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What strategies do you use to push through a tough challenge, be it a run on a treadmill or a stressful phone call with your boss? Perhaps you remind yourself of what you have to gain from completing the task, or you use distraction, or you think about the bad things that will happen if you give in? For a paper in the European Journal of Personality, a team led by Marie Hennecke at the University of Zurich has conducted what they say is the first ever investigation of these strategies, and others, that people use spontaneously in their everyday lives to “regulate their persistence during aversive activities”.
The researchers’ main interest was to see whether people with strong self-control differ from flakier types by virtue of their use of more effective strategies. In fact, this was not the case – yes, some strategies were more effective than others (offering hope to those of us with weaker willpower that we might benefit from adopting such strategies), but greater use of effective strategies did not explain the persistence of the grittier types, thus suggesting, as the researchers put it, that “… trait self-control and self-regulatory strategies represent separate routes to good self-regulation”.
The researchers started with a pilot study in which they presented hundreds of participants with challenging scenarios (such as completing a treadmill run) and asked them to list any strategies they’d typically use to push through to the end. The researchers collapsed the answers into 19 strategies most of which fell under one of two headings: situation modification strategies (e.g. drinking coffee; listening to music while working); and attentional deployment strategies (e.g. motivational self-talk or thinking the finish is near).
Read more here. (The British Psychological Society)
The researchers’ main interest was to see whether people with strong self-control differ from flakier types by virtue of their use of more effective strategies. In fact, this was not the case – yes, some strategies were more effective than others (offering hope to those of us with weaker willpower that we might benefit from adopting such strategies), but greater use of effective strategies did not explain the persistence of the grittier types, thus suggesting, as the researchers put it, that “… trait self-control and self-regulatory strategies represent separate routes to good self-regulation”.
The researchers started with a pilot study in which they presented hundreds of participants with challenging scenarios (such as completing a treadmill run) and asked them to list any strategies they’d typically use to push through to the end. The researchers collapsed the answers into 19 strategies most of which fell under one of two headings: situation modification strategies (e.g. drinking coffee; listening to music while working); and attentional deployment strategies (e.g. motivational self-talk or thinking the finish is near).
Read more here. (The British Psychological Society)
