Perfect Self-Management in 52 Weeks: Willpower

Perfect Self-Management in 52 Weeks: Willpower

In the 1960s, self-control researchers at Stanford University made a groundbreaking discovery: You can keep four-year-olds from gobbling sweets by giving them a new perspective. Walter Mischel, PhD, now professor of psychology at Columbia University, left kids alone in a room with a marshmallow that they were told not to eat in order to get two marshmallows later. Most kids found it almost impossible to wait. If, before leaving the room, the researcher suggested that the children focus on qualities the treat possessed that didn't make their mouths water -- that it was puffy and white, like a cloud or a cotton ball, for example -- they were able to hold off twice as long before gobbling it down. 

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Operating on the premise that the ability to delay eating the marshmallow had depended on a child’s ability to banish thoughts of it, they decided on a series of tasks that measure the ability of subjects to control the contents of working memory—the relatively limited amount of information we’re able to consciously consider at any given moment. According to Jonides, this is how self-control “cashes out” in the real world: as an ability to direct the spotlight of attention so that our decisions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts.

These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.

Mischel previously showed that children did much better on the marshmallow task after being taught a few simple “mental transformations,” such as pretending the marshmallow was a cloud. 

Mischel’s main worry is that, even if his mental transformations prove to be effective, they might still be overwhelmed by variables the scientists can’t control, such as the home environment. He knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” 

According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ” 

Day 1: Today, you’ll start slowly. Force yourself to take action on 3 small decisions, like taking out the garbage. Focus on the long term benefit of using willpower and discipline to reach your goals.

Work Your Willpower

Meditate for just one minute every day this week. Here's how to get started: Sit quietly with your eyes closed and count your breaths. When you reach 10, begin again. Whenever your mind wanders from your breath, start again at one. Work up to five minutes a day.

Day 2: Push yourself to do the next right thing toward your goal. Mental strength comes from overcoming challenges and hurdles. What's uncomfortable today becomes a habit tomorrow if you push hard through the discomfort of something new and different.

Play the "What if?" Game 

Devising a plan B helps you cope with situations that may undo you (cocktails on Friday night) because it shifts the decision-making moment from the danger zone (when the bartender asks if you would like one more gin tonic) to a point in time when you're in touch with what you want to achieve (before you even set foot in the bar). That's what New York University researchers discovered in their study of students who wanted to eat less junk food. When the students thought through tempting scenarios in advance and made if-then plans specifying how to overcome these temptations, it was easier for them to stick to their healthy choices later.

Work Your Willpower

Jot down the obstacles on the road to your skinny jeans, then write down an if-then plan for sidestepping each one. Check out the chart below to see how your cheat sheet might look.

Obstacle	Plan
Office vending machine at 2 p.m.	If I get the urge to buy chips out of the vending machine, then I'll eat the apple I have at my desk
Skipping my morning run because I stayed out too late	If I stay out too late, then I'll do a quick workout DVD in the morning instead of running
Cheese	If I'm craving cheese, then I'll have one low-fat string cheese from the fridge instead of a wheel of Brie

Day 3: Set small daily goals and get them done no matter what. Practicing self-discipline on a daily basis strengthens your willpower. Research shows that by controlling small patterns of behavior you are exercising your control and your overall willpower will improve. If you decide, for example, to drink a glass of water every morning (great for the brain and the body), or to exercise for ten minutes every morning when you get up, and do so, you will find that your willpower is stronger when you apply it to other tasks. So choose a small new activity that will improve your life and get started right now. And you will have begun your story as a self-directed person.

Make Healthy Decisions Easier 

Practice reframing the choices you give yourself. When faced with a doughnut, don't ask yourself "Do I want that chocolate-frosted or not?" The only reward in that equation is the doughnut, and our bodies have been hard-wired over years of evolution to seek rewards such as food and sex to keep us alive. When the brain identifies a reward, it shifts into a state of intense focus and drive. You can use that drive to your advantage simply by changing the reward in any given situation. Make the choice "Do I want to be one step closer to my dream body or not?" It's easier to go after something you want than something you don't want.

Work Your Willpower

When temptation strikes, identify a positive reward that will help you sidestep it. If a friend invites you to happy hour but you're trying to cut back on empty calories, change the focus from food to friendship. There's no law that says you must drink three martinis so that you can hang with your pals. Order a seltzer and start hurling the gossip; that's really what you wanted anyway!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU

Day 4: Identify some of the big things where you feel you lack willpower, and go and take massive action in each area. Example: If you fail to do your term paper on time, divide it into small portions and work on the portions every day. Or do the paper in the beginning of the term instead. An important part of this strategy is to take massive actions in as many areas as possible (with lots of decisions). The brain learns either through habituation or through massive action.

Work your willpower

Learn to be your own cheerleader: Write down the things you say to yourself when you fall short of your goals, then rewrite them as if you were talking to a pal. And while you're at it, figure out what you're going to say when your friends ask you the secret of your rock-solid willpower.

Day 5: Plan ahead. Self-control takes a ton of brain power, and when we are tired, our bodies don’t tend to deliver enough glucose to our brain for it to get the willpower engine going. Don’t try using willpower to abstain from something if you are tired or have used your „self-discipline-muscles“ all day. Make sure you don’t have anything unhealthy to eat around your house if you are worried about eating it. Drinking alcohol weakens self-disciple. 

Now it is time for a wonderful weekend. Remember all your successes from the last week. Write them in your journal.

Perfect Self-Management in 52 Weeks: The Secrets to Successful Behavior Change

Perfect Self-Management in 52 Weeks: 
The Secrets to Successful Behavior Change

Behavior change is one of the most challenging and universal issues we face in trying to improve our health and quality of life.

As we follow a diet or exercise plan, and/or try to stop drinking, snacking on junk or smoking, we look at these issues as separate and distinct from one another. In fact, there is a lot of overlap in terms of the way we need to act to improve any or all of these issues. The same changes that help us to eat more healthfully or improve our mood can help us stop smoking, manage our diet better, and so on.

Partly due to an environment that isn’t always conducive to healthy living (think of the abundance of fast-food restaurants and the amount of time many of us spend sitting at work or in front of the TV), our lifestyles often don’t serve the best interests of our health. That is where behavioral medicine comes in. Behavioral health professionals work to help people to identify long-standing barriers to living healthy lifestyles. They help people to follow the behavioral recommendations that accompany many medical treatments, take action to prevent diseases, and develop a road map that moves you toward health, and not away from it, with each decision you make. The goal is to develop a strategy to improve the overall quality of your life, not just to target one specific issue.

The first thing you need to do is to identify the areas that need work. When you have identified areas to work on, go through a number of steps to create short-term and long-term goals and set up the conditions for success. Finally, visualize what you want your life to be like so that you can stay motivated to stick with your plan through life’s ups and downs.

Day 1: Identify barriers and strengths.

Think about what barriers there are to making improvements in your life. You want to be aware of anything that will make change difficult for you. Also think about what strengths exist in each area — what is currently going well and contributing to good health. These strengths can be built upon and expanded to become most supportive of your health commitment.

When identifying barriers and strengths, it is helpful to ask, “Does this particular thing move me closer to good health, or farther away from it?” For example, some common barriers include being overscheduled or finding it difficult to ask for help. Examples of strengths include being organized, managing your time well, and communicating effectively with others. Different people have different barriers and strengths, and yours will be specific to you and your situation.

Barriers:

Strengths:

Day 2: Make a realistic plan.

Now it’s time to come up with a plan for developing your strengths and eliminating barriers. Once you have identified a particular strength, set goals to keep that strength moving forward, growing and building it in a way that will last. 

An excellent approach to goal setting is to have a main plan (Plan A) and a plan for tough times and setbacks (Plan B). Think of Plan A goals as those you feel you can realistically pursue most of the time, assuming there are no roadblocks. Plan B goals, then, are the ones you can pursue when the road isn’t as smooth.

For example, let’s say your Plan A goal for exercise is to walk or jog after work three days a week, but you find yourself skipping your workouts because your workload is keeping you late at the office. In the long term, you may need to find ways to lighten your workload so you can meet your Plan A goal. In the short term, your Plan B goal might be to take a short but brisk walk at lunchtime during days that don’t allow for a full workout. Short walks may not be ideal, but at least you get some exercise. On a good day, you might even end up getting both the lunchtime walk and the longer after-work exercise session.

To address the barriers you’ve identified, you will need to take a problem-solving approach that reduces or eliminates the barrier and helps you build strength in that area.

Day 3: Find your motivators and milestones.

You may hear all kinds of experts telling you not to set New Year’s resolutions because they don’t last. You may also hear you shouldn’t use other special occasions (such as weddings, anniversaries, or swimsuit season) as motivators. Don’t believe it. Changing habits is hard enough without throwing out perfectly good motivators! Instead, we need to grab all the motivators we can and use them to our best advantage.

As you may have experienced, the problem with event-related goals is that once the event passes, you tend to go right back to your old habits. But that doesn’t mean the motivator was bad — it simply means the plan wasn’t something you could stick with. As long as you put a healthy, realistic, and sustainable plan in place to achieve your goals before the event, and then develop a well-thought-out “next step” plan for afterward, you will be fine.

Think about competitive athletes: They follow a fairly intensive fitness and training regimen to prepare for specific competitions. Then they transition to a realistic “off-season” fitness effort that keeps them moving in the right direction until their next contest or season. They don’t just “pig-out” until training starts again. You may not be a professional athlete, but you can apply this ongoing self-improvement cycle to the goals you are trying to achieve.

Day 4: Practice self-awareness.

We are so busy and so distracted by the way we choose to live our lives these days that being present in the moment appears to be as obsolete as floppy disks. We multitask to the point of absurdity.

The path to health and well-being requires us to pause occasionally and become aware of ourselves without distraction. We need the opportunity to self-examine and to understand what we truly need emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. So, for example, the next time you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed and are tempted to grab that cigarette or doughnut, skip that workout, or distract yourself on the Internet or with social media, pause and ask yourself, “What do I really need right now?” A moment of self-reflection can help you understand why, in that moment, you are so deeply in need of a distraction or are about to make a decision that moves you away from health. Perhaps, rather than reaching for a quick fix, what you really need is to pay attention to an emotion, to sit with a negative thought, or to process some problem you are struggling with. If you practice self-reflection regularly, you may find you are no longer so tempted to make unhealthy decisions. This allows you to become more aware of how to meet needs in healthful ways.

Day 5: Expand your horizons.

This step is fun. List all the ways in which you spend your time: hobbies, modes of entertainment, sports, and so on. What specific activities are you doing? Do you enjoy your activities? Are you in a rut? How can you shake things up and make your life more exciting, more interesting? How can you explore new things and think outside the familiar “box”?

Some people go so far as to reinvent their lives in this step, and others simply add one or two new and fun activities to their routine. There are so many things to do in our free time, yet many of us have not tried anything new for many years. Maybe it’s as simple as exploring your local parks and recreation department Web site and choosing one new thing to try each month, whether it’s an exercise class, a “Shakespeare in the park” performance, new walking trails, or a paddle-boat rental.

Just commit to doing the activity once. If you like it, go back; if you don’t, then simply try something different next time. The whole point is to find activities that expand your world, get you away from the TV and computer, and really add to the quality of your daily life.

If you want to get the most out of this work, do the following exercise. If not, take off to an exciting weekend. Perhaps doing and enjoying something completely new?

Envisioning a healthier life

Now, take a moment to reflect on all the problems and solutions you have identified through your use of the exercises outlined above. Reflect on what you have learned about yourself, your life, and your strengths and barriers. Here is where you bring it all together and try to picture a newer, healthier version of yourself. Try to imagine yourself acting differently in the face of your most common barriers.

For example, if you have trouble saying no and find yourself overcommitted as a result, close your eyes and picture yourself confidently and realistically setting limits, delegating tasks, or asking for help. If you always seem to be struggling to “fit in” exercise, imagine yourself as someone for whom exercise is not a daily negotiation but rather a way of life. Envision yourself as a healthy person who makes healthy choices. As you practice this sort of visualization, your new outlook on your health will begin to feel more like a part of you. Old patterns are tough to break, but with effort, you can make changes over time.

As you carry out your plan to strengthen your commitment to good health, you will notice that there is overlap among the areas, and that progress in one area influences the others. You will see how your goals may be fine-tuned and interwoven to create a smooth plan for living your life comfortably, productively, and happily.

You may want to start keeping a journal to record what you have learned about yourself. This way, you can look back on your progress at various points along the way, such as when you accomplish goals and set new ones. The process outlined here is not a one-time deal. You can come back to it as often as you like, perhaps on a monthly or quarterly basis, as suits your needs. 

Now off you go for an exciting (or relaxing) weekend.
What are you looking forward to the most? Go for it!

(Info: Dr. Martin Binks)