The New Yorker:

Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless. Instead, we must find strategies that don’t require us to be strong.

By Jerome Groopman

Several years ago, I bought a smartphone and soon came to love it. Being able to send an e-mail, look up a fact, or buy something no matter where I was meant a previously unimaginable gain in productivity. Every time I got an e-mail, the phone emitted a ping and I would deal with whatever it was, priding myself on my efficiency. Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

I’d always prided myself on my will power. Like most people who’ve made it through medical training—with its early mornings and its long shifts when your friends are partying—I had an established track record of delaying gratification. It didn’t matter. When I tried switching the phone to silent, I ended up checking it perhaps even more often, just in case there was something to deal with. The only time I managed to resist was during Shabbos, when I don’t read e-mail. But I’d be watching the clock, counting the hours till I could turn the thing on. For the first time, I could imagine what it’s like to be a smoker craving a cigarette. Checking the smartphone had become a bad habit that I couldn’t break.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use. And when Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Paper No. 27, considered how to create citizens who would obey the federal laws of the newly formed republic, he used another proverbial phrase: “Man is very much a creature of habit.” If federal law permeated matters at the state level, it would seem part of everyday life. “The more it circulates through those channels and currents in which the passions of mankind naturally flow, the less will it require the aid of the violent and perilous expedients of compulsion,” he wrote.

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