Why Being Hard on Yourself Backfires

The instinct to punish yourself after a slip feels like discipline. The research says it is usually the reason the slip turns into a collapse.

Research on self-control has heavily analyzed how individuals implement self-discipline and has touched on this subject to a more minimal extent. The time gap following a self-discipline violation and the subsequent event is actually more critical than the act of self-discipline being broken. A field of research covering a range of activities, such as eating, moral conduct, and academic performance, has found a surprising, yet consistent, result. The response society believes is disciplined, and those who advise against this unstructured leniency believe to be indulgent, actually predicts recurrence.

The plan resumes now, not from a symbolic clean slate.

The researchers intentionally allocate varying amounts of attention to different research areas. Self-control research focused on starting, maintaining, and ending amounts of self-control paints a picture of depletion of a resource which leads to breaches of self-control. This breach of self-control has shown to occur in every area of self-control; prevention has failed. Not addressing this half of the equation is not a case of poor research. Failure to solve prevention is more appealing to the general research audience and to readers.