US media: People with strong self-control are actually not mysterious

The Atlantic Monthly article of the United States on January 8, the original title: Becoming a different person, not a decision on the head When I was a child, my father did something that still puzzled me when I was on a family vacation: running. Get up before the sun rises and run at least four or five miles a day. He wasn't trying to train anything, he wasn't trying to lose weight, he didn't have a clear goal, he just ran. I asked him why he started running at that time, and he said he had no great motives and no epiphanies.

It's no exaggeration to say that this is a dream for many people: decide to start doing something, go through the first stages of hardship, and then stick to it for 40 years. While this is a seemingly simple dream, it is often difficult to reach. Now, I exercise once or twice a week, which is less than I expected. Over the years, I've worked hard to develop a variety of exercise habits, buy fitness equipment, make plans, and go out to exercise, but it never becomes self-conscious. My experience is very common among people who want to change the way they do things, such as people who want to reduce the waste of money, people who want to quit smoking, people who want to learn a new language. New beginnings are tempting. We told ourselves that this time, we really had to do something different, but soon we would be reminded that it would always be a long time.

When it comes to changing habits, the conventional wisdom is that if you really want to change, you can do it. If you don't know how to get up at 4:30 a.m. every morning to make sure you run 5 miles before you go to work, it means you're not trying hard enough, or you're not willing, or you're not motivated enough to try harder. Now, anyone who has tried it might suspect that this view must be. Michael Inzlicht, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, said recent studies have shown that conscious decision-making plays a much smaller role in human behavior than previously thought, and that long-term behavior is largely not a combination of a series of conscious choices. When people use the term "self-control," he says, they tend to conflate two different things: one is a largely unchanging element (trait) in an individual's personality, and the other is the way an individual chooses to behave (state) at a particular time. Idiopathic self-control varies from person to person, and strength or weakness may be determined by a combination of genetics, culture, and environment. A person with high trait self-control may be very punctual, while the average person's punctuality may be more susceptible to environmental influences.

Inzlicht told me that a person who is highly self-controlled in the eyes of others may not be as often self-controlled as you are, and they don't actually have more restraint in their actions, thoughts, and emotions at some point. They are not as tempted as others to deviate from their goals. For this small group of people, others have to resist things through self-control every time, such as sleeping late, not going to the gym, impulsive shopping, and smoking even if they want to quit smoking, which they don't think is a viable option.

It's not that personal change or self-improvement is impossible, most people can change their habits and develop new ones. But before implementation, it may be worth it to reconcile with yourself. Irregular exercise habits no longer bother me, mainly because I don't take myself as seriously as I used to. What I can do for myself to make my life better over the next year may not include spontaneous exercise routines but more attention to reading or cooking things that I love and that are good for me. (By Amanda Marl, transliteration)