Quotes About Self-control

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.

lock yourself into a virtuous path.

That's the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they're not immediately available, but once they're right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.

We've said that willpower is humans' greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As

Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow.

When the dessert cart arrives, don't gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. In the spirit of Scarlett O'Hara, tell yourself: Tomorrow is another taste.

The result suggests that telling yourself 'I can have this later' operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree—and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat...the ones who'd postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.

The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called "binge writers" fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair the processing of glucose, which produces immediate consequences for self-control—and, over the long term, a higher risk of diabetes.

The problem with adolescents—from the parents' point of view—is that they have a child's power of self-control presiding over an adult's wants and urges.

When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control.

executive and nonexecutive, every day. Yet few people are even aware of it. When asked whether making decisions would deplete their willpower and make them vulnerable to temptation, most people say no. They don't realize that decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can't resist the car dealer's offer to rustproof their new sedan.

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

If you remind yourself that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad thing, you'll know not to trust your immediate responses to bad events.

Psychologists have found that people who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don't have the same high level of self-control as the true believers. McCullough concludes that the believers' self-control comes not merely from a fear of God's wrath but from the system of values they've absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called "binge writers" fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Making yourself switch to your left hand is thus an exercise in self-control. You can resolve to use your left hand instead of your habitual right hand for brushing your teeth, using a computer mouse, opening doors, or lifting a cup to your lips.

Any of these techniques should improve your willpower and could be a good warm-up for tackling a bigger challenge, like quitting smoking or sticking to a budget.

I have learnt by actual stress of imminent danger, in the first place, that self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder, and, in the second place, that persistent self-control under the provocation of African travel is impossible without real, heartfelt sympathy for the natives with whom one has to deal.

and here was a truly pleasant surprise—they also got better at other things. The students who did the study-discipline program reported doing physical workouts a bit more often and cutting down on impulsive spending. Those in the fitness and money-management programs said they studied more diligently. Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.

In the tales he concocted about his adoptive family, Stanley claimed to be raised by parents who taught self-control. The dying words he ascribed to his fantasy mother were "Be a good boy.

That's more or less what researchers discovered after studying thousands of people inside and outside the laboratory. The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: 1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

With this as the ideal, it's no wonder that so many people set impossible goals. When you detest what you see in the mirror, you need self-control not to start a crash diet. You need to remind yourself that diets typically work at first but fail miserably in the long run. To understand why, let's start with a strange phenomenon observed after the consumption of milkshakes in a laboratory.