Willpower by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney - review

From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, what do you think? I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication? The hapless fools then mutter about inspiration or some such rot before turning tail and fleeing. Good riddance. The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.

It could be because I spend all my working life deploying most of the supposedly novel strategies detailed in this book that I found it quite so annoying – or it could be because I waste rather more of my supposedly freer time struggling with the application of the rest. Either way, the cumulative effect of reading page after page of this pap sapped my willpower something fierce, and willpower – as Baumeister and his amanuensis Tierney never tire of telling us – is a strictly finite resource. Before I read Willpower I was an Odysseus who needed no lashing to the mast of life. Temptations? I laughed in their face. If you presented me with a stark naked and lascivious Kate Moss, her belly-button brimming over with Peruvian flake cocaine, I would simply have told her to rub in the talcum powder then cover up.

But having read the damn book, I am now plagued by a dreadful impulsiveness – my fervid brain tracks across the over-lit realms of modern indulgence on the lookout for newer and more dangerous forms of abandonment. Indeed, the only thing that's preventing me from abandoning this review, hightailing it to the nearest supercasino and putting my vital organs – together with everything I own – on red, is that I've also caught a generous dose of that other will-poisoner: procrastination.

How could it be that a text ostensibly designed by these latter-day Samuel Smileses to infuse me with vim and moral fibre should have such a paradoxical result? After all, its authors are "confident this book's lessons can make your life not just more productive and fulfilling but also easier and happier". Well, the first reason is what I term the "who knew?!" effect. In Curb your Enthusiasm, Larry David and his roly-poly agent, Jeff Greene – neither of them conspicuous for their self-control – are wont to exclaim "who knew?!" whenever life presents them with another obvious truth that they've sought to bypass. Willpower is a book chock-full of such obvious truths, and here – in no particular order – is a selection of them (and feel free to exclaim "who knew?!" after reading each one).

Willpower is a form of mental energy that, when depleted, causes people to lose self-control. This mental energy is fuelled by glucose. Modish theories in the 1960s downplayed the significance of willpower and helped nurture that nauseating cuckoo the Me Generation until it became a monster of self-indulgence. The prioritising of such vacuities as "self-esteem" and "empowerment" have contributed to the undisciplined and impulse-ridden youth we see all around us. If you want to improve your self-control focus on one project at a time. If you use a lot of energy resisting one desire you're more likely to succumb to another. Pre-menstrual tension and low blood sugar make you stressed and so render it harder for you to exert willpower. Decision making is stressful and saps the will. Clear and achievable goals help strengthen the will. Rewards are a good motivator of the will. Self-awareness aids self-control – as does the awareness of others. Religious belief assists people to keep to the straight and narrow … Have you had enough of shouting "who knew?!" yet?

Tierney tells us early on that "Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with 'Oh, my grandmother knew that'. Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory." Well, if there's one thing personal experience usually teaches us it's that either our grandmother – or someone else's – certainly did know that, if "that" is how to maintain reasonable psychic equilibrium. As for psychological testing leading to progress, pull the other one – it's got bells on that, when they ring, make my dog salivate. The sort of tests Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, and his ilk run – most of which seem to involve American college students munching M&Ms – merely take us forward to the past at considerable cost.

Back in the days before I had a moment of clarity and began to follow the clear and achievable guidelines laid down by grandmother-equivalents when it came to dealing with my alcohol and drug addictions – arguably the most egregious lack of willpower conceivable – I fell into the clutches of a maverick shrink who ran an NHS drug dependency unit. He thought I was an "interesting case", so as well as offering me the usual pabulum – more drugs, but legal ones – he also ran a series of "psychological tests" on me, including the Stroop test, whereby different colour words are flashed up on a screen in different colours, eg "red" is in blue letters. The test is a standard way of measuring mental flexibility and vitality because it takes you longer to identify red as red when it's printed in blue. Who knew?!

My shrink thought he might be able to find out whether or not there was something quantifiably different about my willpower by flashing up drug words on the screen, but having them overwritten by other words. Would I identify the drug words more quickly than a non-addict control subject? I can't remember whether he got anywhere with this asinine undertaking because – surprise, surprise – I was strung out on heroin at the time. What I do know is that the experience engendered a healthy disrespect for the Stroop test in me, together with the whole armature of "psychological testing" that surrounds it.

When Tierney isn't professing amazement at the "results" (that is, common sense) revealed by Stroop testing and other laboratory work, he does offer blindingly commonsensical insight into such things as why the Alcoholics Anonymous programme works to reinforce willpower (clear guidelines, positive reinforcement, pre-commitment, and so on, but you knew all that already). He also ventures into the vexed area of dieting and weight loss. Unsurprisingly for a book aimed at a US readership, there's rather a lot about fatty-snacking in Willpower, and also unsurprisingly, Tierney is keen to reassure his high-BMI audience that the reason they can't drop the poundage has little to do with deficient willpower. Apparently dieting is useless for weight loss because we're naturally selected to survive famine. We can lose a chunk once in a lifetime, but the body cunningly adjusts to this self-induced cachexia and the next time we try, it simply won't work.

Fair enough, crash dieting obviously isn't a solution to a metabolism that can manufacture avoirdupois out of avocados, but I do think it worth pointing out that you never saw anyone fat come out of Auschwitz – except Nazis. That a lack of self-control is a pervasive and growing evil in contemporary society is a truth universally acknowledged. Who knew?! Everyone who isn't thrashing around on the floor in a hypoglycaemic fit, but reading a book called Willpower that tells you to sign up for internet programmes that regulate everything from your web-browsing to your spending, isn't going to help. Much better to remember the wisdom passed on to me by one of my counsellors when I was in drug rehab. "Try and get out of that chair," he said to me once at the beginning of a session, and when I looked at him puzzled – and still resolutely seated – he continued: "That's right, trying is lying." By which he meant that you don't improve willpower by reading about it but by exercising it.

Many self-help books have a blurb on them that says something of the form, "You Must Read This Book". Willpower should have the exact opposite. Now, go and talk to your grandmother instead – I'm off to the casino.