[Medium] The secret life of people with high self-control (it’s easier than you think)

https://medium.com/@riikkaiivanainen/the-secret-life-of-people-with-high-self-control-its-easier-than-you-think-7dd26fb5282c

The secret life of people with high self-control (it’s easier than you think)

[미디엄 사이트의 영어 글을 읽으면서 영어와 테크분야를 공부하고 있습니다]

People with high self-control experience fewer temptations in their daily lives

While I was researching this article, all roads seemed to lead to one particular paper that wasn’t even directly about self-control. Based on the number of times it was referenced, its findings seemed to really have taken the self-control community by surprise.

The paper was about everyday temptations, or in academese, the “phenomenology of desire in everyday life,” and it applied the experience sampling method.³

Basically, the researchers asked about 200 people in Würzburg, Germany, to wear beepers for a week and to report on their current or recent desires whenever the beeper went off (seven times each day). If they were experiencing a desire, they were asked a few clarifying questions about it and, on some samples, also about the situation they were in (e.g., whether they’d consumed alcohol or whether they were alone or in company).

Most of the study’s findings were unsurprising:

• Participants were experiencing some type of desire about 50% of the time.
• Most commonly, they wished to eat, sleep, drink, use media, or have leisure time or social contact.
• When participants applied self-control, they often managed to resist the temptation they were facing, about 80% of the time.

But the findings related to a specific subset of participants — the ones scoring high on a trait measure of self-control— were more surprising. These participants didn’t have fewer desires overall, but they did have fewer problematic desires: They reported less conflict and less resistance related to their desires.

In other words, the people who scored high on trait self-control experienced fewer temptations in their daily lives.

These findings are like having researchers finally move their focus away from individual acts of self-control to the people who’re actually good at it only to find these people smirking, “You thought we were going through life gritting our teeth, huh? Oh, you fools!”

“People with high levels of trait self-control are good at avoiding temptation — not resisting it.”

What did the authors of the everyday temptation paper make of their findings? Well, they suggested that people with high levels of trait self-control are good at avoiding temptation — not resisting it.

“This conclusion suggests a reconsideration of how this trait operates.”³ Oh snap!

Their conclusion also aligns with the ironic findings related to ego depletion: If good self-controllers generally avoid temptation, it’s understandable that they’d perform poorly when put into an artificial situation in which they’re forced to resist temptation.⁶ If you don’t lift heavy things, you’re not gonna get strong.

Another study tested this temptation-avoidance hypothesis and found that the people who scored high on trait self-control also reported more frequently using strategies to minimize or avoid temptation.⁷ And it wasn’t all talk: They were more likely to choose to work without distractions, for example, to pick a quiet room over a noisy one before beginning a problem-solving task.

But making individual smart choices doesn’t seem to be the only reason good self-controllers experience fewer temptations.

People with high self-control are good at building and breaking habits

The findings related to temptation avoidance have made researchers curious about the role habits may play in self-control. After all, habits are a way to reduce resistance by automatizing a behavior. Maybe that’s what those lucky people are good at.

This does seem to be the case. One meta-analysis found that trait self-control was more strongly associated with automatic rather than consciously controlled behaviors.⁸

More specifically, people high in trait self-control have been found to have…

• weaker unhealthy snacking habits,⁹
• stronger exercise habits,¹⁰ and
• stronger meditation habits three months after a meditation retreat.¹¹

It seems that “by relying on stable habits and routines, individuals with better self-control can enact important behaviors more automatically and effortlessly.”¹¹

Trait self-control doesn’t, however, predict behavior equally across life domains. It has the strongest effects on work and school behavior.⁸

This makes sense if trait self-control is about building and breaking habits: It may be easier to create routines around working and studying as opposed to, for example, eating behavior which is much more affected by natural drives and genetic predispositions.⁸ It’s as if good self-controllers were saying, “If we can routinize it, we can ace it.”

“The findings we’ve covered so far make it increasingly difficult to view self-control as an ‘all-purpose inhibiting mechanism.’ No wonder researchers have begun to differentiate between effortful and effortless self-control.”

The findings we’ve covered so far make it increasingly difficult to view self-control as an “all-purpose inhibiting mechanism.”⁸ No wonder researchers have begun to differentiate between effortful and effortless self-control.

And although effortful self-control is common in everyday life, the effortless kind seems to be the one driving those enviable long-term outcomes