What factors make self-regulation difficult? And what are the consequences of poor self-regulation? Or, to put the matter more concretely, suppose you sat down one Sunday for a long and productive day of schoolwork, but at the end of the day, all you achieved was making a turkey sandwich and taking a nap. In this section, we’ll examine some reasons that your day didn’t turn out as planned. We’ll also examine the causes and consequences of more serious problems in self-regulation and what you can do to overcome them.

One of the keys to effective self-regulation is the capacity for what psychologists variously call effortful control, impulse control, ego control, or ego strength, and what everyone else typically calls willpower. Willpower is essentially the capacity to overcome the many temptations, challenges, and obstacles that could impede pursuit of one’s long-term goals. For a dieter, the problem may be a chocolate cake; for a premed student, it might be opportunities to party or a tough organic chemistry class; for a loyal spouse it might be an attractive new acquaintance or a partner’s annoying habits.

Walter Mischel and various colleagues have been studying willpower over the last 40 years (Mischel & Ayduk, 2004). To understand how people successfully use willpower to self-regulate, they built on Freud’s concepts of the id and the ego, distinguishing between hot processes, which are driven by strong emotions, and cool processes, which rely more on level-headed reason. Mischel and colleagues proposed that the hot system is essential to providing the direction and energy to seek out goals. In other words, our felt and anticipated emotions lead us to desire strongly those outcomes that bring us pleasure and that help us avert or minimize pain and anxiety. But the cool system is essential to keep us on track in pursuit of such goals as we traverse a minefield of temptations and difficulties. When our hot system predominates, we tend to be impulsive, caving into these challenges and stalling or completely derailing our progress toward our long-term goals. However, when the cool system rules, we leap over these hurdles rather than being tripped up by them.

If you ever thought that some people seem to have more willpower than others, you were right. Mischel and Ebbesen (1970) studied people’s varying abilities to use their cool system to overrule their hot system, working with children as young as four years old. The core idea was to pit an attractive short-term temptation against a more desired delayed goal that can be attained only if the short-term temptation is resisted. The original task was very simple. A child was told that when the experimenter returned in about 20 minutes, she would get two cookies. However, if she didn’t want to wait for the two cookies, she could ring a bell, and the experimenter would return and give her one cookie. Two cookies are better than one, so if the child delayed gratification, she would get the preferred reward. The measure of the capacity for delay of gratification is the amount of time the child waits before ringing the bell. The highest score was obtained by waiting the full 20 minutes for the experimenter to return with the two cookies.

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In an amazing finding, performance on this delay of gratification task at age four predicts a variety of indicators of self-regulatory success up to 30 years later! Specifically, the more time a four-year-old can wait to get the bigger reward, the better that person’s subsequent scores as an adolescent and an adult on the SAT, level of education achieved, self-esteem, tolerance of frustration, coping with stress, and interpersonal functioning (Ayduk et al., 2000; Mischel & Ayduk, 2002; Shoda et al., 1990). The determinants of this stable individual difference are not fully understood, but studies suggest that children as young as 18 months show differences in their ability to distract themselves in order to keep tempting thoughts from derailing their self-regulation (Sethi et al., 2000). The early appearance of these differences suggests that a person’s level of willpower is probably based on differences in temperament and intelligence that result from some combination of genetic predispositions and prenatal and early postnatal experiences (Rothbart et al., 2004).

These findings paint a fairly fatalistic picture, but the ceiling on one’s capacity for willpower is not entirely fixed early in life. Generally, factors that keep the cool system active help the person delay gratification. But beware the factors that block the cool system and activate the hot system, such as high levels of stress, being under cognitive load (Hamilton et al., 2007; Hull & Slone, 2004; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), alcohol and other recreational drugs, and exposure to temptations such as cookies fresh out of the oven.

Does this mean that we should focus only on our cold process and disregard our hot desire for long-term goals? Probably not. If you never remind yourself once in a while about how great it will be to have a degree and a well-paying job down the road, for example, the hot system may turn off completely, depriving you of the motivation necessary to achieve your goals. On the other hand, if you keep reminding yourself about how great the long-term goal, such as a luxury car, will be, you’re more likely to give up on the goal and blow your cash on a quick substitute, a more mediocre car, rather than wait for the payoff later. The optimal strategy lies somewhere between these two extremes of cold and hot processes. People are most successful at achieving their long-term goals if they occasionally remind themselves about the enjoyment they’ll get from those goals, just to keep the juices flowing, but focus more coolly on the concrete steps necessary to achieve those goals.

How did you do? Perhaps this task wasn’t too difficult, and you were able to focus your attention elsewhere. Many people, however, are surprised to discover that even though they try to keep white bears out of consciousness, the bears keep popping up. This is an example of what Dan Wegner (1994) calls ironic processing, whereby the more we try not to think about something, the more those thoughts enter our mind and distract us from other things. In laboratory studies, students who first spent five minutes trying to suppress thoughts of white bears reported having more than twice as many thoughts of white bears by the end of a subsequent five-minute period, compared to students who didn’t first try to push thoughts of white bears out of their minds. If it’s hard to sustain pushing away the thought of cute polar bears, you can imagine how difficult it must be to push away highly troubling thoughts about the low grade you just got on an exam or how badly your date went last weekend!

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Yet we are continually trying to suppress thoughts. But how do we do it, and why is it often so difficult? Wegner (1994) describes two mental processes that we use to control our thoughts. One process acts as a monitor that is on the lookout for signs of the unwanted thought; in order to do such monitoring, such thoughts must be accessible, that is, close to consciousness. The second process is an operator that actively pushes any signs of the unwanted thought out of consciousness. The best way to do this is through distraction, filling consciousness with thoughts of other things.

When asked to suppress a thought, people can generally employ these two processes and suppress successfully. However, once people stop trying to suppress the thought, typically a rebound effect occurs: The unwanted thought becomes even more accessible than it was before suppression. Although there is still some debate about the cause of this rebound effect, one likely explanation is that the monitoring process has to keep the unwanted thought close to consciousness in order to watch for it, and so once the operator stops actively providing alternative thoughts, the unwanted thought becomes more likely to come to mind than if no effort to suppress had been initiated in the first place. For instance, participants who were asked to not think about a particular person in their lives right before they went to bed were more likely to dream about the person than were participants who did not receive this request (Wegner et al., 2004)!

Wegner argues that monitoring is an automatic process: It searches for signs of an unwanted thought without demanding too much mental energy. The operator, in contrast, is a controlled process, requiring more mental effort and energy to carry out. This leads to a testable prediction about the two components of thought suppression. We would expect that when a person is cognitively busy or dreaming, the automatic monitoring process will continue searching for instances of an unwanted thought, but the controlled operator process responsible for focusing attention away from that thought will be disabled. Consequently, the undesired thought kept accessible by the monitoring process will become especially likely to pop into consciousness or our dreams.

Wegner and colleagues have applied ironic process theory to many contexts in which people try to suppress a thought or a behavior. They consistently find that when people are under stress, distraction, or time urgency, efforts at thought suppression generally backfire (Wegner, 1994). Here are a couple of examples: If people reminisce about sad events and then try to suppress sad feelings, they are generally successful when cognitive load is low, but trying to suppress sadness backfires when people are asked to remember a string of nine numbers at the same time (Wegner et al., 1993). When people are listening to mellow, new age music, they can follow directions to ignore distracting thoughts and go to sleep quickly, but if their heads are filled with booming marching-band music, instructions to fall asleep quickly make it that much more difficult to fall asleep (Ansfield et al., 1996).

There are two basic ways to minimize ironic processing. One is to keep distraction, stress, and time urgency to a minimum when regulating our thought and behavior. We can, for example, work in a quiet room or start projects far in advance of their deadline. Of course, we can’t always avoid mental stressors. The second strategy is simply to stop trying to control your thoughts when cognitive strain is likely to be present. Under such circumstances, disengaging from effortful control can eliminate the ironic process. In fact, a form of psychotherapy called paradoxical intervention involves telling the client to stop trying to get rid of their problem. You can’t sleep when you go to bed? Stop trying to! It seems to work, at least for some people, some of the time (Shoham & Rohrbaugh, 1997).

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Our lack of success with trying to suppress unwanted thoughts highlights the more general point that goal pursuit is often an effortful process, and therefore our goals compete for a limited supply of mental energy. Perhaps you are a strong environmentalist and value recycling, but one day you come home from a long day of work and studying. You barely have enough energy to make yourself dinner. You look at the mess of recyclables and nonrecyclables, say “Forget this!” and toss them all in the trash. Why would you give up so easily on a cherished value?

Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998) argue that the ego is like a muscle. We have a certain amount of ego strength that allows us to regulate and control our behavior. But just as our quadriceps ache after we’ve run five miles, our ego strength becomes depleted by extended bouts of self-control. This mental fatigue, or ego depletion, can make it harder to continue to regulate our behavior, even when the two types of tasks are very different. For example, in one study participants watched a film about environmental disasters that included graphic scenes of sick and dying animals. Some participants were instructed to suppress the emotions they naturally felt in response to the movie, whereas others were instructed to deliberately amplify or exaggerate the emotions they felt. A third group received no instructions about regulating their emotions. Afterward, participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip for as long as they could. Compared with those who had received no instructions, participants who had regulated their emotions—either suppressing or amplifying them—showed a significant decrease in how long they could squeeze the handgrip. Even though controlling emotions and controlling a physical action are very different things, this research suggests that they both rely on a limited supply of self-regulatory energy or strength.

Ego depletion can even explain why people sometimes engage in risky behaviors. In another study (Muraven et al., 2002), participants first had to engage in the effortful task of suppressing their thoughts (or not). Afterward, they were asked to sample different types of beer before taking a driving test. Because these participants knew that their driving skills would be measured, they should have been motivated to limit how much alcohol they drank. But despite this motivation, participants who had engaged in the effortful control of their thoughts beforehand drank more beer than those who were not cognitively depleted.

The good news is that our ego strength can be exercised and replenished. Research suggests that spending just two weeks focusing on improving your posture or monitoring and detailing what you eat can strengthen your ability to self-control your behavior on a completely unrelated task (like the handgrip task just described; Muraven et al., 1999). These findings might even suggest that it is better to start small and to gradually build your ego strength over time than to try to change a well-ingrained habit, an effort that might just leave you fatigued.

Recent research is even beginning to uncover the biological mechanisms that underlie self-control. When we engage in difficult self-control, we use a lot of glucose, the fuel that allows our prefrontal cortex to sustain self-regulation. With our blood glucose levels depleted, we literally run out of energy (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007). No wonder you get exhausted after hours of reading or studying! Consuming that sugary Kool-Aid or a high-fat milkshake actually helps to restore glucose levels and increase mental energy (Gailliot et al., 2007). So when you are studying late at night and trying to fight off the urge to sleep, that candy bar might really help you refocus attention on your notes. Of course if you are trying to control your intake of sweets, then this information isn’t nearly so helpful!

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Together, these findings support the hypothesis that self-control is a limited resource that can be depleted and replenished. However, researchers have made discoveries that cast doubt on this idea. For example, people’s personal beliefs about willpower can change the ego depletion effect: If people merely believed that willpower is an unlimited resource, they did not show the typical ego depletion effect (Job et al., 2010). In another study (Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009), expressing one’s core values in life (such as benevolence, tradition, or achievement) counteracted the depletion of self-control strength. If self-control is a limited resource tied to biological changes in glucose, then why would personal beliefs about willpower or affirming a core value instantly restore that limited resource?

These findings spurred Inzlicht and Schmeichel (2012) to dig deeper into the process behind ego depletion. They explored why self-control seems limited—why exercising self-control on one task leads to failures of self-control on a second task. They propose that initial acts of self-control shift people’s motivation away from further restraint or impulse control and toward gratification. Put more simply, engaging in self-control is hard work; it takes deliberation and attention. After people have done this work, they are less motivated to do any further work. They feel like they are “owed” a break, and that they are justified in slacking off. It’s as though our minds say: “I’ve put in the effort, and now I choose not to control myself any further. In fact, it’s time for a reward!” Whereas the limited resource model says that exercising self-control zaps a limited resource, making it so that people cannot regulate afterwards, this account says that expending initial effort makes people choose not to regulate.

A specific example of self-regulation happens when we try to regulate or control our emotions. Imagine that your romantic partner of several months takes you out to dinner. You are expecting a quiet, romantic evening when, over your corn chowder, your partner blurts out that your relationship is now over. Ouch. To maintain your dignity, you try to choke back your surprise, your anger, and your crushing disappointment. But how successful are you likely to be? If you consider what you’ve just learned about people’s attempts to push their thoughts out of mind and the ego depletion that results from such active efforts of control, you’ll probably realize that attempting to control your emotions by suppressing them is likely to be ineffective.

But if suppressing your emotions is not a good way to control your feelings, is there another strategy that will work better? Building on cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, introduced in chapter 2, James Gross (2001) proposed that an alternative to emotional suppression is cognitive reappraisal—reexamining the situation so that you don’t feel such a strong emotional reaction in the first place. In the example of being dumped, you might excuse yourself to go to the restroom and use that time to think about all of your partner’s annoying habits that actually drove you crazy, or about the fact that you are planning to move to Ghana next year with the Peace Corps and won’t have the time for a relationship anyway. With these cognitions in mind, this sudden break up can seem a little more like a blessing than a curse.

But can the mind really control the heart through reappraisal? Research suggests that it can (Gross, 2002). A typical experiment uses a method similar to that previously described in research by Muraven and colleagues (1998). Specifically, Gross (1998) showed people a disturbing film of an arm amputation. He instructed one group of participants simply to watch the film (the control condition). Another third of the participants were told to suppress their emotional response so that someone watching them wouldn’t be able to tell how they were feeling. A third group was instructed to reappraise the film, for example, by imagining that it was staged rather than real. Compared with the people in the control condition, people who suppressed their emotion did make fewer disgust expressions, but they showed increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system and still reported feeling just as disgusted. In contrast, participants who reappraised the film showed no increase in their physiological signs of arousal and reported lower levels of disgust than participants in the control condition. The effect of reappraisal on reducing negative emotions has been replicated in other research using more sensitive physiological measures of negative affect, such as activation of the amygdala (Goldin et al., 2008).

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These findings suggest that reappraisal can be an effective way to avoid feeling strong negative emotions. Certainly the consequences are better than suppression, which can actually have the ironic effect of exacerbating your negative feelings. But we also have learned from Muraven’s research that suppressing emotions has cognitive costs. Do the benefits of reappraisal come at the price of cognitive resources? The answer seems to be no. In a study by Richards and Gross (2000), participants were asked to suppress, reappraise, or simply view a series of negative images. Later they were tested on verbal information that had been presented with each picture. Participants who suppressed their emotions did worse on this memory task than those who just viewed the images, but the people who were instructed to reappraise their emotions did not show these same memory impairments. Taken together, these findings suggest that probably the best strategy for dealing with a difficult situation is to reappraise it in a cooler, more objective way so as to avoid fully feeling negative emotions that would be costly and difficult to suppress.

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Throughout this chapter, we’ve seen how humans regulate their behavior in ways that make us very different from any other species, past or present. Unlike dogs and cats, we often devote huge chunks of our lives to attaining or avoiding what are essentially abstract ideas, such as “being a good friend” or “financial failure.” If we are successful at achieving these goals, it’s because we can think in flexible ways about our own actions, sometimes viewing them as steps toward broader goals and other times breaking them down into smaller, more concrete goals. So far, so good; but as you may remember from chapter 2, people generally prefer to identify their actions at a moderately abstract level so that those actions seem meaningful. For example, a football player heading onto the field will prefer, all things being equal, an abstract interpretation of his action, such as “playing to win” or “impressing the coaches,” to more concrete interpretations, such as “stepping onto the field and shifting my balance forward.”

What levels of abstraction help us achieve our goals? Research on this issue has revealed two basic findings (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). First, people perform easy tasks best when they identify them at relatively abstract levels. Second, people perform difficult tasks best when they identify them at low levels of abstraction. Parenting is a particularly daunting task: Trust us, or better yet, recall—from your parents’ perspective—your own childhood shenanigans while growing up! A study found that the more moms and dads thought about parenting at relatively concrete levels, the more they enjoyed their kids and the less their kids got into trouble (Wegner et al., 1982). These findings have an important implication for a variety of difficult goals, from academic excellence to maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. Although it may be useful to begin an action with an abstract goal in mind, and even bring that goal to mind from time to time for inspiration, we are more likely to succeed if we break difficult abstract goals down into smaller concrete actions, even though those actions may sometimes seem tedious or removed from the loftier abstract goal.

There are times, however, when a person is having a difficult time and would benefit from viewing goals in more abstract terms. Moving up the hierarchy to more abstract identifications is particularly valuable when attempts to meet a goal continue to be unsuccessful. In such cases, attention will shift upward in the hierarchy to allow the person to consider his or her goals more broadly. This is useful because it allows the person to search for alternative lower-level goals that may help him or her achieve the same higher-level goal.

For instance, you may choose the goal of signing up online for a philosophy class that would help you complete your degree requirements. But what happens if the online sign-up system doesn’t allow you to enroll because you don’t meet the prerequisites? Although you have not met your goal, you probably won’t spend the rest of the day mindlessly clicking the “Enroll” icon over and over. Rather, you’d probably consider the higher-order goal of getting enough credits to graduate. Once you do that, you’d stop fixating on getting in that one course and consider other courses you could take to get the credits you need. People can be quite flexible at compensating for blocked goal pursuit by finding substitute means of satisfying the more abstract goal.

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But sometimes people persist in pursuing a goal long after it’s no longer beneficial to do so. The self-regulatory perseveration theory of depression (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; 1992) proposes that this is one way that people can fall into depression. This theory builds on research on self-awareness. Recall that self-awareness theory claims that directing attention to the self leads people to compare their current state with their ideal state. If they notice a discrepancy and they feel they have the means to reduce it, they will alter their behavior to bring it more closely in line with their ideal. But if the chances of reducing this discrepancy are unlikely—for example, if the task is very difficult—the person will disengage, or let go of the goal and divert attention away from the self. And although giving up on goals and avoiding self-awareness can lead to destructive behaviors such as excessive alcohol consumption, letting go of unattainable goals is generally an adaptive response. If you drop a pencil down a gutter, it’s pointless to sit all day by the gutter, fishing around with a coat hanger and hoping that your pencil will magically reappear.

But not all goals are so easily abandoned as your favorite pencil. If a goal is a central source of self-esteem, and the person has few other ways of deriving self-esteem, he or she may have great difficulty in letting go of that goal even after it becomes evident that the goal is lost or probably will never be attained. Pyszczynski and Greenberg proposed that this persistent focus on an unattainable goal results in many of the common symptoms of depression, including elevated negative emotion, a tendency to blame oneself for shortcomings, and decreased motivation and performance in other areas of life. Supporting this theory is evidence that lost and limited bases of self-esteem are precursors of depression, that depressed people tend to be high in self-awareness, and that reducing self-awareness in depressed people tends to reduce their symptoms (Pyszczynksi & Greenberg, 1992).

The reason for this escalating pattern of problems is that excessive inward focus on the self magnifies negative feelings, promotes attributing one’s problems to oneself, and interferes with attention to the external world, leading to further failures. The spiral of misery and self-recrimination culminates in a negative self-image. Many of us, for example, have had the misfortune of being dumped by a romantic partner. When this happens, if the relationship was really important to us, we may become depressed as we continually think about how much we wish we were still with that person, what we did wrong, why we’re unworthy of love, and so on. We obsess about getting that person back. But it’s just not going to happen. We may eventually think that without that person, who previously provided us with such joy, self-worth, and meaning, life really . . . well . . . sucks. A similar negative spiral can begin with other losses in the realms of love and work: the death of a spouse, parent, or child; being laid off; or failing to get a promotion or an opportunity to pursue a desired career.

The positive spiral of recovery begins by identifying the abstract goal that the now unattainable goal was serving. In this way, the person can find alternative means of satisfying that abstract goal (FIGURE 5.6). As he or she invests time and energy in those alternative means, self-focus on the unattainable goal is reduced. Let’s illustrate this positive spiral in the case of a failed relationship. The mourning partner recognizes that the concrete goal of being in a relationship served the more abstract goal of feeling loved and valued. This realization opens up the possibility of other means of establishing personal value. That person may consider other romantic prospects, or recognize that family, friends, or career goals provide a sense of worth. After becoming more involved in those alternative goals, the unattainable relationship seems less important, and no longer is a constant reminder of personal shortcomings.

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Maintaining a state of optimal well-being, then, requires a delicate balance between self-focused pursuit of some goals and at the same time letting go of goals that are beyond our means. This idea is reflected in the well-known “Serenity Prayer” written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and employed by Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

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