Tempting Halloween candy |
Thanks to yesterday’s festivities, both kids and adults have
a few more sweet treats on hand than normal. With a big bowl of candy sitting at
home on the kitchen table or stashed in a desk drawer, many of us now face the
annual challenge of eating our Halloween candy in moderation. Some of us will
succeed; others won’t. We face situations like this constantly in life, where
we are tasked with resisting temptations and overriding our impulses. What might our responses to these situations
reveal about the rest of our lives? Are we happy? Are we satisfied? To approach
this question, let’s imagine a couple of eight-year olds and their new stashes
of Halloween candy.
source |
Jack and Jill are both very proud of their plastic pumpkins
filled with Reese’s and Snickers and are excited to enjoy the benefits of their
trick-or-treating. Jack digs in right away and has trouble getting his candy to
last for more than a few days. Jill, on
the other hand, carefully picks one piece per day, preventing herself from
eating too much at once. Their parents are not surprised – these
actions reflect what their kids usually do when faced with temptations. When you consider these kids, what is your
image of them? Maybe Jack, along with
being impulsive, seems like he’s the kind of kid with a smile on his face,
enjoying opportunities in life and simply having fun. Perhaps Jill, being
diligent with her candy consumption, seems dull and sad, living a life full of
restraint and discipline.
In recent research, psychologists examined possibilities
like these. They were interested in how the tendency to exhibit self-control
might influence life satisfaction overall. To test this, the researchers
measured an individual difference called trait self-control. Individuals who
are high in trait self-control, like Jill, consistently show the ability to
change or control their responses to meet a standard – for example, they might
be able to resist the urge to eat more than one piece of candy a day. People
who are low in trait self-control, like Jack, are less frequently able to
change or control their responses.
In multiple studies, the researchers found that having
greater self-control was predictive of feeling more positive emotion. What’s
interesting is that this positive emotion was what you might think of as “in the
moment” happiness. It does not refer to how good people feel about life
in general, but instead how they feel in the very moment they are asked.
One might guess that people high in trait self-control experience less
momentary happiness because they are constantly resisting temptation, but this
was not the case. Instead, they experienced greater momentary happiness, which
then contributed to greater satisfaction with life overall.
Self-control conflict |
Why might people high in trait self-control experience more
happiness? One reason is because they tend to experience fewer conflicts to begin with, likely because they are doing a better job avoiding them. For example, maybe those high in trait self-control do not even buy any Halloween candy. Additionally, when a conflict occurs, people high in trait
self-control are better at regulating their behaviors and coming closer to
behaving as they ideally want to. This tendency to avoid and manage conflicts
well is then positively related to feeling greater positive affect.
Importantly, this research does not mean that every single
person with low self-control is going to be sad or dissatisfied with life. It
also does not mean that trait self-control is fixed and that nothing can be
done to improve self-control abilities. Jack is in no way doomed to a life of
unhappiness and discontent. If anything, what I hope readers take from this
research is that self-control, most usually associated with laborious restraint
and a lack of pleasure, may instead be associated with joy and happiness in
life.
Enjoying candy one piece at a time! |
How do you deal with the challenge of not eating too much candy at once? What do you think about the evidence that trait self-control and happiness are linked? Let us know in the comments!
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