Willpower

experimenting, the old ideas didn’t seem so dated.
    The result, after dozens of experiments in Baumeister’s lab and hundreds elsewhere, is a new understanding of willpower and of the self. We want to tell you what’s been learned about human behavior, and how you can use it to change yourself for the better. Acquiring self-control isn’t as magically simple as the techniques in modern self-help books, but neither does it have to be as grim as the Victorians made it out to be. Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges. We’re confident that this book’s lessons can make your life not just more productive and fulfilling but also easier and happier. And we can guarantee that you will not have to endure any sermons against bare ankles.

1.
    IS WILLPOWER MORE THAN A METAPHOR?
    Sometimes we are devils to ourselves
When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency.
    —Troilus, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

    I f you have a casual acquaintance with Amanda Palmer’s music, if you know about her banned-in-Britain abortion song or the “Backstabber” video of her running down a hall naked holding an upraised knife while chasing the equally naked guy in lipstick who was just in bed with her, you probably don’t think of her as a paragon of self-control.
    She has been described in a lot of ways—an edgier Lady Gaga, a funnier Madonna, a gender-bending provocateur, the high priestess of “Brechtian punk cabaret”—but the words Victorian and repressed generally don’t come up. Her persona is Dionysian. When she accepted a marriage proposal from Neil Gaiman, the British fantasy novelist, Palmer’s idea of a formal announcement was a morning-after confession on Twitter that she might have gotten engaged “but also might have been drunk.”
    Yet an undisciplined artist could never have written so much music or sold out so many concerts around the world. Palmer couldn’t have gotten to Radio City Music Hall without practicing. It took self-control to create her uncontrolled persona, and she credits her success partly to what she calls “the ultimate Zen training ground”: posing as a living statue. She performed on the street for six years and started a company hiring out living statues for corporate gigs, like holding platters of organic produce at the opening of a Whole Foods supermarket.
    Palmer took up this calling in 1998, when she was twenty-two and living in her hometown, Boston. She made videos describing herself as an “aspiring rock star,” but that occupation didn’t pay the rent, so she went into Harvard Square and introduced a form of street theater she’d seen in Germany. She called herself the Eight Foot Bride. With her face painted white, wearing a formal wedding dress and a veil, holding a bouquet in her formal white gloves, she would stand on top of a box. If someone put money in her tips basket, she would hand the person a flower, but otherwise she remained utterly motionless.
    Some people would insult her or throw things at her. They tried to make her laugh. They grabbed her. Some yelled at her to get a real job and threatened to steal her money. Drunks tried to pull her down off the pedestal or to tip her over.
    “It was not pretty,” Palmer recalls. “Once I had a frat boy rub his head drunkenly in my crotch as I looked skyward thinking, Good Lord, what have I done to deserve this? But in six years I broke character maybe twice. You literally don’t react. You don’t even flinch. You just let it pass through you.”
    The crowds would marvel at her stamina, and people routinely assumed it must be grueling to hold the body in a rigid pose for so long. But Palmer didn’t find it a strain on her muscles. She realized there was a physical aspect to the task—she learned not to drink coffee, for instance, because it produced a slight but uncontrollable quiver in her body. But the challenge seemed to be mainly in her mind.
    “Standing still isn’t really that difficult,” she says. “The discipline in being a living statue is much more in the nonreactivity department. I couldn’t move my eyes, so I couldn’t look at interesting, intriguing things that were passing me by. I couldn’t engage with people who were trying to engage me. I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t wipe my nose if a piece of snot started to dribble down my upper lip. I couldn’t