March 28, 2026

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How to build self-control, according to psychologists

Exercising self-control doesn’t need to be unpleasant, research shows

By Francine Russo edited by Allison Parshall

doble.d/Getty Images

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 f