What’s the most coveted human virtue — empathy? honesty? courage?
Or how about … self-control?
That’s the assertion of the new book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength*, by Roy Baumeister, a research psychologist at Florida State, and John Tierney**, a New York Times science writer. The book builds off Baumeister’s research on the physical aspect of willpower, which he and his research collaborators found behaves like a muscle: it can be strengthened through exercise but it becomes fatigued from overuse. Willpower is generated in large part by sleep and diet, and feeds off of the glucose in our bloodstream.
Baumeister and Tierney argue that our ability (or inability) to exercise self-control is most often the key between success and failure. And it’s hard not to see their point: I type these words on the very day that a special election is being held in New York to replace the disgraced (and aptonymic) Congressman Anthony Weiner.
As Baumeister and Tierney point out, “Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison.”
The authors have agreed to answer your questions about their book and related topics, so fire away in the comments section. As always, we will post their responses shortly. And here, to prime the pump, is the book’s table of contents.
1. Is Willpower More Than a Metaphor?
2. Where Does the Power in Willpower Come From?
3. A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey
4. Decision Fatigue
5. Where Have All the Dollars Gone? The Quantified Self Knows
6. Can Willpower Be Strengthened? (Preferably Without Feeling David Blaine’s Pain)
7. Outsmarting Yourself in the Heart of Darkness
8. Did a Higher Power Help Eric Clapton and Mary Karr Stop Drinking?
9. Raising Strong Children: Self-Esteem Versus Self-Control
10. The Perfect Storm of Dieting
Conclusion: The Future of Willpower-More Gain, Less Strain (As Long as You Don’t Procrastinate)
*I liked this book well enough to blurb it: “Willpower (the thing) lies at the curious intersection of science and behavior. Willpower (the book) lies at the intersection of Roy Baumeister, an extraordinarily creative scientist, and John Tierney, a phenomenally perceptive journalist. Ignore it at your peril.”
**I used to edit Tierney in the Times Magazine. To me, there are three important, separate skills that a good non-fiction writer must possess: reporting, thinking, and writing. Even among successful writers, very few possess all three in abundance. Tierney is among those few.
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I’ve noticed at high school wrestling meets all of the dads are fat. Presumably they were wrestlers once. Is this an example of long-term loss of willpower?
The title made me think of the Gary Puckett and the Union Gap Song:
Lady Willpower, it’s now or never
Give your love to me
And I’ll shower your heart with tenderness
Endlessly
Jonathon Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant to describe the mind in his book “the happiness hypothesis.” The idea is that our rational conscious self is the rider and our unconscious self is the elephant, which has two important implications:
– Our unconscious is a surprisingly powerful driver of our actions (by definition we are not aware of it)
– Force alone cannot control our unconscious automatic reactions.
He argues that the only way to control our will is to tame the elephant through meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and medication. Do you agree that those three activities are powerful interventions, and do you believe they are the most effective interventions?
Whenever I hear about self-control/willpower, the Marshmallow Test conducted by Walter Mischel comes up. They found that four-year-olds who were able to wait longer to get two marshmallows (rather than giving up, ringing a bell, and only being allowed to eat one), were better off academically in their teens.
Are there any good strategies to teach young children ways to reign in their impulses? Also, are there any studies that provide evidence that teaching young children impulse control strategies might lead to social/academic success later in life?
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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Your book suggests glucose plays an important role in regulating self-control and endurance and points out the paradox of dieting. Are you aware of any related experiments involving ketogenic dieters — or other alternate nutritional lifestyles — and how do you think this might impact willpower?
Following Taubes work on how carb overload is starving people to death and Davis’ work on the changes in wheat structure (my poor summaries here not their words), positing “willpower” as a bodily process fueled by glucose seems to have clear implications for explaining, among other things, why school children who eat honey buns for breakfast, candy all morning, pizza and corn for lunch, and chips all afternoon have little-to-no impulse control… they simply have no usable fuel.
Add Stephen Phinney’s work showing athletes on ketogenic diets having seemingly-unlimited energy reserves, and it makes total sense that persons on controlled-carb eating plans have little trouble turning down foods that aren’t acceptable: they have sufficient energy reserves to fuel their willpower in the background without them ever noticing the process. (We only really notice willpower when we fail to marshall the wherewithal to “exercise” it.)
When some highly visible person starts connecting the dots here … it’s going to be very interesting.
Gary Taubes is a genius! No one accepted — or even bothered to investigate — what he wrote in Good Calories, Bad Calories because food has become like a religion in this country, and the conventional wisdom within our society — furthered by the Freakonomics guys in at least one of their NY Times columns) — is that fat people lack willpower and are morally inferior.
Great comment. Thank you for mentioning that other book. I’d never heard of it.
Having watched an interview of Tierney on Reason TV, the term glucose caught my attention. I’ve been lowcarb for over a year, and along with the help of GABA, and Taurine, I find my capacity for concentrated thought and willpower to have skyrocketed. Of course this psychological change is of little note compared to the physical.
I’m heartbroken typing on a Mac, and wondering if Jobs would still be creating had his pancreas not been overburdened by decades of carbohydrates.
I find it disturbingly similar the way media off the web treat the concept of ketogenic diets as fad, and the candidacy of Dr./Rep. Ron Paul as eccentric. Despite post agricultural western civilizations dire predicament, I still hold out hope for the future.
Could the gate keepers of the status quo be losing control as the flood of information on the net drowns their disparaging censorious hyperbole.
With the advent of condoms and other contraception methods human beings gained the ability to take control of reproduction. Simultaneously cultural barriers to sex began to fall. Suddenly we were presented with a new form of self-control. Yet the rate of unplanned pregnancy is near 50%.
1) Do those unplanned 50% represent a natural selection of a low-self-control trait?
2) Since we now have the responsibility control something that was once culturally taboo and thereby beyond our control, do we contribute to willpower overload with each new advance that gives us a little more control over ourselves? Is it a Catch-22?
3) Can we create beliefs and rules for ourselves that allow us bypass the need to engage the willpower-circuit? For instance, can I reverse the current way of thinking and decide that broccoli and brussel sprouts are an indulgence while McDonalds hamburgers make me want to gag? Taste and desire are subjective, right? Can I manufacture the desire for those things that are good for me and produce revulsion for those that are not? If I did this would I not avoid the need to exercise self-control at all?
I don’t know if those attitudes can be deliberately manufactured, but I have them. I’d have to exercise a certain amount of willpower to eat a McDonalds’ burger if other choices are available, and quite a bit in order to stay inside working on this computer when I could be taking the dogs for a hike.
Humm… Maybe I don’t actually have that much willpower?
Can will power be quantified? If not, how would I know I’m improving?
Do you think willpower is directly correlated with intelligence? Maybe not in the sense that there is a direct relationship but in the fact that someone more intelligent may be able weigh risk versus reward or possibly when saving money an intelligent person may have an easier time predicting how long it will take to reach a goal? Or is willpower something completely separate based maybe more in thick headed-ness?
Or if you are more intelligent and spend more time weighing risk/reward, does that lead to decision fatigue and therefore less willpower? Is this is why “smart” lawyers and doctors end up having sexual indiscretions while the “dumb” blue collar guy stays faithful?