The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

Imagine Your Future Self.
Studies show that imagining your future self can increase
your present self ’s willpower. One experiment asked couch potatoes to imagine either a
hoped-for future self who exercised regularly and enjoyed excellent health and energy, or
a feared future self who was inactive and suffering the health consequences. Both
visualizations got them off the couch, and they were exercising more frequently two
months later than a control group that did not imagine a future self. For your willpower
challenge, can you imagine a hoped-for future self who is committed to the change, and
reaping the benefits? Or a future self suffering the consequences of not changing? Let
yourself daydream in vivid detail, imagining how you will feel, how you will look, and
what pride, gratitude, or regret you will have for your past self ’s choices.

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A TIME TO WAIT, AND A TIME TO GIVE IN
We’ve been assuming that it is always better to delay gratification. But is it?
Ran Kivetz, a marketing researcher at Columbia University, has found that some people have a very
difficult time choosing current happiness over future rewards. They consistently put off pleasure in
the name of work, virtue, or future happiness—but eventually, they regret their decisions. Kivetz calls
this condition 
hyperopia—
a fancy way of saying farsighted. Most people, as we’ve seen, are
perpetually nearsighted. When the promise of reward is in front of their eyes, they cannot see past it
to the value of delaying gratification. People who suffer from hyperopia are chronically farsighted—
they cannot see the value of giving in today. This is as big a problem as being nearsighted; both lead
to disappointment and unhappiness in the long run.
For people who have trouble saying yes to temptation, giving in requires as much self-control as
saying no does for the rest of us. They must turn every strategy in this chapter on its head. People who
are hyperopic—unlike the myopic majority—must precommit to indulgence. For example, you might
choose a gift certificate over cash back when redeeming credit card reward points. That way, you
will be forced to treat yourself to a luxury instead of squirreling away the cash for a future emergency.
(However, you also need to make sure the gift certificate doesn’t languish in the kitchen drawer, going
unused because it never seems like the right time to splurge.) You can also use reframing to help make
better decisions, just like people who want to avoid giving in to immediate gratification. Instead of
focusing on the cost of an indulgence, the hyperopic person needs to reframe it as an investment. You
might imagine how much pleasure you will receive from it over time, or think about the indulgence as
a necessary way to restore yourself for work. (Marketers are well aware of this need, and are happy
to position their luxury products in a way that reduces consumers’ guilt.) And when you think about
how your decisions today will affect your future self ’s happiness, you must imagine the regret you
will feel if you do not indulge today.
I confess, I can get a little hyperopic myself. When I need to remind myself to indulge, I think back
to a bottle of champagne that I carried around for five years. It was given to me by my boss when I
received a fellowship to attend graduate school. When she handed it to me with a congratulatory note,
it didn’t feel right to break the bottle open. I was nervous about whether I would succeed in grad
school, and in my mind, getting in was just the first hurdle. I told myself I’d drink it when I arrived at
Stanford and felt settled in. So the bottle drove cross-country with me, from Boston to Northern
California. I settled in to the psychology department, but the time still didn’t feel right to drink the
champagne. I hadn’t done anything yet to celebrate. Maybe at the end of the first year, or when I
published my first paper.
Well, that bottle of champagne moved with me four more times. Each time I packed it up, I thought,
I’ll feel like I deserve to crack it open when I pass the next hurdle.
It wasn’t until after I submitted
my dissertation and received my diploma that I finally pulled the bottle out. By that time, it was
undrinkable. As I poured it down the sink, I vowed to never let another bottle go to waste, or another
milestone go uncelebrated.