3 Strategies to Improve Your Self-Control

What is self-control? People use a variety of terms to refer to it: discipline, grit, will power, determination. Psychologists define self-control as the ability to manage your behavior to achieve your goals or avoid negative consequences. Self-control is partly genetic and a limited resource that can be depleted.

400;”>Losing weight, following a healthy diet, getting regular exercise, saving money, and giving up bad habits all require self-control. Improving your self-control can be a challenging but a worth-while endeavor. Research shows that people with better self-control enjoy better health, financial stability, better relationships, and confidence.

How Important Is Self-Control?  

In a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA), 27% of respondents reported that they believe lack of willpower is the main reason they are unable to reach their goals. Self-control is closely linked to achieving any type of accomplishment. Maybe you want to earn a college degree, quit smoking, or lose weight. It’s pretty easy to see how self-control plays a part in that.

One study found that in terms of academic success, self-control is more important than IQ and that students with higher levels of self-control got better grades and were more likely to get accepted in competitive education programs.

The benefits don’t stop at academic performance. Studies have also shown that students with better self-control are less likely to engage in harmful habits like substance abuse and are more likely to maintain good physical and mental health as adults.

Delayed Gratification and Ego Depletion

In order to improve your self-control, you first need to understand two essential concepts: delayed gratification and ego depletion.

Delaying gratification means prioritizing long-term rewards over short-term desires. Let’s say you’re following a diet, so you need to avoid consuming certain categories of foods. You prioritize your long-term goal, which in this case might be losing weight over the short-term desire to eat a sugary snack. You might tell yourself that you can have a treat on occasion, but you’ll have to wait X amount of time.

It’s essentially the ability of waiting to get what you want, and the Stanford “Marshmallow Test” has shown that this ability plays an important role not just in goal attainment but also in overall success and well-being.

Ego depletion refers to how self-control or willpower is a limited resource. It can be strengthened in the long-term, but in the short-term, you can “run out.” This means that if you have to muster a lot of self-control for one task, you won’t have as much to handle subsequent tasks. For instance, you stick to your diet, and you don’t have any unhealthy snacks the entire day, but on your way home from work, you stop at a store and over-spend.

Make Sure You Get Enough Sleep

Our first tip for improving your self-control is to make sure you get enough sleep. A study done by the University of Washington found that sleep deprivation lowers glucose levels in the prefrontal cortex, making it harder to control your impulses. Lack of sleep also makes you more vulnerable to the effects of stress, which means your flight-or-fight response will be triggered more easily, making you prone to poor decisions. If you tend to have problems falling asleep, you can research some sleep hygiene tips and try natural products like CBD buds, which can be smoked with a delta 8 vape cart. 

Getting regular exercise has been shown to improve sleep quality, and it’s a good way to practice self-discipline. Together, sleep and regular exercise will make you more resilient to stress, improve your cognitive functions and self-control.

One Goal at a Time

You’ve probably made a few lists of New Year’s resolutions in your life. The problem with those is that you’re setting too many goals at once. As we’ve mentioned before, self-control is a limited resource, so it’s better to start one goal at a time.

You also have to think about how you frame that goal. A common New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. That’s a bit too vague. It’s better to set a goal such as lose 20 pounds. Then you have to think about why you want to lose 20 pounds. How is that going to benefit you? The more you care about the outcome, the easier it will be to stay motivated. You’ll want to write this down for moments when your enthusiasm dwindles.

Next step is to figure out how you’re going to lose those 20 pounds. What type of exercise are you going to do? How are you going to change your diet? Based on this, you can set smaller goals and work your way up. For example, you start with a 30-minute walk every day. This will allow you to build habits gradually, and since you start with goals that are easier to attain, it will help you gain the confidence to strive for more ambitious goals.

Confidence is very important. If you don’t think it’s possible for you to achieve a goal, you won’t put as much effort. Don’t punish yourself with self-criticism when you fall back. Let’s say you skipped one day of exercise. Focus on motivating yourself to keep going and reward yourself for each small achievement with self-praise.

Understand the Cause of Your Behavior 

In case you want to build self-control to stop a certain behavior, it’s better to start with a phase in which you try to understand the cause of the behavior rather than simply using all your willpower to abstain from it. For example, you tend to procrastinate. You can spend some time reading research on procrastination and strategies that could help. Maybe you procrastinate because the workload you’re avoiding feels overwhelming, which gives you anxiety.

Next time you feel tempted to procrastinate, you can spend 5 minutes doing breathing exercises and set a timer for 20 minutes in which you will do part of your workload. Once you get a better idea of the steps required to complete your task, it will feel less overwhelming.

Look up several strategies that you can test and find what works for you. This applies to any negative habit you want to stop. Instead of criticizing yourself and focusing entirely on willpower, it’s more productive to find out why you engage in this particular behavior and what triggers you need to avoid or manage.