In the battle to resist temptation and focus on long-term goals, an iron will is good, says David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. But another tool may be better: “Inherent in you is a whole other set of mechanisms that nobody is paying attention to, nobody is teaching in schools,” he says. These mechanisms are our emotions—long assumed to be willpower’s enemy. In his article, “A Feeling of Control: How America Can Finally Learn to Deal With Its Impulses,” DeSteno, who is the author of The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More and the editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion, writes, “We need to use every weapon in our arsenal for self-control, and we’re ignoring half of them.”
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