Where does a person get the willpower to read a book with
the title, ‘Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Strength’? A book with such a
title could not help reminding readers of their past failures in exercise of
willpower. However, I didn’t find the book by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
an ordeal to read. Rather than making me feel more guilty, the book left me
feeling that some of my past failures might perhaps be understandable under the
circumstances.
The authors discuss research findings which suggest that in
the short term an individual’s willpower is limited and is depleted by
exertion. When your willpower is depleted you are more likely to become
frustrated and to act impulsively. This means that the best time to make
changes in your life is when there are few other demands being made on you, so
you can allocate most willpower to the task.
The book provides some good advice about how to deal with procrastination
and the anxiety that can be associated with it. For example, once you make a
definite plan to do the things that you have been procrastinating about, you
will stop fretting about them. If you find yourself procrastinating by
substituting other activities for the activity that should have highest
priority, try the ‘nothing’ alternative. Set aside time to be spent either on
the high priority activity or doing nothing.
The book also has good advice on how to deal with
temptations. Postponement can work better than trying to deny yourself
altogether. Where necessary, use pre-commitment. Set bright lines – clear
unmistakeable boundaries that you expect your future self to respect. Monitor
performance regularly and don’t forget to reward yourself for reaching goals.
One of the points that came through to me in the book is how
careful we need to be in making judgements about the ability of other people to
exercise willpower. For example, the book suggests that it is often a mistake
to attribute obesity to lack of willpower. Paradoxically, many people who are
over-weight or obese have in the past exercised a great deal of willpower in
following crash diets that have resulted in rapid weight loss. The problem is
that when subjected to diets that simulate the effects of famine, human bodies
tend to respond by holding on to every fat cell they can.
My main reason for reading the book – apart from the feeling
that my own willpower could do with some improvement – was to see what light it
sheds on arguments for government interventions to remove temptations that are
bad for individual health and well-being. This issue is not discussed directly but,
as the subtitle implies, the book argues strongly that individuals have the
potential to exercise a great deal of self-control if they know how and want to
do so.
This raises the question of how much self-control each of us
wants to exercise over our impulses. While reading the book I found myself
thinking that I don’t actually want to remove from my life all temptations for
impulsive behaviour that I might later regret. I feel that I may obtain some satisfaction from leaving myself somewhat vulnerable to impulsiveness. For example, while I
accept that there would probably be health benefits in restricting my (already
moderate) alcohol intake to one glass of wine per day, that is a bright line
that I don’t want to draw – at least, not yet!
I suspect that a lot of other people think as I do about
such matters. We feel that it is appropriate for the control we exercise over
ourselves to be somewhat lenient. Some of the boundaries we set are
deliberately flexible, for example with allowances for special occasions. We don’t
want our lives to be totally governed by bright lines. The last thing we want
is a paternalistic government that seeks to help us by taking the temptations
out of our lives.
Paternalists tend to respond: ‘It's not about you. Our aim is to help vulnerable people’.
Paternalists tend to respond: ‘It's not about you. Our aim is to help vulnerable people’.
So why don’t they help vulnerable
people to develop the inner strength they need to deal with their addictions
and leave the rest of us to run our own lives for ourselves?