Dr. Kentaro Fujita

He wasn't testing whether children could just gut it out and use their own brains to inhibit their behavior.

Instead, he was looking at things like covering your eyes or covering the bowl or turning your head or imagining the marshmallows to be puffy white clouds or imagining –

that there's a picture frame around it, so it's not real, it's just a picture.

All of these different behavioral and psychological strategies that children were using, these enhance self-control without leveraging willpower.

At this point, you could ask, what is willpower?

And it's not actually clear in psychology what that actually means, but most people understand willpower to be the effortful inhibition or suppression of impulsive tendencies.

So there's a yummy piece of cake in front of me and I'm really tempted to eat it.

Willpower or inhibition is the active fighting of that temptation, telling myself, don't think about it, don't give in, don't do something about it.

I think this is sort of the paradigmatic sort of version of self-control in which you use your mental muscles to push down those ideas.

Those trainings are the ones I was telling are not very effective.

but training some of the other strategies that we might have like closing your eyes or imagining a cockroach crawl across the cake or asking yourself what your children would say if they saw you eating the chocolate cake after saying that you wouldn't.

all these other strategies, behavioral and psychological strategies or tools, as we might refer to them, those can be taught and those can, in fact, improve your self-control.

So whether or not self-control is something that you can learn to get better at, I think the answer there is yes.

Whether willpower is something that you can get better at, there I am not so sure.

I think what you're saying, Andrew, is something super profound, more profound than you might think.

So for years, self-control researchers have assumed that the secret to self-control is actually doing exactly the opposite of what you suggested, which is turning off the hot system, right?

Because they argue that these limbic systems, these hot systems, these more quote unquote animalistic systems are the things that make the temptation so powerful.

And so by activating those systems,

All we're doing is we're upregulating the temptation impulses.

And so for years, and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model, for example, and many, many others, they talked about making your cognitions cooler.