How to Improve Your Self-Control

Some people seem to find it easy to resist temptation while others can be relied on to always yield to self-gratification. To a certain extent we have to accept our starting point on the self-control sliding scale and do the best we can with it.
3. How to improve your self-control:
Global processing. This means trying to focus on the wood rather than the trees.
Abstract reasoning. This means trying to avoid considering the specific details of the situation at hand in favour of thinking about how actions fit into an overall framework - being philosophical.
High-level categorisation. This means thinking about high-level concepts rather than specific instances. Any long-term project, whether in business, academia or elsewhere can easily get bogged down by focusing too much on the minutiae of everyday processes and forgetting the ultimate goal.

clipped from www.spring.org.uk "It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back." ~Mick Jagger New research suggests self-control can be improved using abstract reasoning. 1. Evidence that abstract thinking improves self-control It never ceases to amaze just how different two people's views of exactly the same event can be: one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. But the way in which we view people or events isn't just constrained by unchangeable patterns of thought that are set in stone. Dr Fujita and colleagues explored the idea that simple manipulations of how we construe the world can have a direct effect on self-control. Their hunch was that thinking from a more abstract, high-level perspective increases self-control. 2. How personality and the situation affect self-control Self-control is not just affected by how we are thinking at a specific moment, that would be too easy. We have each developed different amounts of self-control.