To act on my values do I need to work my self-control muscles?

Roy Baumeister (2014) has done a lot of research on self-control.   Self-control can be compared it to a muscle.  Like a muscle, it can be depleted.  When I am working in the gym, at a certain point some muscles will just give up and I will have to stop.  When this happens while I am trying to control actions, psychologists call it ego depletion. Baumeister has calculated that the average person spends 3 to 4 hour a days working their self-control muscles to inhibit desires.  If I am awake for about 16 hours a day that means that close to a quarter of my waking hours are spent inhibiting myself.  So what does this research on self-control have to teach us about taking action on values?  Do I need to be building my self-control muscles?

I would say “not necessarily”.  I have nothing against self-control but I think it is smart to limit the need for it.  I have two suggestions.  The first is fit value-based actions into day-to-day life.  For example, if I value creativity and I want to become a better portrait painter, I will probably make more progress if I start to sketch people on the bus than if I try to set up a proper studio to do portraits.  Both studio and bus-sketching will move me towards my goal, but the first demands relatively little self-control – just put a drawing pad and pencil in my backpack.  The second may require a lot of will power to save money to rent a studio and buy art supplies or arrange for a model to sit for me.  Big actions will be more susceptible to ego depletion so I will make more progress if small value-related actions are part of my routine.   

The second suggestion is frame your value in an inspiring way.  In research carried out in our lab with people working on articulating and acting on their values (Fitzpatrick et al., 2016), we found that values that lead to change often had an inspirational quality.  People who changed were “touched” or “lifted up” by their values.  Perhaps the inspiration meant that they needed less self-control.  The inspirational quality of a value is personal for me.   When I think about my most important value, I say to myself, “I want to leave the world a better place than I found it.”  That phrase moves me.  I could say “I want to make a contribution.”  It means about the same thing.  But only the first one moves me.  When I have to do something that is difficult and I can think of that phrase, it seems to take self-control off the table.  If you have identified a value that you think is important, ask yourself, “Does it inspire me?”  If not, you may need to use more of your self-control muscles to turn it into action.

Reference

Baumeister, R.F. (2014). Self-regulation, ego depletion and inhibition.  Neuropsychologia, 65, 313-319. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.08.012

Fitzpatrick, M., Henson, A., Grumet, R., Poolokasingham, G., Foa, C., Comeau, T., & Predergast, C.  (2016). Challenge, focus, inspiration and support: Processes of values clarification and congruence. Journal of Contextual and Behavioral Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2016.02.001