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

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: PRECOMMIT YOUR
FUTURE SELF
Ready to put the squeeze on your future tempted self? This week, commit yourself from a clear
distance. Pick one of the following strategies and apply it to your willpower challenge.
1. Create a new default. Make choices in advance and from a clear distance, before your
future self is blinded by temptation. For example, you can pack a healthy lunch before
you’re hungry and salivating over take-out menus. You can schedule and prepay for
anything from personal training sessions to dental visits. For your willpower challenge,
what can you do to make it easier for your future self to act on your rational preferences?
2. Make it more difficult to reverse your preferences. Like Cortés sinking his ships, find a
way to eliminate the easiest route to giving in. Get rid of temptation in your home or
office. Don’t carry your credit cards when you go shopping, and only bring as much cash
as you want to spend. Put your alarm clock across the room so you’ll have to get out of
bed to turn it off. None of these things make it impossible to change your mind—but they
will at least make it damn inconvenient. What can you do that would put a delay or
roadblock between your feelings of temptation and your ability to act on them?
3. Motivate your future self. There is no shame in using a carrot or a stick to nudge yourself
toward long-term health and happiness. So argues Yale economist Ian Ayres, who
created the innovative website stickk .com to help people precommit their future selves
to change. His site emphasizes the stick—finding a way to make immediate gratification
more painful if you give in. Whether it’s taking bets on whether you’ll gain weight
(something Ayres did, to great success) or donating money to a charity if you don’t meet
your predetermined goals, you can add a “tax” to the immediate reward. (Ayres even
recommends choosing an “anti-charity”—an organization you don’t support—so the cost
of failure is more painful.) The reward’s value may stay the same, but the cost of giving
in makes immediate gratification far less tempting.

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