The PoWeR technique: a strategic approach to self-discipline

Strategies beat stoicism

People who talk about self-discipline often make it sound like a matter of clenching really hard. Or of bullying yourself through negative self-talk.

But effective self-discipline is about working smarter, not just harder. We've known this since Odysseus tied himself to the mast, and we've studied it extensively in the lab.

From Robert Sapolsky's Behave:

In the 1960s Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel developed the “marshmallow test” to study gratification postponement. A child is presented with a marshmallow. The experimenter says, “I’m going out of the room for a while. You can eat the marshmallow after I leave. But if you wait and don’t eat it until I get back, I’ll give you another marshmallow,” and leaves. And the child, observed through a two-way mirror, begins the lonely challenge of holding out for fifteen minutes until the researcher returns.

Studying hundreds of three- to six-year-olds, Mischel saw enormous variability — a few ate the marshmallow before the experimenter left the room. About a third lasted the fifteen minutes. The rest were scattered in between, averaging a delay of eleven minutes. Kids’ strategies for resisting the marshmallow’s siren call differed, as can be seen on contemporary versions of the test on YouTube. Some kids cover their eyes, hide the marshmallow, sing to distract themselves. Others grimace, sit on their hands. Others sniff the marshmallow, pinch off an infinitely tiny piece to eat, hold it reverentially, kiss it, pet it.

As expected, older kids hold out longer, using more effective strategies. Younger kids describe strategies like “I kept thinking about how good that second marshmallow would taste.” The problem, of course, is that this strategy is about two synapses away from thinking about the marshmallow in front of you. In contrast, older kids use strategies of distraction — thinking about toys, pets, their birthday. This progresses to reappraisal strategies (“This isn’t about marshmallows. This is about the kind of person I am”). To Mischel, maturation of willpower is more about distraction and reappraisal strategies than about stoicism.

What do I know?

Self-discipline is my jam. I've spent a lot of time honing my ability to do what I say I'm going to do. Maybe not 10,000 hours, but certainly 10,000 learning cycles. And the PoWeR technique, which I'll explain below, is one of the most valuable frameworks I've developed with all those iterations.

First, a quick reality check: No single technique will turn anyone into a disciplined person. For that, you'll have to put in your own 10,000 iterations.

But here's an idea of what the technique will do.

The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

Well, think of the PoWeR technique as a strategic crowbar for prying that space wide open with minimal effort.

PWR: the main ingredients

Let's start with the "PWR" in "PoWeR." These letters are capitalized because they're the core steps of the technique. They stand for Pause, What-now decision, and Reset.

In short: You hold your breath and don't allow yourself to breathe again until you begin taking an action that aligns with your goals.

I'll break down the steps.

Step 1: Pause

Let's say you're in a situation where you want to exercise self-discipline. Maybe you keep snoozing your alarm instead of getting up. Maybe you're doomscrolling a social feed instead of working on that important project. Maybe you've just reached for the marshmallow instead of waiting for the nice man in the lab coat to bring you mallow #2.

The first step is to pause and take what I call a "ransom breath":

1. Whatever it is you're currently doing, stop doing it.

2. Take a deep breath and hold it in.

3. Commit to yourself that you won't release the breath until you start taking a specific, goal-directed action (explained in the next step).

You now have a hostage situation on your hands.

P.S.: Obviously don't hold your breath to the point of passing out. If you naturally run out of air, just start a new breath hold.

Step 2: What-now decision

"What-now" is short for "What should I do now?"

In the scenarios I mentioned above, you already have a general idea of what you should do. But to make a "what-now decision," you need to concretize that idea into a specific action step. The action step should be simple enough that you can get it done before running out of breath. But "simple" doesn't mean "trivial."

Here are some examples:

• Scenario: You keep snoozing your alarm. What-now decision: "I'll stand to my feet with no part of my body touching the bed anymore."

• Scenario: You're stuck in a doomscrolling loop. What-now decision: "I'll close this browser tab (or mobile app)."

• Scenario: You reach for the mallow. What-now decision: "I'll sit on my hands and start counting onesies twosies threesies foursies."

Step 3: Reset

Exactly what you think:

1. You "unpause" to take action on your what-now decision.

2. Once you've satisfied the conditions that you laid out in step 2, you release the ransom breath and go about your day.

And that's that.

Why this works

To use a financial analogy: because the return on your investment of energy is massive. PWR amounts to an implementation intention with a side of suffocation. Together, they generate a lot of chemical motivation at the cheap, cheap cost of taking a breath.

I won't explain implementation intentions in this essay. Feel free to hit up Wikipedia if you're curious. But I do want to nerd out for a moment about suffocation. Because it's wild.

The woman without fear

Back in the 60s, a woman was born with a disease that completely destroyed her amygdala. That's the region of the brain that's responsible for fear. In the scientific literature she's known as Patient S.M., but the media likes to refer to her as "the woman without fear."

Venomous snakes? Domestic violence? Haunted houses? Risky financial bets? She won't flinch at any of it. No amygdala, no fear.

Right?

Wrong. When researchers had S.M. inhale a single breath of carbon dioxide, which creates a suffocating sensation, her response surprised everyone. Here's author James Nestor's description of the scene:

Right away, her droopy eyes grew wider. Her shoulder muscles tensed, her breathing became labored. She grabbed at the desk. “Help me!” she yelled through the mouthpiece. S.M. lifted an arm and waved it as if she were drowning. “I can’t!” she screamed. “I can’t breathe!”

A researcher yanked the mask off, but it didn’t help. S.M. jerked wildly and gasped. A minute or so later, she dropped her arms and returned to breathing slowly and calmly.

Thanks in part to S.M., we now know that there's a second and deeper way to trigger the fear circuit — and that this "suffocation alarm" may have even evolved before the amygdala.

This matters for self-discipline because the amygdala is often the biggest obstacle to exercising willpower. It can easily overwhelm the executive center of the brain where we do a lot of rational decision-making.

But the executive center can fight back. By consciously controlling the breath, it can leverage a powerful alarm system to override the amygdala and divert resources away from it. At least for a few seconds.

But sometimes a few seconds aren't enough. Which brings me to the final two letters of the PoWeR technique.

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O and E: the bonus ingredients

Sometimes, PWR be damned, you'll still struggle to pry open that space between stimulus and response. You'll want to stop scrolling or gaming or Netflixing, and you'll think to yourself, "Just take a deep breath." But even that tiny action will prove too tall of an order.

Or an even more common scenario: you'll pry the space open successfully, only for it to slam shut again the moment you stop paying attention. Like when your fingers unconsciously reopen that addictive browser tab you closed three minutes ago.

In these situations, you can add the little "o" and the little "e" to "PoWeR": Override and Environment.

In short, an "override" involves working your way up from a small ransom breath to a larger one during the pause step. And "environment" means adding constraints to your physical environment that make it easier to avoid relapsing into unwanted behavioral patterns.

Override

This is basically a variant of a pause:

1. Stop doing whatever you're doing.

2. Do an immediate breath hold by simply closing the windpipe in your throat (instead of taking a deep breath, as you would in the original "pause" step).

3. Commit to yourself that you won't breathe again until you take a full ransom breath involving a deep inhalation.

4. Take a normal ransom breath, and then continue naturally to the "what-now decision" step.

Environment

If your environment isn't conducive to intentional action, make environment change the target of your what-now decision. Do this by setting up an environment constraint. Here's how Alicia Juarrero defines "constraints":

Conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow without directly transferring kinetic energy.

Examples:

• Don't just close the browser tab. Use a site blocker like Freedom or Delayed Gratification to block yourself from accessing the offending website for the next 30 minutes.

• Don't just get out of bed. Play an upbeat soundtrack on your mobile phone that puts you in a mood to get going.

• Don't just ignore the marshmallow. Hide it from view by moving it to the chair on the opposite side of the table.

…Or just eat the damn thing. You're only four years old, after all.