Understanding self-control

breaking down the components of self-control so I don't doomscroll and snack my way to misery. doing the things that wisdom dictates instead.

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I’ve been working on regulating my news intake. More accurately, I’ve been working with the impulse to consume media—especially speculation, opinion, and analysis—that’s unhelpful to me or others. My goal isn’t no news, but the right amount. I recall a quotation attributed to various spiritual teachers, something like: “read as much news as you need to open your heart, but no more.” By that measure, how much do we really need to read? In any case, I’ve been reading too much. In my worst moments, I reach for sensationalistic and provocative stuff, like the horrid Drudge Report, with some part of me saying “let’s see what these guys over here have to say.” To take back control, I’ve installed mindful launch delays on apps and installed browser extensions that block certain sites. I work to clarify specific limits then try to stick to them.

It’s hard to clarify goals, and then having done so, it’s hard to stick to them. As many people find, in addiction recovery and in life.

I’ve had a lot of experience working with self-control in my recovery from addiction. Other examples include trying to stop refined sugar or exercising daily. Another is stopping computer work when I hit the point of diminishing returns, when I’m getting too tight and analytical and just tired, and it’s just not a good use of effort. That last example illustrates an important question: what if I’m efforting too much? What if the issue isn’t that I should be working harder on self-control, but that the conflict is not what I think it is?

Everyone wants self-control, though they might define it differently. Simultaneously, we often feel skeptical of the concept of self-control, sensing we’re working hard in ways that aren’t helpful.

I’m interested in better understanding self-control, as an experience and a phenomenon, but the problem is no single field has the answers, and no one has the final word. Understanding different perspectives on self-control can help us approach our challenges more effectively. We often tell ourselves unhelpful stories about control—activating our inner critic or leading to misdirected efforts. Just as different scholars talk past one another on this topic, we often do the same internally. My hope is that examining different views of self-control will help us to understand and better manage those struggles.

Some great, recent Substack essays (1, 2) have reviewed challenges to the notion of “ego depletion”: the idea that self-control supposedly depletes through effort, like a finite resource. Ego depletion was hot for a moment, gaining popularity in no small part because it jibes with our intuitive experience; suppressing our impulses does feel taxing! But this concept hasn’t held up amid the replication crisis.

So, self-control isn’t like a muscle that gets fatigued—not a resource that gets used up, not a battery that drains, choose your metaphor. Now what?

What is self control? The classic view

In a messy concept like self-control, laden with cultural and philosophical baggage, it’s essential to get clear on what we’re discussing and trying to change. In experimental psychology—just one slice of relevant fields—there’s no consensus on what exactly self-control means, though there are various definitions with varying utility. Several are helpful, if we can keep in mind that we’re far from an integrative solution.

The classic view of self-control goes back to Plato, who famously compared the soul to a charioteer wrangling the horses of passion and reason. In modern psychological terms, this is sometimes translated into “desire” versus “goals.” Note that self-control doesn’t just mean stopping behaviors—it can be both inhibition and initiation. If I want to go to the gym, but hesitate, successful self-control means overcoming resistance and getting there. If someone in early recovery wants to resist drinking despite cravings, successful self-control means abstaining.

Let’s be clear from the start that many psychologists take issue with this classic model. Michael Inzlicht, one of the anti-ego-depletion authors linked above and a leading psychologist in the field of self-control (who has a very useful Substack, by the way—way better than The Drudge Report), argues that self-control is better understood as a value-based choice—a process of resolving conflict between two competing goals.¹ Let me bookmark these concerns for now, but just keep in mind the desire/goal framing is far from universally accepted.

I am not ready to dismiss the classic view of passion versus reason just yet. This description does square with our experience. It matches mine, at least in some cases, not to mention the experience of people with addiction who feel overpowered by desires, despite their better judgment. Owen Flanagan, a distinguished philosopher and person in recovery who I’ll be interviewing shortly on my podcast, argues in his new book from OUP (What is it Like to be an Addict?) for taking the addict’s phenomenal experience seriously: “Listen carefully to what addicts say about what it is like to be an addict.”

A helpful perspective on self-control comes from a relative recent paper that breaks the classic conflict between desires and goals into components. The authors define self-control as the conflict between desire (“passion”) and higher-order goals (“reason”). They acknowledge this is a limited, narrow definition, noting that self-regulatory phenomena also include “desire-desire conflicts” (strawberry versus vanilla) and “goal-goal conflicts” (study versus do chores). Beyond desire and higher-order goals, they identify countervailing forces: control motivation (the aspiration to control desire), control capacity (all the cognitive resources that are not motivation), and control effort (the effective use of that capacity).

This description gives us a framework to describe different kinds of self-control failures:

• Desire-based failures: when desires are simply too strong

• Higher-order goal-based failures: when attention to goals isn't sufficient

• Motivation-based failures: when there's a lack of motivation to pursue the goal

• Capacity-based failures: when cognitive resources to inhibit desire are inadequate

I find this model useful, though limited, of course. It captures just one type of "self-control," when someone experiences conflict between a higher-order goal and an immediate desire. But there are practical implications that align with the way we approach issues in substance use disorder treatment. When sensing a self-control conflict, it’s useful to step back, diagnose correctly, then match strategies to the problem:

• For desire-based issues: manage your situation to regulate those desires. Take care of your body. Remember HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired). Prioritize exercise, sleep, and other physical needs.

• For motivation-based issues: This is espcially relevant to the philosophical literature on weakness of will (“akrasia”). But while it runs deep, there are simpler strategies to put in place. Motivational Interviewing is aimed at this issue, e.g., prompting people to define clear goals. This critical step is often missed. We follow the herd instead of clarifying what we truly want and why.

• For goal-based issues: refresh your commitment. An example: during my undergrad years, after a first semester derailed by drinking, I needed a very high GPA every single remaining semester to qualify for Phi Beta Kappa. This mattered because I knew wanted to do something competitive, like a PhD or an MD. So, every semester I calculated and posted a printout of my target GPA by my desk and bed. I felt like a nerd (because I was one). But the goal, and refreshing it daily, mattered more.

• For capacity-based issues: this is what we often want to improve most, but following recent research, we can probably do the least about. Better to adjust expectations here.

All of these strategies are relatively individualistic. Perhaps most importantly: create supportive environments that mitigate against failure. This newsletter is called Rat Park, after all—named for the experiment where rats in enriched social environments consumed less morphine than isolated rats. Sometimes the environment itself is the most reliable form of self-control.

Beyond Passion and Reason

Consider again Plato’s chariot allegory—the two horses in conflict are not set up as morally equal. The passion horse is an ugly brute, “a crooked great jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.” The reason horse “is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control.”²

Maybe we’re not being entirely fair to the poor passion horse.

In a culture that prioritizes achievement, profit, growth, and productivity, self-control as resistance to short-term temptations can seem extremely attractive. The problem lies in assuming long-term goals are superior. Take anorexia, where excessive "self-control" becomes destructive, or workaholism, where suppressing immediate needs leads to burnout and disconnection. There are many situations in which control is more the problem than the solution.

Back to that initial caveat from Inzlicht and colleagues, who suggest that self-control should be redefined as "the process of resolving conflict between competing goals" rather than a battle between impulsive desires and rational thoughts. One paper boldy states: “decisions that we label self-control are merely a fuzzy subset of all value-based decisions, which involve selecting a course of action among several alternatives.”

There’s an advantage here to rejecting an inherent moral, virtue-based hierarchy between short- and long-term goals, an important intervention that helps explain when control becomes the problem.

But, well, isn’t control sometimes the solution too? I have a problem with calling self-control nothing more than a values-based choice, just as I resist collapsing addiction into nothing more than voluntary behavior, which I discussed in my last post. In ordinary language, self-control means more than resolving a conflict between two competing goals. it means, well, exercising control over the unruly parts of ourselves. I know that tons of refined sugar don’t help my mental state, and I try to stop, but I still eat the whole chocolate bar. I click over to Drudge Report, even as I say to myself, this isn’t serving me, I don’t want to take in what these guys are feeding me.

In other words, people call it "self-control" because they often feel out of control. There's a reason addiction has been compared to demonic possession throughout history, and why acting against our better judgment (back to akrasia) is so distressing. This struggle is ancient and not just a socially constructed artifact. As Paul wrote in Romans: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

Where does that leave us?

Self-control, like “addiction” or “recovery,” can mean a lot of different things in everyday language. The perspectives above represent just two ways of looking at self-control from experimental psychology—even within that field, there are other perspectives. Both are useful in context, neither complete on its own.

In the broader sense, self-control is among the most important capacities in human life, essential to flourishing and social health. It deserves examination from multiple perspectives. I'm far from offering a final argument here—in a way, I'm just thinking out loud, which is one of the stated goals of writing on Rat Park.

For practical purposes, I’d suggest treating these perspectives as tools. The trickier part is we have to develop awareness and meta-cognition to recognize when each view is most helpful to try. Sometimes, seeing self-control as passion versus reason works well. Other times, that framing is misleading.

My intuition is that values matter here in another way: when people say they're having difficulty following a higher-order goal, it may reflect a genuine hierarchy in terms of virtue ethics and flourishing. Recovery programs, Buddhism, and other wisdom traditions suggest specific virtues worth striving for. Buddhism in particular frames virtues (“perfections”) and ethical teaching (“precepts”) as hypotheses to be tested in our lives rather than commandments to be followed—a big topic, perhaps something better for a future post.

For now, I’ll insist that when we determine our goals and values, we enter vital territory. What kind of person do I want to be? What is meaningful to me? This requires care, including care in a physical, intuitive, interoceptive sense: connecting with our felt sense of what’s right—what is authentically us. The right kind of opening the heart, perhaps not through news. This in particular isn’t always a logical or analytical process, which may explain how and why working to hard to grasp onto an ideal of “self-control” is dangerous.

All these elements relate to perceiving what is workable and wise. And having done this work of clarification, there still remains the question of why we sometimes violate these higher desires. At the very least, I’m trying to loosen my grip a bit, but also to take care when it matters.

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1. see especially his 2017 paper with Berkman, Hutcherson, Livingston, and Kahn

2. Angela Duckworth and colleagues quote and discuss this allegory at length while exploring self-control beyond the desire-goals conflict