The New Science of Willpower

The idea of helping people self-regulate their behavior has been a major focus of society for thousands of years. Think of how cultural norms, religious guidance, medical advice and legal prohibitions all encourage us to demonstrate self-control. There’s just no question that urges and desires are part of the human experience and that without self-control and moderation, they can lead to personal and/or community catastrophes.

Some of the earliest work in modern-day scientific circles goes back to the 1960s when researchers were trying to see if people could use self-reinforcement to shape their own behavior. I had the pleasure of working with one of those pioneers, Fred Kanfer, when I was a beginning grad student at the U Oregon Medical School. Fred and several others across the country initiated some very creative thinking about this age-old problem of getting folks to change behavior that appeared controlled by apparently uncontrollable “urges” using self control therapy.

Lots of advances have occurred since those early days. The work of Ray Baumeister exemplifies where we are today. Baumeister and his colleagues re-introduced the word “willpower” to apply to the complex area of self-regulation. He and his group demonstrated that willpower can be taught and strengthened with exercises, that it fatigues, and that it recovers strength through rest and through calories. His work directly challenged the commonly held belief that willpower was some quality we were born with and that some of us had a lot of it while others had almost none of it. He used the analogy of willpower as a muscle to drive home these points. It fatigues, it can be made stronger, etc. There have been some recent adjustments to his ideas. For example, a lot depends on a person’s personal belief about willpower. We’ve embraced his ideas in our apps, however, and the vast majority of his findings seem ideal for guiding individuals to improve self-regulation. As it turns out, most people with strong negative habits have already tried to end them and have failed, so they have concluded that they have little or no willpower. So all of our apps have sections for willpower strengthening activities based on Baumeister’s findings as one facet of what we believe to be cutting edge, research based advice.

Nonetheless, and in spite of the name of our apps (willpwr), we know that success involves much more than just “toughing it out.” We know from neuroscience studies, for example, that to end a negative habit, we must build a new neural pathway that will eventually fire more easily than the old habit when a trigger is encountered. So, we offer a comprehensive set of many techniques coming from a variety of disciplines to give the fullest help possible to our customers.

The core concept in all of our apps is self awareness, and smartphones offer a way to construct self awareness and to deliver on-the-spot guidance better than any other tool we have found.