Willpower: why being hard on yourself makes you give up

In September you made up your mind: the gym four times a week, no more takeout, three hundred a month into savings. The first week goes smoothly. Then on Thursday a call runs until eight and the workout is gone. Friday night you're wiped out and you order sushi, "might as well." Saturday a few too many things end up in your cart; on Sunday your running shoes never leave the closet. Monday morning you look in the mirror and decide you just don't have any willpower. Then you pick up your phone and draw up a new plan, even more ambitious than the last.

The "what the hell" effect

Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist who teaches a course on willpower at Stanford that became one of the most popular the university's continuing studies program has ever offered. In her book The Willpower Instinct she devotes an entire chapter to what happens after the first slip.

Two researchers at the University of Toronto, Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman, named it the "what-the-hell effect." They first spotted it in dieters. A slice of pizza or a bite of cake was enough to make them feel so guilty that the whole diet felt blown. And at that point, they might as well finish the cake.

The same mechanism shows up everywhere. A study of drinkers found that people who drank more than they meant to didn't just wake up hungover: they felt guilty and ashamed. And the worse they felt, the more they drank the next night. In another experiment, Polivy and Herman rigged a scale so dieters thought they'd gained five pounds. Instead of buckling down, they turned to food for comfort.

Here's the point: it isn't the first slip that brings you down, it's the shame that follows. And often the fastest way to feel better is the very thing you were trying to avoid.

The doughnut experiment

If guilt sabotages self-control, two American psychologists, Claire Adams and Mark Leary, wondered whether its opposite might help. To find out, they invited young women who were watching their weight into the lab and asked each of them to eat a whole doughnut in four minutes, then drink a full glass of water, so they'd feel uncomfortably full.

Then, before a supposed candy taste test, half of them heard a simple message: lots of people feel guilty after eating a doughnut, so don't be too hard on yourself, everyone indulges sometimes. The other half heard nothing. Faced with three bowls of candy, the women who had been let off the hook ate 28 grams. The others ate almost 70.

Common sense says the opposite should happen: "don't be too hard on yourself" sounds like permission to overdo it. Instead, it was guilt that drove people to eat more.

Why being hard on yourself weakens your willpower

Many of us are convinced we need a stern voice in our heads. "If I don't keep myself in line, I'll fall apart." "If I forgive myself, I'll just do it again." McGonigal says that whenever she brings up forgiveness with her students, those are the objections she hears.

The research says otherwise: self-criticism goes hand in hand with less motivation and worse self-control. In a study at Carleton University in Ottawa, the students who were hardest on themselves for putting off studying for their first exam ended up procrastinating more on the exams that followed. The ones who forgave themselves got back on track.

There's more. People who look at their own mistakes with compassion tend to take more responsibility for them, are more open to advice, and learn more from the experience. The reason is simple. If a slip doesn't make you feel like a failure, you can look it in the eye and figure out what happened. If it fills you with shame, your only goal becomes making that feeling stop. And the quickest way to do that, once again, is to give in.

The New Year's resolution trap

There's one more piece. Polivy and Herman found that we tend to decide to change right when we hit bottom: after a binge, staring at a credit card statement, the morning after one drink too many. Deciding to change feels good instantly, and the bigger the goal, the bigger the rush of hope. So we set enormous goals.

Then reality kicks in: the first slip, the disappointment. We quit. And the next time we feel low, we start over with an even bigger resolution. The two researchers call it false hope syndrome. If you recognize yourself in the "starting Monday, everything changes" routine, Monday isn't the problem: starting from a fresh date genuinely helps, as the fresh start effect shows. The problem is starting over every time with an impossible plan.

The book tells the story of Ben, a twenty-four-year-old teacher who dreamed of becoming a novelist. He'd committed to finishing his novel by the end of summer: ten pages a day. He'd write two or three, then feel so far behind that he'd skip the next day entirely. He kept telling himself a real writer would manage it, and eventually he gave up. When he tried looking at himself the way he'd look at one of his students in the same spot, he realized he would never say "who are you kidding?" to them. He went back to the novel with a more realistic commitment: writing once a week.

Your plan for the next slip

The next slip is coming; it's only a matter of time. But you can decide right now how you'll handle it.

1. See it coming. Ask yourself when you're most likely to give in: Friday night, tired, after a rough day, when your plans fall apart. Picture the scene and decide what you'll do. According to the research McGonigal cites, predicting how and when you'll be tempted makes you more likely to keep a resolution.
2. When it happens, ask what you're feeling. Disappointment, frustration, exhaustion. Notice it without running from it.
3. Remember that everyone slips. A setback doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It just means you're human.
4. Talk to yourself the way you'd talk to a friend. What would you tell them if they were in your shoes? Probably: "Okay, it happened. Tomorrow we pick it back up."

Then start again from the next step, not from next Monday.