How To Gain Self Control.

Indulge or wait for bigger rewards? Self-control is the key to making the right choices in tough situations. Learn how to master it.

First off, what is self-control? According to google it is “the ability to control oneself, in particular one’s emotions and desires, especially in difficult situations.” essentially, It’s the ability to make the right decisions between a short-term reward vs a long-term reward.

Name anything important to your life and self-control has played a major role. The importance of self-control is the difference between fortune and failure, abundance and scarcity. Your life boils down to such a simple decision to do, or not to do. People who do have a high level of self-control aren’t missing out on entertainment and the other little things we do in life. Rather, they are enjoying themselves just as much as us if not even more compared to the people who indulge in short term activities like watching television or scrolling. In reality it’s people who lack self-discipline who suffer more.

1. Change your relationship with the object

Trying to resist temptations is an uphill battle, if you don’t change your relationship with the object it’ll remain. If I asked you to imagine a bear, you probably imagined it immediately and that’s how I see trying to resist a temptation. Instead reducing the value of that temptation would be a lot more effective in self-control.

I’ll be taking an example from an episode of an anime show Saiki-K. Saiki has a classmate that everybody fawns over (the whole world in fact) but not Saiki. How is Saiki able to control his lust over a woman that in this anime is the equivalent to Aphrodite? Though not intentional, he’s not resisting his desire for her, rather he’s changed the relationship with her by seeing her as something morbid like flesh or a skeleton. This is a technique Buddhist monks used this technique where they detach themselves from sensory pleasures by imagining the human body in various states of decay the process is called Paṭikūlamanasikāra. Seen from that perspective, worldly pleasures lose some of their allure.

In my own self-experiments I didn’t use social media for 90 days all that time however I still craved to scroll on Instagram and when the 90 days were over I returned to my usual self. Yet, interestingly enough it took an instant to remove my TikTok addiction, I was scrolling for hours hitting double digits daily on a regular so I certainly had a really deep addiction to TikTok compared to Instagram, so what changed? I was reading an article and there were comments making fun of people who use TikTok and it made me feel ashamed to be associated with that app and since then I have hardly touched the app and it’s not at all tempting. In other scenarios it could be a walk to McDonalds when you see people who you wouldn’t want to be associated to eating the same things as you, it makes it harder to want to go in and buy a burger. To summarize, I personally think that the best method is to reduce the value of temptation by changing the relationship with our stimuli and increase the value of the long-term reward.

2. See the bigger picture: Adopt a high-level construal

When you start seeing things in a bigger picture it’s hard to make bad decisions.

Bob and Joe are good friends, Joe is overweight and wants to become fit. One day they are eating food together, Bob orders a nice burger with chips at a chicken shop. Joe sees that burger and now the cravings start, he thinks to himself “I’ll eat today and I’ll start tomorrow.” however, “Today is yesterday’s tomorrow” this quote highlights that the issue with waiting until tomorrow is that when it arrives it is called today and so you’ll always be stuck waiting for tomorrow. It’s highly likely that he will make that same action over and over again. Have you been a victim of this mindset? Think have you always constantly set a target for a six pack or getting a study routine and getting A’s and yet after a year you’re still the same, eating those burgers and procrastinating longer than you should. You probably have a low-level construal. When you realize its not just a burger but something that costs your good health, weight, cognitive performance you begin to reduce the value of this thing and its easier to resist. Essentially, if you’re in a high-level construal, then you’re thinking more abstractly.

3. Remove Delusions

Most of us like to believe that we have self-control, free will and we go to extents as far as deluding ourselves into thinking so. For instance, we eat junk because most of us think that we have control and we’ll take our health seriously and be in perfect shape in the future. Just think right now, the person you are currently is who you will be in 10-20 years. Are the actions you are currently engaging in corresponding with your desired self or is it not? Once you put the effort to picture yourself in that state it’s a lot more harder to make bad decisions.

Sometimes we would prefer to engage in damaging acts to allow the belief that we have self control because of this illusion. But it’s no surprise “Numerous studies show that feelings of lack of control can lead to anxiety, helplessness, pessimism, failure to act when it is possible to influence events, and even depression.” While it may have these effects its more often damaging as it can prevent us from taking proper steps to fully analyze a situation. Some of us delude ourselves into thinking that it’s impossible like losing weight because of “old age” and “bad metabolism” that it’s out of our control when really it’s just laziness and a lack of self control that we don’t like to admit. I say laziness because normally it’s due to not having done proper research and having a concrete plan on tackling the problem and we’ve seen hundreds of people get in great shape despite reasons like “bad genetics” and the rest of the excuses.

Summary

Change Your Relationship with Temptation: If the object of want still has worth, it can be difficult to resist temptation. Change your perspective to make it less appealing.

See the High-Level Construal (Bigger Picture): Because we concentrate on instant gratification, short-term desires frequently win over long-term. Selecting long-term advantages is made simpler by adopting a grander viewpoint.

Eliminate Delusions: A lot of people think they’ll change “tomorrow,” which gives them a fictitious sense of power. The secret to dispelling this myth is realizing that your present behaviors influence who you will be in the future. Take ownership of your deficiencies rather than attributing them to outside variables like age or metabolism.