Heroic Interview: Willpower with Roy Baumeister

You're listening to Willpower, an Optimal Living.

Interview with Roy Baumeister and Brian Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Roy Baumeister, who literally wrote the book on Willpower, which is the book we're going to focus on today. He has written, at the time, he wrote Willpower, over 450 scientific publications. He's one of the world's most cited psychologists. And as you know, if you listen to much of this stuff, willpower and the Greek idea of arete is one of my favorite concepts. And I'm truly just thrilled and honored to be chatting with you, Roy. And I appreciate you taking the time.

Glad to be here. Thanks, Brian.

Well, the subtitle of Willpower is Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Can you talk to us about what willpower is and why it's the greatest human strength?

Yes, willpower is the capacity or the energy that enables you to change what you're doing. I think of the simplest psychological part of self control is just overriding one response to do something else. Whether it's an impulse that you restrain or changing your emotional state better or worse, or controlling your thoughts so that you focus on what you're doing or remain concentrated or whatever, or also regulating your performance to try to make yourself keep going when you're tired, to find the right balance between working fast and working carefully, performing up to your capabilities. All, all these things I think are important now as to why it's the greatest human strength. John Tierney, the New York Times writer I had the good luck to be working with on that book. I mean, that was a phrase he came up with. And as a scientist I thought, well, we got to justify that. But I think you can make a good case that it is. It's one of the keys to the success of human culture, which is how our species solves the problems of survival and reproduction by creating these fancy social structures. But they only work if most of the people follow the rules most of the time. And you have to respect others property and do your job and pay your bills and so forth, and then it works and everyone's better off. But force a culture to work, a great deal of self control is required. Sometimes I have people do a thought experiment to imagine, suppose they took an ape or a gorilla and gave it a place in the human world and gave it a job and a car and an apartment and so on. You know, it really wouldn't work out, and it's probably its Inability to bring its behavior in line with the rules of society that would fall apart. If we all have enough self control to kind of do our bit, then we have all this marvelous progress of civilization. So in that sense, it's the greatest human strength. Another salient comparison for me is I started off my career doing research on self esteem. And we initially were all quite taken with the idea that if we could improve people's self esteem, it would solve a lot of individuals and society's problems. There was very tempting evidence for this because low self esteem is correlated with all sorts of bad outcomes, Whether it's a drug addiction or victimization or whatever. But over time, it gradually emerged that self esteem is really a result, it's not a cause. So it's just tempting in the school that, yeah, kids who do bad in school have a little bit worse self esteem. So I thought, well, if we could raise their self esteem, maybe it will cause them to do better in school. But it doesn't. The doing well in school leads to higher self esteem, but it doesn't work in reverse. So, well, looks like you really have to do the math problems after all, rather than just believe that you're great at it. So with some disappointment and reluctance, a lot of us kind of gave up on self esteem. But self control seems like the real thing is much more powerful in terms of actually producing benefits than down the road. That's what I tell teachers and parents and so on. If you want the best for the youngsters, forget about self esteem and concentrate on self control. It's better for them and better for society. There's more evidence of this coming out all the time. People with good self control do better in work, they do better at school. They're also more popular, they have better relationships, Other people like them better, they're healthier. Both mental and physical health improves with higher self self control, make more money in life, fewer behavioral problems, and at the far end, you actually live longer. People with high self control have significantly longer greater longevity, which is one of the gold standards for health outcomes, of course. So it's really what's not to love there. The other way I put it sometimes is psychologists really found two traits that seem to predict success in life in every place they've been tested. And one is intelligence and the other is self control. We've been trying to increase intelligence for decades and it doesn't seem like there's a lot that can be done there in any lasting way. You can give kids a head start and so on, but that seems to fade out as soon as the programs end. But self control does at least seem that you can improve it in a somewhat more lasting way. And now we're looking for bigger and more ambitious studies to be done to verify this. But that's part of what's exciting to me is that understanding self control really offers a serious promise for how we could help people live better, happier, healthier lives.

Yeah, that's really exciting. Is it true? I think it was Martin Seligman who said something along the lines of self control or willpower out predicts IQ by a factor of two for academic performance. Is that, is that accurate?

He did have one study showing that it's hard to make a sweeping statement that strong. I think need a lot more data. But Dr. Selman is certainly right. The evidence does suggest that self control is stronger than intelligence. Ideally you want to have some of both. But it's ironic. Our measures of intelligence were designed to predict who's going to do well in school. And that's what IQ testing is basically for. And so for him and others to come along with a self control measure and say, well look, this actually predicts better than the IQ measure for predicting how kids do in school, that's really.

Quite amazing and exciting because we can all build our self control, right?

Yes, I think so. Yes, I believe that. So, yes, a very promising way forward.

Wonderful. Well, I'd love to talk about some of those practical ways we can build self control. One of the phrases that you use with John in the book is the people with good self control use it more for offense than defense. Can you talk to us about that?

Yes, this is something that's come up in the last few years. I mean, doing self control studies since about 1990s. So I been working on it for a long time. And yet a real change in my understanding came just in the last few years. Partly it was a big project looking at the personality differences. And we all know some people have better self control than others. And we wondered, do they just have more willpower? Which was the natural first assumption. Somehow these people are at resisting temptation and pushing themselves to do the right thing. And yet that seems not to be true. They have maybe the same amount of willpower, they just use it more effectively. What we discovered was that people with good self control, it's not that they use it for these heroic acts like working all night or resisting a huge temptation or something like that. Rather they use it to establish good habits and break bad ones. So they set up their life. So it kind of Runs on automatic pilot and kind of gets them where they need to go. We all associate willpower, for example, with dieting, including smoking and such things. Well, sure enough, in the big compilation of all the research results, yeah, people with good self control are a little better at those things, but those are small effects. The big effects show up in things like work and school, where the were the biggest ones. And there it's not. You might think, oh, what do you need great self control for to do that? It's well, when you have the paper due tomorrow and you haven't started, you can force yourself to work all night and get it done on time and meet that deadline. I mean, that might feel like a bigger version of self control, but that's not what people with good self control do. Rather, they develop good work habits, get going ahead of the deadline so they don't find themselves in that position of the report's due tomorrow and I haven't started. They get going early and then it's not as stressful. People with good self control, we're finding all these things. They have less guilt because they don't screw up as much. They have less stress in their lives. Again, goes from this is what we call playing offense rather than playing defense, which is to count on your self control to bail you out of a tight spot. Rather use it often. We don't get into a tight spot in the first place. And it works. Also, I mean, I mentioned the work in school examples, but some of the same things in relationships and personal adjustment practices and so on. Working through the habits. As I said, it was a basic change in my thinking right about the time we wrote that willpower book. Come to realize that this is what people with good self control do. It's not necessarily having more willpower. It's just using it to set your life to run properly.

That's really exciting. Using it wisely to, as you said, have your life run on autopilot. The book has a ton of ideas in terms of ways we can cultivate our willpower. I'd love to chat about a few of my favorites and hear your favorites. One of the big ones that you come back to. Well, actually you start with glucose. I think that was one of the first things that you mentioned. Maybe we'll start there. Eating your way to willpower.

Okay, well, glucose is a chemical in the bloodstream that carries the body's energy around and takes it to the various organs and to the muscles and certainly to the brain. People know the term kind of means sugar, but sugar Is not really the optimal thing to do for energy. We actually use it in the laboratory because it has very fast effect. But if you want to eat to improve your self control, you probably want to eat something with a better glycemic index instead of burning. So you get a quick burst of energy and then a crash, get something that will burn over a longer period of time, like, like protein. Regardless, we stumbled on this somewhat by accident. We were testing a different theory about how self control works, which my students said, well, if resisting temptation depletes your willpower, maybe giving in to temptation will restore and build your willpower. I thought, well, I've heard this before. I didn't think it was going to work. But I said, well, go ahead and try it. Let's collect some data and see if we need to revise our theories. And so he ran a study where he first depleted people's willpower. The way we do these is to have them first exert self control on one task and then after a while we measure how well they perform in terms of self control on a different task. So it doesn't seem like it's the same thing, it's unrelated. And the usual finding is that you use up some of your willpower the first one, so you don't do as well on the second one. In between, Matt Galliott, who was running the study, gave some people ice cream as a treat. So I got to have them indulge in yielding to temptation, so to speak. And it turned out that they did improve in self control. But the idea that this was some kind of pleasure that they indulged in, that, that caused it, that was knocked out by another treatment. We ran in the experiment where some people got something to eat that didn't taste very good, but they also showed improvement. And so well then took out the idea that the pleasure was responsible. And Matt was kind of disappointed. Oh, the experiment didn't work. But I said, well, look though both of these things work compared to the control group who didn't eat anything. Could it just be somehow the food? So he'd been talking about willpower and self control energy, but using that as a metaphor, it's like you feel like you have energy or something like that, but you know, the body does have actual energy that it gets from food. So we started looking into this and nutritionists, without elaborate theory or anything, they collected lots of data on people who have glucose problems or what happens if you give people more or less and they builds up a fair amount of evidence that made it look like at least was there for us to pull together and say, well, I guess when people are having glucose problems, their self control is down. Even beautiful studies like they'll tell a whole class full of students to skip breakfast one day and then they'll all come in and random assignment, half the kids will get breakfast and half of them won't. And then what happens that morning? Well, the kids have had breakfast, they learn better and they behave better than the kids who didn't get anything to eat. And then at 10 o' clock or 10:30 when everybody gets a snack, then everything's fine again and then all the differences vanish. So it really looks like you're going to school without any gas in the tank. You don't have enough energy to fund your self control. And then you don't behave properly and you don't concentrate on what the teacher is saying, you don't learn the lessons and so forth. Anyway, the role of glucose already there was a fair amount there. We did some experiments further to test this too. Now initially we thought it was quite simple that well, your first act of self control uses up the glucose in your bloodstream and you just don't have enough. That's not really right. That is not held up. It's a lot more complicated than that and supposedly should have known. The body is a very complicated system and it has glucose stored in different places and so on. You realize how, how important glucose is. Your body is just designed to conserve it whenever it can. And so these willpower depletion effects, these are mostly your body's conserving energy. It's not running out, it's not in danger. Certainly a modern well fed citizen of the United States or Western Europe or something is in no danger of running out of glucose and not having enough fuel for the brain to operate. But the system we evolved under conditions where you might not get anything to eat tomorrow and there might not even be much to eat for the rest of the week. So your body has to protect its system. And it also, it turns out glucose is used a lot by the immune system. That's why the one sign when you start to get sick if things like bother you more that something upsets you more than it should, well that could be a sign your body is taking its energy to fight the illness and it's not leaving enough for self control to regulate your emotions as you normally do. And back in evolutionary history, of course they didn't have antibiotics or medicine or anything. Living outdoors without much in the way of clothes, if you've got a cut on your foot or something, it could get infected and that could be life threatening if your immune system doesn't have the energy to, to fight it. So your body really evolved to try to preserve and conserve the gluten energy that it has. And it's the energy that's used for everything. So fortunately, our ancestors evolved the capacity at some point to channel some of that energy into self control and advanced complicated psychological processes mediated by stuff in the brain. So it spares a little, but the same rule is there, it'll use someone, it's important, and then cut back to conserve. Now, in terms of operating your daily life, well, yes, at the end of the day, you don't resist temptation as well. Your decision making is also not as good. We learned that glucose and willpower are also used for making choices and making decisions. Some clever studies done to show when people buy a car, they often have a lot of decisions to make. And as you go on making the decisions, you start more and more to just go with whatever standard because that's the easy sort of the default option. And that can end up costing you a lot of money. Some of the car dealers seem to know this. So they start you off choosing the interior fabric or something where you have 100 different choices and you use up all your decision making energy making those choices. And then later on when things like rust proofing or whatever that can add a hefty chunk of change to the cost of the thing, you're sort of burned out and you say, yeah, fine, whatever is standard, do what everybody does. And then that boosts the price. So when you get to that point, that's where getting a dose of glucose might restore your body and brain to the condition where they're willing to expand and allocate more glucose again. So take a break, tell the students before the examination you probably want to have a Coke with real sugar rather than a diet Coke, because I'm just learning some of this other stuff. Caffeine, you know, does not really give you any more energy. It just erases the brain signal that you're tired. The caffeine binds with the molecules that are a byproduct of using glucose. And so caffeine erases the signal that you're tired. So if you have an old fashioned Coke or a standard, I'm not talking about the really old fashioned kind of these to put cocaine in them, but sort of the basic standard Coca Cola where you get sugar to get energy and caffeine to erase the feeling of fatigue. That combination would get you up. And again, for best results in an exam, you want to have full complement of energy there. So caffeine alone does not quite do that. It just erases the signal that you're tired. So your body expends more of its energy from its stores, but it doesn't really give you any more energy.

This is all good and we can talk about that for quite a while. You make the important point in the book as well that for sustained energy over an extended period of time, the low glycemic options are what's going to probably dial us in the most. And then you also reference to get the most out of your willpower, use it to set aside some time to sleep, which we won't go into right now, but just in terms of that energy conservation and optimization. The next idea I'd love to hear you describe is pre commitment. And you and John use Odysseus and his pre commitment strategy as a way to most wisely use our willpower. Can you talk to us about that?

Okay, yeah. Pre commitment, this is not so much from my work, but this is from other people's work and it's very good work. It's somehow easier. It's often easier to make decisions not in the heat of the moment. So if you decide what you're going to have for dinner early and plan it, you can plan a healthy dinner. If you wait till that moment, you're more likely to eat junk food. You know, wait till you're hungry and decide at the last minute. So planning your meals in advance, especially planning them when you're not starving at the moment, you can make better plans. So that's pre commitment in the sense that you are committed to a certain strategy. The same with much of that is come up with stuff like retirement savings. If you leave it to people each month when they get their check to decide the paycheck to decide how much to put away for retirement, there'll usually be something better to do. But if you pre commit and tell your employer to take out this much every month and put it into a bank account or a retirement account or something like that, so you don't have the temptation when the money comes that oh, I'll buy something else with it now, it's already going there. Again, it's a pre commitment in the sense that you decide in advance before you get the money that some of it will be put away for retirement or, or be a more proximal goal like buying a house for yourself or saving put your kids through college or whatever. But again, it's easy to do if you make the plan in advance, decide when you're not desperate for money or needing it, when you have a rational wherewithal to figure out what's best. And you say, okay, well, each month I'm going to set aside this much money. Over time, that works. So what that does is spare the load on willpower. Again, this is the kind of thing that people with good self control do. They set life up to run automatically and smoothly in a way that will get them where they want to go, rather than counting on willpower to, okay, I just got paid and I can either go out on the town or I can put it in the bank. And it's a much dicier kind of choice. There's a story from Odysseus as though and he wanted to hear the siren singing without steering his ship onto the rocks. So he lashed his, tied himself to the mast, and that way he could hear the sound this ethical singing. But he wouldn't be able to grab the steering wheel and drive closer, which is in the myth how the other sailors would end up crashing on the rocks and drowning.

That's great. And his crew actually plugged their ears. Right. Which was an even better strategy.

Yes. Down here, the crew, they couldn't hear it, so they weren't tempted. That's preventing the temptation there. But both, again, they didn't wait until they were hearing the music and tempted to go closer and listen to it. The pre commitment, they made these things before the moment of danger.

That's great. In your research, what's your favorite, most practical, impactful finding you've discovered?

Oh, I don't know. I had the good fortune of working with lots of talented, bright young people, and they come up with all sorts of creative and clever things. So it's been a long voyage of many small and interesting discoveries. There's no way I could pick one.

Well, it won't put you under that pressure then. How about if you're open to sharing anything in your life that you kind of discovered and then it impacted you significantly.

Yeah, well, I don't use research to, to study my own problems or issues so much, but we do learn from these things. I think I mentioned a moment ago about we learned how much the immune system uses glucose at different times. And that's one way I've changed. I used to make myself just keep working whenever I started getting sick. And if I'd go to the physician, they'd say, oh, you should take it easy. And so on. But I think, well, I'm not digging ditches out in the hot sun or anything like that. I'm just sitting in a chair working on my computer. I can do that whether I'm sick or not. So I would ignore that, but it really isn't that efficient. And what I realize now is that when you're starting to get sick, your body wants all of its glucose, all of its energy to fight the disease. And so it's why you feel tired. And the best thing to do. And even in terms of work productivity, the most efficient is just to go to bed and sleep around the clock. Sometimes I'll sleep for 36 or 48 hours and just get up to watch a little TV or eat or drink something. But let your body have all the energy. That's what it wants. And then you get back to work after just two or three days where you get sick. You know, I'm gonna be sick for a couple of weeks. And, yeah, you know, I used to work through it, but often the work wasn't very good either. Trying to write a paper or something, and I go back and read this, and this is all stupid and it doesn't make sense. So it's not very efficient to push yourself to try to do creative work when you're sick because your system really wants all the glucose for that. And glucose is tied into creativity. When people are depleted of their willpower, their creativity goes down in a variety of ways. So that's one thing I've changed. When I start to feel sick, I try to cancel everything. And it's like nature's way to tell you you got to sleep for 36 hours. You can usually tell it's the time when you lie down in bed, even in the afternoon, and the bed just feels so good to you. Normally that doesn't for me. I'm not asleep in the afternoon kind of person. But if I'm fighting an illness, you can just tell that that bed feels so welcoming. And that's as good a sign as you get that your system wants you to go to sleep and let it do its job fighting the illness. Get that done, and you can fight it off and get back to work and play much faster.

That's amazing and inspiring. As a guy who's, at the time you published this book five years ago, had produced the 450 scientific publications I didn't mention that was your 28th book. So that's fantastic. But using that willpower to rebuild our stores of energy and willpower is fantastic. We've obviously not even scratched the surface of all the different research we can talk about related to willpower and all your other work. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you feel would be important to highlight?

Oh, I don't know. I think your point of in general, food and sleep eat reasonably well. That's hardly surprising advice, but it will help your self control and mental functioning too. Most people are not really getting quite enough sleep in our civilization. At least that's what the experts who track those things say. And it's a little better if you can let your body it doesn't have to be every night, but get enough sleep for that. And it's like a muscle too. I think that's important. As far as we can tell, if you exercise self control a little bit now and then, it makes the muscle stronger. And when you need the strength of character to see you through difficult times, you'll have a little more to fall back on.

I like the way you point out that when you build willpower in one aspect of your life, it also improves willpower in other aspects. So just as a muscle gets depleted by overuse, it also gets built up over time by continued smart use. Right?

Right.

Well, fantastic Roy. Thank you so much for taking the time. And thank you so much for dedicating your career to doing such important and impactful work.

Okay, well Brian, thanks for the interview and have a good weekend.

Thank you.

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