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How to quit smoking? Think about smoking
I quit smoking many years ago, but even today I can recall the unpleasantness of that time—the cravings, the obsessive thoughts. My strategy was to keep my mind and body busy all the time, in
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Who Says Self-Control Is a Good Thing?
The fundamental goal of human life is the same now as it was during the Stone Age — survive and reproduce. Easy enough, right? Wait, not so fast. As APS Fellow Todd Heatherton demonstrated in
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Can I Take That Back? The Study of Impulsivity
It doesn’t matter that you know better. It doesn’t matter that you’re aware of the consequences and will regret them later. At some point, your carefully disciplined sense of control will collapse — whether it
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Hazardous Thinking
Much of the attention given to risky behavior focuses on affect — how that drink or cigarette will make one feel. But what about cognition? Cognitive processes like prediction, planning, reasoning, and memory also play
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Dog tired: What our hounds can teach us about self-control
We humans have much more self-discipline than other animals. We can and do set goals—losing 25 pounds, going to college—and then go without certain pleasures to achieve those goals. We’re far from perfect at this
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A willingness to wonder
Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs, and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that individual addicts cannot will themselves into recovery and healthy sobriety, indeed that the ego and self-reliance are often
