Walter Mischel, the founder of the marshmallow test, had good advice on self-control – Quartz

He offered the children a plate of marshmallows and became one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century.

Walter Mischel, who died on Wednesday, September 12, was a clinical psychologist known for his work on delayed gratification. In a series of studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Mischel told children ages three and five that if they could wait 10 minutes to eat a meal, they would receive two. Later, he found that the ability to wait longer seemed to predict how children would succeed in school and in life. (Modern attempts to replicate the study have had different results, suggesting that the test may have been more effective in assessing parental wealth than for any other measure.)

"I'm the marshmallow man," he told the New York Times.

During his work, Mischel developed self-control strategies that he ultimately applied to his own life. Once, for example, he promised his three-year-old daughter that if she stopped sucking his thumb, he would stop smoking his pipe.

Breaking a habit works like that, he told the New Yorker: If you want to prevent yourself from wanting something, you have to mentally protect it to make it less desirable – and take care of something else, for you get rid of it.

"The key, ultimately, is to learn to mentally" cool down "what Mischel calls the" hot "aspects of your environment: things that move you away from your goal. Cooling can be accomplished by placing the object at an imaginary distance (a photograph is not a treat), or by reframing it (representing marshmallows as clouds and not candies). Focusing on a totally independent experience can also work, as can any technique that manages to change focus. "

In the case of Mischel, he used this technique to eventually replace his agreeable associations with smoking with the image of a hospitalized man.

For small children, the key to self-control is often to distract themselves from the object of their desire. "Four-year-olds can be brilliantly imaginative for entertaining themselves, turning to piano keyboards, singing small songs, exploring their nasal openings," he told the Atlantic in 2014.

But adults can do better by applying "if-then" strategies that are a bit more sophisticated. For example, a person who is trying to quit may choose to take a break from playing a game on their phone rather than smoking.

It helps if you have some kind of motivation pushing your efforts into self-control. The best graduate students of Mischel were not the ones with the most sitzfleisch, but those who were there because they wanted to answer a burning question, he told the Times – to cite an example, why some people

The more you use these tactics, the more you do – and the happier you will be. "We have found a way to really improve the choice and freedom of the man," he told the New Yorker. "If we have the skills to allow us to discriminate when we do or do not do something, when we drink or do not drink something, and when we do not expect something, we are not longer victims of our desires. "