Self-control is one of the most important and helpful personality traits. People who are good at self-control benefit in multiple ways. They are more successful than other people in school and work. They earn more money. They have stronger, more durable close relationships, and they are more popular generally. They have better mental and physical health. They are less likely to smoke tobacco, suffer addictions, or be arrested. They even live longer. Their friends and lovers are happier, because people with good self-control are easier to get along with than other people.
Over many years, my research has found that self-control works like a muscle. It may be strong or weak, but its strength is limited. In particular, after you exert self-control, your muscle will seem “tired” in the sense that it won’t work as well for a while. Put another way, after you have expended some of your willpower, you won’t have as much, until it can replenish.
Moreover, exerting self-control is not the only way that your willpower gets depleted. Making decisions also depletes it. (The harder the decision, the more depleted.) The same goes for making plans and taking an active rather than a passive stance (such as by showing initiative). Interpersonal conflict also depletes willpower.
Although self-control strength is limited, it can be increased — just like a physical muscle becomes stronger with regular exercise. If you practice self-control, you get better at it. Hard-working athletes, religious churchgoers, and military personnel typically have better self-control than other people, partly thanks to the years of training their self-discipline.
Another resemblance between self-control and a muscle is that it is stronger than you think. There does eventually come a point at which your muscles are too tired to function properly, but you start feeling tired long before that point. Remarkably, studies show that when your muscles are moderately tired, they can still operate at maximum power for a short time if there is a good reason to do so. Tiredness is a signal that the brain makes to tell you to conserve energy. It is the same with so-called ego depletion, the state of reduced willpower. Your body seeks to conserve willpower energy by not thinking as hard or not self-controlling as much as you normally would. (This is a dangerous time for yielding to temptation, breaking your diet, cutting corners at work, making bad decisions, or relapsing.) But you can still push yourself to exert self-control or make hard decisions, if it is important enough.
To replenish your willpower, food and sleep are effective, because willpower is connected with the body’s energy supply. Indeed, poor self-control and low quality sleep form a vicious circle in which each makes the other worse.
People with good self-control use it to break bad habits and form good habits. Habitual action doesn’t take nearly as much willpower as exerting self-control does. Once you set up your life with good habits, it can run smoothly, almost on automatic pilot.
Early in my career I studied self-esteem. Many of us thought that increasing self-esteem would help people live better, happier lives. But the results were disappointing. High self-esteem is more a result of success than a cause. In contrast, self-control really does lead to better outcomes. My advice to parents, coaches, teachers, and others, is to forget about self-esteem and concentrate on building self-control. That’s what will pay off most in the long run.
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Professor of psychology associated with the University of Queensland, Florida State University, and Constructor University Bremen. He is among the most prolific and most frequently cited psychologists in the world, with over 700 publications. His 45 books include the New York Times bestseller Willpower. His research covers self and identity, self-regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, consciousness, free will, and self-presentation. In 2013 he received the William James award for lifetime achievement in psychological science (the Association for Psychological Science’s highest honor).