Self-Control Is a Myth

When I was in grade school, my lowest report-card score was always in the same category: Exercises Self-Control.

That I still remember this exact wording roughly 40 years later says something about how much it hit home, and not just because my parents were the type to take report cards extremely seriously.

For decades, most of what I wanted to fix in my life seemed to come down to self-control. So, for example, I’d decide for the millionth time to do something that went against my immediate desires, like save part of my pay check. I would tell myself over and over how this time it was going to be different, because now I was going to control myself. And then I would just spend the money like I always did.

In the crucial moment when I decided to buy whatever it was, it was like I could feel myself scrabbling around inside, grasping for this power to contain myself that other people seemed to have. And time after time, I came up empty-handed.

It felt like I was trying to pilot myself with a joystick connected to nothing. It felt awful, like I was doomed to a small life because, unlike other people, I couldn’t seem to practice self-control.

It took me so long to understand that the problem wasn’t that I lacked self-control. The problem was that self-control wasn’t a thing, at least not in the way we’re usually taught to understand it. Which is maddening, because so many of us are trying to access this mythical power every day, and blaming ourselves when we can’t figure out how to do it.

Here’s why self-control doesn’t work, and what to do instead.

Wanting vs. control

When we think in terms of self-control, we usually see wanting on one side and control on the other. In general, wanting gets attached to stuff that is bad for us, and control to stuff that is good for us. If we want to act better, we need to increase our control, so we can resist the force of wanting.

So let’s say you’re on the way home from work. You want to go straight home to takeout and TV, but you also think you should go to the gym. When we understand such moments in terms of self-control, we believe we’re experiencing a struggle between wanting on one side and controlling ourselves on the other.

This belief is actually truly weird when you look at it more closely. First, we treat going to the gym as an externally imposed standard or rule, which is disconnected from what we actually want. And then we decide that the gym can still happen, provided we just have the control to act against our own desires.

But think about it: exactly how are we supposed to choose to apply this control, if what we want is the opposite? Even if we think of self-control as a force in us that we should be able to switch on, we still have to want to flip the on-switch. Something in us has to decide to activate the self-control to go to the gym. Which means something has to motivate that decision, to get the control to kick in. And that’s a problem, because the whole point of control is supposedly to get us to act against what we want.

This is what I mean when I say self-control is a myth. Control can’t be the opposite of wanting, because we can’t marshal ourselves in a direction that no part of us wants to go. Because we’re also the ones that have to choose to do the marshalling. When it comes to human motivation, control without wanting is a contradiction in terms.

I realise I’m getting pretty abstract here, but I think it’s worth really trying take on board how much this literally makes no fucking sense. Because seeing that helps explain how borderline Kafkaesque it can feel when we try to change our behaviour through self-control.

It feels this way because we’re basically issuing ourselves a never-ending series of totally un-followable instructions, like Want what you don’t want! Motivate yourself without being motivated! Opt for what you don’t choose! And then believing that there must be something wrong with us when we can’t figure out how to do it.

Other people don’t have more self-control

Before I understood any of this, I genuinely thought people who seemed self-controlled were just making themselves completely miserable over and over and over. So I believed people who, unlike me, were ‘good with money’ just denied themselves all the time, felt awful, and somehow kept doing that forever.

As we’ve just seen, that actually makes zero sense. There has to be a motivation for self-denial, because the choice to deny ourselves has to come from somewhere in us. That means that, one way or another, even people who look like they’re purely self-denying must have desire attached to the choices they make.

So does that mean they all just masochists, choosing their own suffering because they enjoy it?

Nope. It turns out they’re mostly not choosing suffering at all.

This completely blew me away when I first realised it. It happened when I finally started using a budgeting app that worked for me. I actually got pleasure from keeping track of stuff and making it all work. I liked checking it and seeing in the numbers in the green instead of the red.

When I described this to an old friend of mine who has always been excellent at saving money, and she looked at me like I had just encountered fire for the first time. It turned out she had been feeling these little happy-budgeting pings the whole time.

That’s when I realised that all these self-controlled people weren’t somehow able to act while denying themselves all pleasure. They were just getting different pleasures than the ones I knew about. My friend got good feelings from being in control of her money, and she used wanting those as a motivation. Which, unsurprisingly, worked a hell of a lot better than my approach, i.e., telling myself that budgeting was 100% miserable but I somehow had to make myself do it anyway.

None of which is to say that my friend doesn’t also have wants she opts not to satisfy. She likes a nice pair of boots as much as the next person. But in her mind, denying those wants never worked the way I imagined. It wasn’t, I want the boots but I will say no even though that feels awful. It was, I want the boots but I want the pleasure of the money in the bank more. She wasn’t steeling herself to forgo all satisfaction. She was getting her satisfaction from something else.

This kind of satisfaction isn’t just harder to come by in the usual way of thinking about self-control. It’s by definition off the table. Because when we think our problem is not enough self-denial, the last thing we’re going to see as a solution is wanting more. We’re so busy believing wanting is the barrier that we don’t realise it’s actually the fuel.

Want bigger and further away

People often talk about my friend’s kind of motivation as a capacity for delayed gratification, or the ability to activate the prefrontal cortex and override the ‘primitive brain’. If this works for you, that’s fab. But for me and many of my clients, these descriptions can wind up inadvertently reinforcing the control vs. wanting model that is keeping us stuck. So I suggest just thinking of this approach as just wanting something bigger and further away.

The key to shifting into this type of motivation is to get really really really specific ahead of time about the results of the action you want to get yourself to take in the moment. If you tell yourself you don’t want to buy the boots because ‘you’re saving up to travel’, the boots are probably going to win, because they are gorgeous and tangible and right bloody there.

But if you have really thought hard about the warm sand and the ocean breezes and the thousands of miles you’ll be from your boss — if you can picture the words VACATION in big red letters on the exact week in your calendar that this bliss will occur — you’ll be able to use your desire for that experience to propel you past the boots. You’ll feel how much bigger that satisfaction will be than the fleeting retail buzz, because you’ll have made that bigger motivation concrete and real to yourself on purpose.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll also come to love these moments as a reminder that you are not and never were some weak-sauce person who can’t get themselves to do hard things. It turns out that I’m not lacking in self-control, and neither are you. All those times we couldn’t seem to find the on-switch had nothing to do with something missing in us. They had to do with a really non-functional model of how human motivation works.

It takes practice to harness your wanting in a deliberate and useful way, but you’ll be astonished how much faster you can create change once you start. Changing our behaviour through wanting is simple, direct and powerful because getting us to act is what wanting is for. Wanting is the only wired-up joystick there is. You don’t need to grow some other mythical force of self-denial. You just need to get all the fiery, propulsive, unbounded power of your desire lined up in the direction you most want to go.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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