Opinion

Where there’s a way, there’s a will

(Photos by Getty Images)

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In 1967, Stanford University researchers asked 500 4-year-olds to square off against a marshmallow. In the now famous “marshmallow test,” the preschoolers were each left alone in a room with the gooey confection. They were told that they could eat the marshmallow immediately — or hold out for 15 minutes and double their loot.

For many, it was a painful, comical struggle with their own desires. Some were able to wait. Some gobbled it right away. All fidgeted with temptation.

The purpose of the original study was to discover when people develop the mental processes that allow for delayed gratification. At the time, researchers could not imagine their work would help spawn an intriguing scientific inquiry that is still unearthing why some of us are more hardwired than others to succumb to our desires.

New research suggests that there are physical differences in the brains of strong-willed people versus their weak-willed counterparts. Other researchers, meanwhile, are learning that summoning willpower can be as simple as getting a good night’s sleep, keeping hunger at bay and turning your back (literally) to the stuff that tempts you.

A newly published follow-up study revisited the now-adult marshmallow kids and found that those who were better at delaying gratification as children remained better at it as adults. Meanwhile, single marshmallow-gobblers were more likely to seek instant gratification all these years past.

“Forty years later — it’s almost beyond belief,” says co-author Dr. B.J. Casey, of Weill Cornell Medical School. “A lot happens between 4 and 40.”

Casey and her colleagues coupled tests of willpower with brain scans to find that the two groups showed key differences in two parts of their brains. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational behavior — “or for Star Trek fans, the Vulcanized part of the brain,” Casey said — was associated with better temptation resistance.

More interestingly, the instant-gratification group showed an increase in activity in their ventral striatum, a part of the brain thought to be associated with addiction.

“This is the first time we have located the specific brain areas related to delayed gratification,” Casey says.

. . . TO THOSE WHO WAIT

The brain scans seem to suggest a genetic component to willpower, which may turn out to be one of the most important factors to a fulfilled life. Healthy self-control has also been associated with less drug abuse, lower divorce rates, more altruistic behavior and fewer physical and mental health problems.

When co-author Walter Mischel revisited the marshmallow preschoolers as teens, he found those who showed more self-control in the original experiment scored on average 210 points higher on their SATs than their counterparts — suggesting the secret to a successful life has more to do with self-control than intelligence.

Earlier experiments found that the kids who were most successful at resisting the marshmallows were the ones who could distract themselves the best in the face of temptation. Videos of the 4-year-olds in the original study show the “high delayers” singing songs, playing with their shoelaces and even looking away. And even the “low delayers” could learn to hold out, if researchers told them to first imagine the marshmallow was a cloud instead of candy — in other words, they could literally learn to cope with temptation.

In the updated study, Casey, Mischel and their colleagues ditched the marshmallows in favor of pictures of smiling faces.

“Marshmallows might work for 4-year-olds, but they don’t do it for me,” Casey explains. “We’ve had 40 years of socialization to learn that smiling faces are good things.”

Participants were asked to press a button whenever they saw a particular face flash on a computer screen. Both groups did fine, so long as the faces that flashed before them remained neutral. But when faces they were supposed to ignore were smiling, the people who had a tough time resisting marshmallows as kids were significantly less likely to curb the impulse to press that button.

“If you have a heightened reaction to your environment, it’s going to be harder to regulate your behavior,” Casey says.

Casey was quick to dismiss the notion that delaying gratification is necessarily preferable to giving in to your natural impulse. After all, the marshmallow gobblers might be more likely to be the explorers and entrepreneurs among us — if we all waited for marshmallows, we’d never take risks.

GOOD WILL HUNTING

In a study of more than 3,000 people, British psychologist Richard Wiseman found 88% of all resolutions end in failure.

That’s a dispiriting figure, but scientists insist that willpower can be honed, increased and even learned.

“You can improve self-control,” says Roy F. Baumeister, of Florida State University, co-author of the new book “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength” (Penguin) with science writer John Tierney. “When you exercise your willpower regularly, it gets stronger.”

For years, the concept of “willpower” had long been a folk-term, not something that came up often in scientific literature, Baumeister says.

What he and others have discovered however is that a person’s resolve can literally be drained out of them — a concept known as “ego depletion.” And a key factor to this is glucose.

In one experiment, Baumeister found that students who fasted for three hours and then had to perform a variety of self-control tasks had significantly lower glucose levels than students who didn’t have to exert self-control. Glucose is the body’s energy supply. The fact that it was used up meant resisting temptation requires actual energy.

In another experiment, Baumeister and his colleagues had participants watch a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen — a task that required self-control and drained them of energy.

They then gave the participants a glass of lemonade. Half of the students got lemonade with real sugar, while the other half got a drink with a sugar substitute. On the next series of self-control tests, the group given fake sugar performed consistently worse. A lack of discipline that was caused by a lack of energy.

“Willpower looked like much more than a metaphor,” Baumeister and Tierney write. “It seemed to be like a muscle that could be fatigued through use.”

The message to dieters is simple, Baumeister says: Don’t diet.

As Baumeister and Tierney wrote: “In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.”

“Instead of squandering your willpower on a strict diet, eat enough glucose to conserve willpower,” Baumeister says. “Having enough energy will enable you to function more effectively in all domains. People with better self-control are nicer to their spouses and less open to temptation.”

That’s not to suggest that a man trying to fight the urge to cheat on his wife should just down a fistful of raisins.

“Eating well can give you a greater capacity” to resist, Baumeister said. “But food itself wouldn’t make much of a difference. Plenty of people eat well but have bad marriages.”

TRIUMPH OVER THE WILL

Hunger isn’t the only factor in ego depletion. Willpower can also be broken when a person simply has too much to think about.

Researchers at Columbia University and Ben-Gurion University in Israel teamed up on a review of more than 1,000 decisions made by the parole board of an Israeli prison system. They found that prisoners who appeared just before the board’s mid-morning snack — at around 10:30 am — had only about a 15% chance of getting parole. The ones who came right after the break had around a 65% chance.

“As judges made one decision after another, their brains and bodies used up glucose, that crucial component of willpower,” Baumeister and Tierney write. “They had fewer available mental resources to make further decisions. And so, apparently, they tended to go for the less risky choice.”

A person’s freedom doesn’t have to be on the line for us to become overwhelmed by data.

In a study at Stanford business school, undergraduates were divided into two groups. One was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. The students then had to walk down the hall, where they were offered either a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. It took just five digits to overtax the brain into making a bad decision. And these were the brains of Stanford students.

Similarly, Baumeister believes that when former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer hired a prostitute, it might have had more to do with that chocolate cake in Stanford than with any deep-seated desire to sabotage his career.

“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, spurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the car dealer’s offer to rustproof their new sedan,” he writes.

Indeed, Casey notes that when people feel depleted, they not only lose self-control, they tend to be more emotional and react more to stimuli.

“We know there are a number of things that decrease our ability to regulate our behavior — stress is one of them,” she says. “If you are reactive to cues and you are stressed, you are more likely to be pulled by them.”

But if you can’t find a less stressful job, at least be sure not to let your blood sugar drop. And by all means, get some sleep.

Lack of sleep is one of the main reasons why parents of newborns and teenagers alike can be such an irrational bunch, Casey says.

“Sleep is probably even more important than food: The more that researchers study sleep deprivation, the more nasty effects they keep discovering,” Baumeister writes. “A rested will is a stronger will.”

How to increase your willpower

If you think you don’t have the willpower to quit smoking, lose weight or stop biting your nails — well, you’re probably right. Four decades of research into the physiology and psychology of willpower have revealed that some people’s brains are simply “wired” to withstand temptation better than others. But that doesn’t mean you are doomed. In his new book, “Willpower,” Florida State University social psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister says willpower can work like a muscle — getting stronger with simple exercises that can be done daily.

* Sit up straight: Research by Baumeister and Dianne Tice found that when students expended a little extra energy remembering not to slouch, they strengthened their overall willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. In a separate study, Baumeister found that over time, overall good habits become encoded in our minds as automatic.

* Use the wrong hand: If you’re right-handed, try brushing your teeth with your left hand. Lefties should switch their computer mouse to the right. Concentrating on changing a habitual behavior (like using your dominant hand to do things) will strengthen your self-control. The trick is to stick to these Mr. Miyagi-like exercises, even when they feel as though they have nothing to do with the habit you’re trying to drop.

n Pre-commit: Lock yourself into a promise that you will not, under any circumstance, give in to the temptation you are trying to avoid. “The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path,” Baumeister writes. In doing so, you will make the temptations so unthinkably disgraceful that it would be impossible to give in to them.

* Invite shame: A variety of Internet sites help people stick to their goals by offering to publicly humiliate those who mess up, including payments to organizations the weak-willed person hates. Smokers in the Philippines who quit using this type of program were 40% more likely to be nicotine-free a year later.