How can we improve our self-control?

How can we improve our self-control? This is an absolutely amazing TED talk by Dan Ariely about self-control.

I delayed posting my blog post yesterday because I wanted to go and watch the Wales-Denmark Euro 2020 game in the pub. I made a pact with myself that I could go out and do that as long as I made a commitment to post 2 articles on my blog today.

This ties in beautifully with Dan’s talk. He explains how self-control explains our procrastination, our lack of exercise, our bad food choices, and bad relationship choices.

We all have good intentions about altering our behaviour to improve our future. The problem is that in the short-term we do very different things, which sabotage our plans.

Dan tells a story about needing to give himself injections with unpleasant side effects three times a week for 18 months, in order to give himself a chance of overcoming hepatitis C and avoiding cirrhosis of the liver. The medication made him sick for 16 hours every time.

When faced with deciding whether to do something with immediate unpleasant results, that is good for our long-term future, we tend to over-focus on the present and sacrifice the future.

In the same way, we struggle to delay gratification, and often choose immediate rewards, even if they are smaller. This also explains why people give in to the temptation to answer a mobile phone while driving.

Dan managed to stick to his injection schedule, and was the only person in his group who achieved this. He linked the injection time to starting to watch a few films that he had rented that morning.

The importance of taking the medication on time should have motivated everyone in the group, but because the effects of liver cirrhosis would not happen for another thirty years, they were vastly discounted. The immediate injections became more focal, with more control over people’s lives. Dan’s trick was to substitute videos, to connect something good with something bad, which is known as reward-substitution. Interestingly, the thing he substituted (films) was much less important than medical side-effects, but it was what made him successful. Choosing the correct substitute is clearly vital!

Dan looks at the problem of global warming (and any other self-control problems), and speculates that reward-substitution could be used to get people to behave in the right way because of the wrong reason.

Dan’s second solution is called the self-control contract. In a similar way to Ulysses’ solution to avoiding the temptation of the Sirens, this is when we do something in advance to remove our temptation. We can design tools to help us deal with temptation, for example a moving alarm clock that you have to get out of bed to snooze, an alarm clock that pays money to a charity you hate if you snooze it, and websites that let you bet around losing weight.

We need to design our own Ulysses contract, to come up with solutions to overcome our temptations. The difficulty that some of the organisations trying to design these solutions face is one of human rights and privacy laws.

I found this talk fascinating, and I will use it to work on solutions to some of my own self-control issues!

Project 365

I set up this website after deciding that I want to build a more creative life for myself, so I can give up my job and be in control of my own destiny.

I have set myself a goal of publishing an article on my website every day this year, to document my journey from employment to self-employment.

The name I chose was Project 365 because I see this as a year that I have dedicated to learning and self-development, as I countdown to freedom. It started on 1st January 2021, so I have 189 days to go!