacity for for control now different people have different impulses I mean one of the one of the puzzle is grab the water here one of the puzzlers is in self-control as gender differences as you may know Sigmund Freud said yeah you thought the the super-ego derives from castration anxiety and he said well women don't have a penis though their self-control is going to be weaker they'll have a less of a suit but you know all the data show that women are less likely to do although the self-control problems are less likely to get into fights or sexual misdeeds and drugs and stuff like that so which way does it go but on the gender-neutral tests that it looks like men and women do about the same that the difference is men women have about the same capacity for self-control but men and especially like adolescent boys and so on have have stronger impulses for a lot of these things and so the control is worse by the same token moving from childhood into adolescence you know the problem is you they've learned to control themselves to a certain level as children and they take that same self-control and suddenly their impulses are a lot stronger so the behavior gets a lot worse such as why people occasionally complain about teenagers but you know they're they're operating with a child's amount of self-control on an adults kind of impulses so the impulse is very in strength but it is the one capacity that you're using for all different things you know the impacter groups either for hands will power the willpower of groups no there is not in terms of grouping now there there is stuff about people can work together and can influence each other indeed other than pure willpower there are other things you can do to improve self-control and you know social pressure is a good one so it's just as a simple example you people try to quit smoking if they decide themselves I'm gonna quit smoking and don't tell anybody well they could be little bit successful they tell all their friends they're gonna quit smoking they might do a little bit better because it's more of an embarrassment and things like that so social factors play into it indeed there's evidence people quitting smoking is contagious people do it when their friends and neighbors and so on do it obesity and dieting the same sorts of things people gain and lose in in groups so there there there are social influences there but say your basic idea that one football team have better willpower than another football team I don't know of any any kind of research on that that's the interesting thing to look at unless your examples about willpower are to be around kind of preset self-restraint is there in there a form of O'Hara that's Morris commitment-oriented where is more fun yeah this is a good point a restraint is what people tend to think of but self-control is for which willpower is is one of the key tools no it's just a matter of altering yourself in the research they often use the term self-regulation and I like the term regulation because it means change but not just any change it means change toward a particular idea so when the government has regulations for how to make buildings or how to make sausages or whatever it doesn't just I do them differently it says they have to be made in this certain manner with these ingredients or the windows in every room or whatever regulations they make and so you are you're changing yourself when I first surveyed the literature on self-control there are four main domains there's controlling your thoughts that's like trying to concentrate trying to reach a certain conclusion trying to you know shut that annoying song out of your mind trying to forget about your stupid ex-boyfriend or girlfriend all those things controlling your emotions as in well that can be either increasing or decreasing an emotion or prolonging an emotion you know sometimes you try to stay angry long enough to you'll make your case when we have to wait your turn to complain you know waiting in line for the cable company to eventually start trying to sustain your indignation anyway any sort of regulating of your emotional state then there's impulse control which can be it's mostly restraining but it could be I mean use self-control to drag yourself out of bed in the morning there's a positive thing or another and military thing to get yourself to walk toward people who are shooting at you that is not natural and so it takes a fair amount of self-control to do it so that's that's the third and last would be performance regulation so you try not to choke under pressure try to do your best try to persist in the face of failure speed accuracy trade-offs and so on there might be a couple other things you know like managing your life and figuring out how to but those are the main four thoughts feelings impulses and and again it's it's one stock of willpower that applies to all of them now that doesn't mean that people are equally good at all of them you have a limited resource and so people budget it so some people get all their work done on time but have you have trouble finding time to get a haircut or something like that anteed one of the early studies they were trying to develop a scale for this and he said well he was developing it at Stanford the students and he said okay well with a student with good self-control - he'll turn in all his assignments on time it'll change his socks everyday and you know made all these other lists and you know they made this questionnaire gave it to all the students at Stanford well getting your work done on time and changing your socks every day we're correlated - 0.6 apparently they could do one or the other researchers that's basically during exam time especially taking exam time there's some other recent papers that students doing exam time everything else goes to hell because they you know they're using their willpower to try you know complete the work that they should have been doing all semester or or just try to maximize their performance and concentrate and so they stopped washing their hair they go back to smoking more they start eating badly the emotional control gets down and get crabby and anxious and all these things so there's a sort of whole general degeneration of behavior in students around exam time but it's because you you have a limited resource so it's like I said it is one thing that's used for all the different ones but a limited resource so you budget it and you put it on what's important one of the big strategies is not and we've talked about building this willpower muscle and doing these exercises but some of the voices almost interesting the recent research has shown that paradoxically the people who have who score highest in self-control I see use it less during the day and these are studies following people when they're exerting it and that's because people use their self-control not to just resist one temptation after another but they set up their lives so that they don't have to use that you know they don't walk by the by the bakery they don't put things out to the last minute they don't go to all-you-can-eat buffets and and that way they can serve their willpower so they have it when the emergencies come off and so they rely on habits instead of these conscious decisions and efforts of well it's easier to add a schedule work out with a friend three days a week and instead of trying to decide every day whether to make yourself exercise or not and and John that's willpower to it's just you're using it to control your habits and that seems to be the more important and productive way to use it you know you think of willpower as ulysses on the deck you're resisting the sirens call and debating whether the steer is ship onto the rocks or pull away or not but but actually the person with good self-control went home by a different route and didn't get exposed for the temptation and that's it in this beeper study that i mention when people wore beepers we thought okay people high self-control will just resist more more temptations because we record how often do they resist a temptation but they actually resisted less the but we also found it they were much less likely to be exposed to problematic sorts of desires so again creating good habits willpower people think of it for dieting is that's everybody's favorite example but there's just a huge meta-analysis that combined a large number of studies and you know trade self-control helps a little bit with dieting and stuff like that but has much bigger effects on work and school performance because that's something we're setting up good habits is something that people can do so you're using your willpower for that we call it in the book playing offense rather than defense no wait till you're in a crisis and use your willpower to bail yourself out and instead use it to set life up so that you don't have as many crises all right and something else to do people tend to equate and researchers have also done this too the first thing you think about when the subject of self-control of willpower comes up is dieting and yet that that is really one of the least of things correlating with willpower the other self-control and willpower do not correlate that well with ability to lose weight and that's because dieting is such a singularly hard thing to do and part of that is this glucose connection that you need there's this case 22 that in order to either diet you need willpower in order willpower you need to eat so there's this contradict and that's why you have people a phenomenally good self-control and everything else have a hard time losing weight it's really it's the FIR it's a stereotype people think of using self-control but it's actually oh okay well willpower's severing willpower from being tired and you mean separating the low willpower problems from that yeah well there's some some connection to it now you can have a lot of energy and have poor self-control that's sort of the stereotype affecting the kids with attention deficit disorders they're bouncing off the walls and so on so energy alone is is not enough now in terms of low low energy well yeah the result sign is clear on this you know you think that just being physically tired should impair everything else and there are some connections like that but it is simple also the the depletion effects where the self-control starts to go bad that happens long before people feel physically tired so I don't know yet all the tie ins there and there there are lab and other labs are working on these tie ins the things like heart rate variability is connected to self-control that having a more variable heart rate seems to be associated with good self-control and that when the heart rate gets more uniform for some reason that and so we don't know exactly how how that works but that that's an important thing too there are other times so I would say when you're using up a lot of your physical energy yes that's probably going to take away from willpower but you will see willpower changes in self-control changes long before you have any sense of a physical exhaustion or an exertion we mentioned one more thing the immune system is a highly variable but sometimes a very intense user of glucose so when you're fighting off a cold you know findings that say when you have a cold it's driving there is worse than driving drunk in terms of your your impairment well that's that's a sign and in self-control is impaired then too so we've gotten to in the laboratory one sign that somebody might be starting to get sick is that the thing their self-control breaks down they seem to get more irritable more bothered by things and that's long before they have any other symptom or any feeling of being bad but it does go you know what happens when you do really start to get sick the people who fight it off are the ones who just stop doing everything and go and sleep because that allows your body to take all its energy and put it into fighting off the disease and and that you know you can bounce back and be healthy you think oh I got to go to this meeting and finish this thing but it's often more efficient in the long run just to take the day off sleep it away and allow the immune system to work and then you get back there because that is again it's the same basic glucose that you use for all these things that's used for disease did you say reading or eating but there were various experiments before this is no teakwood they would have people go everywhere he talked about some of them and there were other ones where they had to go through the process that were choosing a computer to buy and they would go through all the process of reading about them and doing it but the people who actually had to choose exactly which feature they showed it a place in whereas the other ones didn't and you know there's been another thing where researchers have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what are the physical symptoms of ego depletion how do you know when when you're and and it's been surprisingly difficult there isn't one simple thing you feel the way you feel when you're tired you know you're tired but Abin ego depletion doesn't manifest itself in any one thing it's more that things in general seem to affect you more you know good things you know seem you know seem better bad things are more irritating but it's not it isn't a very sharp symptom that way yeah reading is an interesting one because it takes some degree of controlling your attention it's one of the arguments why it was better for kids to read books than watch TV and then so on but but it's certainly not as strenuous to say doing math in your head or something like that so I would guess that you'd have a little bit of use of willpower and glucose and energy for just reading and it depends to on what you're reading do you have to force yourself to keep doing it say reading Conte or reading your statistics book is probably going to deplete your energy reading something that's fun to read probably would be much less depleting yeah along those lines you know when you're I guess passionate about something or interested in something maybe like reading comic books so did you find it all in your studies you said earlier that the two factors that determine our successful person our intelligence and self-control is like passion or interest well yeah when I said the two traits these your passion will be tied to some specific thing so yes being passion being motivated will help you do whatever it does but you know being passionate that that one thing doesn't necessarily generalize to to everything else so you know I'm what I'm what I meant by that they've looked at intelligence and in every occupation it's been studied smart people do better than dumb people you know and not just software engineers but janitors and waiters and waitresses and so on the intelligent ones do better than the other it's it's it's remarkable and self-control they're not as much data but it's looking like the same thing so yes in there a big passion is not a trait that you carry around independent of what you're doing but passion be more specific but yeah that'd be a plus given that self-control is sort of seen it's affected by social environmental variables is there a way that you can maybe borrow self-control from others around you outsource we talk in the book about this about outsourcing self-control and in really 12-step groups do different you go there and and one of the points we've got a chapter dealing with the quantified self movement that you're probably somebody was here but they're all these new digital tools for monitoring yeah I mean the basic steps in self control are to as a set realistic goals and to monitor yourself and you know that we all make this it's called the planning fallacy that we all tend to think we'll get more done and and we talk in the book well how do you set long-term goals or short-term goals but monitoring is a huge part of that and that's where you can get relying groups to do it for you and you can rely on software to do it for you I mean I've I have rescue time monitoring my computer to tell me when I'm so I can see how much time I spent on Microsoft Word which is productive and how much time I'm surfing the surfing the web and I used mint calm to track my money for me and all these things that you know that help you you're basically outsourcing it to other people and that's that's one of the reasons that studies have consistently shown that religious people have more self-control now some of that's probably because religions have some of these exercises the equivalent of of sitting up straight that you do these prayers and meditations and that that builds your self-control but some of it also is that you're part of this group this congregation that is watching you and that you know that they're going to see you do something wrong so you've basically outsourced that self-control to someone else and I think one of the great things about social media now and all these do digital tools is that you can do it you know there are websites like stick comm where you can make a bed and in the point of every and everybody's watching you and then there's a stop I'm sure you guys know about you know where they'll they'll email your your boss your spouse which websites you visited and so I mean that's really outsourcing self control oh yes that's not my specialty area but it's some of the top people Berkeley you know specifically treat ADHD as a deficit in self-control and see that as as the core aspect of it you know the core manifestation so yes absolutely that would be it seems to me that you could remember states in which you made good decisions and you could kind of observe how you felt and make a trial balloon and vertically and make comparisons and get a feel for yeah I mean remembering why things went you know when things went right and one of the great things about monitoring is simply being able to to watch yourself over time and see what correlates with what I mean it gives you the sense yeah and one of the ways around the planning fallacy we all it's amazing there's been these experiments when they ask students to predict how long it will take them to do a term paper everybody expects to get it done too soon basically very few very few people even meet their worst-case deadlines yeah that's right and you'd think I mean I've been a journalist you know all my life and you think I would know by this time how long it takes me to write a column and yet I'm still always telling my so I'll get that done in the morning and what I found writing this book what I did it I mean I did a few things I had rescuetime it's just but the simplest thing I did was I just made myself write down at the end of the day how many words did you write that day so that that helped restrain my procrastinating because I knew you know that I could go research a topic for two hours and it would might be fun but it wasn't gonna add to that total so I knew I had to do that but the other thing was it was just good to be able to look at it at the end of the week I never got down as much as I wanted to but I would still could see how much had gotten done and I gradually became a little more realistic when I'd say oK we've gotten 30,000 words done and I'm hoping by the end of this month I'll have this much done but I was getting more realistic I wouldn't tell myself oh you're gonna write 3,000 words a day this week you know I could look back and see you've never done that before why would you do it as you're talking about IQ analogy and muscles I started thinking is the goal to turn ourselves into like hulking superheroes of self control and then the reason why I asked that is because I was thinking about my artist friends who who are frankly pretty reckless at time they just and and it seems like there's something cool and they they use that time to incubate the ideas and create and I'm wondering if there's a danger of like you know perpetuating you know there's a good line about that now I'm in the book we when I visited David Allen's of the getting things done GTD was really fun visiting him and he has a nice line about it because he works a lot of artists The Simpsons writers use GTD I mean he got me using GTD I use it and I use rememberthemilk and and and his line about artists was he but he tells them is that your mind could only handle one mess at a time you know and he said that if you're trying to find God and you have to get dog food you know you might as me thinking about dog food so get you know get rid of the dog food get that so your mind is free to create and I think that's really Jeremy drew Carey we profile him he's someone that the David Allen worked with and he had enough money he hired David Albers just come and sit next to him and go through his inbox but say what do I do with this email what with that and carried this that he's found it amazingly liberating this he could actually go read a book or go to a yoga class or work on you know on a comedy routine without thinking there there's 12 other things I ought to be doing so thinking about the combinations we mentioned beginning success beam in elegance and animal power and many of us have little children and wondering what what you might recommend we do to just teach them that will power a young age success later it's a fairly long chapter in the book about about this because we realized the importance of it and as I said I started off in the self-esteem movement in our societies very much with trying always afraid to criticize children and so on because it'll damage their self-esteem but they have great styles team you don't know unless you're constantly negative to the point of abuse of you don't have to worry about their self-esteem make self control the priority and just having that in your mind already as a parent that that's that's a that gets you far you know with ours my wife started that when she's still nursing she would ask the baby to stop crying before she got fed and so the baby learned really good emotion control so she learned yeah and you had to really sit there but you know come on come on stop crying and as soon as she got herself to stop crying she got hold of her feelings then immediately she got the breast and so instead of learning to just cry and go nuts and and and that the only way you get what you want is to you have a tantrum you know you learn to control the tantrum there was this book the tiger mom confessions and so on and for many Americans that's extreme but you know you can't argue with results the asian population they overachieve relative to IQ compared to white people it multiple measures and levels throughout society so some of the things they do you know just insisting that the children have rules and you know with the small child simple rules and then with the older child you have to get them to agree with the rules and participate and remember what you're trying to cultivate his self-control so you look you don't wait till there's a problem when when the child shows good self-control like again with our child - Diane would see well something would happen she didn't get what she wanted or whatever but she managed not to throw a tantrum or not to be upset and well that was good that you showed control and praised them for for showing self-control there as I said the a lot of other things in the book but again making that a priority and realizing that's the goal but watching other parents that is just horrifying to see that the kids I want to go this and the parents doesn't know we can't go the only bit I want to go this mmm probably the kid throws a tantrum and the parent gives in and say oh Jesus you're just training your kid to lose control instead you know if you're about to give the child something and then it does something you know that throws a tantrum or something you say well then I was gonna give to you but I can't give it to you now because you you misbehaved you're making sure insist on showing that control and respect and following rules and then rewarding that very well that that produces a very nice positive and the biggest thing really is consistency I mean it's punishments and rewards they don't have to be strict punishment I mean you know there isn't but but it should be done quickly and consistently and one of and and one of the reasons that successful parents have successful children there's such a high correlation they're probably genetic factors but it's also that those parents have self-control themselves and it takes self-control to instill it in the child it's much easier to let them get away with it to just clean up the mess instead of making them do it and in the book we have nanny Deb from nanny 9-1-1 we talked to her and she how she does it and they have these rules and and it works very well it's sort of that Victorian idea of how people do it and it's is one reason we also talked about how this correlation that's been found between between single-parent households children and those tend to do less well and there could be genetic reasons that can be various reasons for but one is it really takes you there's there's one less person to exert self-control you know you do the single parent is basically just trying to hold things together whereas when there's two you can double-team the reinforcements about how they constantly monitor self-control to kids about to do in the 13 issue to talk about earlier I'm an elementary school or preschool child and I'm told by the teachers they're angels all day and are it makes your wonderful self-control when they get home they're just a matter of whether I give them a snack or don't give the snack they seem to just have a meltdown between the hours of 5:00 and 7:00 what we all do is it should we let that recognize the fatigue and give them a little bit of a breather because they are children and they fit all day long or is it actually not giving in and actually gonna create a cycle of that's not exerting some control you know I struggle at custard to be dureena witching hours looking out my back I mean I think giving them a snack is a great start I mean one of the bit you know that the rules is just eat first and things don't make empty you know and and and I think also just try to be done okay jewel really difficult things to do I mean I wrote the New York Times Magazine excerpted our chapter on decision fatigue and then the magazine and I went up there and I was talking to them and I said we've stopped scheduling meetings at four o'clock now easy after reading this stuff it just it just seemed like that's the you know that's not the time of day to try and make big decisions and do to difficult things so I mean I I mean I I'm with my son I was very you know just let them come and watch them and watch TV or play video game when he gets home he's exhausted from school let him just chill and give him some food and let him relax and probably not sugar because that is a glycemic index thing you know gives an opener and in a crash you know healthier food would probably produce a more stable pattern of glucose and energy how will our release incision how does decision-making from big guy come into play okay decision-making from the gut that tends to be what people do and their willpower is depleted don't make more impulsive ants more and sometimes bad decisions it's whether we don't know all the parts yet but first of all the rational thinking through being disciplined that that's what takes takes willpower and also making that commitment sort of stamping it in I think of it as the the writing to disk phase that uses a lot of energy that that that also takes some of it and I should say too we showed that making decisions depletes self-control but after exerting self-control it changes decision-making too and we're probably some studies on that that people for example a compromise when people in full possession of their power they are compromisers and they are a little bit of this or work things together or trade-off price and quality to get just the right mix when they're depleted from acts of self-control they're just give me the cheapest or give me the best or something that the compromise goes out the window more irrational bias you're making decisions based on things that shouldn't have anything to do with the decision more postponing the decision is I'm not gonna pick anything so decision-making is degraded in various ways to and when will positive analysis paralysis and too much time trying to come up with well there's a great example we have in the book of this actor Jim Turner who was a who was an RLS and and he suffers from diabetes he is a one-man show about it and that and that shows you some of these symptoms of what happens when your glucose is low it's an extreme case and he has it and he was having a crash on the beast on the beach with his son and he realized he had to get he could he had to get some food into him and they got up in there and they left the beach and they were at the concessionary and he had to go to the bathroom and he had to eat and he just he was so depleted he couldn't he just stood there for 20 minutes he couldn't make the decision he just sat down his son was freaking out he couldn't make the decision he said it's like your brain is suddenly there's a there's a piece of your brain missing but that paralysis is you just don't have the energy to make a decision at that point you probably could've had them both done in the five minutes he was waiting to decide which one to do first I'm hearing that you're saying something conservative you actually get that you have a short-term effect is to get worse but the long time what if I see this home at work and in coaching people athletically what if the lack of self-control is in the rest like I think people when they get tired what they do is they go harder they go more and they dress less and that's just a vicious cycle how do you you talk about that about how to get more self-control over resting versus what would you talk about that you know there's a tendon did it take self-control actually to enjoy yourself to them they're people that you know that there are kind of extreme tightwads and extreme spendthrifts but who neither one of them or they're both kind of irascible about these things and people who don't and it does take some with some willpower and self-control to set aside time to enjoy things you know that you've got to use that you've got a you know don't just work all the time you've got to make the effort to plan a vacation and sets in set time aside and make a decision I'm not gonna do any more working this time and I've done enough and it's what's so hard about you go to policing is that you don't really recognize how bad you because like this wrestler may not realize I'm too tired I'm just working harder and I said I need to rest them and and you know just recognizing that that there's one source of energy for all these different things you can't just power through everything you can't just say I'll get by in four hours sleep and keep doing it and doing it and do ten different things you've got to recognize I've got a finite supply so I'll do this but I'm not going to do that there's some experiments we published earlier this year showed an instance of that where we had to assign people to be in a leadership role in a group I mean actually it was all just made up we we told them they were they were doing the same thing either they were assigned to be we told them they're the leader or their the subordinate the follower and the subordinate show the the usual pattern when they were depleted their performance went down the the ones who were told they were the boss they kept going at a high level and in fact sometimes the if if the task had been something that leaders normally would delegate to someone else they they tended not to do it but when they were depleted then they even did those tasks well so they seem to be less judicious in managing their energies or seems to be exactly what your you're suggesting so their performance continued at a high level but then when we tested them afterwards they were really wasted so I remember I'm not knowing exactly what the cure is for it but this pattern is a is is very real that sometimes making the decision about how to manage your energies that is actually degraded when you have less energy to use in things than you you use it inefficiently we would do two more in a good to mention distillates about distal and proximal dough this is to be a discrepancy between mr. Lynn said to me there's a blank this photo that actually goes on oh well there were a couple studies we mentioned a couple studies that in which they some students did better by by having very short term goals and some and somebody having a monthly goal yeah and and we talked about that is that you can't make an overarching generalization about because in some cases you're better actually one I think one was that older students tend to do better right to be effective you need you need you need both if you have too many detailed goals then you end up feel you know you're not flexible so there's to be some degree of flexibility in the timetable and so forth especially as you pointed out most people don't meet their targets day by day but still if you if you mainly set short-term goals then you just you know life goes by well you know where did it all go you don't really get to anywhere you just deal with things one at a time so that's not effective if you just set long-term goals you don't know how to get there and it's sort of frustrating and daunting and you flip a flail around and and don't get there either you you need to have the long term goal and then elaborated unto what are the short-term goals needed to to make progress toward it I'm going to tell my students I advise and so on you you should have a five-year plan you can change it but you know what you're doing now you should have an idea of where you want to be in five years and then you should also translate into the what should I be doing now in order to get there you know they start graduate school on I have a PhD in five years well that means you have to get this much done and get this many publications which that means you better get started to have this much done this month or this semester and that getting both of those is really the only effective way to get where you want to be in life so there's one here that you'd accept you I was just wondering what you think of are there cases where it is better to act on impulse like are you wasting outsourcing isn't it no short way to preserve self-control isn't it also saying well if some apostles are okay I mean if somebody's like in combat you need that kind of impulse and in other cases like from deciding what color of shoes do I want to wear today or something like that I mean saving yes I mean life impulses make life fun and I think if you have good self-control then your impulses won't carry your way into trouble and you sort of know when you can let your guard down and act on impulse and I think that that's appropriate so yeah so we're not all at all advocating a life that's totally planned and budgeted but you know if you manage the big things then you can go out and impulse purchase or eat what you want or do kinky things with your spouse or whatever so yeah you make some space for in enjoying your impulses as well impulsive styles of work good generally don't work as well as effective ones I know people who've studied college professors you know some write very steadily and plot along and write a couple of pages every day and others will stay up all night and work for two weeks really intensely writing a paper and then not write anything for a month that's on it well the ones that get tenure are the first ones who will keep producing at a steady rate so called binge writers that's you know that that's not an effective way to do it but as long as you keep producing and you manage the big things effectively then ensure you can make room in your life for impulsive stuff and everything will enrich life like impulse purchases of say a book okay thank you

Channel: Microsoft Research

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Length: 62min 39sec (3759 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016