This post examines the virtue of self-control. I mostly summarize what others have learned about this virtue, rather than expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn more. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is self-control?

In another post, I cover the virtue of temperance, which involves having a well-chosen and well-regulated set of desires. Self-control is related but different. When an intemperate person gives into an unwise desire, they do so because they don’t see anything wrong with it; when a person without self-control does so, they do so in spite of knowing it’s wrong. Intemperance is a misuse of the will; lack of self-control is a malfunction of the will. Aristotle suggested this analogy: The intemperate person is like a city with bad laws; the person without self-control is like a city that has good laws on the books but that doesn’t enforce them.^[1]

Some philosophers insist that lack of self-control is not really distinct from intemperance.^[2] In their view, the person without self-control does not act contrary to their own temperate judgement, but merely reveals their real intemperate judgement at the last minute, having only deceived themselves into believing that they had good temperate judgement.

While temperance mostly has to do with our desires, self-control also comes into play in how we regulate our responses to other things, such as anger. (Lack of self-control in the face of fear falls under the domain of courage. Sometimes people split off response to anger under a distinct virtue like “good temper.”)

In addition to prompting unwise action, lack of self-control can also lead to unwise inaction, for example procrastination in which you commit to some wise course of action but then dawdle along doing something else instead, tempted by mere inertia or laziness.

Aside from lack of self-control, there is also a failure mode in which the pendulum swings too far the other way: pig-headed stubbornness, in which you stick with your resolutions even when the underlying facts change or when it turns out your resolutions were faulty. A fetish for being “decisive” can lead you to stick with bad decisions when a wiser person would have been more flexible.

Often, particularly in older writing on the subject, you will see the word “continence” used for the virtue of self-control, but nowadays that word has become so linked to advertising for adult diapers that it’s less common. “Willpower” is another common synonym. “Akrasia” (or “incontinence”) is sometimes used for the lack of self-control.

Self-control and cognitive control

Cognitive control is a phenomenon studied in neuroscience and psychology (sometimes under the “executive functioning” umbrella). It is (to oversimplify) the process by which brains select which stimuli to process and which to ignore.

In a “Stroop test” of cognitive control, in order to correctly state the colors of each word in the second set of words, you must successfully inhibit your reading of the text of those words, which gives you conflicting information.

Chandra Sripada believes we can model self-control as a temporally-extended sequence of cognitive control actions, and can then we use the insights from the study of cognitive control to improve our understanding of how self-control takes place.^[3] In Sripada’s theory, the sorts of thing that challenge self-control, such as emotions or cravings, present themselves in the nervous system as a series of cognitive control challenges: brief “response pulses” which, if nothing interferes, tend to evoke predictable changes in “action selection, attention, belief, evaluation, memory, and thought.”

Cognitive control mechanisms might for example inhibit the response ordinarily evoked by the pulse, or might block that response with an equal and opposite response, or might themselves evoke an incompatible response, or might make the precursors of the response pulse less salient to the pulse-producing mechanism so that the mechanism stops producing pulses. There might need to be a variety of such mechanisms to address the variety of changes a particular pulse evokes (e.g. one mechanism to address the change in beliefs, another to address the change in attention, and so forth).

Cognitive control mechanisms that are more-or-less intentional, deliberate, and conscious can in this way prevent the operation of response pulses that are more automatic, habitual, and subconscious.

The mechanisms that produce response pulses seem, from Sripada’s description, to be simpler and more primitive than those that produce cognitive control. They are triggered automatically, by what is immediately available to them, in an inflexible way: (“That word is ‘purple’!”) Cognitive control mechanisms have to be rallied into action and allocated additional resources, and they are more flexible in their operation, having access to our conscious intentions and to the context of working memory: (“But remember, we have chosen to undertake an unusual task; that word may be ‘purple’ but that word is green, so override what you were about to say.”)

Sripada concludes that:

Exercises of self-control consist of skilled sequences of cognitive control aimed at regulating the temporally-extended streams of response pulses associated with an emotion-type state [e.g. emotions, cravings, impulses], in order to prevent the emotion-type state from being effective in action.

How do we lose self-control, and how can we strengthen it?

How is it that you can know the right thing to do, resolve to do that thing, know that you will regret not doing that thing, and yet still screw up at the last minute by choosing something else?

Temptation gets stronger as it gets closer; resolve doesn’t

Part of the problem seems to be that it is easy to resolve to resist temptation when the tempting thing is at a distance and the tempting impulse is mostly theoretical. As the tempting thing becomes nearer and the tempting impulse more vivid, the earlier resolve is not strong enough to hold the fort. This may mean that insights about near and far mode thinking will be important in understanding self-control: If you make your resolutions in far mode, but ultimately make your choices in near mode, they may get out of sync. This may also suggest that lack of self-control is a sort of cognitive bias concerning time discounting.

Physiological factors: blood sugar, sleep, health, drugs, sexual arousal

Good nutrition (sufficient blood glucose in particular), sufficient sleep, and good health make it easier to exercise self-control. Some drugs (e.g. alcohol) make self-control more difficult or at any rate less likely.

Sexual arousal is so notoriously effective at diminishing self-control that it seems we have evolved to implement the heuristic that it is far better to have ill-considered sex with disastrous consequences than to miss a chance to do the nasty.

Peer pressure: a double-edged sword

Peer pressure is notoriously erosive of self-control. For this reason, strengthening one’s assertiveness and self-confidence may be an important factor in bolstering self-control. On the other hand, peers who exercise self-control can perhaps inspire you to greater self-control.^[4]

Self-control as a depletable resource

There is some evidence that self-control is a resource that can be depleted with use and that takes time to recharge.^[5] So for example if you have to use self-control at task A, and then at task B, you will have a harder time than if you were just asked to use self-control for task B. And yet, some evidence suggests that “it does appear possible to improve self-regulation via regular exercise… [I]mproving self-regulation operates by increasing a general core capacity. That is, as the person performs exercises to improve self-regulation in one sphere, he or she becomes better at self-regulating in other spheres.”^[6]

Mindfulness meditation may help to replenish self-control reservoirs, at least in the short term.^[7]

Environmental triggers

One school of thought holds that self-control is less an internal skill or trait like “willpower” and more a matter of strategically adjusting one’s environment to add friction to harmful temptations in order to make them less tempting.^[8] One way to do this is, when you commit to do the right thing, to establish an automatic penalty for later doing the wrong thing: the Beeminder app is one attempt to facilitate this process. B.F. Skinner created a catalog of environmental interventions to influence self-control.^[9]

See also: How You Can Gain Self-Control Without Self-Control (Spencer Greenberg)

Vigilance for triggers of unwanted habitual behaviors can help you exercise self-control before your habit has a chance to get its wheels turning.^[10]

Lack of self-control is hard to fix

Lack of self-control might be harder to fix than intemperance. With the intemperate person, you have the hope of persuading them that their desires are poorly chosen; with the incontinent person, they’ve already been persuaded but it doesn’t seem to help matters any. On the other hand, the intemperate person usually has no regrets about their unwise course of action, while the incontinent person does, so at least the incontinent person has a motive to get better.

Aristotle, who considered self-control extensively in book Ⅶ of his Nicomachean Ethics, compared it with the virtue of endurance.^[11] Self-control is resisting the temptation of things that seem immediately appealing; endurance is resisting the dissuasion of things that seem immediately uncomfortable. It can be difficult to distinguish them in some cases: is the regretful alcoholic reaching for the bottle because they cannot resist the temptation of a pleasing drink, or because they cannot endure the discomfort of withdrawal?

Become more aware of your control failures and your control goals

It is difficult to control what you are not aware of, so in some cases it can be helpful to increase your awareness of what you are trying to control by means of deliberate monitoring (carefully documenting e.g. how much money you spend and on what, how much you eat and of what, etc. depending on what you are trying to develop control over).

Strengthening the quasi-virtue of shame may be a good way of making the negative consequences of failure of self-control more visceral so as to counter the temptation.

If you think of yourself as the sort of person who can easily overcome temptation when in fact you are not, and you fail to update your self image, you will not take steps to improve your self-control or to reduce the temptation in your environment. Better self-awareness and humility may come to the assistance of self-control in such a case.

Rules of thumb like “don’t respond to an email while you’re angry” or “count to ten before you decide” can help give you the space you need to remember your long-term goals in the face of short-term temptations. Another example that a substance abuse counselor told me about is called “play the tape forward”—envision the far-term consequences of the short-term temptation you are contemplating giving in to, so as to make those consequences more vivid, in the hopes that they will weigh more heavily against the temptation.

Some failures of self-control are subconsciously motivated and so are difficult to root out by conscious effort.^[12] These require more painstaking investigation, perhaps with help from someone with an outside perspective.

Some failures of self-control are (perhaps poorly-chosen) attempts to meet a goal or solve a problem. If exercising self-control means not meeting the goal or solving the problem, self-control is that much less attractive. It may be a good plan to become more aware of the specific goal or problem and to prepare other ways of meeting it as alternatives when temptation strikes.

The Christian perspective on the spirit and the flesh

Christians have documented the struggle with akrasia in terms of a battle between the spirit which is inclined to God and the flesh which is mired in sin.^[13] Jesus, as his crucifixion approached, felt himself recoil from his chosen task, and noticed “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”^[14] Paul, in his letter to the Romans, complained, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.… I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability.”^[15] And St. Augustine amusingly wrote in his Confessions, “As a youth I prayed, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not right away.’ ”^[16]

Psychological insights into impulsivity and impulse control

“Impulsivity” and “impulse control disorder” are subjects of psychological investigation, and some interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy have shown some promise in improving impulse control.

Mental contrasting

“Mental contrasting” is a lab-tested method for boosting self-control.^[17] It consists of the following sequence of steps:

Identify some behavior (or behavior change) you hope to adopt.
Identify and imagine the most positive outcome you anticipate from successfully adopting this behavior.
Identify and imagine the most critical obstacle (e.g. temptation) that stands in your way.

Something about doing all three of these three steps, in this order, seems to help people successfully do what they hope to do.

Implementation intentions

Another well-tested method is to establish “implementation intentions.”^[18] You do this by taking your abstract self-control goals (e.g. “I want to drink less alcohol,” “I want to exercise more”) and translating them into concrete actions that you will take at a specific time and place when you expect a contrary temptation to arise (“When the waiter asks if I’d like a drink, I will choose a soda,” “When I go to lunch today, I will take the stairs rather than the elevator”).

You can combine this with the mental contrasting technique as a step #4 (“when step #3’s obstacle appears, I will…”).

Self-control as a mistaken idea

The concept of self-control may rest on a problematic assumption. When we speak of control, we typically distinguish between a controller and something being controlled—like the software that controls a self-driving vehicle’s steering and braking. With self-control, this distinction is puzzling: my choices and intentions supposedly control my choices and intentions.

This suggests an implausible duplication of the self, where one self’s choices govern another self’s choices. I suppose that could be true—I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)^[19] But it seems an odd design decision to separate a wise, decision-making self from an unwise, action-taking self. Why would we concentrate wisdom in a non-acting self while delegating action to an unwise self?

One might argue that a present self tries to control a future self—the same entity under different circumstances. But this may mischaracterize what happens when we fail to follow through on intentions. Consider the statement: “I decided to eat healthily this week, but because of poor self-control I had fast food for lunch today instead.” Perhaps it would be truer to say: I imagined or fantasized about deciding to eat healthily, but when the actual moment of decision arrived, I chose differently.

If I hold on to the idea that I am making good decisions but am plagued by bad self-control, I may not catch on to what is really happening: I am only fantasizing about making good decisions while actually making bad ones. I displace the source of my problem to a chimerical faculty (self-control) rather than facing it head-on.

Disadvantages of self-control

Self-control has obvious advantages, but may also have some subtle disadvantages.^[20] People who are thought to exhibit extraordinary self-control may appear to others to be “robotic” and less “warm” in a way that discourages others from socializing with them.^[21] Behaving in an impulsive or even foolish way—devil may care—can also be a display of power or status. It signals that you are impervious to consequences. Someone who exhibits self-control on the other hand may thereby suggest that they feel fragile or insecure: they have to keep a tight grip. It may be a good idea for this reason to pair self-control with ostentatiously letting yourself go when the occasion for uninhibited action arises.

People with good self-control can also be more severe in judging the minor self-control related foibles in people without it.^[22]

Over time, people tend to cast a rosy glow of possibility over the dares they didn’t take and may come to regret not having indulged temptation more often. People tend to regret their near-past failures to resist temptation but also to regret their farther-past restraint.^[23] In other words: the same person will think “I wish I had worked on my term paper last weekend instead of going skiing” and, several years later, “I wish I hadn't been such a bookworm in college.”

Addiction and other edge cases

Addiction is either a particularly difficult example of lack of self-control or something that goes beyond mere lack of self-control, depending on who you ask. Because the object of addiction comes packaged with strong reinforcing mechanisms (that only get stronger as dependence develops), it is hard to interrupt this with a will that lacks such enticements.

Addicts have painful insight into akrasia: solemn vows of sobriety at dawn that are broken by nightfall; a multitude of attempts to supplement self-control with techniques like “I will stop after two” or “beer and wine only this time” or what-have-you.

The first step in “Twelve-Step” programs is to admit that you are powerless over the object of addiction, that your self-control has met its match. There is something of a paradox to this, in that you begin the path of controlling your addiction by surrendering and acknowledging that your will is weaker than it is. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the addict gives up on trying to conquer alcohol with self-control, and moves on to other strategies (e.g. peer support, a “higher power”, the steps).

Other examples of people whose actions don’t seem to align with their well-considered decisions are people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, Tourette syndrome, and things of that nature. While these seem to be pretty far afield from the usual lack of self-control that people complain about, it’s possible that things we learn about how to treat and control such disorders might be useful in more mundane cases.

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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅶ.10
Apparently also some disciplines use the term “synchronic self-control” to refer to what I’m calling self-control, and “diachronic self-control” to refer to what I’m calling temperance.
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Sarah Stroud & Larisa Svirsky “Weakness of Will” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019)
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Chandra Sripada “The atoms of self-control” Noûs 15 May 2020
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@Psy-Kosh “Self-control may be contagious” LessWrong 14 Jan. 2010
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R.F. Baumeister, M. Gailliot, C.N. DeWall, 7 M. Oaten “Self-Regulation and Personality” Journal of Personality (2006) pp. 1775–1779
However: @Kaj_Sotala “[link] Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited” LessWrong 20 Jan. 2014
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Baumeister et al. (2006) op. cit., pp. 1779–1786
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M. Friese, C. Messner, & Y. Schaffner, “Mindfulness meditation counteracts self-control depletion” Consciousness and Cognition (June 2012)
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@joaolkf “[link] Lectures on Self-Control and the myth of Willpower” LessWrong 13 Mar. 2015
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B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953), chapter ⅩⅤ
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J.M. Quinn, A. Pascoe, W. Wood, & D.T. Neal “Can’t Control Yourself? Monitor Those Bad Habits” Personality and Psychology Bulletin (2010)
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅶ.7
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A. Lipson & D.N. Perkins “Mysteriously Blocked: The Role of Hidden Forces” Block: Getting Out of Your Own Way (1990) pp. 91–113
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@David Hugh-Jones “Self-Control Secrets of the Puritan Masters” Wyclif’s Dust 24 Sept. 2022
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Matthew 26:40-43: “Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Again he went away for the second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy.”
^{^}
Romans 7:14-20: “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.”
Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses Ⅶ.20–21 “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequo [I see and approve the better, but I follow the worse]”
^{^}
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, book Ⅷ, chapter 7
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G. Oettingen, & M.E.J. Stephens “Fantasies and motivationally intelligent goal setting” The big book of goals (2009) pp. 135–178
G. Stadler, G. Oettingen, & P.M. Gollwitzer “Intervention Effects of Information and Self-Regulation on Eating Fruits and Vegetables Over Two Years” Health Psychology (2010)
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P.M. Gollwizter & P. Sheeran “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (2006)
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Walt Whitman “Song of Myself” (1855) #51
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Samantha Lapka & Franki Kung “Wish you had more self-control? You should hear the downsides” Psyche 14 March 2023
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Samantha P. Lapka, et al. “Determined yet dehumanized: People higher in self-control are seen as more robotic.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 14.2 (2023)
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Sarah C.E. Stanton & Eli J. Finkel “Too tired to take offense: When depletion promotes forgiveness” Journal of Experiemental Social Psychology (2012)
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Ran Kivetz & Anat Keinan “Repenting Hyperopia: An Analysis of Self-Control Regrets” Journal of Consumer Research 33 (2006)