Willpower

what they had accomplished and how their health had fared. By asking people about their goals and then monitoring them, the researchers identified three main consequences of conflicting goals:
    First, you worry a lot. The more competing demands you face, the more time you spend contemplating these demands. You’re beset by rumination: repetitive thoughts that are largely involuntary and not especially pleasant.
    Second, you get less done. It might seem that people who think more about their goals would also take more steps to reach them, but instead they replace action with rumination. The researchers found that people with clear, unconflicting goals tended to forge ahead and make progress, but the rest were so busy worrying that they got stuck.
    Third, your health suffers, physically as well as mentally. In the studies, people with conflicting goals reported fewer positive emotions, more negative emotions, and more depression and anxiety. They had more psychosomatic complaints and symptoms. Even just plain physical sickness, measured both by the number of visits to the doctor and by the number of self-reported illnesses over the course of a year, was higher among the people with conflicting goals. The more the goals conflicted, the more the people got stuck, and the more unhappy and unhealthy they became.
    They paid the price for too much brooding—in the most common modern use of the word, not the one in Genesis. The old term for incubation would eventually come to be associated with mental distress, no doubt because so many people could see the same problems later measured by psychologists. A hen might brood contentedly, but humans suffer when their conflicting goals leave them sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t resolve those conflicts until they decide which kinds of goals will do them the most good.

Which Goals?
    Joe is having a cup of coffee in a restaurant. He’s thinking of the time to come when . . .
    Suppose, as a storytelling exercise, you finish that story about Joe any way you like. Quickly imagine what might be going through Joe’s mind.
    Now try a similar exercise. Finish a story that begins with these words:
    After awakening, Bill began to think about his future. In general he expected to . . .
    Once again, you have complete freedom. Complete the story about Bill, and don’t worry about polishing your mental prose. Rough ideas are fine.
    Finished?
    Now consider the actions described in your story. In each story, over how long a period do those actions take place?
    This is not, of course, a literary test for aspiring novelists. It’s an experiment that was previously conducted by psychiatrists among heroin addicts at a treatment center in Burlington, Vermont. The researchers also gave the exercises to a control group of adults who were demographically similar to the addicts (no college degree, annual income of less than twenty thousand dollars, etc.). When Joe sat in the coffee shop thinking of the “time to come,” that time typically covered about a week in the stories from the control group, but in the heroin addicts’ stories it covered only an hour. When the control group wrote about “the future” for Bill, they tended to mention long-term aspirations, like earning a promotion at work or getting married, while the addicts wrote about upcoming events, like a doctor’s appointment or a visit with relatives. The typical person in the control group contemplated the future over four and a half years, while the typical addict’s vision of the future extended only nine days.
    This shortened temporal horizon has been demonstrated over and over in addicts of all kinds. When drug addicts play games of cards in the laboratory, they prefer risky strategies with quick big payoffs, even if they could make more money in the long run by settling for a series of smaller payoffs. Given a choice between getting $375 today or $1,000 a year from now, the addicts are more likely to take the quick money, and so are alcoholics and smokers. The psychiatrist Warren Bickel, who tested those addicts in Vermont and has continued research at the University of Arkansas, says that in studies of heavy users of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, a preference for short-term payoffs has been observed again and again. (The only exception was, once again, marijuana; being far less addictive than other substances, it seems not to require the destructive short-term mind-set that goes with addiction.) A