How Self-Control Leads to Happiness

The new year is a time when we all try to turn over a new leaf by getting rid of bad habits and developing new ones in their place. But as we all know from personal experience, most New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure. The exercise program, the diet, and the limitation on social media that we resolved to undertake on January 1 are forgotten by early February, and we’re back to our old routine.

What we need, we tell ourselves, is more self-control. But the problem is that self-control is no fun. It’s downright miserable. Self-control means giving up all the things that make life enjoyable in the present for goals that may or may not yield happiness in the future. At least, that’s the way we usually view self-control. And until recently, that’s the way psychologists thought of it as well.

In a recent issue of the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, two teams of Dutch researchers challenge the received wisdom that self-control and happiness don’t mix. In particular, Daniela Becker and her colleagues focus on the notion that small indulgences can lead to greater self-control, while Denise de Ridder takes the view that self-control in the short term leads to greater pleasure in the long run.

Mindful Indulgence and Self-Control

Let’s say that your New Year’s resolution is to lose 10 pounds, and your greatest weakness is chocolate. Conventional wisdom tells us that you need to forswear chocolate until those 10 pounds are lost. But willpower will only take you so far, so psychologists recommend keeping your home and work environments chocolate-free to the extent possible. That way, even if the urge for chocolate is overwhelming, there’s no way to indulge, and you’ll just have to make do with a low-calorie apple instead.

Becker and her colleagues, however, argue that such an approach is unlikely to succeed. At any rate, it’s a miserable way to go about trying to achieve the reasonable goal of maintaining a lower weight. Sooner or later, you’re bound to ask yourself whether a healthy lifestyle is really worth it.

Instead, Becker and colleagues advocate for occasional small indulgences as a way to encourage you to maintain the effort needed to achieve your long-term goals. The key, though, is to indulge yourself mindfully.

Many of us consume junk food or alcohol to self-medicate against stress or anxiety. In other words, we consume substances “mindlessly” to forget pain rather than to enjoy pleasure. In mindful indulgence, conversely, we fully experience the pleasure of a momentary treat.

For instance, we may reward ourselves with a single piece of chocolate at the end of a workout routine. Looking forward to that scheduled indulgence can motivate us to complete the workout while mindfully enjoying that reward can give us the resolve we need to continue working toward our goal.

Becker and colleagues also point out how framing—or the way we think about something—can have a big effect on how successful we are in achieving our long-term goals. For instance, they cite research showing that people are more likely to eat and enjoy a food that is labeled as “tasty” rather than one that’s labeled as “healthy.” Since healthy foods can also be tasty, you’re more likely to persevere with your diet if you can find foods that are both good for your health and taste good. In a similar vein, you’re more likely to persist with an exercise routine if you find it enjoyable.

Self-Control and Greater Happiness

While Becker and colleagues focus on how to gain better self-control by making the experience more pleasant, de Ritter instead looks at how exercising self-control ironically leads to greater happiness overall. De Ritter starts with the common conception of self-control as a conflict between short-term and long-term happiness. That is, we forsake pleasure in the moment to achieve a goal later on.

This conflict between present versus future happiness, however, is a false dilemma, according to de Ritter. In her article, she cites ample evidence showing that people who are capable of delaying gratification enjoy more happiness in their lives overall compared to those who yield to immediate temptations.

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We all know how giving in to temptations in the present can lead to even bigger regrets in the future. In other words, people who pursue pleasure in the moment also suffer greater unhappiness later on. Meanwhile, people who achieve a balance between immediate and delayed gratification not only experience less misery but also more satisfaction with their lives overall.

I like to think of this as the pursuit of happiness paradox. In my own experience, I’ve found that the more I pursue happiness, the more it recedes from my reach. And yet, when I stop pursuing happiness and simply focus on living my life, I unexpectedly find happiness all around me.

Controlling How We Experience Pleasure

In short, the vagaries of pleasure and pain that are the hallmarks of a hedonistic lifestyle yield less happiness overall than a life led intentionally toward a greater purpose. Indeed, people who set goals for their lives tend to report greater levels of life satisfaction than those who live aimlessly. Even the difficult times in life can be satisfying, at least in retrospect, when they’re seen within the larger context of goal pursuit.

Furthermore, de Ritter points out, research shows that it’s the pursuit of goals, and not necessarily attaining them, that yields the most happiness and satisfaction with life. Many people get stuck in the mindset that they’ll finally be happy once they’ve achieved such-and-such a goal. But in my own experience, moments when I’ve finally reached the mark I was aiming for, such as receiving my doctorate degree or publishing my first book, were rather humdrum experiences. In retrospect, it was the hours accumulating to years that I’d devoted to each goal that had yielded the most pleasure.

Conventional wisdom presents self-control as a conflict between yielding to pleasures in the moment and rejecting them to achieve a long-term goal. However, new research shows that this isn’t the right way to think about self-control. Instead, self-control is more about taking control over how we experience pleasure. And by doing so, we also increase the total pleasure we experience in life.