Exercises — Chapter 13: Self-Regulation
Part A: Understanding Self-Regulation
Exercise 1: The Self-Regulation Vocabulary
A) Define self-regulation, willpower, self-control, and executive function. What is the common thread? What distinguishes each from the others?
B) Give three examples from your own life of situations requiring deliberate self-regulation — where your behavior needed to be actively guided against an opposing impulse. For each, identify: what was the impulse? What was the goal? What governed the outcome?
C) The chapter argues that self-regulation is not the same as suppressing feelings. Describe the difference between self-regulation and emotional suppression, using a specific example.
Exercise 2: System 1 vs. System 2 in Your Day
A) For one full day, keep a simple tally: how many significant decisions were driven by automatic/habitual processes (System 1), and how many required deliberate effort (System 2)?
B) Identify one domain where you most wish your System 1 were better aligned with your values — where your automatic impulses most consistently conflict with your intentions.
C) Identify one domain where you have successfully moved a valued behavior from System 2 (effortful) to System 1 (automatic). What made that transition possible? What can you learn from it for the domain in Part B?
Exercise 3: The Mischel Insight
Walter Mischel's research showed that successful delay of gratification depended on cognitive strategy (attention cooling) rather than raw willpower.
A) Describe a self-regulation challenge in your own life where the main obstacle is attentional — where you are "heating" the temptation by attending to it, rather than "cooling" it through strategic attention management.
B) Design a specific cooling strategy for that challenge. What would it mean to mentally step back from the temptation — to reduce its hold through how you think about it rather than through effortful resistance?
C) The 2018 replication finding (Watts et al.) found that delay of gratification was also influenced by socioeconomic background and trust in the environment. What does this mean for how we interpret self-regulation differences between people with different life circumstances?
Part B: The Depletion Model Revisited
Exercise 4: Beliefs About Willpower
Carol Dweck and colleagues found that people who believe willpower is unlimited show less "depletion" effects than those who believe it is limited.
A) Assess your own belief about willpower: do you believe it is a limited resource that runs out, or a more flexible capacity that can be renewed and sustained? Be honest.
B) Whether or not the original ego depletion evidence was correct, the practical advice from the chapter remains: reduce unnecessary self-regulation demands, build habits, and match your self-regulation budget to your priorities. Choose one way you could implement this this week.
C) What is the difference between the "willpower as muscle" metaphor (finite, depleted by use) and the "willpower as motivation" model (renewable, influenced by beliefs and motivation)? What are the practical implications of each?
Exercise 5: Your Self-Regulation Budget
Think of self-regulation as a budget that can be spent well or poorly.
A) List the five activities or decisions in your daily life that require the most effortful self-regulation. Be specific.
B) Which of these are genuinely high-value — worth the cost — and which could potentially be automated, eliminated, or restructured to require less deliberate effort?
C) What single change in your routine or environment would most reduce unnecessary self-regulation expenditure?
Part C: Implementation Intentions
Exercise 6: Writing Implementation Intentions
A) Choose three current intentions that you regularly fail to translate into action. For each, write a specific implementation intention in the "When X, I will do Y" format.
Requirements: - X must be a specific, observable cue (not "when I'm ready" but "when I sit down at my desk at 9am") - Y must be a specific, concrete first action (not "work on the project" but "open the project file and read the last paragraph I wrote")
B) For one of your three, now write the defensive implementation intention: "When I feel the urge to [alternative behavior], I will [values-aligned response instead]."
C) Test all three intentions for one week. At the end of the week, assess: which worked? Which didn't? What would you change in the formulation?
Exercise 7: The Eleven-Minute Problem
Jordan spent ninety minutes at his desk with eleven minutes of actual proposal work. This is a self-regulation failure produced by avoidance.
A) Identify a task in your own life that consistently receives less focused attention than it deserves — where you are present but not fully working.
B) Apply the diagnosis: is the avoidance driven by (a) the task's aversiveness (anxiety, difficulty, uncertainty), (b) competing habits (checking email, social media), or (c) a missing implementation intention about how and when to work on it?
C) Design a minimal intervention for this specific task: one environmental change, one implementation intention, and one strategy for reducing the task's emotional aversiveness.
Part D: Emotional Regulation
Exercise 8: Your Emotion Regulation Repertoire
A) List the emotion regulation strategies you most commonly use in response to difficult emotions. Be honest — include both adaptive and maladaptive strategies (avoidance, distraction, substance use are common).
B) For each strategy, classify it using Gross's process model: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, reappraisal, or suppression.
C) Which strategies are most costly (require sustained effort, impair cognition, or amplify rather than reduce the emotional experience)? What is one lower-cost strategy you could develop in the domain where your current strategies are most costly?
Exercise 9: Reappraisal Practice
Reappraisal is the most effective and least costly emotional regulation strategy — changing the interpretation of a situation before the full emotional response has activated.
A) Identify three recurring situations that reliably produce a difficult emotional response for you (anxiety, anger, sadness, shame). For each, write your typical interpretation.
B) For each, generate one alternative interpretation that is equally accurate but produces less emotional activation. This is not denial — it is finding the most accurate available frame rather than the most threatening one.
C) Practice noticing the moment of interpretation in one of these situations this week — the moment before the emotional response has fully activated. Practice deploying the reappraisal at that moment. Note what happens.
Exercise 10: The Pause
Dr. Reyes describes the "response gap" — the capacity to experience an impulse without immediately acting on it — as the foundational self-regulation skill.
A) Identify one domain in your life where you most consistently fail to pause — where impulse most directly becomes action.
B) Design a pause protocol for that domain. What would you do in the gap between the impulse and the response? This does not need to be elaborate: it could be a single breath, a simple question ("Is this what I actually want to do?"), or a brief movement.
C) What would it take to practice this pause consistently enough that it became something close to automatic? What obstacles would you encounter, and how would you address them?
Exercise 11: Acceptance of Difficult Emotion
The chapter describes acceptance (ACT/mindfulness) as acknowledging and allowing emotional responses without acting on them or amplifying them with secondary judgments.
A) Identify one emotion you most commonly try to escape — through distraction, action, or avoidance.
B) Practice the acceptance approach: the next time this emotion arises, do not try to reduce it, escape it, or act on it immediately. Simply notice it, name it ("I am feeling anxiety/sadness/anger right now"), and observe it for 60–90 seconds. Note what happens.
C) The chapter notes that difficult emotions are survivable — that not acting on an emotional impulse does not destroy you. Describe a time when you sat with a difficult emotion without acting on it and discovered it was manageable. What did that experience teach you?
Part E: Habits and Environment Design
Exercise 12: The Habit Audit
A) List five current habits — behaviors that happen automatically in response to cues, without deliberate decision. Identify the cue, the routine, and the reward for each.
B) For each habit, evaluate: Is this habit aligned with my values (from Chapter 11)? Is it a useful automation of a valued behavior, or an automatic behavior I would prefer to have different?
C) Identify one habit you want to replace. What is the current cue? What alternative routine could be paired with the same cue? What reward would consolidate the new routine?
Exercise 13: Environment Design
Environment design — modifying the physical and social environment to reduce temptation and facilitate valued behavior — is often more effective than willpower.
A) Identify three specific behaviors you want to do more of. For each, describe one environmental change that would make the behavior easier to do (reduced friction).
B) Identify three specific behaviors you want to do less of. For each, describe one environmental change that would make the behavior harder to do (increased friction).
C) Implement at least two of these changes this week. Note whether the behavioral change follows.
Exercise 14: Commitment Devices
A commitment device (or Ulysses contract) is a pre-commitment to a future behavior that constrains your later choices — removing the option to choose the less-valued behavior in the moment.
A) Describe one Ulysses contract you currently use or could use. Be specific about what the commitment is, how it constrains future behavior, and why the commitment is more valuable than the flexibility to choose differently in the moment.
B) What are the limits of commitment devices? When do they work, and when do they backfire?
C) Apply the commitment device logic to one current self-regulation challenge. Design a specific pre-commitment you could make this week.
Part F: Self-Regulation Across Domains
Exercise 15: Self-Regulation in Relationships
Relational self-regulation — managing reactive impulses in interpersonal contexts — is among the most socially consequential forms of self-regulation.
A) Identify one recurring relational trigger — a situation with a specific person or in a specific type of interaction — where you most consistently fail to regulate your response.
B) Trace the emotional sequence: what is the stimulus? What is the immediate emotional response? What is the impulse? What is the behavior that actually happens?
C) Design a specific intervention at each point in the sequence: (1) before the situation (prepare, set intention), (2) in the moment (pause protocol), (3) after (learn, repair if necessary).
Exercise 16: Self-Regulation and Intrinsic Motivation
The chapter notes that intrinsically motivated behavior requires less effortful self-regulation because System 1 is aligned with the goal.
A) Identify one significant task in your current life that requires high effortful self-regulation. Is the task intrinsically motivating, or are you doing it primarily for external reasons?
B) If the task is not intrinsically motivating, what would increase its intrinsic value? Can the task be restructured, reframed, or connected to values in a way that reduces its aversiveness?
C) Is there a task in your life that is genuinely intrinsically motivating — that you pursue without needing to force yourself? What conditions enable that natural engagement? How could you import those conditions into less intrinsically motivating areas?
Part G: Synthesis
Exercise 17: Your Self-Regulation Profile
Based on the exercises in this chapter, compile a self-regulation profile:
- My most common self-regulation failure domain: (where do I most often fail to translate intention into action?)
- The primary driver of my failures: (avoidance of aversiveness? Missing implementation intentions? Poor environment design? Emotional reactivity?)
- My most effective current self-regulation strategy: (what actually works for me?)
- The single highest-leverage change I could make: (one specific, concrete action)
Exercise 18: Synthesis Essay
Write a 400-word essay:
"The chapter argues that effective self-regulation is more about design than about willpower — about building the right systems, habits, and environment rather than exerting force of character against opposing impulses. Do you agree? What is the role of deliberate effort in your own self-regulation, and where would better design most change your outcomes?"
Discussion Questions
Discussion 1: The ego depletion hypothesis failed to replicate well. But the phenomenology of feeling depleted is real for most people. What explains the feeling if not a depleting resource? What are the practical implications of the revised model?
Discussion 2: Mischel's marshmallow studies were used to argue for the importance of self-regulation in individual success. The 2018 replication found that socioeconomic background substantially confounded the relationship. What does this mean for individual-level self-regulation advice vs. structural-level change?
Discussion 3: Dr. Reyes argues that foundational self-regulation is the capacity to experience a difficult feeling without acting on it. Is this a universal human capacity, or does developmental history significantly affect its availability?
Discussion 4: Commitment devices (Ulysses contracts) constrain future choices. Is there ever a case that this is paternalistic toward one's own future self? When is pre-commitment wise, and when does it interfere with appropriate flexibility?