Willpower summary

Some people believe that willpower is something we are born with, with a strength and quality that cannot be changed or honed. Not so!

Using your willpower to make positive changes in your behavior can strengthen self-control in other areas of your life. Even minor changes, such as making the decision to say “yes” and “no” rather than “yeah” and nope,” can strengthen your willpower and add to your supply.

Psychologists once hypothesized that our willpower could improve after a period of relaxation. This thinking was based on the existence of celebrations such as Mardi Gras, in which people are allowed to indulge themselves before abstaining from their favorite things during Lent.

The idea is that if let rip and indulge, you’ll have more willpower available to resist other temptations, such as chocolate or alcohol.

We generally direct our willpower toward achieving certain goals. For example, if you want to lose weight (goal), then you’ll have to refrain from eating chocolate cake every night (willpower).

However, your success at focusing your willpower on reaching your goals hinges completely on the quality and composition of those goals.

Not everyone has an iron will, and even those who do are subject to willpower depletion after strenuous exercises in self-control. Luckily, you don’t always need willpower to achieve your goals: alternative strategies, such as developing habits or avoiding temptation, will get the job done just as well.

For instance, rather than using your limited willpower to resist temptation, you can anticipate that temptation and take measures against it. If you know that you won’t be able to resist the cool satisfaction and warm buzz from a beer, don’t go to the bar.

It sounds strange, but you need willpower to develop willpower. But what if you lack the baseline willpower necessary to train it? In these cases, it seems as though believing that a “higher power” is watching over you can have a great influence.

Indeed, religious people seem to have greater willpower than nonreligious people. For instance, religious people are more likely to do things that require self-control, like wearing seat belts, taking vitamins every day and avoiding unprotected sex.

How many times have you heard that the key to a child’s success is his self-esteem? This attitude has been popular for quite a while, but does it hold water?

Even though most Western parents make a concerted effort to consistently bolster their children’s self-esteem, there is little reason to believe that this parenting style is justified. In fact, there is no clear scientific evidence that supports the idea that this creates better social or intellectual outcomes for children.

You would think that people who have strong willpower would more easily lose weight than those whose willpower is easily broken. However, it turns out that this simply isn’t the case.

Willpower alone doesn’t lead to successful dieting. In fact, this was exemplified in one study in which overweight students with high self-control were shown to have only a slight advantage over their peers in a weight-loss program.