Willpower

goals. Low levels were the opposite. For instance, people were asked to reflect either on why they did something or on how they did something. “Why” questions push the mind up to higher levels of thinking and a focus on the future. “How” questions bring the mind down to low levels of thinking and a focus on the present. Another procedure that produced similar results was to have people move up or down from a given concept, like the word singer . To induce a high-level mind-set, people were asked, “A singer is an example of what?” In contrast, to induce a low-level mind-set, they were asked, “What is an example of a singer?” Thus the answer pushed them to think either more globally or more specifically.
    These manipulations of mental state had no inherent relation to self-control. Yet self-control improved among people who were encouraged to think in high-level terms, and got worse among those who thought in low-level terms. Different measures were used in assorted experiments, but the results were consistent. After engaging in high-level thinking, people were more likely to pass up a quick reward for something better in the future. When asked to squeeze a handgrip, they could hold on longer. The results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it. That’s one reason why religious people score relatively high in measures of self-control, and why nonreligious people like Stanley can benefit by other kinds of transcendent thoughts and enduring ideals. Stanley always combined his ambitions for personal glory with a desire to be “good,” as he’d imagined his dying mother telling him. He found his calling along with Livingstone when he saw firsthand the devastation being wrought by the expanding network of Arab and East-African slave traders. From then on, he considered it his life’s mission to end the slave trade.
    Ultimately, what sustained Stanley through the jungle, and through the rejections from his family and his fiancée and the British establishment, was his stated belief that he was engaged in a “sacred task.” By modern standards, he can seem bombastically pious, but he was sincere. “I was not sent into the world to be happy,” he wrote. “I was sent for special work.” During his descent of the Congo, he would earnestly write himself exhortations like, “I hate evil and love good.” At the worst point along the river, when he was despondent over the drowning of two of his closest companions, when he was close to dying himself from starvation and there seemed no prospect of finding food, he consoled himself with the loftiest thought he could summon:
    This poor body of mine has suffered terribly . . . it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.
    Was Stanley, in his moment of despair, succumbing to religion and imagining himself with a soul? Maybe. But given his lifelong struggles, given all his stratagems to conserve his powers in the wilderness, it seems likely that he had something more secular in mind. His “real self,” as Bula Matari saw it, was his will.

8.
    DID A HIGHER POWER HELP ERIC CLAPTON AND MARY KARR STOP DRINKING?
    Holy Mother, hear my cry,
I’ve cursed your name a thousand times.
I’ve felt the anger running through my soul;
Holy Mother, can’t keep control.
    —Eric Clapton, in his song “Holy Mother”
    If you’d told me even a year before . . . that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cock-eyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.
    —Mary Karr, in her memoir Lit

    D uring Eric Clapton’s many suicidal moments, when wealth and fame and his music were no longer enough, he was sustained by one thought: If he killed himself, he would no longer be able to drink. Alcohol was his great enduring love, supplemented by serious affairs with cocaine, heroin, and just about any kind of drug he could get his hands on. When he first checked himself into the Hazelden clinic in his late thirties, he suffered a seizure during detox because he didn’t warn the medical team that he’d been taking Valium—which he’d