Learning to be more self-controlled

These are all just examples of ways to practise increasing self-control. If you have very low self-control, it may be beneficial to learn to spot areas in which self-control and delay of gratification can increase your life satisfaction. If you look around you may be able to find good examples of people who do most of the things written above pretty affectively. I have found it helpful to identify people in my life with very strong self-control and watch how they operate. Often listening to their pithy little tips – gives away their mentality. The quote ‘if you haven’t used it for a year then bin it’ I got from a doctor who was one of my clients. That is now the underpinning of my ‘binning’ mentality. Someone else I used to observe would always say things like ‘there’s no time like the present’ when it came to doing jobs. These kinds of comments reveal underlying thought processes and it is good to watch and learn from these kinds of people.

A cautionary note however. Sometimes those who are the most clinical and the least impulsive can be very intolerant of others who do not demonstrate such self-control. They can be very practical and get very annoyed with people who don’t see things in such a simplified black and white manner. If you have people who are close to you – perhaps family members – who are very skilled in the above types of activities, and you are very impulsive, you may find they are highly critical of you. If you are impulsive and have low self-esteem these people can have a very negative effect on your emotional state. They can be so black and white about these matters that they end up bullying you because you are not doing things the way they expect things to be done. This can particularly be the case if the person in question has quite a ‘dominant’ personality type. If you are being bullied and it is having a strong negative affect on your emotional state, then you may benefit, emotionally, from getting out of their proximity if possible. I have found these types of people often wont listen to reason – from their perspective, their way is the only way. I say all this because this kind of person, with this kind of attitude, can be very damaging to the emotional state of, for example, those dealing with depression. However, hopefully if you are in such a situation, the good elements of their self-controlled behaviour might also rub off on you. However, whilst moving away from these people may alow you to begin to recover from any 'bullying' that you may have been experiencing, if you are extremely impulsive, you may have come to rely on their organisation and control to stop your life spiraling into mayhem and uncontrolled disarray.

Once you have applied self-control to numerous areas of your life (if you were previously very undercontrolled), you will hopefully begin to become attuned to where and how delay of gratification can increase your life satisfaction. As you successively apply self-control to numerous thought processes and life behaviours, you will hopefully also begin to see some life improvements.

Those who are highly impulsive tend to think only in the short-term, or about immediate reward. For example, a typically impulsive individual might think, "l am happier when I eat chocolate so it must be good to eat it.’ Developing more self-control means learning to consider the bigger picture with regards to your decisions. And eventually – if you develop self-control with regards to enough areas of your life, applying self-control will begin to become more automatic, and you will also be able to see much more clearly (particularly when more abstract decisions have to be made) which decision will bring about the highest level of life satisfaction.