Self-Control Never Lasts Because the Standard Is Outside You — Undoing the Reason There Is No Terminus

Introduction: The Goal Line That Flees Ahead

You want to build up your self-control. So you begin something. Manage a week and you want to aim for a month. Manage a month and half a year comes into view. Someone who cut out carbohydrates soon cuts out snacks too. In the end they begin to trim the very number of meals.

The standard updates upward, higher and higher, the instant you attain it. You ought to be nearing the goal, yet the goal line flees ahead. And this race has no winner’s seat. However far you cut off, there is always someone cutting off more strictly.

Ways to build self-control have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why self-control is never visited by a terminus of enough here.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because it is not you who makes the standard. A standard supplied from outside has, structurally, no state of being met.

An Inner Standard Has an End; an Outer Standard Does Not

Consider. If the standard were in your own interior, cutting off would have a natural end. If the aim is to get your health in order, that is enough once it is in order. If the aim is to rest your head, you can stop once it is rested. An inner standard stops when it is met.

But an external standard has no state of being met. There is always someone disciplining themselves longer and more strictly, and against them you still fall short.

You may want to object: I was the one who set the period; no one forced me. True, it was you who last decided let’s make it a month. But that number, “a month” — where did you get it? The going rate an article showed. The existence of others who keep at it longer. The vague air of it means nothing unless you do at least that much. You were merely receiving, as though it were your own decision, a number that drifted in from outside — the very sense of I decided it myself is the sense that arises when you internalise an external standard.

In an environment where countless comparison-targets line up inside the screen, this supply does not stop. The moment you attain a month and are about to be satisfied, the post of someone who has kept it half a year enters your sight. That someone, too, is looking up at another who keeps it a year. Just short of satisfaction, a chain that holds out the next standard keeps turning.

The Record of Achievement Conceals the Desire Itself

The record that is supposed to support self-control has another function: it conceals the desire itself.

When you began cutting off, there must have been some reason. But from the moment you begin keeping a record, your interest moves from why do I cut off to how many days has it lasted. The number is plain, comparable, and gives a sense of achievement. So the record, which was supposed to be a means, takes the seat of the aim before you know it.

Why can a number conceal desire so easily? Because a number has a plainness that desire does not. What you truly want, when you try to put it into words, is vague, its outline unfixed. But the consecutive-day count is grasped at a glance. This plainness becomes a comfortable refuge. A question hard to answer is swapped for an easy-to-answer number.

Someone absorbed in the record is no longer looking at desire. They are looking at the number. The record, while pretending to manage desire, turns your eyes away from it.

▸ How this apparatus of recording and visualisation is designed is treated in you cannot wake early not because you are weak in the mornings.

Much Self-Control Begins From Anxiety, Not Improvement

There is structure on the side of motive, too. Much self-control is performed not to become better but to quiet anxiety.

The trigger is usually not a forward-looking drive to improve but a vague anxiety. The unease of I cannot go on like this. The guilt of I am slack. To cancel that unpleasant sensation, people cut something off. While cutting off, they can at least think I am keeping myself in order. Self-control works like a drug that quiets anxiety for a while.

There is a simple question to tell the motive apart. After you cut the thing off, does your heart grow quiet, or does the next anxiety arrive? A discipline begun from a wish brings a fulfilled quiet after cutting off. One begun from anxiety brings, after cutting off, a new restlessness — will this be enough?

If what strikes you when you fail to keep it up over a short period is not mere disappointment but a heavy guilt that seems to deny your very character, then what broke there is not a habit. The suppressed anxiety is rushing back all at once.

Let me make the difference from healthy self-management clear here. There are disciplines that begin not from anxiety but from a clear wish. I want to concentrate on important work, so I abstain from alcohol for that period. Here the wish comes first and the discipline is its means. Once the wish is met, the discipline quietly ends its role. For the same act, whether it begins from a wish or from anxiety divides whether there is a terminus.

Conclusion: Where Does the Right to Decide the End Lie?

Self-control never lasts not because your will falls short. It is because the right to decide the end was not in your own hands.

The voice stricter still has no end because its source lies outside you. Being outside, that voice does not aim at your being fulfilled. It aims at keeping you running.

So what to build is not will. What to take back is the right to decide the end — being able to draw the line yourself: this far is enough for today. Only there is the end of the race. The whole picture of this argument — the location of the standard — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk” (1979) Econometrica, 47(2)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press