Two other groups of volunteers were not so lucky with the music allocated to them by the experimenter, however. Instead of sleep-conducive New Age sounds, they (poor lambs) had to listen to the rousing marching band music of John Philip Sousa. Again, some volunteers were left to fall asleep in their own time, while others were ordered to go to sleep as quickly as they could. But this time, it was those left to their own devices who first found themselves nestling in the arms of Morpheus. Time-pressured volunteers, setting the process of mental control into action in order to get themselves to sleep quickly, became paradoxically wakeful. Driven to distraction by the stirring sounds of Sousa, the mental upstairs could not cope at the same time with its role of keeping thoughts in check. As a result, floodgates were opened to the wakeful thoughts primed by the mental butler. It actually took them longer to get to sleep, compared to those who were making no special efforts to do so quickly.
There are, it seems, so many reasons for will to fail us that it is a wonder we ever manage to keep our thoughts and impulses in rein. The will is feeble, drained by emotions; it is thin-skinned, and has woefully limited powers of concentration.
But let us look on the bright side – at least there is plenty of room for improvement. These insights into when and why our will is not done offer, if not solutions, then some pointers, at least, as to how to keep willpower healthy and strong. What, for example, can best be done about this unfortunate tendency of the moral muscle to become fatigued with use? One option, of course, is to use it only very sparingly. My father, a professional philosopher, has a job that involves thinking very hard about very difficult things. This, of course, is an activity that consumes mental resources at a terrific rate. The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a delicious luxury chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday’s shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the stale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father’s willpower – rested and restored whenever possible – can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of ten men.
Although we may not all be able to live the charmed life of the well-paid scholar, the general principle – not to spread our inner resolve too thin – is an important one. If your New Year’s Resolutions list reads:
1. Give up smoking
2. Begin punishing new exercise regime
3. Eat only cabbage soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner
then you will almost certainly fail. There is simply not enough willpower to go around. Pick the most important fight, and concentrate on that.
Interestingly, this seems to be what we do naturally when confronted with a grim reminder of our mortality. Researchers asked one group of students to recollect the September 11 tragedy (where they were when they heard the news, their thoughts and feelings).14 Other people were asked the same questions about a fire on campus that had happened at about the same time, one which, fortunately, had claimed no lives. They were then offered a choice of fruit salad or chocolate cake, supposedly as thanks for taking part in the experiment. The morbid thoughts triggered by thinking about the deaths on September 11 focused the minds of the students very sharply on what was important to them. People whose esteem was heavily invested in their physical appearance were much more likely to select the fruit salad, compared with equally vain people whose thoughts had recently dwelled on the campus fire. (So, if you are such a person, keeping a skull in the fridge could be just the ticket for keeping fingers from straying towards calorie-loaded temptations.) The attitude of other people, though – people who regarded their bodies more as hotels for their brains than ends in themselves – was to eat, drink and be merry. These volunteers were more, not less, likely to tuck-in to the chocolate cake if they had just been reminded that tomorrow they might die.
A third strategy for keeping the moral muscle bolstered for when we need it most is to offer it regular exercise. Although exercising self-restraint wears out the will in the short term, it seems that over time, like its physical counterparts, the moral muscle becomes taut and bulging from use. Researchers asked people to exert self-control by not thinking about a white bear for five minutes.15 (If you try this yourself you will discover that this is quite a tricky thing to do.16) So the researchers could see how much this mental exercise tired willpower, both before and afterwards, they asked volunteers to squeeze together a hand-grip for as long as they possibly could. This task also required self-control, to overcome the urge to relax. Sapped by the intervening act of not thinking about white bears, unsurprisingly, the volunteers released the hand-grip more quickly the second time round.
What the researchers wanted to know, though, was whether they could build up the strength of people’s moral muscle by exercising it. With this aim in mind, they asked some of the volunteers to practise self-restraint over the coming few weeks: by monitoring and improving their posture, for example.17 For two weeks, they were told, they should resist their natural tendency to sit slumped like a sack of potatoes and amble sway-backed from here to there. Instead they were to stay strictly erect at all times, and deport themselves as though a book were balanced atop their head. Other volunteers, by way of contrast, were left to live their own sweet way for the fortnight. When the two weeks were up, all the volunteers returned to the lab. Once more, they were put through their paces: squeezing the hand-grip, suppressing thoughts of white bears, then back to the hand-grip again. For people whose wills had been lounging idly for two weeks, the thought-control exercise left the moral muscle as flaccidly exhausted as before. Drooping from its labours after the thought-control exercise, their moral muscle again gave in to the spring of the hand-grip much more easily than before. But the willpower of the other group, perky and toned by the fortnight of training, was now left almost untouched by its wrestles with white bears. Thanks to this newfound endurance, their final session with the hand-grip showed that they were now much better able to withstand the debilitating effects of their earlier self-restraint.
Moving on now to the will’s exquisite sensitivity to the prevailing emotional and social climate, is there anything that can be done to keep the will working even when you are feeling sad and unloved? Perhaps the best we can do in these circumstances is to remember that the problem is not that we can no longer control ourselves, but that we are simply less inclined to do so. Remember that low-spirited people who were told that giving in to temptation would not improve their mood restrained themselves from eating chocolate-chip cookies just as well as did people in a more positive frame of mind. (Funnily enough – in a rare occurrence indeed for a social psychology experiment – there may have been an element of truth to the claim made by the experimenter that eating wouldn’t make them feel better. Although there was no doubt a momentary pleasure to be had from scoffing cookies, it seemed to be gone no sooner than had the last crumb been wiped from the chin. When the experimenter asked the participants about their mood – right after the supposed ‘taste test’ – there was no sign that cookies, once down the gullet, continued to bring happiness. It may be in vain that we attempt to assuage ill-humour by spoiling ourselves.)
The loss of will that comes from rejection from a cruel world can, like the enervating effect of feeling blue, also be overcome. What seems to be the key here is resisting the natural tendency to avoid potentially bruising self-reflection. Those who have just snubbed you may be somewhat startled when you immediately whip out from your pocket a mirror, into which you begin to intently gaze, but – who knows – it could be worth a try.
However carefully the will is nurtured and ministered to, though, a problem remains, as we have discovered. It is hard to be single-minded as we go about our pursuits. The mind easily falls prey to mental distractions, having only poor powers of concentration. As the ironic pro
cess theory points out, when the mind wavers from its intended project of keeping certain sorts of musings out of mind, perversely, we find ourselves besieged with those very thoughts we most wish to avoid. Keeping life simple, calm, and sensibly paced may be a necessity, rather than an indulgence, if we are to keep our thoughts under control, suggests Daniel Wegner.18 And when our lives are a far, far cry from the Zen-like tranquillity that would be most ideal, we may be better off giving up altogether on the doomed mission, and allowing our thoughts to flow freely. Better a trickle of unpleasant thoughts to deal with than a torrent. This, I now know, was my great mistake on that sleepless night. With too many other things already on my mind, which is so often the case for people with insomnia, I was fighting a losing battle with my recalcitrant will. Curiously, what I should have done was try my utmost to stay awake. Insomniacs ordered at bedtime to stop themselves from falling asleep actually get to sleep more quickly than usual. The reason, according to ironic process theory, is that the sleep-starved person calls off her inevitably unsuccessful attempts to keep wakeful thoughts suppressed. With the mental butler no longer priming those very thoughts, they are much less likely to end up bursting into consciousness to keep her awake.19
Take all of these lessons to heart, by all means. But there is even better stuff to come. If we have learned anything so far in this chapter, it is that the will is capricious and temperamental – it is the prima donna within. Stood beside the no-fuss mental butler – which is tireless, efficient and superbly capable – one might be justified in drawing rather unfavourable comparisons. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could bypass that sketchy, off-on willpower altogether? Imagine if, like an idle but cunning dictator, you could exploit the vast power of the unconscious to serve your own ends …
Well, you can! But it does take some work on your part. Remember from the previous chapter that goals, acted on over and over in particular situations, come to be automatically set off by cues in the environment. For example, without even realising it, people who thought it was important to make mother proud worked harder on a word task after thinking about mum. This helpful characteristic of the mental butler can be exploited to your great advantage when it comes to ensuring that noble and worthy goals triumph over base and shameful impulses. If you are disciplined about resisting a particular sort of temptation whenever it appears seductively on the horizon, then sooner or later your unconscious will reward you by joining the tussle on your behalf. The tempting situation itself automatically sets off the goal to resist.
This helpful trick can even have you turning up your nose at chocolate, as the happy findings of some extraordinary research have shown.20 Researchers found themselves a group of women students who were all at least a little ‘ooh, I shouldn’t eat that’ about food. One at a time, each woman was taken into a small office strewn with magazines and other props carefully chosen to set the woman’s unconscious working in a particular way. In the ‘diet prime’ office, the surfaces were covered with magazines about exercise and dieting, with flyers for weight-watching classes pinned to the walls. Other women were led into the ‘temptation prime’ office. Here, the magazine of choice was Chocolatier, with various chocolate-based food items left lying around the office for good measure. For a third group of women, who were being used as a boring comparison group, the magazines were about economics or geography. The volunteer sat in the artfully decorated office while she did a computer task that revealed the clandestine effect of the priming on her unconscious. She saw a series of letter strings and in each case had to decide, as quickly as possible, whether it was a proper word (and included among these was the word ‘diet’), or a nonsense word. Then – oh so casually – she was asked to select either a Twix bar or an apple, as thanks for her participation in the experiment.
As you might expect from what we learned in the previous chapter, women in the diet prime office were quicker to recognise the word ‘diet’ than were women in the comparison group. The diet schema activated, words from this schema leapt into consciousness in the word-recognition task. What is more, the goals of the diet schema also activated, nearly two-thirds of these women chose an apple instead of a Twix. This showed impressive restraint over the norm, since nearly two-thirds of the women from the comparison group (who saw the economics and geography magazines) chose the Twix. The unobtrusive priming of the diet schema successfully tempered the women’s natural tendency to choose the chocolate.
You may, at this point, begin to fear for the women in the temptation prime condition. Did they, you may wonder, not only grab the Twix, but then raid the experimenter’s office for the rest of his supplies? In fact, no. Because these women were used to gastronomic self-denial, the unconscious had set up a strong and automatic link between the temptation schema and the diet schema – the tempting images themselves primed the diet schema. As a result, these women were not only just as quick to recognise the word ‘diet’ as were the women in the diet prime condition – they also showed an equal abstemiousness. The fleeting allure of short-term gratification was successfully and immediately squelched: hurrah!
This is all very cheering, but there is still the drawback that we have to put in a bit of legwork ourselves first. The unconscious only starts pulling its weight once you have a solid history of resisting temptation through conscious effort behind you. If you are the sort of person who responds, ‘ooh, lovely’ when offered a slice of cake, your unconscious will make few efforts to activate the schema of self-restraint in the face of temptation.21 You can’t go around throwing sweeties down your gullet and expect the unconscious to get the right idea. Boring though it is, you need to develop good habits for this willpower-enhancing strategy to work.
Fortunately though, psychologists seem to have discovered a way in which we can develop good habits, instantly. The secret is not just to make a resolution. (‘I will write a book before my baby is born.’) You must also work out exactly how and when you will do it. (Of course if your partner, like mine, draws a salary from bossing people about, this bit may be worked out for you.) To use the grandly official jargon, you must form an ‘implementation intention’.22 (‘I will sit at my desk immediately after breakfast every weekend, and every day of my annual leave, and write so many words a day until it is done.’)
These implementation intentions can have near-magical effects on us, it appears. People who beef up their resolves with a simple but determined plan of action are far more likely to become one of those irritating types who shame the rest of us as they virtuously jog past in an ostentatious display of self-discipline. Students panicked by vivid descriptions of the slow but sure narrowing of arteries in people whose hearts enjoy an uninterruptedly leisurely pace of life, fully intended to take some vigorous exercise at least once in the week that followed.23 But the road to coronary heart disease is paved with good intentions: two-thirds of the students found that they had ‘forgotten’, ‘been too busy’ or ‘just didn’t get round to it’ by the end of the week. In fact, they didn’t exercise any more that week than students who hadn’t been shown the health education leaflet about coronary heart disease.
Another group of students, though – given the same terrifying leaflet about the damaging effects of a sedentary lifestyle – were also made to plan exactly when, where and how they would get their hearts thumping from physical exertion. And they were true to their word. In stark contrast to the dismal efforts of the other students, a remarkable 91 per cent of them remembered to exercise, found time for it and did actually get round to doing it. Likewise, implementation intentions also improve, to a striking extent, the chances that we will reach for an apple in lieu of a chocolate bar, recycle paper cups, finish work on time, or take the trouble to examine vulnerable portions of our anatomy for signs of disease.24 (Sadly, though, the seemingly miraculous powers of implementation intentions are apparently inadequate to overcome the inertia that sets in at the dismal prospect of flossing our teeth.)25
How do implementation intentions
work their wonders upon us? By handing over control to the faithful unconscious. When we confidently and sincerely proclaim that, ‘When I visit the canteen at lunchtime I will buy an apple instead of a Twix’, the mental butler alerts the unconscious of your plans, and it adjusts itself accordingly. The part of your brain that represents the canteen is put on high alert. Then, like the habitual and successful dieter whose unconscious has built up a strong link between fat-loaded treats and the aim of resisting their appeal, the intention of buying an apple is automatically set off the instant you walk into the canteen. With a single act of will (which, frankly, seems to be about as much as we can expect from this undependable part of ourselves), the conscious self can take a much-needed rest and leave the remainder of the job to the more reliable unconscious brain.
‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’, it is said. But what if the will is unwilling? The will is a highly temperamental performer. Cast it in too many performances and it will collapse onstage halfway through the act. Upset or insult it, and it will lock itself in the dressing room and refuse to come out. Distract it, worry it or put it under pressure and it will hit bum notes. The prima donna of the brain, the will must be handled with the utmost care. Only if its many needs are ministered to is there a chance that – just sometimes – it will gift us the strength to pursue the thoughts and deeds we intend.
But with only 188 minutes of uninterrupted sleep to be had at night? Not a chance.
Notes
1 R.F. Baumeister and J. J. Exline (1999), ‘Virtue, personality, and social relations: self-control as the moral muscle’, Journal of Personality, 67: 1165–94.
2 R.F. Baumeister, E. Bratslavsky, M. Muraven and D.M. Tice (1998), ‘Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 1252–65.
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