WILL POWER:HOW TO INCREASE IT?

Willpower: How to Increase It, How to Measure It

Want to diet, but can’t? Self-controlled in office, but messy at home? Read on for some answers, from John Tierney & Roy Baumeister, authors of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Is willpower a single commodity, so to speak, or is there — as I suspect there is — one type of willpower for, say, dieting, another one for academic study, another for this, another for that? No, there’s just one single commodity. There’s one source of mental energy for resisting temptation and performing other acts of self-control, and this resource is depleted every time you make one of those decisions. What you experience may reflect the fact that willpower is limited and so people have to allocate it to certain tasks: They may, for example, use it at the office to work effectively, but have messy homes and be short-tempered in the evenings.

I consider myself a very disciplined man. I’ve never had troubles with productivity at work, studying or doing my homework for school, remaining devoted to my significant other or maintaining financial discipline.
You’re hardly alone, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up. Plenty of people with strong willpower have trouble with weight (like Oprah Winfrey, whom we discuss in the book). Although weight control is often the first thing people associate with willpower, the connection is actually much weaker than in other activities.
Willpower has a much bigger effect on other parts of your life (school, work, personal relationships, etc). People with strong willpower are a little better than average at controlling their weight, but only a little. Weight control is singularly difficult in part because willpower is fuelled by glucose in the bloodstream, which comes from food. Hence there’s what we call the dieter’s catch-22: in order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower. But in order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

How does hypnosis short-circuit self-control?
Hypnosis works largely with unconscious processes. People who are susceptible to hypnosis are able to let their conscious controls relax. In a sense, it is less a matter of short-circuiting — overcoming or rendering ineffective — self-control than of deliberately relaxing it, so that these unconscious processes can operate. However, exactly how hypnosis works, and why some people are so much more susceptible than others, remains a mystery.

Is there a genetic component to willpower? Or does the fact that dedicated kids seem to have equally dedicated parents just a result of the fact that their parents have consistently demonstrated self-control at home?
There’s probably some genetic component to willpower, but that’s hardly the only reason why self-disciplined parents tend to have self-disciplined children. The parents’ own self-control enables them to develop self-control in their kids. It takes willpower to continually monitor children and enforce rules instead of letting things slide. This can be especially difficult for single parents, because they have to run the home and handle all the responsibilities themselves. When their willpower gets depleted, they can’t hand off to a partner with a backup supply.

Are there any good strategies for teaching young children how to rein in their impulses? Also, are there any studies that provide evidence that teaching young children impulse-control strategies might help them achieve social and/or academic success?
There hasn’t been a good controlled study focused on teaching impulse control to some children (and not to a randomly assigned control group) and then following them over many years to assess whether they do better in their adult lives. But there are studies with shorter time spans that show improved performance as a result of teaching self-control. And there’s an abundance of data showing that children with good self-control are more likely to succeed in adulthood. It’s quite possible to teach children to control themselves. Too many parents seem to reward their children for losing control, such as when parents initially say no but then relent when the child throws a tantrum. The child soon learns that losing control is an effective strategy — which is precisely the wrong lesson. Parents should set clear goals and rules, along with rewards and punishments. The punishments don’t need to be severe; what’s more important is that they’re administered quickly and consistently. Disciplined activities, such as regular homework and piano practice, do plenty of good toward building self-control — especially if parents recognise and reward children for improvements in self-control.

Can willpower be quantified? If not, how would I know I’m improving?
During lab experiments, willpower is quantified by measuring how long someone can work at a task, or squeeze a hand-grip exerciser, or hold a hand in ice-cold water. That enables researchers to see how a person’s willpower at the start of an experiment compares with the level at the end of the experiment. But that’s generally not a practical method to use in tracking your willpower over a long period of time. Your level of willpower will fluctuate, depending on various factors — the time of day, what you’ve eaten and how much your self-control has been depleted by the challenges you’ve had to confront during the day. But you’re right: it’s essential to measure yourself so you can see if you’re improving. You can’t easily make a direct measurement of your overall level of willpower, but you can measure it indirectly by setting goals and monitoring your progress.

Is there a simple way to strnghten willpower?
A simple way to strengthen willpower is to pick small things that you would like to change. It might be something like cleaning up the dishes right after dinner. Once you succeed at that (and it becomes a habit that doesn’t require much conscious exertion), pick something else. Don’t worry about these small changes when you’re coping with severe demands elsewhere in life. Make them during relatively peaceful lulls. As you gradually succeed at more important and difficult changes, that will indicate that you’ve made progress.
© 2011 The New York Times News Service