So, I could write this review. Or then again, I could clean the kitchen cupboards, or not deal with my tax bill, or stare blankly into space. Or, you know, google some more. Because where, I ask, does one find the willpower to deal with not one but two new books on willpower?
It's a procrastinator's recipe for disaster. You wait forever for a book to tell you how to exercise more, and drink less, and develop an iron self-control and God-like levels of self-discipline, and then two come along at once. So how do you choose between them? Should you read Maximum Willpower by Kelly McGonigal, or Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney?
In McGonigal's corner is the fact that her book claims a can-do, change-your-life sort of attitude. But the fact that she styles herself "Kelly McGonigal PhD" is not overly promising.
Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney, meanwhile, offer the insights of a psychologist who's done some of the leading research into the field (Baumeister), alongside a New York Times science columnist (Tierney) who can presumably spot a lucrative gap in the publishing market for well-written pop science with attitude, particularly that aimed at the new-year, new-you crowd.
Or could staring into space actually be the wisest option? Possibly, according to Baumeister. Having too many choices, and being forced to make too many decisions, can seriously dent your willpower, a process Baumeister calls "ego depletion", a factor, the authors suggest, in the lack of self-control demonstrated by "deciders" such as Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton.
Choosing gifts for their wedding registry, for example, made women's self-control fall through the floor. In an experiment conducted in Baumeister's lab, being forced to decide between different sheets and toasters led to a wholesale collapse of the will. In a standard willpower test (keeping your hand immersed in ice cold water), these women cracked long before the non-choosing control group.
The grandaddy of willpower science is the "marshmallow experiment". Devised by Walter Mischel in 1972, it's a classic of social psychology and the bedrock for all later research on willpower and self-control. In it, researchers left four-year-olds alone in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they could wait until the experimenter returned they'd get two.
If you watch the footage on YouTube of this, you'll see the extreme toll this takes on some of the children (although you can't help but admire the boy who picks up his marshmallow, licks it and then replaces it), but it's what happened next that gave researchers a new insight into the workings of character.
Baumeister and Tierney tell the story of how this happened. The children happened to attend the same school as Mischel's daughters and he began hearing stories about them and happened to notice that the children who'd eaten the marshmallow seemed to get into more trouble. He and his researchers tracked them over years and discovered that the children who held out the longest in the test did better academically, earned more, weighed less, had more successful relationships and were less likely to have problems with drug abuse.
What's most remarkable about this is that it's one of the very few factors from childhood that have been proved to have any decisive effect on how adults turn out. "When researchers compared students' grades with nearly three dozen personality traits, self-control turned out to be the only trait that predicted a student's grade-point average." Willpower, it seems, really is character.
If you're the kind of child who liked a marshmallow, ate your Easter eggs in three seconds flat and never knowingly saved your pocket money, fear not. The first piece of good news is that Baumeister's research suggests that willpower operates like a muscle and can be improved with practice. Exhibiting self-control in one small aspect of your life can lead to greater self-control in other, more important areas. Two Australian psychologists, Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, for example, found that students who were enrolled in an exercise programme or made to manage their money more carefully held out better against temptation in other areas. They smoked and drank less and studied more. (Neuroscientists believe that the practice strengthens neural pathways to saying "no" rather than "yes", but neither book really goes into this.)
One thing underlined in both books is that a sugary snack can be a powerful willpower aid. Want to improve your chances of sticking to your resolution? Eat something. Resisting temptation, a task undertaken by our frontal lobes, is energy-intensive work and you'll do it much better after you've had some glucose. (One reason why diets come apart is what Tierney and Baumeister call "the perfect storm of dieting", though it's rarely willpower per se that's the problem.)
What's incontrovertible is that willpower is back in fashion. The Victorians were hot on it, but after the second world war, a certain understandable suspicion crept in about the very idea of a psychology of the will. Meanwhile, Freudians believed it was all about the unconscious anyway. The idea that there is a self, which can be controlled (or not), has only gradually become popular again. Now, though, we've reached the point where Kelly McGonigal can inform us that her Science of Willpower course, part of Stanford University's Continuing Studies programme, is one of the most popular classes on campus.
And that is where her book falls down. There's lots of interesting facts and research, but McGonigal's jokes are better suited to the lecture hall, while her prose style might be described as American Aspirational. Whereas Baumeister and Tierney are mining the Freakonomics genre, in which hard science meets punchy anecdote, McGonigal is like a sports coach egging you on from the sidelines: "Willpower is actually three powers – I will, I won't and I want – that help us to be a better version of ourselves"; "Self-awareness is the one 'self' you can always count on to help you do what is difficult."
Willpower is the better written of the two, but they both serve their purpose. They're both self-help, it's just that Baumeister and Tierney have the wit to disguise it better, layering in mentions of Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will and quotes from St Augustine ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet"). While McGonigal sets homework and "willpower challenges", Baumeister and Tierney also feel no compunction about weighing in with a directive or two. Be like Odysseus and lash yourself to the mast is one piece of advice – ie, simply remove yourself from temptation. If monitoring yourself is too arduous, they suggest various bits of software to watch over you instead (RescueTime will keep a check on your computer usage, for example).
They also bravely wade into the potentially explosive issue of child-raising. Low self-esteem isn't what holds children back, they claim; it's low self-control. Over-praise your child, they seem to suggest, and you're setting him or her up for a life of obesity and alcohol abuse.
There's a lot of science in both books, from the studies of Israeli judges who are more likely to grant parole first thing in the morning rather than last thing in the afternoon (after decision fatigue and ego depletion have set in) to the transmission of social behaviours: you can catch obesity from someone you like. But ultimately, they're self-help for people who think they're above self-help. Baumeister and Tierney's message is, in fact, that all of us could do with a little helping hand.
"Self-control is ultimately about much more than self-help. It's essential for savouring your time on earth and sharing joy with the people you love." What's more: "People with stronger willpower are more altruistic. They're more likely to donate to charity, to do volunteer work and to offer their own homes as shelter to someone with no place to go." Their theory? That willpower evolved to help us get along that little bit better with other people.
Take note, procrastinators. Or, you know, go and put the kettle on instead.
