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

RESOLVING TO FEEL GOOD
So far, we’ve seen the many ways that feeling bad can lead to giving in. Stress sets off cravings and
makes our brains even more attracted to temptation. Reminders of our mortality can send us searching
for the comfort of food, shopping, or cigarettes. Guilt and self-criticism? That’s a quick path to “What
the hell, I might as well indulge some more.”
Sometimes, though, feeling bad pushes us in a very different direction. Overwhelmed by guilt,
anxiety, and stress, we turn to the one thing that really does feel good: resolving to change. University
of Toronto psychologists Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman—the researchers who first identified the
what-the-hell effect—have discovered that we are most likely to decide to change when we are at a
low point: feeling guilty about a binge, staring at a credit card bill, waking up hung over, or worried
about our health. Setting a resolution offers an immediate sense of relief and control. We don’t have to
believe that we are the person who made that mistake; we can become a completely different person.
Vowing to change fills us with hope. We love to imagine how making the change will transform our
lives, and we fantasize about the person we will become. Research shows that deciding to start a diet
makes people feel stronger, and planning to exercise makes people feel taller. (Nobody said these
fantasies were realistic.) People will treat us differently, we tell ourselves. 
Everything
will be
different. The bigger the goal, the bigger the burst of hope. And so when we decide to change, it’s
tempting to give ourselves some very large assignments. Why set a modest goal when setting a
gigantic goal will make us feel even better? Why start small when you can dream big?
Unfortunately, the promise of change—like the promise of reward and the promise of relief—rarely
delivers what we’re expecting. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets
us up to feel much worse later on. The 
decision
to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you
get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change
can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful
fantasies (“I lost five pounds, and I still have a crappy job!”). As we face our first setbacks, the
initial feel-good rush of deciding to change is replaced with disappointment and frustration. Failing to
meet our expectations triggers the same old guilt, depression, and self-doubt, and the emotional payoff
of vowing to change is gone. At this point, most people will abandon their efforts altogether. It’s only
when we are feeling out of control and in need of another hit of hope that we’ll once again vow to
change—and start the cycle all over.
Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But
that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and
these are not the same thing. If all you care about is the feeling of hope, this is not an irrational
strategy. Resolving to change is, for most people, the best part of the change process. It’s all downhill
after that: having to exert self-control, saying no when you want to say yes, saying yes when you want
to say no. The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to
the rush of imagining that you will change. And so it’s not only easier, but also much more fun, to milk
the 
promise
of change for all it’s worth, without the messy business of following through. That is why
so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to
make a change for good. The high we get from imagining our own extreme makeovers is a difficult
drug to quit.
False hope syndrome is especially sneaky because it masquerades as self-control. In fact, it does

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such a good job fooling us, I’d wager that while you were reading this very section, it took you a
moment to realize that I was describing another willpower trap, not the silver lining of feeling bad.
And that’s exactly why the promise of change is worth looking at. There is a fine line between the
motivation we need to make a change, and the kind of unrealistic optimism that can sabotage our
goals. We need to believe that change is possible; without hope, we’d resign ourselves to the way
things are. But we must avoid the common trap of using the promise of change to fix our feelings, not
to fix our behaviors. Otherwise, we can turn what looks like willpower into just another version of a
rat pressing a lever, hoping this is the time we get the reward.