Back to Blog
Selfcontrol for multiple days5/21/2023 The model eloquently explains many of our most vexing self-control failures. As a doctoral student studying self-control, I can understand why. The success of Baumeister’s book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2012), co-authored with John Tierney, suggests that the strength model resonates with many people. If you overwork your self-control muscle, you’ll eventually run out of willpower, and lose the ability to exert self-control. Baumeister suggested that the same thing happens when you use self-control. But keep it up, and that minor burn will grow into a full-blown conflagration, at which point you won’t be able to keep going. If you start doing pushups, you’ll feel only a minor burn. His strength model likens willpower to a muscle. In 2007, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister put forward what has become the most influential psychological model of self-control. But what is self-control exactly? A working definition is that it’s the ability to do what’s in your best interests in the long run – such as managing your weight – over what’s enjoyable right now – such as gorging on cookies. Whether it’s pizza, beer or doing anything but exercising, we all have our vices, and many of us would like to have better self-control. Research that prompted people to record what’s happening multiple times a day found that self-control failures are a frequent and common occurrence of everyday life. Look on the bright side, at least it was fat-free milk. Wouldn’t they go great with milk? Maybe just one more with a glass? Before you know it, you’ve polished off a dozen cookies and several glasses of milk, and you’re cursing your poor self-control. Two are enough, but despite your best efforts you continue eyeballing those remaining cookies. Once home, you enjoy your celebratory cookies as planned. You’re on a diet, but you reassure yourself that you’ll eat only one, two at most, to celebrate the arrival of the weekend. After getting the necessities, you decide on impulse to buy a dozen cookies. After grinding through the day, you stop on the way home to buy groceries for dinner. You’ve had a long week but fortunately it’s Friday and things are looking up.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |