Willpower

choice for him, understandably. So many ordeals, so many varieties of agony. The seventeen-minute breath-hold on Oprah was awful but brief. For sustained terror, there was the last part of his thirty-five-hour stint standing on the pillar, when he was fighting hallucinations and the urge to nod off (and fall eight stories to his death). For prolonged pain, there were the forty-four days without food in the Plexiglas box above the Thames. Not only did he have to watch people below eating merrily away, but he also had to look at a giant advertisement for batteries with the slogan “When Willpower Isn’t Enough.” He tried to appreciate the humor of the ad, but that got progressively difficult. “By the thirty-eighth day, my mouth was tasting like sulfur because my body was eating its own organs,” he recalled. “I ached all over. When your body starts eating its muscles, it feels like a knife being stabbed into your arm.”
    But the toughest of his stunts, Blaine told us, was the sixty-three hours encased in ice. When they sealed him in six tons of glacial ice in Times Square, the ice was barely half an inch from his face. He was overcome with an uncharacteristic surge of claustrophobia, and he started shivering from the cold immediately. The ice kept him miserably cold for the next three days even though the outside weather turned unseasonably warm, which created a new problem: melting ice that caused a steady Chinese-water-torture drip of glacial water onto the exposed skin of his neck and back. Meanwhile, he couldn’t nod off because leaning against the ice would cause frostbite, and the sleep deprivation became the biggest problem on the last day, when he was supposed to wait to be freed on a prime-time network television special.
    “I started to feel I wasn’t right,” Blaine said. “I’ve been through organ failure, but there’s nothing worse than mental illness. I looked through the ice at a guy standing in front of me and asked him what time it was. He says, ‘Two o’clock.’ I say to myself, Oh, man, I’m not done with this until ten P.M. That’s eight more hours! I tell myself it won’t be so bad once there’s only six hours left, so I just have to get through the next two hours. That’s the kind of time-shift technique I use to change perspective so I get through these stunts. I waited for at least two hours, just patiently waited, and it was difficult. I was hearing voices. I was seeing people’s bodies carved into the ice. And I don’t realize that these are all hallucinations from sleep deprivation. You don’t know what’s going on—you think it’s real because you’re awake. So I waited two hours, and I looked at a guy through the ice and asked, ‘What time is it?’”
    Gazing through the ice, Blaine still had enough mental resources to realize that this guy looked much like the guy at two o’clock. Then he discovered that it was the same guy.
    “He goes, ‘Two-oh-five,’” Blaine recalled. “That’s when things got really bad.”
    Somehow he stayed in the ice until the prime-time removal, but he was so dazed, incoherent, and weak that he had to be rushed off immediately in an ambulance. “At the end I started to think I was in purgatory. I genuinely believed that I was being judged, and that this was a place I was waiting to go to heaven or hell. Those last eight hours were the worst state I’ve ever been in. To go through something that horrific and not quit—that took something that was beyond me.”
    Yes, that did indeed sound like the toughest feat of them all. But then something else occurred to Blaine once he heard about the experiments by Baumeister and other scientists. After learning of the wide-ranging benefits of the willpower-strengthening exercises, Blaine nodded and said, “That makes perfect sense. You’re building discipline. Now that I think about it, when I’m training for a stunt and I have a goal, I change everything. I have self-control in every aspect of my life. I read all the time. I eat perfectly. I do good things—I visit kids in hospitals and do as much of that as I can. I have a whole different energy. Complete self-control. I eat food based on nutrition. I don’t overindulge. I don’t drink. I don’t waste time, basically. But as soon as I’m done with that, I go to the opposite extreme, where I have no self-control, and it seems to spread through everything. It seems like when I stop eating right, then I’m not able to sit