Self-Control
No Willpower Needed: Proven Techniques to Boost Self-Control
A recent study suggests self-control need not require a lot of willpower.
Updated May 6, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Self-control helps resolve conflicts between immediate and long-term goals (eating cookies vs. losing weight).
- Effortless self-control can be achieved via automatizing behaviors and building good habits.
- Effortless self-control can also be achieved using antecedent-focused strategies.
Published in Current Opinion in Psychology, a recent paper by Gillebaart and Schneider discusses how high self-control is associated with “quicker self-control conflict identification and resolution.” The paper’s findings and strategies for effortless self-control are summarized in this post.
Self-control conflicts
Self-control refers to the process of resisting temptations (e.g., eating junk food) that conflict with enduring goals that usually involve bigger but delayed rewards (maintaining a healthy weight and looking good).
Here are three examples of self-control conflicts that many of us may be familiar with:
- Playing computer games for many hours daily vs. achieving academic success.
- Staying up late and binge-watching a TV series as opposed to getting sufficient sleep and being alert the next day at work.
- Engaging in impulse buying instead of saving money to purchase the car or house you have been dreaming of.
So the inability to control oneself is essentially a delay-of-gratification failure: You want what you want, and you want it now.
Naturally, many people see self-control as effortful and requiring much willpower. The assumption is that self-control relies on a limited source of energy (willpower), so it is quickly exhausted and fails as the number or strength of temptations grows.
The question is how to achieve your goals if you don’t have the willpower needed. Could it be that willpower is not really necessary for resisting temptations, being productive, or living a happy and fulfilling life?
Yes. It is indeed possible to self-regulate with little effort and willpower. So, how do people who are good at self-control do it?
Research suggests individuals high in self-control are often faced with as many conflicting motives as those who have low self-control. Yet, they report experiencing less ambivalence, fewer temptations, and less resistance to behaviors that serve long-term goals.
One explanation is that people who are good at self-control are quicker to identify and resolve self-control conflicts. They do so by relying on healthy habits and anticipatory strategies. These are discussed in the next two sections.
Building healthy habits for easy self-control
Habits are behaviors triggered automatically by contextual cues (e.g., a particular time or place). Therefore, they can occur without conscious awareness or effort directed at achieving a goal.
Habit formation occurs as a result of repeating a behavior in a specific context frequently enough that the context eventually triggers the behavior.
For instance, if you regularly practice a few minutes of deep breathing before sleep, this behavior soon becomes habitual. As a result, when you lie down in bed, you will automatically focus on the breath without conscious thinking. So it requires no willpower.
In other words, when a behavior becomes automatic, less effort is required to control it.
Research suggests that those successful at self-control—people who achieve positive life outcomes—have stronger good habits and weaker bad habits.
High self-control individuals may form new good habits more easily and quickly, perhaps by engaging in the desired behavior more frequently than the average person. Learn more about forming healthy habits here.
Effective strategies for easy self-control
Self-control strategies can also help. As we will see, some are more effective than others.
Many impulsive people use response-focused strategies, but these techniques are generally not very effective. Why? Because they require a lot of willpower.
Suppose you bought a large tub of vanilla ice cream and brought it home. A response-focused strategy would be to sit there staring at the ice cream while fighting the impulse to eat it. Not easy at all.
Individuals high in self-control are more likely to use anticipatory strategies, which help prevent self-control dilemmas or resolve them sooner. Four common techniques include: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, and reappraisal.
To illustrate how they work, I will use the example of managing binge eating.
- Situation selection: Anticipate temptations. Do not walk by the pastry shop unless you want to be seduced by the slices of chocolate lava cake in the display window.
- Situation modification: Modify the environment. The candies, cookies, or chips you bought for a party will be safest in the back of the pantry.
- Attentional shift: Look away from temptation. Instead of thinking about the leftover pizza in the fridge, shift your attention to something else, be it a bowl of fruits, a song on the radio, or your summer vacation plans.
- Reappraisal: Use reframing. One approach is to think of the temptation in a negative way or focus on its negative consequences. For instance, thinking of donuts as balls of dough made with rancid oil; or pondering how eating donuts regularly can affect your health, weight, and appearance.
Takeaway
Self-control means saying no to urges and short-term goals that conflict with valued long-term goals.
High self-control is desirable. Individuals high in self-control tend to succeed in numerous domains—health, relationships, finances, work, and academic performance. Additionally, research shows higher self-control is associated with health, happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction.
The good news is that you do not need a lot of willpower to become better at controlling yourself and your urges.
By building good habits and using effective anticipatory strategies, you may experience fewer and smaller self-control dilemmas in the first place. This means you would be tempted less often and require less willpower to achieve goals.
Note that no single self-control technique will work for all temptations and situations. Therefore, if you want to become good at self-control, experiment with a variety of strategies to determine which works best in a particular situation. Be flexible. And adapt.
Finally, remember that perfect self-control is not realistic. So be forgiving of yourself.
Luckily, giving in to temptation will not always cause irreversible damage to happiness, health, and well-being; or get you expelled from Paradise. So learn from failures and move forward.
