[Discussion] Your self-control is your most important skill. Learn how to improve it.

Preface: I took all the material from an article titled The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: How Self-Control and Willpower Determine Your Success in Life. If you want to read more about this topic with better formatting + sources, go there.

Why willpower is important

People’s ability to control yourself and delay gratification is one of the strongest predictors of success later in life, affecting factors such as their social competence, ability to deal with frustration, financial status, and physical and mental health.

How our psychological self-control systems work

The TL;DR version is that we use two systems when it comes to self-control:

• An impulsive hot system, which promotes detrimental behaviors such as fixating on rewards.

• A rational cool system, which promotes positive behaviors such as successful self-distraction.

How this relates to improving your self-control

From the article:

Based on this, we can say that overall, our self-control depends on our ability to inhibit the occurrence of “hot” behaviors, by utilizing “cool” strategies.

This means that you want to avoid obsessing about the rewards, or fixating on the difficulty of resisting the temptation to enjoy them. Instead, as soon as you recognize yourself starting to fall into one of these negative thought patterns, you need to mentally “exit” it as quickly as possible.

You can do this by distracting yourself, and by engaging in unrelated positive experiences. This can be anything from playing a game to reading a book, to talking with a friend. The more positive the experience, and the more it can distract you from the potential reward, the more it will help you exercise restraint and self-control.

This may sound difficult to accomplish, but studies show that self-control training can be beneficial in the long term, and that you can strengthen your willpower through the regular practice of small acts of self-control. This is important, since it means that doing something such as reducing your snacking behavior can later help you exercise self-control in unrelated areas, such as pushing yourself at the gym, or fighting against your procrastination tendencies when it comes to doing work.

Again, full credit goes to: The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: How Self-Control and Willpower Determine Your Success in Life, which also contains more useful information on the topic.

Submitted April 07, 2018 at 06:53PM by randomusefulbits https://ift.tt/2GGDjPP