Willpower

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    First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
    Copyright © Roy T. Baumeister and John Tierney, 2011
    All rights reserved

    Excerpt from “Holy Mother” by Stephen Bishop and Eric Clapton.

    Excerpt from Lit by Mary Karr. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Karr.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Baumeister, Roy F.
    Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney.
    p. cm.
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54377-1
    1. Will. 2. Self-control. I. Tierney, John, 1953–II. Title.
    BF632.B292 2011
    153.8—dc22
    2011013944

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To our children,
Athena and Luke

INTRODUCTION
    H owever you define success—a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions—it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven’t learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control.
    Hence this book. We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favor, with some twentieth-century psychologists and philosophers doubting it even existed. Baumeister himself started out as something of a skeptic. But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose self-control as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fueled by the glucose in the body’s bloodstream. He and his collaborators discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise. Since Baumeister’s experiments first demonstrated the existence of willpower, it has become one of the most intensively studied topics in social science (and those experiments now rank among the most-cited research in psychology). He and colleagues around the world have found that improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.
    They’ve come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor