You want that new video game so badly, but you’re trying to knock your credit card balance down. Or you’re binging your favorite TV show and can’t wait to find out if a character lives, but it’s late, and you need to be alert for work tomorrow. Just exert a little self-control, you tell yourself. But it’s so hard!
People frequently think of self-control as something that requires willpower—the effort of giving up some immediate pleasure for a long-term goal. A study from last year found that people in the U.S., the Netherlands and China tend to write about self-control with words such as “difficult” and “unpleasant” and about people who show self-control as “virtuous.” For decades, psychologists held a similar view. In fact, one prominent theory in the 1990s called ego depletion stated that if you used the willpower “muscle” too much, it would get tired and become less effective.
But in the past decade, the science has shifted. Scientists noticed that some people found self-discipline to be completely effortless yet still stuck to their goals better than those who had to exercise a lot of willpower. People who possess naturally high levels of self-control may create habits that rarely expose them to temptations to veer off course, says psychologist Denise de Ridder, who studies self-control at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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There has been a sea change in the field away from the “willpower” understanding of self-control towards one that focuses on specific strategies or habits that make self-discipline easier, says psychology researcher Johanna Peetz of Carleton University in Ontario. Here’s what scientists have learned.
The Importance of Routine
One of the first clues that the conventional wisdom about willpower was wrong came in 2015. In six varied experiments—one of which lasted more than a year—researchers studied high school students’ self-control. The result: whether students who reported high self-control were pursuing good grades, regular exercise or better sleep, they relied on routines for studying, exercising or going to bed. These structured habits—doing the same thing in the same place at the same time of day—were more likely to lead to long-term success than attempting to squelch counterproductive impulses in the moment. People with these good habits reported doing them automatically, without having to think about it.
Since then, other researchers have studied what the average person struggling to stay on track might learn from people who naturally show self-control. In an experiment, de Ridder and colleagues found that establishing small, repeated habits can help achieve goals. They recruited participants who reported struggling to stick to goals, then asked them to pick something they wanted to get better at, such as eating more healthfully, exercising or protecting the environment. They were encouraged to pick a modest daily goal—for example, exercising for 10 minutes, eating some vegetables for lunch or recycling. Participants logged their progress with an app for three months and through questionnaires. Although the study did not find a connection between the participants’ capacity for self-control and their habit formation, those who completed the study and consistently achieved their small goal reported that they felt they had developed a stronger habit.
Practice Makes Habits Easier
Establishing habits like these can make sticking with a challenging behavior feel easier over time, de Ridder says. In a 2020 study, she and her colleagues followed another group of people who chose a goal that had been hard for them to achieve and kept diaries about their progress over four months. The goals fell into the same general categories as those in the other study. Participants chose, for example, to eat fruit at breakfast, be more patient with a friend or save money in the supermarket. The more times people practiced the behavior, the more they improved their ability to use self-discipline. Establishing a habit does require effort at first, de Ridder says, but after about three months, it often gets easier.
It makes sense to see self-control not merely as foregoing pleasure, de Ridder says, but also as being able “to create adaptive routines and strategically avoid conflicts, which in turn leaves more room for attending to what one finds important in life.” These structures can help organize your surroundings in a way that makes doing what you think is good for you feel more natural.
Mindset Shift
Habits are not the only advantage people with high self-discipline may have. A 2025 study found that they may actually prefer doing something meaningful—that advances their goals—rather than something that’s just fun or relaxing. In an at-home experiment, participants completed psychological profiles that measured the strength of their self-control trait. Then they were asked to name four things they would do if they had an unexpected free hour. They rated these activities—reading, sleeping, baking, exercising, grocery shopping, and the like—by whether they found them primarily enjoyable or meaningful.
The participants were then told to do anything they liked for the next hour (while being compensated). The people high in self-control chose activities they rated as meaningful, such as exercising or doing chores; the others went for the purely enjoyable, such as taking a nap or listening to music. “Those high in trait self-control would not choose to just lay down on the sofa and dream away for 60 minutes,” says University of Zurich psychologist Katharina Bernecker, lead author of the study. They didn’t have to use willpower to suppress an urge for a nap. “We concluded that maybe the story that they are so good in impulse control and suppressing pleasure may not be the full story.” In fact, they take pleasure in doing activities that are constructive.
Is it possible for the average person to learn to reframe their preferences so that they will enjoy doing the hard—but meaningful—thing that’s been haunting their to-do list? There’s no proven tool yet to help a person do this. Nevertheless, creating small habits can still help make a tough task easier. Think about what’s tripping you up and what habits you might use to help. If you’re having trouble clicking off the screen at night, you could try setting your alarm for half an hour before bed and training yourself to click off as soon as your alarm blasts. If you want to take up running, but something always derails you, create a routine in which you run one mile every day before breakfast.
After a few months, the research suggests, pursuing your goal will get easier. Who knows? If given a free hour, you might even prefer to take a run than a nap.