Willpower

religion with tamping down these temptations,” says McCullough, who suggests that prayers and meditation rituals are “a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”
    Religious believers build self-control by regularly forcing themselves to interrupt their daily routines in order to pray. Some religions, like Islam, require prayers at fixed times every day. Many religions prescribe periods of fasting, like the day of Yom Kippur, the month of Ramadan, and the forty days of Lent. Religions mandate specific patterns of eating, like kosher food or vegetarianism. Some services and meditations require the believer to adopt and hold specific poses (like kneeling, or sitting cross-legged in the lotus position) so long that they become uncomfortable and require discipline to maintain them.
    Religion also improves the monitoring of behavior, another of the central steps to self-control. Religious people tend to feel that someone important is watching them. That monitor might be God, a supernatural being who pays attention to what you do and think, often even knowing your innermost thoughts and reasons, and can’t be easily fooled if you do something apparently good for the wrong reason. In a notable study by Mark Baldwin and his colleagues, female undergraduates read a sexually explicit passage on a computer screen. Then some of the women were subliminally shown a photograph of the pope. Afterward, when asked to rate themselves, the Catholic women (that is, the ones who accepted the pope’s religious authority and associated him with God’s commandments) rated themselves more negatively, presumably because their unconscious had registered the image of the pope and left them with a sense of disapproval for having read and possibly enjoyed the erotic reading.
    Regardless of whether religious people believe in an omniscient deity, they are generally quite conscious of being monitored by human eyes: the other members of their religious community. If they attend a house of worship regularly, they feel pressured to control their behavior according to the community’s rules and norms. Even outside of church, religious people often spend time with one another and may feel that their misbehaviors will be noticed with disapproval. Religions also encourage monitoring through rituals, such as the Catholic sacrament of confession and the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, that require people to reflect on their moral failures and other shortcomings.
    Of course, it takes some discipline to even start practicing a religion, because you have to attend services, memorize prayers, and follow rules. One reason for the higher levels of self-control found among religious people is that the congregations are biased samples of people who started out with higher self-control than average. But even after taking that factor into account, researchers still see evidence that self-control improves with religion, and many people instinctively reach the same conclusion—that’s why they take up religion when they want more control. Other people in times of personal troubles rediscover the faith they’d learned in their childhood but then abandoned. Their religious reawakening may involve a vague regret that if they’d lived the proper way, they wouldn’t be having their current problems (with alcohol or drugs or debt), but underlying that regret is most likely the recognition that the discipline of religion will help them get back on track.
    Mary Karr, the lifelong agnostic, ended up surrendering so completely that she was baptized a Catholic and even went through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, an advanced series of rigorous, time-consuming prayers and meditations. Her path, clearly, is not for everyone. Even if you were willing to adopt Catholicism or another religion just to improve your self-control, you probably couldn’t gain most of the benefits without genuine belief. Psychologists have found that people who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don’t have the same high level of self-control as the true believers. McCullough concludes that the believers’ self-control comes not merely from a fear of God’s wrath but from the system of values they’ve absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness.
    He advises agnostics to look for their own set of hallowed values. That might be a devout commitment to helping others, the way that Henry