Dr. Heidi Grant

How You Are Sabotaging Your Self-Control

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Why thought suppression is a bad way to deal with temptation.

Have you ever tried to lose weight by just not thinking about food?  How about trying to play it cool and stop yourself from calling (or emailing, or texting) your love interest by blocking out all thoughts about that person?  Ever try to quit smoking by trying not to think about smoking?  Did it work?  I’ll bet it didn’t.  And it’s really not your fault that it didn’t.

Thought suppression is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it is a very commonly used strategy – people often try to block out or put the lid on unwanted thoughts and feelings, in order to control their influence.  Dieters try to suppress thoughts of tempting snacks, alcoholics suppress their desire to drink, stressed-out workers suppress their feelings of anxiety, and smokers suppress the thought of cigarettes when trying to quit.

On the other hand, thought suppression is not only very, very difficult, but it works only very briefly, and has some very nasty unintended consequences.  Suppression has often been shown to increase the frequency of the unwanted thoughts you were trying to rid yourself of, once the period of active suppression is over.  Suppress thoughts of smoking, and the thoughts come rushing back with even greater force once you let your guard down.  But does this unintended consequence actually lead to more smoking?  Are you actually worse off in terms of quitting than when you started?

Yes, you are.  In a new study, undergrads who smoked at least a half-pack a day on average were asked to keep track of their smoking for several weeks.  For all of Week 2, some of the students were asked to try to suppress any and all thoughts about smoking.  Not surprisingly, they smoked significantly fewer cigarettes during Week 2 than non-suppressers.  But during Week 3, when these students were no longer required to suppress thoughts of smoking, they smoked significantly more cigarettes than non-suppressors!

While they were at it, the researchers who conducted this study looked at students’ stress levels across all three weeks.  Not surprisingly, suppressors reported a dramatic rise in stress during the week they were suppressing (while non-suppressors stress levels remained unchanged).  So not only does the thought-suppression strategy backfire, it feels terrible while you are doing it.

So how can we deal with unwanted thoughts more successfully, in ways that don’t end up actually diminishing our willpower?  I’ve written about this in previous posts, but here are two suggestions:

  1. Don’t suppress, replace.   Decide in advance what you will think about when a thought about smoking, snacking, or hitting “redial” pops into your mind.  When you find yourself thinking about how yummy a candy bar would be right now, try replacing that thought with one that focuses on your health and weight-loss goals (e.g., “It feels better to fit into my skinny jeans than it does to wolf down chocolate-covered nougat.”)

  2. Don’t suppress, plan.   Creating an if-then plan is an easy and effective way to deal with temptations.  You don’t need to block out the thoughts – what you really need is to learn how not to act on them.  By planning on exactly what you will do, in advance, when the tempting thought occurs, it becomes far easier to stick to your goals.  For instance, when thoughts about smoking occur, plan to chew gum, or step outside for several long deep breaths of fresh air.  Whatever you plan to do, it will disrupt the connection between the thought and giving in to the temptation, and over time, the thoughts will fade all on their own.

It’s almost never a good idea to put a lid on your thoughts and feelings.  It may feel like it’s working in the short term, but soon you’ll find yourself right back where you started – surrounded by candy wrappers, and wondering why he hasn’t returned your three dozen phone calls.

How to Put An End to Our Emotional Eating

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When I’m feeling bad – whether it’s anxious, depressed, or simply frustrated – I often find myself wanting to seek comfort in the arms of a pint of chocolate ice cream or a bag of Doritos.  I know I’m not alone.  Psychologists call this emotional eating, and it is thought to be one of the major contributors to obesity in our country.

Americans are stressed out, and seeking treatment for anxiety and depression in record numbers.  Experiencing all of those bad feelings each day leads us to consume more and more high-calorie junk food, to try to make ourselves feel just a little bit better (ignoring the fact that binging almost inevitably leaves you feeling even worse).

At least, that’s how most of us, including the psychologists, think emotional eating works.  Only we are wrong.

Feeling bad does NOT make you more likely to reach for comfort food.  It’s turns out that it’s how you deal with your bad feelings that determines whether or not you’ll be brushing the potato chip crumbs off your pants.

Recent research shows that experiencing anxiety, depression, or anger is only associated with emotional eating when we try to suppress our feelings – to control them by not expressing them, by keeping them to ourselves and trying to push them out of our minds.

Aside from being a really lousy strategy for dealing with emotions for a whole host of other reasons, suppression is really hard to do.  It relies heavily on, and often fully exhausts, your capacity for self-control.  This leaves you unprotected –  completely vulnerable to temptation.  And that is why we reach for “comfort” foods – they are the sweet and salty snacks that we normally have the self-control to resist.  But if you’re using up all of your willpower trying to suppress your fear or sadness, then when the junk food appears you are practically a sitting duck.

So, how can we deal with our feelings in ways that don’t leave us vulnerable to temptation?  You can engage in what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal, which is really just a fancy way of saying “thinking differently.”  Try following these steps:

  1. Don’t hide from your feelings – take a moment to examine them.  In particular, focus on what’s causing them.  Why are you feeling so anxious, so frustrated, so down?

  2. Next, try to think about the cause of your trouble in ways that diminish its impact:

    1. Be objective (Would other people react this way?  Am I over-reacting? Am I blaming myself when I shouldn’t?  Am I being too pessimistic?)

    2. Put it in perspective (In the scheme of things, is this really a big deal?  If things don’t work out this time, is it really the end of the world?)

    3. See the silver lining (What have you learned?  How will you take this knowledge with you and use it to grow and improve?)

Tackling your feelings head on, and thinking about them in ways that will actually help you to cope with the circumstances that caused them, may sound hard, but it actually uses less self-control than suppression.

New studies show that when people use this strategy to cope with their feelings, they don’t succumb to the call of the cookie.  And of course, they tend to feel better much more quickly.  So it’s not just a good way to stick to your diet – it’s a good way to become a happier person, too.

Just Don’t Do It!

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In my first year of graduate school, I got the opportunity to give my very first psychology lecture.  The professor who taught the course suggested that I videotape my performance, so I could see what I did well and what needed improvement.  When I finally sat down to watch the video, it was more than a little horrifying.  My “um”s and “uh”s outnumbered the actual words 2-to-1.  Even worse, I saw that I touched my nose over and over again while speaking, as though I were constantly monitoring my own sobriety.  Somewhere along the way I had unknowingly developed some very bad habits, and unless I wanted to be ruthlessly mocked for the rest of my teaching career, I was going to have to break them.

Habits are learned associations.  If you repeat the same behavior in the same situation over and over again, your mind makes a connection and a habit is born.  Light up a cigarette enough times in your favorite bar, and eventually just walking through the door will make you reach for your cigarette pack.  “Situations” can be emotional states as well.  Start using profane words to express your frustration, and pretty soon you’ll be cursing like a sailor every time you lose your temper.  My um-ing and nose-touching were nervous habits – responses to the stress I felt whenever I spoke to a large audience, that probably become habits somewhere in my adolescence (Why didn’t anybody back then tell me?)

Once a habit is formed, all you need is the situation or the cue, and the behavior that goes with it follows automatically.  In other words, you act without conscious intent (or even awareness – I certainly had no idea I had become a nose-toucher).  Most people have at least one bad habit of some sort that they’d like to rid themselves of, whether it’s smoking, nail-biting, over-sleeping, cursing, slouching, or eating too much when we’re nervous, depressed, or bored.

But what is the best strategy to use to break a bad habit?  Should you try to distract yourself, to take your mind off of the habit-triggering situation? Should you remove yourself from the situation entirely, or avoid it like the plague in the first place?  These strategies actually work very well when it comes to resisting temptations (like a plate of doughnuts, or a flirtatious co-worker), but not for breaking bad habits.

Distraction isn’t useful because the habit-behavior happens automatically – you don’t even need to be focused on what you’re doing.  Avoiding the situation altogether is pretty much impossible for most bad habits – how exactly do I avoid public speaking if I’m a professor?  How can we avoid ever being nervous, depressed, or bored?

So to really break a habit, what you need to do is focus on stopping the response before it starts (or, as psychologists tend to put it, you need to “inhibit” your bad behavior).  A recent study by Jeffrey Quinn, Anthony Pascoe, Wendy Wood, and David Neal shows that the most effective strategy for breaking a bad habit is vigilant monitoring – focusing your attention on the unwanted behavior to make sure you don’t engage in it.  In other words, thinking to yourself “Don’t do it!” and watching out for slipups.

In their study, participants kept a daily diary for a week or longer, to record their attempts at not engaging in a bad habit (e.g., overeating, sleeping during an early morning class, smoking, getting nervous before a test). With each attempt, they indicated which strategies they had used:  vigilant monitoring (thinking “Don’t do it!”, watching carefully for mistakes, or monitoring their behavior) distracting myself, or removing myself from the situation.

The results showed that only vigilant monitoring was effective in stopping bad habits. (A second study conducted in the laboratory, in which the experimenters manipulated which strategy participants used, produced the same results).  When people think to themselves “Don’t do it!” they are actually able to take their brain off autopilot and break the situation-behavior connection.  Over time, use of this strategy will destroy the connection completely, and the habit will be no more.

Incidentally, this is exactly how I stopped my nose-touching and excessive use of “um” and “uh” while lecturing.  I consciously monitored what I did with my hands and kept them away from my face at all times.  I wrote “NO UMS” at the top of each page of my lecture notes, to remind me not to fill my pauses with nonsense words.  I would videotape myself every so often to check on my progress.  Over time, (and it definitely took a while), I broke my nose-touching habit completely, and my ums and uhs are now no more frequent than everyone else’s.   I’m sure that I still give my students plenty to laugh about, but that’s ok with me.  I wouldn’t want to ruin all their fun.

J. Quinn, A. Pascoe, W. Wood, & D. Neal (2010) Cant’ control yourself? Monitor those bad habits.   Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 499-511.

https://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/499?rss=1

How Standing Up Straight Can Help You Lose Weight

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Self-control, or willpower, is essential for achieving just about any important goal.  Resisting temptations (like tasty snacks or cigarettes), ignoring distractions (like your rapidly filling email Inbox or your gossiping coworkers), taking actions you’d really rather not take (like getting on that treadmill or asking your penny-pinching boss for a raise) – all of these actions require significant self-control.  Do you have the willpower to get the job done, or have you found yourself giving in to temptations, distractions, and inaction when trying to reach your own goals?   If it’s the latter, you’re not alone.  But more importantly, you can do something about it.

It turns out that our capacity for self-control is surprisingly like a muscle. That’s right – like a bicep or tricep.  Like any muscle, self-control can vary in its strength, not only from person to person, but from moment to moment. Even well-developed biceps sometimes feel like jelly after too much strain, and so too does your self-control muscle.  Spend all day dealing with distractions, hassles, and stressors at work, and it’s awfully hard to summon up the willpower to resist the allure of the cocktail, the cigarette, or the fully-loaded nacho platter.

The good news is that depletion is only temporary -after you rest it a while, you will get your strength back.   The great news is that if you want more self-control in general, you can get more.  And you get more self-control the same way you get bigger muscles – you’ve got to give it regular workouts.

Do you have a sweet tooth?  Try giving up candy, even if weight-loss and cavity-prevention are not your goals.  Hate exerting yourself physically?  Go out and buy one of those handgrips you see the muscle men with at the gym – even if your goal is to pay your bills on time.  In a recent study, psychologist Mark Muraven asked a group of adult men and women in one study to either avoid sweets or use a handgrip over two weeks.  The ”avoid sweets” group was told to eat as little cake, cookies, candy, and other dessert foods as possible.  In the handgrip condition, people were given handgrips to take home and asked to hold them twice a day for as long as possible.  Both tasks require self-control – either to resist temptation, or to overcome physical discomfort – so both function as a kind of self-control workout.   At the end of two weeks of sweets-abstinence and handgripping, Muraven found that participants had significantly improved on a difficult computerized concentration task -having nothing to do with either giving up sweets or using a handgrip – that required lots of self-control.[i] Just by working their willpower muscle regularly, their self-control strength had increased measurably in a matter of weeks!

In another study from 2006, psychologists Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng gave participants a free gym membership, and individually-tailored exercise programs (designed by trainers) that included aerobics, free-weights, and resistance training.  After exercising regularly over the course of two months, these men and women had not only increased their ability to do a variety of laboratory self-control tasks, but also reported that many other areas of their life had improved as well.  They smoked fewer cigarettes, drank fewer alcoholic beverages, and ate less junk food.  They said they were better able to control their tempers, and less apt to spend money impulsively.  They didn’t leave their dishes in the sink, didn’t put things off until later, missed fewer appointments, and developed better study habits.  In fact, every aspect of their lives that involved using some self-control seemed to have improved dramatically.  When you exercise, it turns out that it’s not just your physical muscles you’re building.

Self-control training studies have used many different approaches – directing people to refrain from cursing, or to use their non-dominant hand to open doors and brush their teeth.  Just sitting up straight every time it occurs to you can help you build up self-control strength.  What all these different methods have in common is that each one forces you to do something you’d rather not do – to fight the urge to give in, give up, or just not bother.  Pick an activity that fits with your life and your goals – anything that requires you to override an impulse or desire again and again, and make an if-then plan (see my earlier posts) to add this activity to your daily routine.  It will be hard in the beginning, particularly if you aren’t used to working your self-control muscle that much.  I can promise you with complete confidence that it will get easier over time if you hang in there, because your capacity for self-control will grow.  When it does, it can impact every aspect of your life for the better.

M. Muraven (2010) Building self-control strength: Practicing self-control leads to improved self-control performance.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 465-468.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJB-4Y34WJ8-1&_user=8137820&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2010&_rdoc=36&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info%28%23toc%236874%232010%23999539997%231669135%23FLA%23display%23Volume%29&_cdi=6874&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=40&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=8137820&md5=17cf7a1c7c5852e5a1d20c20f1090686

M. Oaten & K. Cheng (2006)   Longitudinal gains in self-regulation from regular physical exercise.  British Journal of Health Psychology, 11, 717-733.

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpsoc/bjhp/2006/00000011/00000004/art00012

Be Careful What You Plan For

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The best plans for when you're freaking out.

If you read my last blog post, you’ll know that I am a big fan of planning.  If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal.  Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take steps to reach your goal (e.g., “If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthy option like fruit or veggies,”) can double or triple your chances for success.  But once you’ve decided to make an if-then plan, the next thing you need to do is figure out what goes in it.   And it turns out that some plans suit each of us better than others.

Imagine for a moment that you are preparing for an upcoming exam, knowing that you are the kind of person who tends to break into a cold sweat at the sight of one of those oval-filled answer sheets or a #2 pencil.  You have what psychologists call “high test anxiety,” and it’s a real problem for you, because being anxious during an exam makes you easily distractible and less able to focus on answering the questions.  So, having read my last blog post, you decide to make an if-then plan for dealing with your problem.  “If I am getting distracted during the exam, then I will……” What?  What should you do?  Should you plan to increase your efforts and focus on the task at hand (the exam), or should you plan to ignore the distraction?

Those two options may sound similar to you, but from a psychological perspective, they actually aren’t.  One plan emphasizes how you should approach the task, (by working even harder on the exam) and the other emphasizes how you should deal with the distraction (by ignoring it).     If instead your goal were eating better to lose weight, it would be the difference between planning what you would eat more of (fruits and vegetables) or planning what you would avoid eating (temptations like candies and junk food).

You might think that both kinds of plans would get the job done equally well for anyone, but that’s not the case.  A recent study by Peter Gollwitzer, Gabriele Oettingen, and Elizabeth Parks-Stamm shows just how important it is for each of us to tailor the plans we create to our own personality. If, for instance, you are someone who is highly anxious, you need to choose your plan wisely.

In their study, the researchers began by asking each participant (NYU students) to indicate how much they suffered from test anxiety.  Next, the students were told that they would be taking a very difficult math exam, where each multi-step problem required considerable memory and focus.  Entertaining commercials would play on a portion of the students’ computer screen, and they were told to try to ignore the commercials and concentrate instead on solving as many math problems as possible.

Before beginning, each participant made one of two types of if-then plans: ones that emphasized focusing on the math task (“If I hear or see the commercials, then I will increase my efforts on the math task!”), or ones that emphasized ignoring the distractions (“If I hear or see the commercials, then I will ignore them!”)

Parks-Stamm, Gollwitzer, and Oettingen found that the more anxious the student was about test-taking, the more effective the distraction-avoiding plans were, and the less effective the task-focused plans were.  In fact, among high-anxiety students, those who planned to ignore the distraction solved nearly 50% more problems (78 vs. 54) than those who planned to focus even more on the test!

So when you’re feeling anxious about reaching a goal, think about what stands in your way.  Then, try making if-then plans to prepare yourself for the obstacles, distractions, and temptations that might derail you.  Creating plans that focus on what could go wrong can be the best way to keep it from happening in the first place.

E. Parks-Stamm, P. Gollwitzer, & G. Oettingen (2009) Implementation intentions and test anxiety: Shielding academic performance from distraction. Learning and Individual Differences, 20, 30-33.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W5P-4XB1V6X-1&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F28%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1270306654&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d113bbd75ff15e01b7aba1ccc4a53358