The Secret to Self-Control — Full Transcript & Summary

[00:00] Translator: Emanuele Rossi Reviewer: TED Translators admin My mom was 42 years old when I was born,

[00:18] and she started exercising for the first time in her life. and then she started doing 5K races, and then she started doing 10K races.

[00:32] And after that, she ran a marathon, and after that, my mom did a triathlon. By the time she was 57 years old,

[00:44] my mom was trekking uphill to the base camp of Mt. Everest. And let me tell you about my dad.

[00:56] (Laughter) When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to science classes. He was also my calculus teacher in high school.

[01:12] (Laughter) The value of health. And I learned something important from my dad:

[01:27] And these two values have guided me on my trek through life, and they've helped me appreciate an epidemic that we are all facing.

[01:40] Instead, it is the epidemic of unhealthy living. A half billion people worldwide are obese.

[01:52] And you would think that 50 years after the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on the dangers of tobacco was published we'd be beyond the problem of smoking. Today, a billion people worldwide use tobacco.

[02:09] Tobacco and obesity are two of the most preventable causes of premature death. Solving these problems is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

[02:22] because of brain neurotransmitters, because of environmental influences such as peers and the media. are not things that you and I can solve on our own.

[02:40] But there is one piece of this puzzle that may hold the key: Our choices about what we do with our cravings to engage

[02:52] in addictive behaviors like smoking or overeating. There is a new science of self-control

[03:04] that may hold the key to reversing these epidemics. Willingness means allowing your cravings to come and to go,

[03:16] while not acting on them by smoking or eating unhealthy. But actually, I'm not talking about willpower, and I'm not talking about

[03:28] Instead, I'm talking about a different notion of cravings that looks like this: dropping the struggle with your cravings.

[03:44] Opening up to them, letting them be there, Now at this point you may be very skeptical. (Laughter)

[04:01] I was when I first heard about it years ago. He said, "Jonathan, this book will change your life forever!"

[04:17] And I said "Oh, OK... Yeah... yeah, I'll check it out." So I went through it and thought, "Nah, this is a bunch of psycho-babble,"

[04:29] Until some years later when my wife brought me to a workshop on willingness at the University of Washington, So then I read the book,

[04:44] and I got trained in it, and what I learned was that willingness is part of acceptance in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach to behavior change.

[04:57] that's being used to help people with anxiety disorders, with addictions are now using it to help improve their employees' performance

[05:09] Now, to understand why I was blown away, you have to understand the world I live in. a common way you help people quit smoking and lose weight

[05:23] is you teach them to avoid their cravings. Avoid thinking about smoking, distract yourself from food cravings. There's a song from a Broadway show that captures this perfectly.

[05:37] (Singing) When you start to get confused because of thoughts in your head, hold them in instead.

[05:53] Turn it off like a light switch just go click. when you're feeling certain feelings that just don't seem right. Treat those pesky feelings like a reading light and turn them off.

[06:08] (Applause) where the song we keep hearing is "turn off the bad feelings."

[06:24] Now, let's take a look at these cookies. (Laughter) They just came out of the oven ooh, they are so good!

[06:37] Mm-mm, just feel that craving to eat those cookies. Now, turn it off! (Laughter)

[06:52] You want those cookies even more now, right? You can't turn it off! Maybe, you can leave the light on.

[07:10] My research lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, here in Seattle, to see if showing people how to be willing to have their cravings

[07:26] We are conducting trials and face-to-face interventions and a telephone quit smoking hotline and a website called webquit.org

[07:39] and in an app called SmartQuit. These technologies have the potential to reach millions of people with interventions that could save their lives.

[07:51] And let me tell you about the data. When you pool together the results from six clinical trials, including trials conducted by our colleagues,

[08:07] to the avoidance approach - avoiding your cravings —- and it varied depending on the study. However, for the people who were randomly assigned to the willingness condition,

[08:24] twice as many quit smoking. Now, of course, the data only tell us one small part of the story.

[08:36] I'm going to weave together experiences I've had And I'll together refer to them as one person

[08:49] So, as is typical of people who come in to want help for quitting smoking, who started smoking when she was a teenager.

[09:02] She tried to quit smoking several times and was not successful. was going to be helpful to her for quitting, and yet she was really hopeful that this time would be different.

[09:14] So, the first thing that I showed Jane was to be willing, that is to be aware, of her cravings in her body. And what I did was I asked her

[09:27] to journal that, and just to track the intensity over time, So in the middle of explaining this, she stops me and says, "What are you talking about? I don't have cravings, I just smoke!"

[09:42] So I said, "Well, why don't you try it, and we'll see what happens, So she came back a week later and she said, "You know, I've been tracking my cravings,

[09:57] And now I can't stop thinking about smoking! What am I supposed to do?"

[10:09] Well, before I tell you my answer, let'’s look behind the scenes. was that Jane was having cravings all along, and like a lot of us, she was living on autopilot.

[10:24] You wake up in the morning, you smoke a cigarette, you get in the car, you smoke a cigarette. We're often just not aware of what we think, what we feel before we act.

[10:38] and one of the ways I showed her to do that was with an exercise called "I am having the thought". So, one of Jane's thoughts before she had a cigarette was,

[10:53] So I asked her to add the phrase "I'm having the thought Then I asked her to add the phrase "I'm noticing I'm having the thought,"

[11:10] that I'm feeling a lot of stress right now, Now, we can all do an exercise like this when we have any kind of negative thought. Like for my thought that "I'm boring all of you with my talk"

[11:26] and I'm having the thought that I'm boring all of you with my talk. between me and my thoughts. that I can choose not to run off the stage in front of 1,500 people.

[11:45] And the fact is we don't act on every thought we have, because if we did, we'd all be in a whole lot of trouble. So, this was helpful to Jane, but there was something else

[12:00] I felt a lot of compassion for her about it. from people when she would be outside smoking a cigarette.

[12:14] The criticism from her husband for being a smoker, and the self-loathing that she developed about smoking. And she dealt with this shame by having a cigarette,

[12:28] which gave her relief temporarily until the shame came back. "What would it be like if we tried to honor this feeling of shame

[12:41] as part of the human experience? If you had a close friend who is feeling shame about smoking,” “what would you offer this friend as words of caring and kindness,

[12:58] and could you then offer those words to yourself, Jane?" and she had this look of this temporary respite from the shame,

[13:12] not to act on the craving. the secret to self-control is to give up control.

[13:25] we get into a tug-of-war with a monster, a craving monster. "Come on, smoke a cigarette. Come on, have that cookie. Come on!"

[13:40] "No craving monster, I'm going to distract myself from you, And the craving monster says, "No, no, come on, you know you want it!" and you're going back and forth and back and forth

[13:54] — you have that cookie, you have that cigarette, And then you're in the tug-of-war again doing what we've learned how to do.

[14:06] unless you drop the rope. is that if you just allow the monster to be, you discover in a few minutes

[14:21] that the craving monster is not as threatening as he appears. And sometimes, he even goes away. As we break for lunch, we're going to have choices of what to eat.

[14:33] (Laughter) When you see them, try to be aware of the cravings in your body,

[14:47] See if they pass on their own. Whatever choice you make, try to bring a spirit of caring for that is the mountain that we are all climbing.

[15:04] (Applause)