Hi my name is Hedy Kober. And I'm psychologist and a cognitive
therapist scientist at Yale University. And if you remember one thing from my
talk today, let it be this. If you want to you can train yourself to
have better self-control. But before we start going to take a step
back and try to define, what is self-control?
I like to think about it in a few different ways.
Self control, or self regulation, I am going to use these terms interchangeably,
is what you exercise when you want to change something about how you'd
otherwise think, feel or behave in any given situation.
And you can think about situations when you need to use self control as those in
which you have options for your emotions, your thoughts or your behaviors.
And you need to exert some effort in choosing one over the other.
You might ask yourself why would I need to exert some effort?
Well, typically is because one option is harder to choose.
And that's typically the one that's better for you in the long term.
Now, you may have heard self-control defined as a set of problems that
differentiate between what's now and what's later.
And so the idea is that one of the options comes naturally in this moment.
like when you're tempted by cake, and you really want to eat it and it looks really
good. But the other option is to control
yourself, and you need to exert some effort not to be tempted by this cake.
Now, self-control can be exercised in different domains, as I've already
alluded to. There's control of thought, for example
when you have a persistent thought. Maybe about something that upset you,
something that didn't go quite as well as you had hoped.
Maybe someone broke your heart. the control of emotions.
Sometimes you have negative emotion. You're angry at someone, you're upset
about something. And there are ways that you can reduce
that kind of negative emotion. Of course, there's also control of
craving or temptation. Which is kind of the canonical way that
we think about self control. And one of the ways that I'm going to
talk about it today. And then there's the control of behavior,
which is really linked to, to, to these other forms of control.
and this includes how to stay focused on a task.
But it also includes choosing to behave in a particular way that's better for
you. Or stopping yourself from behaving in
ways that are slightly less optimal. And the amazing thing is that we have to
exercise self control all the time in many, many different kinds of contexts.
For example, you are exercising self control right now because you're not
taking a nap and you're probably not eating cake.
You're watching me talk about self control and that probably requires some
self control on your part. and to illustrate that, I want you to
find more examples of when you exercise self control successfully in the last
month. So you probably though of a few times
When you've exercised self control successfully and you can give yourself a
point for each one of these instances. for example, maybe you criticized someone
in your head. But you didn't tell them about it because
you thought it was going to hurt their feelings.
Maybe you were really tired, even exhausted, but you still brush your teeth
before bedtime. how about you got irritated walking down
the street, someone bumped into you. Maybe you were in traffic.
But you didn't yell at anybody, you didn't act on it in any kind of way.
and all of these are examples of successful self-control, and good for
you. Of course, the other side of that is also
really important. We, not infrequently fail at
self-control, and the classic way to think about this are times when you've
done that recently. Right?
So maybe you texted while you were driving or you were tempted to eat
dessert even when you thought you shouldn't.
And what you can see from both kinds of these examples is that self control is
part of almost everything that you do. And that you do this with varying levels
of success. But there's something that is central and
really important to many, many aspects of your life.
And indeed, research has shown repeatedly that being able to exercise self-control
effectively is associated with long-term health, long-term happiness and long-term
success. And it doesn't mean that exercising
self-control in a particular moment would make you happy.
But people who exercise self-control in general.tend to behave more consistently
with their long term goals and are typically happier and healthier as a
result. In the first set of experiments that
really showed that nicely was Walter Mischel's Marshmallow Test Experiments.
And in these experiments, kids are put in a room in front of a table where a
marshmallow or a cookie are presented and they're given a choice.
You can either eat the marshmallow now. Or you can wait 15 minutes and get two
marshmallows. And for kids, marshmallows are really
exciting. They love marshmallows.
If you've ever met kids, you know that's true.
And so, for them, the temptation to eat the marshmallow or the cookie right now
is really high. And the question is, of course, can they
regulate their craving? Can they control their behavior and delay
their gratification? And before I tell you what the answer is,
I want you to think back, for when you were a kid.
Three, or four, or five, just like the kids in these experiments, do you think
you'd be able to wait for a second marshmallow or a second cookie?
Well, I wanted to know what the answer was for me and I thought about it and I
wasn't exactly sure. And so, I called my mother.
And my mother said this. She said, you were so stubborn as a
child, that maybe to prove a point you might have waited, but you also had a
really, really hard time delaying gratification.
And then, she thought about it another moment and she said, and if it was
pretzels, there was no way that you would have waited because they were your
favorite. And, of course, I'm just one example.
But the idea is that there's variability. And the results in these experiments were
exactly that. Kids varied in their ability to wait.
Some kids couldn't wait at all. As soon as the experimenter left the
room, [SOUND] immediately they ate the cookie or they ate the marshmallow.
Other kids managed to wait the entire 15 minutes, and at the end of the experiment
they got two cookies or two marshmallows. But the second and really, really
important finding is that the number of minutes that kids waited ended up
predicting a whole host of outcomes for their lives.
They were better l-, better rated by their teachers in school just a few years
later. They got better SAT scores in high
school. They made more money, they, didn't go to
jail and didn't use as many drugs when they were in their 20s and 30s.
So many many long time successes were associated with better self control.
And I'll get back to these experiments in just a few minutes to make another point.
But what we can learn from this now is that the ability to exercise self control
is incredibly important. Has great implications for life.
And in fact, a recent set of experiments has shown that self control is a better
predictor of school performance in kids than even IQ.
And as a researcher, as soon as I realized how important self control was,
I knew that we needed to find out more about how it works.
And I started reading a lot about it and one of the metaphors that I came to
really like was the metaphor of self control as a mental muscle.
And I really like it because self control ends up being like a mental muscle in
three important ways. The first way is that if in any given
moment, if you exercise the right technique or the right strategy, you can
lift much heavier weights. You can do a lot more with this muscle.
The second way is that this muscle doesn't have, infinite capacity.
It's somewhat limited. if you use the muscle a lot earlier in
the day, you might have less ability to use it later in the day, just like with
real muscles. And the third thing is really cool, I
think. Potentially, the most amazing, which is,
you can teach yourself or train yourself to have much stronger mental muscle self
control. That will allow you to do much more over
time. Okay, let's break it down.
So the first was technique, right. And the idea that if you learn the right
technique and exercise it in the moment you can exhibit much better self control.
There are already strategies you can set up ahead of time to ensure that you'll
have better self control and one such strategy is to use reward substitution.
Maybe there's something that you don't want to do.
You can promise yourself a reward. instead of the task itself.
Or in my case, for example, every time that I submit my taxes, I take myself out
to a really nice dinner at my favorite restaurant.
Another way to do this is to set a contract ahead of time with yourself,
sometimes called Ulysses contracts. Where, if you don't do something that you
maybe want to do or need to do you will incur some kind of penalty.
So a friend of mine, for example, had a deal with her husband, if she doesn't go
to the gym three times a week, he ends up donating to the charity that she really,
really, doesn't like. And so this motivates her to go to the
gym. But we can't use this for everything,
right? Imagine you're already at dinner, you
didn't set up a contract. But you really want to make sure that you
don't get tempted by this luscious, wonderful cake that just arrived at your
table. How do you do this?
Is there a way in the moment to control your craving and delay your
gratification? Well, it turns out that even from these
Walter-Michele marshmallow experiments, we know that that's true.
Right? Some kids could really wait as much as 15
minutes. And so adults must be able to do that as
well. Well, the cooler finding, I think, in
these marshmallow experiments, is that even the kids who couldn't wait, if the
experimenter taught them some strategies right then and there.
Suddenly, they were able to wait much longer.
Can we do the same thing with adults? Well, the first thing that's difficult to
do with adults is to get them to really want marshmallows.
So we can't get them to want to devour marshmallows, but we can tempt them with
other kinds of foods. And this is really how food commercials
work, right? You see an ad for this creamy, beautiful
ice cream, and you think to yourself,[SOUND] that looks so good.
I want to eat that right now. and so that's exactly what I did in some
of the experiments that we ran in my lab. We show people pictures of food.
We show cigarette smokers pictures of cigarettes.
We take individuals who smoke crack cocaine and we show them pictures of
crack cocaine and other people smoking crack cocaine and what results is a state
of craving. They're really tempted.
They want to eat. They want to smoke.
What we do then is we teach them a very simple strategy for regulation of
craving. We call this the Regulation of Craving
task or the ROC task. And what we tell them to do is we tell
them to think about all the reasons that they have not to eat the chocolate cake,
not to smoke cigarettes, not to smoke crack, right?
Think about the negative consequences that they might incur if they engage in
this behavior. so, for example.
If I, if I were a participant in my own experiment, and I saw a picture of
chocolate cake. I might think to myself, well it looks
really good. But if I eat it it might be bad for my
weight. It will probably over time, raise my
blood pressure. be bad for my health.
I might have a higher risk of diabetes. It's really bad for me.
I really, really don't want to do this. Not to mention, I might feel bad about
myself if I eat this cake. And what did we find?
We found that when individuals use this strategy to regulate their craving.
they actually reported much lower craving.
And even more than reporting lower craving, they reported that they wanted
to eat this food less, they wanted to smoke less, they wanted to engage less in
these behaviors when they thought about these consequences.
And then, when we looked at their brain activity, what we found is that using
these techniques allows them to recruit parts of their brain, the prefrontal
cortex, which we know is associated with better self control.
And in turn what we saw is a reduction in brain activity in regions of their brain
that we know gives rise to craving. So in using these strategies they were
better able to control their craving and they were able to change the way their
brain worked in that moment. Now, of course, it, this didn't work
perfectly. It didn't work for everybody.
But it worked for a lot of our participants.
And so, this is something that you might want to try next time you're in that kind
of situation. Now, the second thing that makes self
control like a mental muscle, is the fact that the ability of this muscle might be
limited. For example, when you go to the gym you
maybe can do a certain set of exercises with the same muscle, but you can't
really go on forever. And maybe after you finish being at the
gym, you can't really lift as many heavy boxes as you would if you hadn't gone to
the gym and exercised your muscle. Well, self control turns out to be
similar. There's now many, many studies that have
shown, that when you use self-control later in the day, you might have a little
bit less self-control available. and there are different ideas about why
this happens, but either way, what I want to tell you today is that you can really
anticipate that this is going to happen. Notice when you feel like people call
this depleted and that there are things that you can do to make this better.
So for example one finding is that if people pace themselves, knowing that you
have to go to dinner tonight and exercise self-control in the face of dessert.
you can pace yourself throughout the day and not use as many of your self control
resources so that you have some spare left.
the second thing is that people found that positive emotion reverse this effect
of depletion. So if you feel like you've already
exercised a lot of self control, maybe you don't have a lot left right in this
moment. you can watch a funny movie.
It turns out that, after this funny movie, a lot of people show kind of a
return of this self control strength. The third finding that had come out
fairly recently, is the idea that individuals who believe that exercising
self control won't deplete them, don't get quite as depleted.
And you can try to do this, in your own time.
The third and I think most amazing way in which self-control is like a muscle is
the fact that you can train it. Now, we know from clinical psychology
that there are treatments that help individuals exercise better self-control.
For example, in a treatment called cognitive behavioral therapy for
addictions or substance abuse disorders, individuals who use drugs learn how to
use the same strategy that I told you about just a few minutes ago.
to reduce their craving for drugs, and reduce their drug use.
And indeed that kind of treatment is one of the best treatments we have for
addiction. And in a finding from Cathy Carol's lab
at Yale we recently learned that those individuals who learn how to to use a
strategy the best at the end of treatment.
Are also those individuals who end up using the least drugs and doing the best
over time. we also have shown that individuals who
undergo this treatment actually show changes in the prefrontal cortex from
before to after treatment. With a prefront, their prefrontal cortex
actually becomes more efficient after treatment.
So more able to carry out these self control operations.
But of course, these treatments are complex they're long, they often happen
over the course of several months. What about briefer training self-control,
can that help if you don't go through an entire treatment that have other kinds of
components to it? Well luckily, we have evidence now, that
there's shorter kinds of training you can do to improve your self-control.
For example, in a series of studies that we recently completed in my lab, we've
shown that with half an hour of training. using the kind of strategy that I told
you about we can train cigarette smokers to regulate their craving.
And over the course of the next two weeks, with just half an hour of
training, they report smoking a lot less. So we are able to help individuals
control their smoking by training them in using this particular strategy.
Now, of course, this is a very direct kind of practice, right, you practice
using a strategy To regulate your craving, and you get better at regulating
your craving and you smoke less. But it turns out that there's also
indirect training that you can do. And training in smalls acts of self
control can also strengthen your self control muscle and help you have better
self control in general. So what are some examples?
some researchers have asked people to turn open doors or open cabinets for an
entire week with their non-dominant hand. So if you're right-handed, you would do
this with your left hand, if you're left-handed, you would do this with your
right hand. And it turns out that at the end of this
week, people were better at exercising self-control in general.
Other kinds of exercises include going to the gym regularly, refraining from eating
sweets and even using a hand grip. All of these kind of training improve
self-control in general. Of course, nothing that I told you today
will help you if you're missing one key ingredient, and that is the motivation to
change. Well it turns out, that if you don't have
the motivation to change, how are you going to learn the right techniques?
and if you do have the motivation to change not only can you learn the right
techniques, but you can apply them in the moment.
You can prepare yourself for being depleted and counteract it if you need
to. And of course, practice, practice,
practice to increase your self-control. this is the one thing that you are
supposed to remember from this lecture. If you want to, you can work to have
better self-control. And to illustrate this importance of
motivation, I'm going to tell you the one joke that I know to tell.
How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but only if the light bulb really wants to change.
Thank you and good luck.