Foregoing rewards today for increasingly beneficial outcomes tomorrow is difficult. You might find it challenging to wrap your head around what’s best for your future self since that reality’s less tangible — and you know what you want now.
But making difficult daily sacrifices to achieve your long-term goals, like choosing to work out instead of watching TV to improve your fitness, is an invaluable practice. Learning how to improve your self-control means more personal and professional development as you gain power over your decisions and, thus, your life.
What's self-control?
Self-control is a skill that helps you achieve what you want in life. Note the word skill: it’s something you can work on and improve, which is promising if you’re struggling with self-control and often feel your goals are out of reach.
This skill requires regulating your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to achieve specific goals or avoid undesirable outcomes. You’re cultivating the power to resist temptation, delay gratification, and maintain focus on your priorities.
As you direct your willpower toward a desired outcome, you can decide not to do something that compromises this outcome. For example, you may want to check your work email but won’t because you’re trying to create a better work-life balance.
Other times, to exercise self-control you’ll decide to be intentional about doing something. You might progress toward your goal of building better sleep habits by waking at a certain time each day, regardless of your urge to snooze just once more.
Self-control is a finite resource, and using it extensively can lead to decision fatigue. This phenomenon is known as “ego depletion.” Every time you exercise self-control, your decision-making power reduces until you start again the next day. This is why you may be unable to make decisions after a long work day.
Self-control and willpower
Lacking self-control isn’t the same as lacking willpower, and understanding the difference will help you improve both to achieve your goals.
- Self-control works to regulate your emotions and decision-making — whether or not there’s an immediate temptation.
- Willpower helps you resist your impulses in the moment of temptation.
Self-control is how you get yourself to the gym each day. Willpower is how you push through when you’re ready to give up. Self-control refers to how you structure your meals for the week and what you buy at the grocery store. Willpower is how you resist overeating when you’d rather indulge.
Self-control and self-discipline
Self-control also isn’t quite synonymous with self-discipline, although you’ll use both to successfully avoid today’s temptations to gain tomorrow’s progress.
- Self-control is about stopping a behavior or starting a new one.
- Self-discipline is about following through on that change.
Self-control helps you start to make a change, like signing up for a gym membership as a New Year’s resolution. And self-discipline helps you follow through with that resolution, attending the gym time and time again.
Types of self-control
You might broadly understand you struggle with self-control, but knowing which type is important so you can focus your energy on the right thing. Here are three main types of self-control:
- Impulse control: This is your ability to resist acting on your immediate desires or impulses. Impulse control restrains you from speaking out of turn in social situations or buying food you’re trying to avoid.
- Emotional control: Regulating your emotional responses helps you respond to situations in a controlled and rational way.
- Movement control: This involves regulating your physical movements and actions. It’s particularly important in sports and stage performance contexts.
Why is self-control important?
Self-control is important because it helps you achieve fulfilling goals that make you feel you’re living your most authentic life. You become more resilient and dedicated as you keep distractions and impulses from derailing progress.
Feeling in control of your life is also crucial to your sense of self-determination. When you want something, you know you can make it happen. This empowering feeling contrasts with thinking everything’s out of your control and you’re not responsible for how your life turns out.
You’ll know you have the control necessary to make changes and work toward goals that align with your values. This sense of autonomy over your situation can enhance your life in the following ways:
- Improved decision-making
- Greater chance of success in your personal and professional life
- Healthier relationships
- Fewer unhealthy cravings (such as alcohol or cigarettes)
- Increased academic performance
- Improved physical health
- Better mental health
- More self-confidence and self-esteem
- Better leadership skills
- Improved ability to self-advocate
13 tips on how to improve self-control
Self-control is a muscle. It takes practice, patience, and dedication to strengthen it properly.
Here are our tips on how to build up self-control.
1. Start small
Set small goals and reward yourself for completing them. If you want to reduce your social media time, start by leaving your phone in another room for 30 minutes. Then gradually increase your amount of time spent away.
2. Think big
Remembering the big picture will keep you from making brash decisions. When you understand the long-term impacts of your behavior, it’s easier to maintain composure and self-control.
3. Get some rest
Ego depletion means losing impulse control when you're tired. You think less clearly and are more likely to cave to temptations. To avoid this, sleep between 7–8 hours at night to ensure you get enough rest.
4. Do physical exercises
Physical exercise wakes your prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for self-control. Even a little bit helps, so don’t feel you need to do an hour of circuit training daily to get this benefit.
5. Download an app
Practicing self-control is challenging, but many online tools can help you build healthy habits and curb bad ones. If you think you’re spending too much time on social media, look for apps or browser extensions that cut you off after a certain amount of time.
Or, promote healthy habits by tracking behaviors like your sleep pattern, caloric intake, or exercise routines.
6. Get to know yourself
Self-awareness, or getting to know yourself better, helps you direct your energy toward self-improvement. You can’t curtail bad habits unless you know about them.
Pay attention to what distracts you, motivates you, and draws your focus. Then, leverage this information for improved self-control.
7. Make fewer decisions
Steve Jobs famously kept a wardrobe exclusively made up of turtle necks, jeans, and white shoes. Why? To combat decision fatigue.
Your energy is a limited resource. And every decision you make, even if it’s just your clothes for the day, contributes to willpower depletion. If you’re not careful, you’ll quickly run out of energy, making it more difficult to exercise self-control.
Take a leaf out of Steve Jobs’s book and automate low-level decisions to avoid mental fatigue. Plan your outfits, meals, and exercise routine for the week so you don’t have to make a game-time decision in a depleted mental state.
8. Pay attention to what you eat
Some foods are better for your brain than others. Look for foods that can help you maintain a healthy level of blood glucose. A single banana or a glass of lemonade is enough to give you a quick boost of glucose levels.
9. Treat yourself
Self-care is essential to self-control. If you’re always tired and stressed, it’s difficult to maintain composure over time.
Taking care of yourself also involves forgiving yourself when you don’t meet your goals or expectations. The fact that you’re trying is what matters, so be kind to yourself.
10. Drop the negative self-talk
Negativity only holds you back. Instead of complaining that you can’t do something, why not give it a try? Then, you’ll know without a doubt if you actually can do it.
In most cases, you might be surprised by what you’re capable of if you just maintain a positive mental attitude.
11. Remove the temptation
You might find it hard to follow through on good intentions if you’re constantly tempted. The best way to avoid temptations is to remove them altogether. Take the choice off the table to make it easier to exercise impulse control and practice self-discipline.
If you struggle with impulse eating, for example, don’t stock your pantry with unhealthy snacks to avoid indulging in temptations.
12. Reevaluate your thoughts and actions
When faced with a challenging situation, take a deep breath. Use that moment to reflect on your thoughts and actions. This helps you make a more controlled and deliberate decision while avoiding impulsive reactions. You’ll make thoughtful choices that align with your goals if you think before you act.
13. Ask yourself, “What if?”
This strategy involves considering the potential consequences of your actions and whether they align with your goals. Use the “What if?” strategy to evaluate the potential outcomes of different decisions and choose the one that’s most aligned with your values.
A complementary strategy is implementation intention, which involves creating a predetermined plan to avoid distractions and complete goals. If you have trouble staying focused at work, create an implementation intention to take a five-minute break every hour to stretch and refocus.
Then, define a plan for avoiding distractions and staying on track.
Using self-control to achieve your goals
In most cases, achieving your goals requires exercising some self-control. You typically need to make behavior or habit adjustments to learn new things and reach new heights personally and professionally. Here’s how this tight-knit relationship works:
- Goals reinforce your self-control by rewarding good behavior
- Self-control helps you achieve your goals by keeping you on task
Here are some tips to help you leverage this relationship and use self-control to achieve your goals.
Make SMART goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound. You might find exercising self-control to accomplish smaller, well-defined goals like these easier than motivating yourself with a larger, more daunting goal.
Here’s an example:
- Specific: Improve your physical fitness by running three miles three times per week.
- Measurable: Track progress using a running app and aim to increase your average pace by 10 seconds per mile each week.
- Achievable: Start by running one mile three times a week, gradually increasing the distance as you build endurance.
- Relevant: Improving your physical fitness is important because you want to feel more energetic and reduce your risk of chronic disease.
- Time-bound: Start your running program next Monday, and aim to reach your goal of running three miles each time, three times per week, within 12 weeks.
Learn to prioritize your goals
Since self-control is a finite resource, you can’t just exert self-control equally on all fronts right away. Start by prioritizing your goals to focus your self-control. Instead of starting a new diet, exercise plan, and sleep routine all in one go, focus on one thing at a time.
Eventually, your self-control “muscle” will strengthen, and you can add in more goals.
Practice delayed gratification
In the 1972 Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, children were asked to choose between eating one marshmallow immediately or waiting to earn two marshmallows after a short delay.
The marshmallow test results showed that those who were able to delay gratification and wait for the larger reward tended to have better life outcomes, like higher standardized test scores and levels of self-determination.
Use self-control to avoid a reward until you complete a goal. When you finally earn it, you’ve created a positive reinforcement for 1) reaching your goal and 2) practicing self-control.
Take control back
Knowing how to improve self-control is about understanding and working around your limits. Look inward to identify your strengths, weaknesses, motivators, and distractions. Then, organize your life to take advantage of the good and minimize (or eliminate) the bad.
The reward from all this hard work is an increased sense of control over your life. When you want something, you’ll feel capable of achieving it — so you probably will.
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