Willpower

Not only is my house full left over Christmas chocolate but the supermarkets are already pushing Easter eggs onto me and there's only so much willpower we have to resist.
But sometimes it's all a matter of perspective.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Willpower 0:02

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and today you'll learn a little bit about willpower and if you are ready, we'll start the show. Hey, hey, hey. Happy New Year. How are you doing? The first week back to work after a bit of time off at Christmas is often a tough week for people, I've found over the years. I've seen it in clients and I've certainly seen it in myself, to be honest. And a lot of people are gonna be going back to work on Monday. And then by Friday, probably are really gonna be feeling the strain. And if that's you, I hope this weekend refreshes you and you can feel a bit more determined and ready to go next week, rather than feeling the pull of social media every 10 minutes or some leftover Christmas chocolate every 30 seconds. A lot of people messaged me throughout last year asking for an episode about willpower and self-control, and I thought I'd done more episodes on it before than I have. 'cause I've done quite a few bits on Patreon about it. But I couldn't find very much for the public when I had a little search. I think I did something back in 2020, but I thought I'd go into it a little bit more today 'cause this is a good time of year to try and improve our self-control. And also a good time to notice just how hard it is. If your house is anything like mine it's still full of leftover Christmas chocolate, and I'm constantly being reminded of those old marshmallow experiments that pop up in self-help books a lot, that Walter Mischel at Stanford University did with kids to test their self-control. This was a while ago, and not surprisingly, when you think about it, they don't have quite the same effect as they used to when they're replicated, which is interesting. If you're not massively familiar with the Stanford marshmallow experiments, I'll tell you a little bit about them now. So what these psychologists wanted to see was whether or not there was a link with how well a primary school kid could handle delayed gratification and their successes later on in life. So they tested this by giving these children the choice of either one marshmallow now or two later on. And they did find that the children that were willing to wait 15 minutes to get an extra treat, they did have what tends to be called better life outcomes. They had more qualifications when they were older, they were healthier, they were less likely to have drug or alcohol problems, that sort of thing. But it's not such a good predictor anymore. Kids don't seem to mind missing out on that extra treat by taking the single sweet now 'cause things don't feel quite as scarce anymore. They know they've got all the treats they want at home anyway. So, what's the point in waiting? So marshmallow treats aren't quite so worthy anymore. They've become devalued. So they need to find other ways of testing children's willpower, I think, to see what influence willpower has on our lives. There's a big debate about nature versus nurture though, and the interaction between our genetics and our experiences. But it's worth recognising that it's not just our genetic stuff. It's not just an inborn part of our personality. I mean, it plays a big part, but we know that willpower can also be strengthened. It's a skill that just takes practice to hone it until it becomes habitual. Part of who you are. And because it takes practice, that means struggling with it, which doesn't mean you're broken. It's just part of being human. It's worth me saying, though, that although It can be strengthened, It can and does still run out if you use it up. Let me remind you, or tell you about it if you've never heard me talk about it before, the experiment with the radishes, the cookies, and the impossible puzzle. Now, this was a study into the effects on our persistence if our willpower had recently been tested. They called it ego depletion. Nice and easy experiment to replicate. They got some participants, asked them all to skip a meal and then split them into three groups. Two of the groups were told to come along to a tasting session. The other group missed this bit out and just did the second part of the experiment because what the other two groups had to do first was something to test their sensory memory, they were told. They had to eat something, wait a little while and then fill in a questionnaire. So all individual, of course, one at a time, each of these hungry participants starts off walking into a room where the experimenters had just baked some chocolate chip cookies, and the room smells amazing. On a table is a plate of cookies with some little chocolate sweets nestled against them, and another plate with some radishes on. Half of the people were asked to eat three or four cookies or chocolates, and the other half were asked to eat three or four radishes. They had five minutes to do that. And the experimenter left the room and watched them through a window to make sure they didn't cheat. After five minutes, there's a couple of questionnaires about their psychological state, and then they're asked to wait a while before they take another questionnaire, and whilst they wait, they're asked to do a little geometric puzzle. A little puzzle where they're given lots of paper and a pencil and they're asked to copy out a shape, a line drawing, but they weren't allowed to go over the lines and they couldn't take the pencil off the paper. You know, that sort of puzzle. This is what they were told. I got it written here. You can take as much time and as many trials as you want. You will not be judged on the number of trials or the time you will take. You will be judged on whether or not you finish tracing the figure. If you wish to stop before you finish, i.e. solve the puzzle, ring the bell on the table. Now, it was designed to be impossible. The drawing just couldn't be traced without taking their pencil off the paper or going over the same lines twice. It was just impossible. So persistence was the only thing that was being measured. So either they would ring the bell to say that they'd given up, or after 30 minutes, the experimenter would come in because the experiment had come to an end. The third group was the control group to compare everybody to. They just skipped a meal and did the puzzle. So those folk, they quit the puzzle on average after about 33 attempts, averaging 20 minutes. So that's the normal amount of willpower that we have. The people that were asked do eat either the cookies or the chocolate. The ones that hadn't had to hold themselves back from eating treats, they averaged 34 attempts and 19 minutes. So they worked a tiny little bit quicker, maybe because they weren't so hungry, but they still quit at around the same time. And the radish group, the group that had to use some willpower? Instead of 33 or 34 attempts. They only managed 19 goes and instead of giving up at 19 or 20 minutes, they quit at eight minutes. Interestingly, in the questionnaires, the radish group described themselves as more tired and more fatigued than either of the other groups, even more than the ones that had skipped a meal completely and ate nothing before they did the puzzle. Which might sound familiar if you've ever had a bad day where everything just feels harder. So ego depletion really is a thing. And this experiment has been replicated and shown the same results as well. So it's not a one-off. Willpower does run out if we use too much of it. But obviously it regains itself and that's often forgotten about when psychologists talk about this experiment. Yeah, the big lesson does seem to be, don't take on too much at once, especially this time of year. Don't quit your smartphone in the same week that you are also quitting vaping or need extra persistence to write an essay or something. But we also see from lots of studies over the years that willpower actually rebuilds itself. It doesn't run out and then stay out. It relights itself. And I wanna know what actually helps it come back quicker. To see what the fuel is that reignites our willpower to give us that self-control. 'cause it's not just about not eating the party snacks we bought in advance for a family buffet this weekend for New Year. Self-control keeps us off social media. Self-control helps us to turn off the TV and not click next episode. Self-control gives us more time for the things we might be procrastinating about. It helps us to challenge any negative self-belief and raise our self-esteem. So it's useful. But for it to become second nature and effortless, it might take some effort first. What we find is that being specific helps. If there's an area of your life that you want to have more self-control over, then the more specific the better. Rather than saying to yourself, I want to work with more focus, look at what that means. 'cause it could be that your goal needs to be, I want to work on a project for two hours without checking my emails. In which case then you know that turning off your email software is a good idea. 'cause that extra half a minute it might take for it to load up is enough for you to know it's not worth clicking it. It gives you a longer gap between the thought and the behaviour to be able to go, Nope, I need to carry on with what I'm doing. So be specific. If you are always late for appointments, set a goal of being five minutes early for everything and think about how good that would feel, value that feeling of being reliable. And at the same time devalue the extra five minutes that you spent on social media or whatever is the reason to be consistently late, if that's what it is. That old marshmallow experiment did give us some good insight into what helps us actually, 'cause there were quite a few different versions of the experiment. When the children were asked to think about how sweet and chewy the marshmallow was, they found it hard to resist it. When they were asked to look at it and see how much like a fluffy cloud it resembled, they had more self-control. When it was in a see-through box as opposed to a completely opaque box, and so it was outta sight and outta mind, that helped as well. That was replicated with some studies with office workers actually having M and Ms in a clear bowl rather than an opaque one that made them eat more of them. And having the bowl on the desk next to them, rather than on their own desk, helped as well. Again, it creates a gap between the thoughts and the behaviours that gives you the chance to go, Nope. We know that attitude helps. So devaluing the distraction and increasing the value of the goal is definitely helpful. One cross-cultural study showed something quite interesting, once. In a lot of places, homework is a chore, broadly speaking. It's a pain in the backside that has gotta be done just to play the education game. But in Chinese culture, homework is viewed more like practicing work so as to make the school work less difficult when you do it. That's a great attitude. Not sure my kid would've felt the same way when they were at school, but what did help them was thinking about the end result of not having any homework. The idea of having a weekend free of homework was attractive enough that it could strengthen their self-control during the evenings in the week to get them off of YouTube. Like I say, it increases the value of doing the homework, in this case. A bit like how when people who like audio books listen to them when they exercise, they increase the amount of time they exercise. If they only listen to the audio book when they exercise. If they listen at other times too, it doesn't help 'cause it hasn't increased the value of the exercise enough 'cause they can sit on the sofa and do that. Psychologists call this temptation bundling. So if you like audio books, maybe only listen when you're doing a task that you've got little value for, like exercising or housework or commuting. I know that's a slightly different angle than self-control, but if you hate your 45 minute commute to work and you can find a way of not, then your day is definitely going to be improved. When someone comes to me with an issue that takes a lot of self-control to overcome, like nail biting or trichotillomania, which is the compulsive pulling out of hair, surprisingly common that one, they often say that there's a correlation with stress. Even though it doesn't actually calm them down. So it seems odd that when they've had a bad day, they find themselves doing it more. And it's because they don't have enough willpower left to keep their hands still. 'cause they used up so much of it by holding back from screaming and punching somebody. Or running away, during their stressful day. It's called the fight or flight response for a reason, isn't it? And stress does make us feel like that. And of course, we can't fight our way out of a pile of paperwork and we can't run away from it, so it takes self-control. And then there's not enough left in the reserves at the end of the day to keep our hands out of the Terry's All Gold box. So don't beat yourself up as you're improving in this, it's a journey. Well, we need to bring up the episode to a close for today, so I'll leave you for now. You know where I am if you need anything. Look me up on Patreon if you want a little bit of extra help. Six pounds a month and far cheaper than seeing a therapist every week, and some people have told me they find it just as valuable, actually. Link is in the description as always, and I'll be back before you know it. There is a five minute bonus episode tomorrow anyway, actually, which I am literally about to record, so I'll speak to you then. Tarra.