Self Control Guide
Francisco Raya
Self-control is the ability to control our feelings, emotions, and reactions. Many people struggle with self-control. For example, we need self-control when it comes to staying off social media while at work, sticking to a budget, and regulating our sugar intake.
Motivation is important in honing self-control skills. Figuring out what motivates you the most is key to accomplishing your goals. Otherwise, what is all this work for? When you look at the bigger picture instead of every detail needed to cross the finish line, you'll find yourself more motivated to get things done.
For example, when working on a long-term project, it's easy to get frustrated by the many small steps, meetings, and approvals required to finish it. Instead, periodically reminding yourself and others on the team of the end goal can help promote motivation.
Executives and managers should keep this in mind: the more you push employees to work extra hours and answer messages and calls all the time, the more likely employees will be stressed and unhappy. As a result, they may end up cutting corners and engaging in unethical behavior.
Do you encourage your team to prioritize sleep? Do you set a good example? Tired workers are not good for business. Take note of when employees are overworked, and encourage them to openly communicate about it so you can support them accordingly.
Self-regulation is a great way to increase self-control because it helps you take control of your feelings and actions. Someone who lacks self-regulation can have difficulty dealing with stress, anger, or anxiety.
Short bouts of moderately intense exercise can help boost your self-control. No matter how busy you are, plan to include a short burst of exercise in your daily routine. Take note of how you feel after exercise, and you may find you have more energy throughout the day.
Accountability is key. There are many ways to outsource self-control support, including apps that you can download to your phone. They can be helpful when meeting a work deadline, ensuring that you never miss a workout, and keeping track of your meals and spending.
For example, do you react impulsively to issues? Do you pause to listen to others' feedback? Are you able to stay composed and positive in stressful circumstances? Can you exercise patience in annoying situations? The ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check is the mark of a seasoned leader.
For example, some people prefer not to make a decision at all, while others may make impulsive or irrational decisions. If possible, avoid making important decisions at the end of the day when your brain is exhausted. "Sleeping on it" can be very helpful.
Additionally, automation is your friend. Put at least some aspects of life on default so you have less decisions to worry about. That can mean using apps or simple decisions you make for yourself in advance. Steve Jobs, for example, always dressed in jeans and black turtlenecks. See how you can simplify decision-making with some simple hacks.
You can find yourself losing self-control if the task at hand seems unbearable. Setting actionable SMART goals can help you avoid being overwhelmed. "SMART" goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound.
Setting achievable and realistic goals can help you build discipline to complete everyday tasks in both your personal and professional life. Accomplishing your dreams, no matter the size, will result in higher motivation and increased self-control moving forward.
The takeaway: Self-control can be improved. Figure out what motivates you the most, keep an eye on the big picture, and establish SMART goals to reach key milestones. Maintain a healthy lifestyle with good sleep and some exercise. When you learn how to have self-control, you'll find it much easier to go about your day-to-day life both personally and professionally.
Several years ago, a group of elementary assistant principals that I was a part of got together to share ideas and learn from each other. One idea that stuck with me was shared by Katie Herrera at Pope Elementary. We were discussing how many of the behaviors we were trying to teach our students really boiled down to needing to improve their self-control.
Katie explained how she would blow bubbles for her students, but tell them NOT to dance around or pop them. Then, she would explain to them that THAT was self-control. They would discuss how it felt and what they had to do to keep themselves from popping the bubbles. She would explain how they could also show self-control in other situations.
In a recent PBIS team meeting, we started to discuss how we needed a way to help our students grow their self-control. I decided to put together a slide deck to share with teachers at my school so they could easily lead the class through this lesson with little preparation/planning ahead of time. Check out the slide deck below and grab a copy of your own to edit by clicking this link!
Meredith Akers is an Elementary Principal who believes that the best way to help others grow is to build relationships, offer support, serve, love, and be transparent about how she is working to grow herself. Her daily aspiration is to make a positive impact and to leave those she serves better off for having interacted with her.
Successful self-control means sacrificing the immediate pleasure (chocolate cake) and choosing the delayed reward (healthy weight), while self-control failure means sacrificing the delayed reward and choosing the immediate pleasure.3
Name anything important to your life and self-control plays a major role.5 In an extensive longitudinal study spanning across three decades,6 researchers from Duke university followed 1,000 children. At the beginning, they assessed their self-control skills, intelligence and social class, and examined what impact these characteristics had on their life success. Can you guess which of these factors was most important?
In general, people with better self-control eat more healthily,7 do more exercise,8 sleep better,9 drink less alcohol,10 smoke fewer cigarettes,11 achieve higher grades at university,12 have more peaceful relationships,13 are more financially secure,14 and enjoy stronger physical and mental health.15,16
You wake up, the alarm blares and you drag yourself out of bed. Work is exhausting. Your boss piles on more deadlines and the stress ratchets higher. You planned to exercise and read a book when you got home, but now all you can think about is opening a beer and watching Netflix.
Do you remember your first commute to work? You probably had to pay a lot of attention on the way not to get lost. After taking the same route many times, however, the commute became automatic. Now you can listen to music, speak on the phone, rehearse your speech, or plan your day, all while driving and navigating automatically.
Over millennia, natural selection has built us with many automatic behaviours and drives which helped us survive and reproduce. Although these behaviours served us well in the past, they were designed for the environments our ancestors lived in, which are completely different from the ones we live in today.
The result of this mismatch between our environments and our programming is that if we give a free rein to our automatic drives, we end up lying on the couch munching on biscuits and ice cream. If we want to eat healthy and take enough exercise, however, we have to constantly inhibit our automatic tendencies, which places a burden our brains.32,33
This is exactly what Wegner found in his original study on thought suppression.39 In the study, he asked participants to ring a bell whenever they thought of a white bear. Surprisingly, the participants who were explicitly instructed not to think about a white bear ended up ringing the bell more often than those who were encouraged to think about it.
To directly test the effect of thought suppression on self-control, scientists asked participants to either suppress or verbalize thinking about chocolate for five minutes. After that, they could eat as much chocolate as they liked. The suppression group ended up consuming twice as much chocolate at the end of the experiment.43
In another study, researchers asked smokers to either think about smoking as much as they could (expressing thoughts), to suppress all thoughts about smoking for 3 weeks, or to do nothing in particular (control group). Which group do you think ended up consuming most cigarettes during the third week?
Whereas in the first week, the suppression group smoke fewer cigarettes than the other two groups, the effect reversed in the remaining two weeks (ironic rebound), so the suppression group ended up consuming most cigarettes. Surprisingly, smokers who actively thought about smoking did not consume more cigarettes than the control group.44
To test this popular wisdom, researchers followed students for the full length of a semester. At the start of the semester, the students had to list 4 important personal goals (e.g. getting a specific GPA, improving their health, learning a language, etc.). The researchers tracked their goal progress while measuring how much they tried to resist temptations that conflicted with their goals.49
One would expect that the students who put in more effort into resisting temptations would be more successful in achieving their goals. Surprisingly, no such relationship was found. Regardless of how hard the students tried to resist, it had no positive effect whatsoever on their goals.
Initial studies did show that when participants trained self-control, they became better at it. For example, smokers interested in quitting smoking who regularly squeezed a hand grip for 2 weeks remained abstinent for longer than the control group.51
Nevertheless, a recent meta-analysis of many studies has found that the effect of self-control training is rather small and may well be due to researcher bias and placebo effects, rather than an actual improvement in self-control.52 All in all, the evidence for self-control training is flimsy.
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