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WHEN EXERCISE LICENSES EATING, A BRIDE-TO-BE GAINS WEIGHT
Cheryl, a thirty-five-year-old financial adviser, was getting married in eight months. She wanted to
lose fifteen pounds before the wedding, and had started working out at the gym three days a week.
The problem was, she knew exactly how many calories every minute on the stair climber was worth.
As she burned more calories, she couldn’t help imagining the food she was earning the right to eat.
Although she had planned to cut back on calories, too, she felt free to eat a little more on workout
days. If she exercised an extra five minutes, she could get chocolate chips on her frozen yogurt, or
have a second glass of wine with dinner. Exercise began to equal a license to indulge. As a result, the
scale had budged three pounds—in the wrong direction.
By thinking about exercise as earning food, Cheryl was undermining her goal to lose weight. To get
out of this licensing trap, she needed to see exercise as a necessary step to achieving her goal, and
healthier eating as a
second, independent
step she also had to take. They weren’t interchangeable
“good” behaviors, and succeeding at one didn’t license her to take it easier on the other.
Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself. You aren’t off the hook just because
you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive
action makes you forget what your actual goal is.
THE PROBLEM WITH PROGRESS
Even if you aren’t turning your willpower challenges into measures of your moral worth, it’s still
possible to fall into the trap of moral licensing. That’s because there’s one thing
all
Americans
instinctively moralize. No, not sex. Progress! Progress is good, and making progress on our goals
feels good. So good that we like to congratulate ourselves: Well done, you!
Maybe we should think twice before we hand ourselves the gold star. While most of us believe that
making progress on our goals spurs us on to greater success, psychologists know we are all too quick
to use progress as an excuse for taking it easy. Ayelet Fishbach, professor at the University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business, and Ravi Dhar, professor at the Yale School of Management, have
shown that making progress on a goal motivates people to engage in goal-sabotaging behavior. In one
study, they reminded successful dieters of how much progress they had made toward their ideal
weight. They then offered the dieters a thank-you gift of either an apple or a chocolate bar. Eighty-five
percent of the self-congratulating dieters chose the chocolate bar over the apple, compared with only
58 percent of dieters who were not reminded of their progress. A second study found the same effect
for academic goals: Students made to feel good about the amount of time they had spent studying for
an exam were more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong with friends.
Progress can cause us to abandon the goal we’ve worked so hard on because it shifts the power of
balance between our two competing selves. Remember that by definition, a willpower challenge
involves two conflicting goals. Part of you is thinking about your long-term interests (e.g., weight
loss); the other part wants immediate gratification (chocolate!). In the moment of temptation, you need
your higher self to argue more loudly than the voice of self-indulgence. However, self-control success
has an unintended consequence: It temporarily satisfies—and therefore silences—the higher self.
When you make progress toward your long-term goal, your brain—with its mental checklist of many
goals—turns off the mental processes that were driving you to pursue your long-term goal. It will then
turn its attention to the goal that has not yet been satisfied—the voice of self-indulgence.
Psychologists call this
goal liberation
. The goal you’ve been suppressing with your self-control is
going to become stronger, and any temptation will become more tempting.
In practical terms, this means that one step forward gives you permission to take two steps back.
Setting up your automatic retirement investment may satisfy the part of you that wants to save,
liberating the part of you that wants to shop. Getting your files organized may satisfy the part of you
that wants to work, liberating the part of you that wants to watch the game on TV. You were listening
to the angel on your shoulder, but now the devil seems much more compelling.
Even the most trusty tool of goal pursuit, the To Do list, can backfire. Have you ever made a list of
everything you need to do on a project, and then felt so good about yourself that you considered your
work on that project done for the day? If so, you’re not alone. Because it’s such a relief to make that
list, we mistake the satisfaction of identifying what needs to be done with actual effort toward our
goals. (Or, as one of my students said, he loves productivity seminars because they make him
feel
so
productive—never mind that nothing has been produced yet.)
Although it runs counter to everything we believe about achieving our goals, focusing on progress
can hold us back from success. That’s not to say that progress itself is a problem. The problem with
progress is how it makes us feel—and even then, it’s only a problem if we listen to the feeling instead
of sticking to our goals. Progress can be motivating, and even inspire future self-control, but only if
you view your actions as evidence that
you are committed
to your goal. In other words, you need to
look at what you have done and conclude that you must really care about your goal, so much so that
you want to do even more to reach it. This perspective is easy to adopt; it’s just not our usual mind-
set. More typically, we look for the reason to stop.
These two mind-sets have very different consequences. When people who have taken a positive
step toward meeting a goal—for example, exercising, studying, or saving money—are asked, “How
much
progress
do you feel you have made on your goal?” they are more likely to then do something
that conflicts with that goal, like skip the gym the next day, hang out with friends instead of studying,
or buy something expensive. In contrast, people who are asked, “How
committed
do you feel to your
goal?” are not tempted by the conflicting behavior. A simple shift in focus leads to a very different
interpretation of their own actions—“I did that because
I wanted to
,” not “I did that, great, now I can
do what I really want!”
WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:TO REVOKE YOUR LICENSE,
REMEMBER THE WHY
How do you focus on commitment instead of progress? A study by researchers at Hong Kong
University of Science and the University of Chicago provides one strategy. When they asked
students to remember a time they turned down a temptation, moral licensing ensued, and 70
percent took the next opportunity to indulge. But when they also asked the participants to
remember
why
they had resisted, the licensing effect disappeared—69 percent resisted
temptation. Like magic, the researchers had discovered a simple way to boost self-control and
help the students make a choice consistent with their overall goals. Remembering the “why”
works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat
will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good.
Remembering the why will also help you recognize and act on other opportunities to accomplish
your goal.
The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and
remember the why.
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