Willpower

not smoke again for months. But if you’re someone who can’t control your drinking or your smoking, you can’t look on that drink or cigarette as an isolated event. You can’t have one glass of champagne because you’re toasting your best friend’s wedding. You need to see the one lapse as a precedent that will establish a long-term pattern. For our pilgrim, that means recognizing that if he pops into the village pub for one drink, he’s going to have another and another, and may never make it to the Celestial City. So, before the road takes him too close to the pub and warps his judgment, he needs to prepare himself.
    The simplest policy might be to just avoid pubs. Before getting close to one, he could leave the main road and take a detour around it. But how could he be sure he’d follow that policy consistently? Suppose, as he prepares to take the detour around the pub, he remembers that farther down the road, in the next city, is a tavern that’s unavoidable. It sits right next to the only bridge spanning the river he must cross. He fears that when he reaches that city tavern tomorrow evening, he’ll yield to temptation. Suspecting that his dream of a long sober walk to the Celestial City might be doomed, Eric the Pilgrim starts bargaining with himself: If I’m going to get drunk anyway tomorrow evening, what difference does it make if I stop for a drink now? Carpe diem! Bottoms up! For him to resist a drink tonight, he needs to be confident that he won’t yield to temptation tomorrow.
    He needs the help of “bright lines,” a term that Ainslie borrows from lawyers. These are clear, simple, unambiguous rules. You can’t help but notice when you cross a bright line. If you promise yourself to drink or smoke “moderately,” that’s not a bright line. It’s a fuzzy boundary with no obvious point at which you go from moderation to excess. Because the transition is so gradual and your mind is so adept at overlooking your own peccadilloes, you may fail to notice when you’ve gone too far. So you can’t be sure you’re always going to follow the rule to drink moderately. In contrast, zero tolerance is a bright line: total abstinence with no exceptions anytime. It’s not practical for all self-control problems—a dieter cannot stop eating all food—but it works well in many situations. Once you’re committed to following a bright-line rule, your present self can feel confident that your future self will observe it, too. And if you believe that the rule is sacred—a commandment from God, the unquestionable law of a higher power—then it becomes an especially bright line. You have more reason to expect your future self to respect it, and therefore your belief becomes a form of self-control: a self-fulfilling mandate. I think I won’t, therefore I don’t.
    Eric Clapton discovered that bright line in one moment at Hazelden, and he appreciated its power once again when he chaired an AA meeting not long after the death of his son. He spoke about the third of the twelve steps—handing your will over to the care of a higher power—and told the group how his compulsion to drink had vanished the instant he got down on his knees at Hazelden and asked for God’s help. From then on, he told them, he never doubted he would have the will to remain sober, not even on the day his son died. After the meeting, a woman came up to him.
    “You’ve just taken away my last excuse to have a drink,” she told him. “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.” Upon hearing her, Clapton realized that he had found the best way to honor the memory of his son. Whatever you call his gift to that woman—social support, faith in God, trust in a higher power, a bright line—it left her with the will to save herself.

9.
    RAISING STRONG CHILDREN: SELF-ESTEEM VERSUS SELF-CONTROL
    You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way!
    —Lady Gaga
    Brats are not born. They’re made.
    —Deborah Carroll, a.k.a. Nanny Deb

    T hanks to the wonders of reality TV, middle-class parents across the United States have experienced a privilege once limited to the wealthy: outsourcing their jobs to a British nanny. Their stories vary, as you would expect from unhappy families, but the basic narrative arc is the same for each episode of