What a brilliant insight!
A few tweaks to our environment may enable us to emulate people who seem more disciplined.
A study of self-control among college students bears out this hypothesis. The students were told to report every time they thought, “Oops, I shouldn’t do this” — for instance, when they stayed up too late, overslept, overate, or procrastinated. They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment.
Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator. “Successful self-control,” writes the social psychologist Wendy Wood, “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”
Even people who score high on self-control questionnaires may owe their apparent virtue to situational factors rather than to sheer fortitude. A study of such people in Germany found that they reported resisting temptation surprisingly rarely. “They were living their lives in a way that hid the marshmallow almost all the time,” Wood writes.
This observation leads to the crux of Wood’s book: The path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors.
We achieve situational control, paradoxically, not through willpower but by finding ways to take willpower out of the equation.
