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Introduction: The Collapse After the Restraint
For a set period you clamp down hard on a desire. So far, so smooth. But past a certain point, the desire you had clamped down bursts out as though a dam had broken. Its force is far fiercer than the self you were before you cut it off. You are swallowed, without a brake, into a quantity you would never normally touch. And when you come to yourself, only a deep regret remains.
Most people interpret this collapse as a defeat of the will — I could not discipline myself, my weak self showed its face. And, resolving stricter next time, they begin the same round trip again.
The techniques for beating temptation have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why it is the people who cut off strictly who collapse fiercely.
Let me give the conclusion first. Fierce indulgence is not a defeat of the will; it is a product manufactured by fierce self-denial. Self-denial and indulgence are not two opposing states but nothing other than the front and back of one and the same coin.
📖 Contents
Forbidding Casts a Light on Desire
First, from the findings of psychology. There is a phenomenon the psychologist Wegner demonstrated, called the ironic process of mental control: the harder you consciously try not to think of a thing, the more it refuses to leave your head [Wegner, 1994]. The person told not to picture a white bear keeps thinking of the white bear. It is a commonplace fact, confirmed again and again in the laboratory.
Desire sits on the same logic. The more you forbid you must not want this, the more that desire settles at the centre of consciousness. The act of cutting off, far from erasing desire, casts a light of unmatched strength upon it.
From the moment you decide to quit sugar, sugar becomes a far larger presence than before. May you eat it or not. Did you hold the line today or not. The thing you were supposed to have given up occupies your head around the clock. The object you were supposed to have released settles, by the act of releasing, at the centre of your heart.
And the force thus stored is released all at once the moment restraint fails. This is the true form of the collapse that comes after self-denial.
The Collapse Becomes Fuel for the Next Self-Denial
This round trip has an effect easily overlooked. Each time they collapse, people feel I am still too soft, and resolve to cut off more strictly next time. That is, the failure of collapse becomes fuel that strengthens the next self-denial all the more.
This collapse, which looks at a glance like defeat, far from making people let go of self-denial, reinforces the dependence on it. A coin, come up heads or tails, remains one and the same coin. Both faces bind the person to the same place.
Here another psychological force is added. People are built to feel the pain of losing more strongly than the joy of gaining [Kahneman & Tversky, 1979]. For someone who has begun recording their abstinence, a single day’s lapse is no longer a mere day’s event. It is experienced as the pain of losing the asset of an accumulated streak. So a single exception summons a disproportionate guilt.
▸ This mechanism — the record substituting itself for the aim — is treated in self-control never lasts because the standard is outside you.
Indulgence, Too, Is Not Something You Chose
What deserves attention here is that even that collapse is not something you chose.
At a glance it looks like a liberation of desire, as though you were enjoying yourself by your own will. But in the midst of the outburst you are savouring nothing. You are merely swept along by the recoil of the clamp-down. There is no freedom of choice in it. Self-denial distorted the desire, and the distortion burst out in the form of indulgence. Self-denial had even decided the shape of the indulgence.
If so, self-denial and indulgence are not opposites. Both are merely two appearances of a state in which the standard of desire is not in your own hands. In self-denial you are ordered from outside to cut off and you obey; in indulgence you are pushed by the recoil and swept along. There is only the difference of whether what commands you is an external norm or the recoil of suppression — in both phases, the one holding the wheel is not you.
This view carries important meaning for someone who, worn out by cutting off, heads for release. Quit self-denial and set desire loose, and as long as it is the recoil of self-denial, you are still on the same coin. From heads to tails, from tails to heads. Whichever way the coin faces, the one flipping it is not you.
Conclusion: What to Ask Is the Hand Flipping the Coin
You cannot beat temptation not because your will is weak. Forbidding grows attachment and recording produces the pain of loss — the very method of cutting off is a structure that manufactures attachment and guilt.
So the advice hold a stronger will does not work. It is a technique for keeping an external standard more surely, while the standard itself is preserved without anyone asking whose it is.
The real problem is not the face of the coin but whose the hand flipping it is. Unless you take that hand back, however many times you re-choose heads or tails, the binding game itself does not end. What is in question is the single point: who is flipping that coin? The whole structure is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Wegner, D. M. “Ironic Processes of Mental Control” (1994) Psychological Review, 101(1)
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” (1979) Econometrica, 47(2)
