We all know someone who seems effortlessly disciplined. They wake up early, exercise without complaint, avoid doom-scrolling, and somehow always say no to the biscuits. Meanwhile, the rest of us vow to change, break our resolutions by February and blame our weak willpower.
It feels like the key is willpower. Willpower is our ability to resist temptations in the moment by making an effort. Sometimes that effort is about actively holding ourselves back. Sometimes it’s about trying very hard to deny that you wanted something in the first place.
But what if our faith in willpower is actually a reason we fail?
As a behavioural scientist, I’ve been researching this question for years. The science reveals that the people who are best at self-control aren’t using more willpower than the rest of us. They’re using less.
How do they do it? Rather than using willpower to fight temptation head-on, they design their lives so that good choices are easy and bad ones are difficult. They build exercise into daily routines and make it an unthinking habit. They anticipate the open biscuit tin and plan to avoid it.
They don’t win the fight against temptation; they set up their lives so the fight never has to happen. And the good news is that the skills they used can be learned. One of the best tactics is to use “commitment devices” – ways to bind your future self before temptation strikes.
Some are simple. You might make a public pledge, like announcing on social media that you’re going to run a half marathon next month. The announcement means you get hit with a psychological cost – known in the research as a soft penalty – if you fail. You’re weaponising social pressure against yourself.
But soft penalties are sometimes not enough – so, instead, you can ratchet up the consequences and create a hard penalty. That might be betting money that you’ll donate to a cause you dislike if you break your rule. Want to stop using your phone at work? You might use an automated service to ensure that £5 leaves your bank automatically every time you open an app during the day. Services like stickK.com have sprung up to meet our need to limit our own options.
Want something stronger? You can try restricting your options in advance. Some are soft restrictions, barriers that make bad choices harder but not impossible. Think of an app that makes you wait 30 seconds before opening Instagram. You can override them, but often they do enough to break the spell and make you reconsider. One study found that people who set screen time limits reduced their time spent on Facebook daily by more than a third over six weeks.
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But soft restrictions aren’t infallible; for instance we can always make the effort to get a ladder and get the biscuit tin down from the highest shelf. The nuclear option is to use hard restrictions that make failure almost impossible. For instance, you can buy a box called a kSafe that has a timer lock – once your phone’s inside, you can’t get it out until time’s up. Short of taking a hammer to it, you’re forced to stick to your intention.
Regardless of what you choose, there are some rules that will always stand you in good stead. Commit to a goal that is both specific and hard to fake.
Identify things that you do regularly, like brushing your teeth, that can act as potential “triggers” for a desired behavior, like remembering to take medication. Over time, that link will become automatic, just like a habit. It works in the same way for some habits we may want to break, like how finishing a meal acts as a cue to have a cigarette or a vape for many smokers.
The tragedy is that we resist these methods, even though they work. We’ve been taught to believe that “real” self-control means white-knuckling through temptation. Using aids feels like cheating, and we fear being judged by others. Research shows we actually trust people less when we know they use commitment devices rather than willpower. We think, “If they can’t trust themselves, why should I?”
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That attitude is a trap. This faith in willpower alone is a cultural hangover that means it’s seen as more virtuous to fail than to succeed with help.
The most successful people I know aren’t suffering through constant self-denial. They’ve made a few smart decisions that removed a thousand hard decisions in the future. You can join them. Stop trying to win the battle and start designing your life so you never have to fight it.
Dr Michael Hallsworth is the author of The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives (MIT Press)
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