Who’s in there? A behavioral toolkit to enhance self-control

This piece was first published at The Decision Lab.

Self-control is associated with many consequential outcomes in our life: the ability to create a network and develop social relations, long-term savings, academic and professional achievement, stable and harmonic relationships, maintaining healthy habits, among others. Therefore, it represents a key competence to work on.

Common sense has it that self-control can be achieved through willpower. If we are “strong enough”, that is, able to exert effortful actions to inhibit temptations and impulses, we can assume control of our deeds and thoughts.

However, psychologist Kentaro Fujita and colleagues disagree with this approach:[1] when people suggest others “use willpower”, what do they actually mean? What kind of tool or behavior are they referring to? Fujita states that instead of a single, disciplined, and highly effortful response as willpower, self-control is better conceived as a “toolbox of strategies” — an individual should then test and apply the tool that works best for them in each given situation. Hence, “improving self-control is not about becoming stronger, but rather about becoming smarter.”[1]

A behavioral toolkit for self-control

Different behavioral tools have been identified to help us deal with everyday challenges. Once we tend to overestimate our self-control, Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch suggest making decisions in advance, when our “cooler head” prevails, in order to promote more desirable, long-term decisions.[2] It is a form of anticipating the self-controlled choice, and committing ourselves to it, before moving into a tempting situation. This is particularly helpful for moments of arousal, and other situations where emotions are running high.

Another option is self-punishment: once people commit to a decision, they can establish a costly penalty if they fail to make the desired choice. For instance, Ariely & Wertenbroch give the example of making a monetary donation to a political group whose views are completely opposite to yours.[2] This kind of punishment and the emotional burden it imposes can motivate people to forgo temptations and enhance self-control in certain cases.

Katy Milkman also suggests pairing “should” behaviors, which promote long-term self-controlled goals, with more enjoyable “want to” behaviors, represented by short-term gratifications.[3] Examples could range from listening to your favorite music only when you go out for a walk, or allowing yourself to have candy after four healthy meals in a row.

Finally, there is choice architecture: modifying the environment so that fewer desirable actions are inhibited or become more difficult to perform. Do you want to reduce the time you spend on your phone? Try leaving it in another room or inside a drawer, rather than in your pocket all the time. You need focus on finishing an academic paper? You’d better take your books to a library or someplace where there are no distractions.

Those are all valid strategies to overcome temptation when it comes to making decisions. In specific contexts, they could help you navigate out of a ruminant posture and analyze the facts with an increased learning approach, too. Still, Ethan Kross, Ariana Orvell, Kentaro Fujita, and other researchers and behavioral scientists mentioned above believe in a simpler way to achieve that, shifting from the effortful willpower-based methods to a more “mundane” and natural one: the “generic you”, when it comes to our inner conversations.

The voice inside our head

We frequently talk to ourselves. Those inner dialogues represent a powerful tool our brains have evolved to help us make plans for the future, applying a systematic view and determining all the necessary steps to get there. This important shift lets us go beyond “survival mode” to a more strategic approach: Once we were able to project scenarios long ahead of our time, life suddenly became a little more predictable, a bit less uncertain.

But aside from the forecasting tone, our voices also have a rearview mirror function that leads us backward. They recall episodes, conversations, thoughts, feelings, and an incredible group of additional elements to create scripts and discuss the roles we played then.

Although this is an important feature for self-development, it could easily become tricky, especially in moments of distress. After all, our memories are not so precise,[4] and our own interpretations of the world are skewed by biases.

Negative episodes, in particular, can trigger ruminant behaviors, which can contribute to increased distress and, in turn, make a difficult situation even more difficult. Distorted contexts, animosity, judgments based on perception rather than facts — all consequences of a rationale that prioritizes subjectivity over maintaining a more neutral position, where words and actions can be analyzed in a cold state.

Moreover, when individuals are not able to release themselves from those damaging thoughts and conversations, things tend to become harder, as they avoid new experiences and block themselves, even from happiness.

Recent behavioral research,[5] however, discovered interesting and less effortful strategies we can develop to deal with such blight dialogues.

Recounting x reconstruing

People commonly talk about their own experiences afterward — with friends, family, or someone they feel intimate enough to do it. And this is a good thing: as addressed in several experiments,[6],[7] venting a negative feeling contributes to emotional adjustment.

Nevertheless, how you do it matters a lot. Research by David Lee and colleagues8 tested people who had gone through unpleasant events. In one experimental group, participants similarly recounted the episode to another person, whereas in the other, they were prompted to reconstrue what had happened to them from a broader perspective.

The results demonstrated that members of the first group “experienced an increase in negative affect compared with baseline” — in other words, felt worse — while in the latter participants “were buffered against this increase in negative affect, despite spending just as much time talking about their negative experience as recounting participants. They also reported having more closure.”

Recounting versus reconstruing have different impacts: the former means going over near the same emotions felt before, perhaps even exacerbating one’s feeling of unfairness, or the desire for justice. Reconstruing an experience, on the other hand, “helps people make meaning out of their negative experiences.”[8]

Although these two approaches can look quite different, there is a very simple strategy we can apply to move from one to the other: the researchers observed that reconstruing participants spontaneously used the word “you” generically more often than recounting participants. That is, reframing yourself from an external perspective, as you were telling a story about someone else, improves our ability to find significance in past events so that we can learn from them.

Research conducted by experimental psychologist Ethan Kross and colleagues[9] indicated that “reflecting on negative personal events using distanced (vs. immersed) self-talk leads people to consider their experiences akin to the perspective of an outside observer,” and that this process promotes emotion regulation. For example: when preparing for an anxiety-eliciting speech, individuals who were cued to use distanced self-talk were more likely to view the upcoming speech as a challenge that they could cope with rather than as a threat over which they had no control. Furthermore, they also reported lower levels of anxiety.[9]

Creating a distance — in both time and space — between yourself and the negative experience is, therefore, an effective way to perceive those events as further away from the self, and consequently reduce emotional reactivity when trying to make meaning from them.

Curiously enough, this is an embedded mechanism several people already practice unconsciously: it is common that we use the generic “you” to refer to hypothetical situations that require self-control. Studies by Ariana Orvell and colleagues[10] found that people are up to five times more likely to use the generic “you” when prompted to make meaning from negative experiences.

Generic “you” enhances self-regulation

Self-regulation, which includes skills such as executive function — working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control — gratification delay, and persistence can be improved through self-distancing.[5] As we create a mental space between the stimulus and the response, we are able to step back from the current problem and (re)gain self-control.

Beware, though: this psychological distancing is neither avoidance nor distraction. On the contrary, it helps us reflect on our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors from a different perspective, whilst focusing on why we were feeling what we were feeling.

A study from Kross and colleagues revealed that individuals more prone to suffering from past negative also experience more benefits from self-distancing.[11] In fact, “the more symptoms of depression individuals had, the more useful they found self-distancing.”

Children also benefit from self-distancing. Recent experiments[12] with 4- to 6-year-old kids demonstrate that the greater the distance from the self, the better they perform on self-regulation tasks. In other words, incentivizing children to shift from a self-immersed voice (“What should I do?”) to a third person (“What should ‘you’ do?”) improves self-regulation. Additional tests found successful results when an even more distanced tone was used, i.e. “What would Batman [or any other fictional character the kid admires] do?”

One last voice

Altogether, those studies and experiments improve our understanding of the human brain, especially how inner dialogues can influence our behavior towards learning processes, emotional control, relationships, and ultimately, happiness.

As behavioral science dives deeper into this matter, new findings will emerge shedding light on potentially disruptive approaches. For now, the research suggests that this subtle linguistic device is capable of:

• Enhancing feelings of connection between people and ideas (framing an idea as applying to people in general rather than to a specific person or moment)[13]
• Eating healthier (redirects one’s attention from hedonic temptations toward self-control),[14] and
• Improving outcomes for individuals in therapy.[8]

This considered we may want to pay more attention to this little “us” inside.

Or is it you?

References

1. Fujita, K., Orvell, A., & Kross, E. (2020). Smarter, not harder: A Toolbox approach to enhancing self-control. Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

2. Ariely, D., Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment. Psychological Science, Vol. 13(3): 219–224.

3. Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., Bazerman, M. H. (2008). Harnessing our inner angels and demons: What we have learned about want/should conflicts and how that knowledge can help us reduce short-sighted decision making. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(4), 324–338.

4. Loftus, E. (June 2013). How reliable is your memory? [Video]. TED: Ideas worth spreading.

5. Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. Vermilion.

6. Rose, A. J. (2002). Co–Rumination in the Friendships of Girls and Boys. Child development, Vol. 73(6), 1830–43.

7. Nils, F., Rimé, B. (2012). Beyond the myth of venting: Social sharing modes determine the benefits of emotional disclosure. European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 42(6).

8. Lee, D. S., Orvell, A., Briskin, J., Shrapnell, T., Gelman, S. A., Ayduk, O., Ybarra, O., & Kross, E. (2019). When Chatting About Negative Experiences Helps — and When It Hurts: Distinguishing Adaptive Versus Maladaptive Social Support in Computer-Mediated Communication. Emotion: Advance online publication.

9. Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters. Journal of personality and social psychology, 106, 304–24.

10. Orvell, A., Ayduk, O., Moser, J. S., Gelman, S. A., Kross, E. (2019.) Linguistic Shifts: A Relatively Effortless Route to Emotion Regulation? Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2019; 28(6): 567–573.

11. Kross, E., Gard, D., Deldin, P., Clifton, J., & Ayduk, O. (2012). “Asking why” from a distance: Its cognitive and emotional consequences for people with major depressive disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 121, 559–569.

12. Grenell, A., White, R. E., Prager, E. O., Schaeffer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A., & Carlson, S. M. (2019). Experimental paradigm for measuring the effects of self-distancing in young children. JoVE.

13. Orvell, A., Kross, E., & Gelman, S. (2020). “You” speaks to me: Effects of generic-you in creating resonance between people and ideas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

14. Furman, C. R., Kross, E., Gearhardt, A. N. (2020). Distanced Self-Talk Enhances Goal Pursuit to Eat Healthier. Clinical Psychological Science, 8(2), 366–373.