This weekend I came across some thought provoking ideas while reading inThe New York Timesa review of the bookWillpowerby Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. The reviewer, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, points out that “Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, individuals have [always] struggled with self-control. In today’s world this virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have largely tamed the scourges of nature, most of our troubles are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke, and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons, and become addicted to heroine, cocaine, and email.”
Baumeister and Tierney maintain that “self-control, though almost certainly heritable in part, can be toned up by exercising it” and that conversely “the will, like a muscle, can be fatigued.” They note that when one practices self-control “with small but regular exercises, like tidiness and good posture,” one builds a reservoir of willpower that extends to other tasks. However, they also discovered that “immediately after students engage in a task that requires them to control their impulses, ...they show lapses in a subsequent task that also requires an exercise of willpower.” Quite literally a sweet spot seems to exist between practicing and exerting self-control.
Baumeister’s experiments suggest that “willpower consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose, has a limited capacity and operates on rules that scientists can reverse-engineer.”
Baumeister and Tierney underscore the importance of developing willpower by citing an archetypal experiment in the 1960’s “that tormented preschoolers with the agonizing choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows 15 minutes from now.” When followed up years later, the group of 4-year-olds “who waited for two marshmallows turned into adults who were better adjusted, were less likely to abuse drugs, had higher self-esteem, had better relationships, were better at handling stress, obtained higher degrees, and earned more money... Together with intelligence, self-control turns out to be the best predictor of a successful and satisfying life.”
As parents and teachers it’s important for us to expect reasonable, developmentally appropriate self-control from our children and to foster conditions that build willpower. As Baumeister and Tierney point out, self-control is a critical lifeskill that can help lead to a more successful and satisfying life.