Can Self-control Become Effortless?

If you are reading this blog, we can make two predictions. First, you’re probably interested in changing something about yourself. You want to be thinner or stop smoking, or eliminate using porn, end gambling or compulsive shopping, get control of your drinking… Secondly, while you haven’t given up yet, it’s likely that you think of yourself as somebody with poor self-control, because you have undoubtedly tried to change yourself without success and your habit is getting the best of you. The dilemma is quite simple. You find yourself repeatedly caving to temptation and failing to heed the longer term, illusive goal. The cake is now; the weight loss goal is shelved or forgotten, at least until after that cake is eaten.

Now it turns out that there are people, most likely not reading this blog, who don’t struggle with temptation. They don’t experience a conflict between temptation and goal. Yes they are human, but if they want to lose weight and encounter a double-fudge German chocolate cake with whipping cream and a cherry on top, it doesn’t phase them. No self-control dilemma at all. They just walk away. Born that way? Maybe, but we doubt it.

Dutch researchers Marlene Gillebaart and Denise de Ridder at Utrecht University are fascinated with these folks. They are hoping to observe these “high in trait self-control ” individuals to figure out what makes them tick. Then they hope to develop interventions that will allow the rest of us to use our self-control more effectively --- and apparently effortlessly, as they do.

Here’s our suspicion. Anybody can do that, once you learn how. Not that it is easy, mind you, but we think “high trait self-control” is a learned skill, not a magic trick nor a gift of nature. We think it’s like many other skills -- playing a musical piece until you don’t think consciously of the notes; tying your shoes without having to imagine bunny ears or rabbits running around the tree and down the hole… you just do it. Automatically. From weeks, months or even years of practice, you’ve automated all kinds of complicated skills that are now effortless and usually outside of conscious awareness. Even learning a second language works that way. With tons of practice, new language learners reach a point where they don’t translate before speaking, they just speak.

Before automation comes practice, lots of it, and strong motivation, which we think is a first cousin to willpower. The high-in-trait-self-control folks have had previous successes, and they’ve learned many “smart regulation strategies” to help them in early stages of resistance to urges. So with our bet on willpower as an effortful, intermediate mechanism that can eventually lead to new, effortless behavior, we’ve constructed our Willpwr apps to help you build those new habits and to encourage you to keep going. By jumping in exactly when you need that guidance, encouragement, and choice of smart regulators, we think we’ve hit on a way to overcome much of the intense conflict of giving in to the urge and doing something positive instead.

You need to know, however, that even after reaching this automation phase of acquiring new behavior patterns, there can be relapses. Child psychologists (and parents!) know about a child’s “regressions” to earlier behavior, and anybody who has seriously made attempts to change a negative habit knows about relapse. Learning theorists refer to it as “spontaneous recovery of a previously habituated response.“ We’ve got lots of names for more or less the same thing. You can blow your recovery even years after you traded your old behavior in for newer, healthier patterns, so you always have to have awareness. But if the new pattern is automated, it is much, much easier to be truly successful.

Now as an aside, I lived in Holland a long time ago for two years doing postdoctoral work. During that time I tried my best to learn Dutch, and I can vouch for that earlier comment about “automating” a second language. I was far from truly fluent, but I could have pretty regular conversations that just seemed to happen without me sweating bullets. Hey, maybe I can rev up that old ability and say hi to those Dutch scientists in Utrecht. “Goede dag, Dames! Ik hou van Uw werk!"