Willpower

know about themselves. A failure, a slipup, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. After all, the other person might not buy the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. And you’ll have even more trouble selling that excuse when you expand from one person to a whole social network.
    By going public, you’re not just exposing yourself to potential shame. You’re also outsourcing the job of monitoring, which can ease the burden on yourself. An outsider can often encourage you by pointing out signs of progress that you’ve taken for granted. And when things are going badly, sometimes the best solution is to look elsewhere for help. One popular QS application, Moodscope, was developed by an entrepreneur battling depression who wanted help monitoring his condition. He devised an application that lets him take a quick daily test to gauge his mood. Besides using it to record his own emotional ups and down so that he can look for patterns and causes, he created an option for the results to be automatically e-mailed to his friends. That way, when his mood darkens, his friends see the data and get in touch with him.
    “The digital tools and the data are just catalysts for people to motivate themselves and one another,” Dyson says. “You find the model that works best for you. Maybe you compare numbers with your friends because you don’t want to be ashamed in front of them. Or you don’t want to let down the team. Different people are motivated in different ways.”
    If you’re a spendthrift, you can try to control yourself by letting a tightwad friend be alerted when you start a spending binge. And if you both study your patterns of spending, you can start to understand what causes the binges. Do you make impulsive purchases when you’re in a good mood and your willpower is low? Or are you one of the compulsive shoppers who buy when they’re feeling depressed or insecure. If so, you’re suffering from what psychologists call misregulation, the mistaken belief that buying something will regulate your mood for the better, when in fact you’ll just feel worse afterward.
    Even if you’re not a spendthrift, you could still benefit from tracking your spending and comparing it with what your neighbors are doing. You might discover that you’re an extreme tightwad—not the worst problem to have, but still a problem, and one that’s surprisingly common. Behavioral economists have found that neurotic penny-pinching may be even more prevalent than neurotic overspending, affecting some one in five people. Brain scans have similarly pinpointed the culprit: an insula that reacts with hyperactive horror at the prospect of parting with cash.
    The result is a condition that researchers call hyperopia (the opposite of myopia), in which you focus too much on the future at the expense of the present. Such penny-pinching can waste time, alienate friends, drive your family crazy, and make you miserable. The studies show that tightwads aren’t any happier than spendthrifts, and that they suffer a case of saver’s remorse when they look back on all the opportunities they passed up. When the time comes for the final monitoring, when you’re adding up not just your assets but your life, you don’t want to rediscover that old proverb about there being no pockets in shrouds. The Quantified Self consists of much more than dollars.

6.
    CAN WILLPOWER BE STRENGTHENED?
    (Preferably Without Feeling David Blaine’s Pain)
    The more the body suffers, the more the spirit flowers.
    ––David Blaine’s philosophy, borrowed from St. Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century ascetic who lived for decades atop a pillar in the Syrian desert

    W e wish to consider a scientific explanation for David Blaine.
    We don’t mean an explanation for why Blaine does what he does. That’s impossible, at least for psychologists, and probably for psychiatrists, too. When he is not doing his famous magic tricks, Blaine works as a self-described endurance artist, performing feats involving willpower instead of illusion. He stood for thirty-five hours more than eighty feet above New York’s Bryant Park, without a safety harness, atop a round pillar just twenty-two inches wide. He spent sixty-three sleepless hours in Times Square encased in a giant block of