Will Power!

The Secret Life of People With High Self-Control: It's Simpler* Than You Think

*nb: Changed 'Easier' to 'Simpler' to make the point of the article clearer and less clickbait-y.

That feel when one of your disabilities helps with one of the New Shiny Mental Illnesses Invented By Modern Society: the reason I don't 'mindlessly scroll social media on my phone' is because that physically hurts. I learned VERY early in my life from my mom, who also has deQuervain's, that managing the pain is largely AVOIDING activities that trigger it, like scrolling and other tiny, repetitive mouse movements.

I didn't wholly avoid Social Media Mental Illness, because social media was desktop-based for a while, and I did ruin friendships because of how social media preys on your brain, and the parts of your brain it preys on, are particular spots where I'm more vulnerable than others, particularly when it comes to emotional regulation-something traumatised people do not do very well, particularly before therapy, as I was when I first got on social media. However, I also didn't get any reward, for those same reasons (I don't recognise anything but direct private conversation as 'attention') and while my history of remake-delete-remake is spotty and repetitive, I never ended up putting social media on my phone , and never ever learned the phone habits, because of the simple fact that I cannot use my thumbs for anything ever, and generally can't do repetitive tiny touchscreen movements with my fingers, because it immediately begins to cause agonising pain. I had tiktok very briefly because I discovered cosplay, but after it became clear people didn't make friends there, the whole thing seemed very frustrating-you can't talk to the cosplayer, they only respond to other videos that entertain them, and I don't like making videos because that's not the fanwork I make-so I deleted it after only a couple of weeks.

This article is from someone who gorged on a whole lot of academia about the topic, and mostly, people with 'good self-control' recognise what tests it at an earlier stage and avoid the situations, places, etc that they know the triggers are likely to be-installing ad-blockers, not making social media counts at all, etc. This is in keeping with the REAL way to control anger as well: you learn what anger looks like before it becomes anger, when it's just a feeling of slight irritation or even knowing 'going out to do groceries overstimulates me and that causes irritation with people to come easier, so I need to mitigate the overstimulation by wearing headphones at the grocery store and being alone for a while to recover when I get home' or 'I am feeling irritated by everything, that means I need to walk away from this conversation and disconnect for a bit'. Basically, the only thing that is going to help you learn any 'self-control' is the same thing that helps you learn 'anger management': catching it before it snowballs into 'resisting temptation' at all.

Which, of course, means practising real mindfulness-- not 'uwu imagine your thoughts are leaves on a stream' 'just take deep breaths and empty your mind' nonsense*; but what you learn in DBT classes: spending a lot more time with your self, sitting with your uncomfortable feelings without judging yourself immediately as 'bad' and running away screaming.

We've looped right back to Vincit qui se Vincit/Know Thyself, like we've really just got hard data backing up these sayings now. You have to know yourself and know what helps you before you can make any progress at all. And that requires being uncomfortable and spending time with a person that a lot of us hate so vehemently that we fill our lives with distractions so we never have to be alone with this person. Which is sad. That's sad. And that's not something to make haha funnysilly jokes about all the time instead of like, confronting or acknowledging as the one thing you gotta do before you can feel better about anything in any way.

Γνῶθι σαυτόν

Know Thyself

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*I specifically say meditation of the 'deep breaths and empty your thoughts' is nonsense because that doesn't work for people with Symptoms and is in fact specifically going to make some people with some Symptoms worse, and I have many of those Symptoms.