Is changing your situation the key to self-control?

A Q&A with Penn Professor Angela Duckworth, author of GRIT and SITUATED

This is a special newsletter to celebrate the launch of my dear friend and frequent collaborator Angela Duckworth’s terrific new book, SITUATED: Find the People and Places Who Bring Out Your Best. Angela has been working on this book for quite a few years, and believe me, I’ve heard a lot about the journey. I’m thrilled for the world to have access to the insights in SITUATED.

Below is a Q&A with Angela about self-control. I hope it will pique your interest in picking up a copy of SITUATED and in joining us for a free Zoom event on November 2nd from 1:30-2:00 pm ET where I’ll be interviewing Angela and taking questions from the audience.

Oh, and in other Angela news: we’ve just kicked off a new season of Choiceology with… what else… an episode featuring Angela! We talk about how much it helps to give other people visibility into the progress you’re making on your goals. Since Angela is one of the friends I rely on most to hold me accountable, it was extra special to release this episode right before her book’s launch.

Join Me & Angela Online on November 2nd at 1:30 pm ET for a Virtual Book Event

Q&A: The Science of Self-Control

This month’s Q&A from Choiceology is with Angela Duckworth. Angela is a professor with joint appointments at Wharton and in Penn’s psychology department. She is a MacArthur “genius” award winner, author of the New York Times bestseller GRIT, and my co-author and friend. She and I co-founded and now co-direct the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Penn. In this interview, Angela shares insights from her research on self-control and the power of changing your situation to improve your outcomes, which is the topic of her new book, SITUATED.

Me: Let’s start with your favorite definition of self-control, Angela.

Angela: Self-control, as I define it, is the successful resolution of an internal conflict where one choice is clearly better and the other choice is more attractive. So, you have a conflict between what you know is better for you, typically in the long run, and a temptation that’s more pleasurable in the moment.

Me: So, potato chips are calling to me, but I should eat fruit.

Angela: Or a kale salad, yes.

Me: What can people do to improve their self-control? For example, when it comes to the self-control dilemma of paying attention to important things like your work or family versus temptations like social media, I know one of your favorite pieces of advice is “put your phone away.”

Angela: Yes, that’s something I’m telling teenagers across America. “Put your phone in another room. Put it in a drawer.” I’ve done a national study of teenagers in the US, and the summary insight is the farther they are from their phones, the higher the GPA. We ask teens, “You have a big test. Where do you keep your phone?” And one answer is that they keep it face up next to them, so they don’t miss any notifications. One answer is that they keep it next to them but face down and sound off. There are all these gradations up to, “I keep it in another room altogether.” And this is where we can graph distance from your phone and GPA, and it’s a monotonic relationship.

Me: Monotonic meaning consistently increasing. So, the further I am from having access to my phone while I’m working, the better my grades. Of course, it’s correlation, so we don’t know what’s causing it, but it’s a striking correlation.

Angela: Yeah, it’s a little trick you can learn when you’re four, but you can also learn when you’re 54, which is to modify your situation. I think this is one of the most important things we should learn.

And not just with your phone. You can do it with the food you keep in your house. You can do it at work.

Me: Right, or with the people you don’t want to text in the middle of the night. Take them off your contacts list.

Angela: Exactly.

Me: So, I know people who are incredibly self-controlled at work but really struggle in their personal lives. How common is that? Is self-control a trait we should think of as constant across contexts or is it something that varies across parts of our lives?

Angela: Early in my career, I had a graduate student named Eli Tsukayama, and he had the same question. Are you always a seven or are you sometimes a four and sometimes a 10? So, we made a very long questionnaire to ask people, “Where do you fail in your self-control?” Then we made a catalog. We called it the Seven Deadly Sins study because it looked like there were seven categories, though it ended up being eight. Very inconvenient. But anyway, there are the familiar categories: food, alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, impulse shopping. Then there’s emotion dysregulation. Confession here — my greatest self-control struggle is probably my temper. But it’s not at all hard for me to regulate eating and drinking. I don’t think you’ve ever seen me finish a glass of wine — I just don’t have the desire.

So, it turns out, people vary considerably across domains of life in how self-controlled they are. But the key is that they’re not better at suppressing impulses in some domains than others. It’s that the impulses themselves are weaker or stronger for them depending on the domain (food, shopping, etc.).

Knowing that allows you to arrange your life to avoid strong impulses if you know your Achilles’ heel lies in a certain domain. For example, recovering alcoholics try not to hang out in bars. If you really struggle with drinking, a bar is not a location where you can be successful.

Me: What are some examples of things you do differently in your life because of what you’ve learned from science about self-control?

Angela: My husband hates this, but I’ve really wanted to get to bed at a regular time. But like many people, when it comes to bedtime, I’m like, “Well, I’ll just check 25 more emails. I’ll just tidy up the counter…” So 10:00 becomes 10:30 and then suddenly it’s 11:30 and I’m off my schedule. So, I programmed my Alexa to say, “Angela, it’s time for bed” at exactly 10pm. And do I hop out of my seat and start brushing my teeth? No. But that little nudge helps.

So that’s an obvious and simple thing.

Other people have their tricks, too. Almost everybody I know now knows about your work on temptation bundling, Katy. I tell them, if you have trouble working out, listen to your favorite podcast at the gym. But I also tell them to put on their gym clothes, because once you’re in your gym clothes, you’re like, “Ok, fine. I’ll work out.”

I have a lot of situational hacks like that, from the trivial to the most important things in my life. I’m trying to use my situation as my ally.

Me: I love the advice to use your situation as your ally. Of course, that’s the main message of your terrific new book, SITUATED. Has your perspective changed on this over time?

Angela: For a lot of my life, when things weren’t going well, I would think what’s wrong with me? And now I think, what’s wrong with my situation? Is the task undefined? Do I need more advice? Am I not sleeping enough? It’s a much more productive question to ask because it leads you to solutions instead of self-hatred or shame.

Me: That’s a great question to ask and great takeaway for everyone reading this interview. Thank you, Angela!

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Angela’s insights about self-control, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig deeper into this topic or watch our full interview on YouTube, and be sure to pick up a copy of Angela’s new book SITUATED wherever books are sold.

Wishing you a wonderful September. See you in October!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

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