You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow experiment. The one where kids are left alone and told not to eat the marshmallows. Some do, some don’t. It shows us that some people are more predisposed to immediate gratification than others. Carl Erik Fisher has written a great article about this, it's his quotes below.
You’ve probably heard that this ability to delay gratification is linked to success. This correlation was discovered by accident, but people bloody loved it. Then came the idea of willpower as a finite resource. Again something people loved. But a 2015 meta-analysis of studies into this idea of willpower as a finite resource found a lot of publication bias and very little evidence that it’s real. Then an international experiment, with more than 2,100 subjects found no evidence of it.
That totally changed my view of personal behaviour change, particularly around patience. Now, everything I’ve done on patience is about avoiding the need for willpower, because brute force doesn’t work in my view. But by questioning the very existence of willpower opens you up to a richer, more diverse and of course complicated set of ideas.
“Willpower may simply be a pre-scientific idea—one that was born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research, and enshrined before rigorous experimental evaluation of it became possible. The term has persisted into modern psychology because it has a strong intuitive hold on our imagination: Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing. But these ideas also have a pernicious effect, distracting us from more accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our efforts toward meaningful self-control.”
If willpower doesn’t exist, then we need a toolkit of ideas to change our behaviour. What can you actually do then?
Carl points to a number of things, all of which are picked out and put into practice in my patience course.
“Emotional self-regulation is a complex function, and as we’ve long known in psychotherapy, trying to willfully manage your emotional states through brute force alone is bound to fail. Instead, regulating emotions also includes skills such as shifting attention (distracting yourself), modulating your physiological response (taking deep breaths), being able to tolerate and wait out the negative feelings, and reframing beliefs.”
If you want to improve your patience, you can do a lot better than trying to exercise will power. Instead try working on the root causes of your stress, reframe situations that test your patience into learning opportunities for your children. After all, your job as a parent is to help them grow up to be brilliant big people. Exerting control over them – do what I say – runs counter to this belief. The reframe helps you approach previously stressful situations in a new light.
