20. On self-overcoming

Why Won’t You Do What You Want You to Do?

You know what you want. You want to be fitter, healthier, stronger, more focused, more creative. You want to stop scrolling, quit drinking, wake up earlier, stop saying yes to people who don’t deserve it. 

And yet—you don’t do it.

Why?

In this episode, we explore the tension between desire and action, reason and impulse, intention and failure. We delve into the fragmentary and conflicting human psyche to understand how self-control is acheived. Through the story of a colleague who couldn’t implement a simple behaviour change, we open up the deeper question of self-overcoming. 

Drawing on Nietzsche’s drives-psychology and my two decades working in behaviour change services, I explore why it feels like we are at war with ourselves—and why, in Nietzsche’s view, that’s exactly what we are.

We’ll challenge the myth of willpower, examine Nietzsche's own theory of self-help, and ask what it means to bring a noble order to the chaos of the self. 

This is the beginning of a two-part deep dive into Nietzsche, habit, conflict, and the science of personal transformation.

Music: Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls by Godspeed you! Black Emperor

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Transcript

Many years ago, I worked with someone - let’s call him John. John was ordinary in every respect: a little overweight, slightly dishevelled in that way that single men often are, average height, average looks, average everything, a fly-under-the-radar, don’t-rock-the-boat kind of guy. I liked John, and his predicament became an object of fascination to me.

Like me, he held a middle-management position at the company where we both worked in London. I was doing a lot of running at that time, including a few marathons at weekends, and because John wanted to shift some of his excess weight, he asked my advice about getting into running. We discussed his circumstances and what opportunities there might be to integrate a running habit into his lifestyle. His daily routine was to take the bus to the office each morning. Now, despite the distance from home to work being just a couple of miles, the ride took about thirty minutes because the bus was travelling at rush hour when the roads into the city were heavily congested. This tedious daily journey to work seemed to be a neat opportunity. If, instead of taking the bus, he ran those couple of miles, he would get the exercise he was looking for, plus it would incur a zero time-cost, because he would just be sitting on a dawdling bus if he wasn’t running. As an added benefit, he would save some money on bus fares too. It was a watertight business case. We even had shower facilities at the office so he could bring a change of clothes in a daypack, freshen up after his exercise and be at his desk spruced and feeling good about himself at 9AM. In high spirits, he declared he would start running to work the following Monday.

Monday morning came. I was expecting to see John arrive at the office in his shorts, breathless, sweating, pleased with himself. Instead he shuffled in, as usual, wearing his creased shirt and tie. ‘What the hell happened?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I couldn’t be bothered. I’ll start tomorrow.’ 

You can probably guess. Tomorrow came. No run. The day after. No run. And so on. Over a period of many weeks John managed the run to work maybe two or three times. He was never able to establish the routine he wanted. His plight became a topic of conversation around the office and something of a running  joke (pardon the pun). Colleagues would wait for him to walk though the door—would it be bus or run? Bets were made with the very short odds being on bus. Each time he turned up in his crumpled shirt and tie, there would be good-humoured laughter and shaking of heads.

John and I rehearsed the case for changing his morning routine over and over again. He wanted more exercise. He wanted to lose weight. The bus was slow, uncomfortable and crowded—he could rarely even get a seat. The time investment for the run was the same as the time taken for the bus journey. The money spent on bus fares was a potential saving. He wanted all these benefits. Rationally, there was no good reason not to run into work. It was all win, but he just couldn’t do it. In my exasperation, I recall asking him, ‘For god’s sake, man—why won’t you do what you want you to do?’

So let me ask you, esteemed listener: ‘why won’t you do what you want you to do?’

Poor John, huh? Isn’t it just so incredibly, unbelievably difficult to change your behaviour? Most of the time you are damn sure what it is you want but making it happen seems almost impossible. You want to lose weight. You want to stop eating crap. You want to cut-down on drinking. You want to quit smoking. You want to get up earlier. You want to stop wasting time scrolling through trivia n your phone. You want to be more confident, more creative, more organised, more productive. You want to stop letting people push you around. And yet all these good intentions seem to come to nought. You fail to implement these choices, to make these changes, over and over again. The weirdest thing is, not only do you know the right thing to do, you actually want to do the right thing too, yet you consistently fail to do it. How can that be? How can it be that you won’t do what you want you to do?

Today we’re talking about the challenge of changing behaviour. Or to use Nietzsche’s terminology: self-overcoming. We want to change, to grow, we want to be better version of ourselves, we want to overcome our current state, transfiguring it into an improved state.

This is what it is to learn and to grow. It is the most natural impulse in the world, a healthy, evolved proclivity. Whether we like it or not, nothing stands still, everything changes all the time. Everything is in the process of becoming something else—something new. This is will to power in its most obvious psychological form. Quite obviously, we want the new to be better than the old. This is transcendence in the most tangible, empirical sense. Nobody wants things to be getting worse - nobody wishes decline and degeneration upon themselves. 

So today and in the next show, because this is a big topic, I’m going to give you an overview of behaviour change techniques that are scientifically proven to be effective in supporting positive behaviour change. And of course, this will be through a Nietzschean lens. In fact, Nietzsche was remarkably prescient—as he was in so many areas—in adducing how self-transformation is successfully effected. I will be discussing for the first time in the podcast his “drives psychology” and what is astounding is that modern evidence-based behaviour change aligns with this drives psychology incredibly well, even though it doesn’t propound the same psychological model. In fact, his drives-psychology seems to be the missing piece in this modern methodology. 

I feel I am particularly qualified to talk about thus stuff, because as you will know if you have listened to previous podcasts, I worked in government funded behaviour change services for 20 years, supporting people with addictions and leading teams that worked with thousands of people every year to quit smoking, lose weight, get more exercise, reduce alcohol and so forth.

So let’s look at the question again: why won’t you do what you want you to do? Why do you fail to make the changes we profess to want? It doesn’t make sense.

The usual answer is that you lack willpower. When you are not being defensive and making excuses for your failures—something we all do—you might be prepared to admit to yourself that you just don’t have the determination and the discipline. Such admissions are hard because confessing to a lack of self-control makes you feel ashamed of yourself. Are you so weak that you cannot even resist that cigarette? It feels like a moral failing—as if you have yielded to the temptations of the devil sat on one shoulder, rather than the angel sat on the other. This moralising of lack of self control will become important in later shows, so make a note. Society makes us feel morally culpable for our lack of self-control.

But returning to this image of the devil and the angel, maybe this image holds a grain of truth. You see, the problem isn’t that you won’t do what you want you to do—in fact, to oversimplify just a little, you always do what you want you to do; instead the problem is that it’s not actually that clear what it is you want you to do?  

What do I mean when I say you always do what you want you to do? Well, say when you want to lose weight you restrict your calorie intake. But then you see that donut, a nice glazed one with icing and a custard filling, and you suddenly find that you want it; you want it so much that you scoff it despite your other desire which is to avoid such unhealthy food. You may regret it immediately afterwards, of course, but you definitely want it at the time. You see, even if someone holds a gun to your head, forcing you to do something, you comply because you want to—you want to live and so you choose the option that means not getting shot. 

Another example: you might hate your job, but you go to it voluntarily because you want the salary. You don’t want to go to work, but you do want to go to work as well. In the former case because it sucks and in the latter case because you want the money. You want it and don’t want it at the same time.

We could say that any time you act, you do so because you want to. You do what you want, and we know what you want because that is what you do. 

So maybe the angel and the devil on your shoulder is not such a silly metaphor. With the donut you want two things: you want to limit your calorie intake and you want to eat the donut; you want two incompatible things at the same time. 

Well, not at the same time exactly: these desires fluctuate and compete with each other: one moment, you want only healthy low calories foods; but then you see the donut and the desire for it suddenly comes to the fore; then once you’ve scoffed it, the desire for dieting returns along with your sense of guilt at having temporality deviated from your healthy regime.

Here’s the problem then: wanting two incompatible things. That’s a difficult spot to be in, there’s a tension, but it gets worse: you want a multitude of incompatible things, and these incompatible desires vie with each other to influence your choices. Their relative power is volatile too (your desire for sugary donuts is stronger when you are hungry and weaker when you are full) and so your ability to control and regulate your own behaviour, making it consistent. is severely compromised. 

This is St. Paul in Romans 7:15-25, and I’m going to abridge this quite a bit.

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. […] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. […] What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

So St. Paul, experiencing these conflicts between different desires, attributes the tension to a war between good and evil. And it is probably a good bet that the evil he is talking about is lust. Indeed, Christianity moralises and condemns all the most natural animal appetites. This can be glimpsed in the ‘seven deadly sins’ of Christianity: pride, wrath, envy, lust, avarice, gluttony and sloth. For an animal living in a hostile wilderness, brutally competing with others for the opportunity to reproduce, in a life or death struggle for territory and subsisting on scarce resources, these so-called ‘sins’ are merely the behaviours that best promote survival. What is pride but healthy, rational self-regard? What is wrath, but a surge of extra energy to assist the individual in dealing with threats, injustices and frustrations; to enable her to fight her corner? What is envy but the desire to accrue more resources or status than the next individual, thereby securing and improving its situation in life and in the community? Likewise, avarice supports the accumulation of life-sustaining resources. Gluttony fulfils a similar function on a physiological level because food could often be a scarce resource for our wild forebears. Sloth is the tendency towards energy conservation and bodily recuperation once basic needs are met; it is a principal of any reasonable economy. And, as we discussed in show 17, Nietzsche greatest opprobrium against Christianity concerns its debasement of the sexual impulse: or lust as it is derided. 

So St. Paul and the Christians set their religious commandments against the basic animal instincts and see in the tension, a mortal battle being waged. And they are right, a battle is being waged. For Nietzsche, the human is always at war with itself.

Here then we come to Nietzsche’s drives psychology. Nietzsche’s sees in each of us, not a unified psychological entity but a collection of drives struggling and vying with each other for expression. Every drives wants something, is aimed at something, is a desire seeking gratification, it is its own will to power. Unfortunately, the drives are usually aimed at different things and you experience this as that familiar feeling of being in two minds about something. Indeed, this is a telling adage, because for Nietzsche this is all that thinking is. It is the conscious manifestation of different drives struggling against each other. He writes “thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another” (BGE.36). 

Should I do this or should I do that? When one finds it difficult to come to a decision, you can bet this is because the drives are fairly equally matched and so there is no clear winner—though one will always prevail in the end. Similarly, when one finds it easy to make up one’s mind, that is because there exists a drive (a desire for something) that is so strong that its activity is irresistible to other weaker drives that might desire a contrary course of action.

So with my friend John, there were conflicting drives stopping him implementing his running habit. Let’s speculate as to what was going on with him. Sure, he wanted to lose weight, get healthy, to run to work. But he demonstrably wanted something else too—he wanted to avoid physical exertion. This is not something to sniff at; we all share this drive. It can be considered the natural desire to conserve energy—actually a very sensible and efficient drive and an ancient one. Remember sloth is on of those seven deadly sins, right?

Here’s Nietzsche on behaviour change from Daybreak 109. A long passage but I will read it in full:

“SELF-CONTROL AND MODERATION, AND THEIR FINAL MOTIVE.—I find not more than six essentially different methods for combating the vehemence of an impulse. First of all, we may avoid the occasion for satisfying the impulse, weakening and mortifying it by refraining from satisfying it for long and ever-lengthening periods. Secondly, we may impose a severe and regular order upon ourselves in regard to the satisfying of our appetites. By thus regulating the impulse and limiting its ebb and flow to fixed periods, we may obtain intervals in which it ceases to disturb us; and by beginning in this way we may perhaps be able to pass on to the first method. In the third place, we may deliberately give ourselves over to an unrestrained and unbounded gratification of the impulse in order that we may become disgusted with it, and to obtain by means of this very disgust a command over the impulse: provided, of course, that we do not imitate the rider who rides his horse to death and breaks his own neck in doing so. For this, unhappily, is generally the outcome of the application of this third method. In the fourth place, there is an intellectual trick, which consists in associating the idea of the gratification so firmly with some painful thought, that after a little practice the thought of gratification is itself immediately felt as a very painful one. (For example, when the Christian accustoms himself to think of the presence and scorn of the devil in the course of sensual enjoyment, or everlasting punishment in hell for revenge by murder; or even merely of the contempt which he will meet with from those of his fellow-men whom he most respects, if he steals a sum of money, or if a man has often checked an intense desire for suicide by thinking of the grief and self-reproaches of his relations and friends, and has thus succeeded in balancing himself upon the edge of life: for, after some practice, these ideas follow one another in his mind like cause and effect.) Among instances of this kind may be mentioned the cases of Lord Byron and Napoleon, in whom the pride of man revolted and took offence at the preponderance of one particular passion over the collective attitude and order of reason. From this arises the habit and joy of tyrannising over the craving and making it, as it were, gnash its teeth. “ I will not be a slave of any appetite,” wrote Byron in his diary. In the fifth place, we may bring about a dislocation of our powers by imposing upon ourselves a particularly difficult and fatiguing task, or by deliberately submitting to some new charm and pleasure in order thus to turn our thoughts and physical powers into other channels. It comes to the same thing if we temporarily favour another impulse by affording it numerous opportunities of gratification, and thus rendering it the squanderer of the power which would otherwise be commandeered, so to speak, by the tyrannical impulse. A few, perhaps, will be able to restrain the particular passion which aspires to domination by granting their other known passions a temporary encouragement and license in order that they may devour the food which the tyrant wishes for himself alone. In the sixth and last place, the man who can stand it, and thinks it reasonable to weaken and subdue his entire physical and psychical organisation, likewise, of course, attains the goal of weakening a single violent instinct; as, for example, those who starve their sensuality and at the same time their vigour, and often destroy their reason into the bargain, such as the ascetics.—Hence, shunning the opportunities, regulating the impulse, bringing about satiety and disgust in the impulse, associating a painful idea (such as that of discredit, disgust, or offended pride), then the dislocation of one’s forces, and finally general debility and exhaustion: these are the six methods.” 

So in a nutshell, Nietzsche believes we can overcome deleterious habits by:

1. Avoid 
2. Rationing
3. Overindulgence
4. Negative association
5. Diversion
6. Exhaustion 

So for a bad habit like problem drinking we might apply these methods in the following ways.

Avoidance - don’t hang out with people you normally drink with if you are trying to be teetotal. Don’t go into bars obviously.

Rationing - Only allow yourself drinks on Fridays

Overindulgence - Get so drunk that the self-disgust motivates change. This is the idea of hitting rock bottom, where you lose your home, your job, and your relationships, before having enough impetus to turn things around.

Negative association - Before drinking bring to mind all the embarrassing things you’ve done while drunk. Maybe keep a record you can refer to when you are tempted.

Diversion - take up gym instead, for example, and focus all your energy on that. Those times when you would normally drink, go and lift weights instead. I’ve seen this happen with many people. They replace one obsession with another less damaging one.

Exhaustion - I think Nietzsche is focused very much on lust in this one and the lengths that religious ascetics have gone to to overcome this most fundamental of instincts. Indeed, we talked about some of them in episode 17. Probably, not the most appropriate method for someone who is trying to control their drinking I would suggest.

But Nietzsche continues:

“But the will to combat the violence of a craving is beyond our power, equally with the method we adopt and the success we may have in applying it. In all this process our intellect is rather merely the blind instrument of another rival craving, whether it be the impulse to repose, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. While “we ” thus imagine that we are complaining of the violence of an impulse, it is at bottom merely one impulse which is complaining of another, i.e. the perception of the violent suffering which is being caused us presupposes that there is another equally or more violent impulse, and that a struggle is impending in which our intellect must take part.”

So what Nietzsche is saying here is that it isn’t the case that you contain a multitude of competing drives; you just are a multitude of competing drives. What you think of as you, is just the conscious epiphenomenon emerging from the subconscious struggles of the drives. The intellect he mentions, that takes part isn’t you, it’s just a process of figuring out how to get things done. The drives and their relentless activity determine your actions, your desires, and your emotions, and the intellect, which desires nothing in itself, is a means not an end,—Nietzsche writes in BGE.192 “reason is only a tool.” The intellect, the reason, is the apparatus that enables our desires to be fulfilled. Remember Hume again: ‘the reason is and ought to be to be the slave of the passions’. 

The self is an arena where the struggle amongst your many, many competing drives is played out, and the strongest will always win, and the result of the battle will determine our actions. So not only does it feel like you are at the mercy of your drives, it seems there is no you apart from the drives. That the sense of a unified self is something artificial. That consciousness is in Nietzsche’s opinion not the illustrious entity our popular culture lauds it as, is an important topic, and a big one. So it is not something I will discuss much further today, but you need only listen to the last episode—episode 18—to get a summary of Nietzsche conception of consciousness, its over-aggrandisment, its limitations, and its pathologies. 

More importantly for us, when considering self-overcoming, is the problem of self-control and self-improvement. If we are at the mercy of our drives, with them controlling us rather than us controlling them, how can we effect our own personal growth and development? Well, remember again that there is no independent you sitting at the centre trying to wrangle this rabble of drives. What you experience as you, is just their product. But consider, you are listening to this personal growth podcast, maybe you read self-help books, perhaps you have a personal development plan or at least make attempts to implement one. What I am saying is that you demonstrably want to improve yourself, ergo you have a drive for self-overcoming already. Indeed, we all do, remember earlier when I said we are all becoming and we want to become something better, a desire that is a natural healthy, evolved, proclivity. The problem isn’t that you have no drive to improve; the problem is your drive too improve gets overwhelmed frequently by other stronger drives. Look to our case study: the dieter and the donut.

So just how do we control strong drives and stop them defeating our best intentions and undermining our positive behaviour change goals, making us feel out of control and like failures. Well, firstly, it’s important to understand that none of your drives are bad—or evil as St. Paul might say—every one of them has your best interests at heart. Actually, your drives are blind for the most part, so though they will in the broad sense, they do not think in the ordinary sense of the word and they do not envision goals. They do not have conscious purposes and instead they strive only to express themselves. This is one reason why their activity can be counterproductive to our interests. 

These drives exist because at some point in your life or in the evolution of the humans species they were useful and so they became part of your physio-psychology.

Let’s look at a few examples:

The desire for the donut is the drive for sugar and fat, valuable nutrients that were scarce in the wildenerness in which early humans evolved over millions of years. Therefore a compulsion to gorge on these things on the rare occasions they were available was a strategy for survival and so it was embedded physiologically. This drive then contributed to the survival and reproduction of individuals who had it. Their genes were more likely to be passed on. Passed on to you and I in our cravings for sugar, fat, and salt. So here we have one of the oldest and therefore strongest drives humans posses, and that’s why obesity is such an epidemic. Gorging was healthy in our ancient environment. In a modern society it is distinctly unhealthy. Such primal impulses took aeons to be incorporated physiologically and it will likely take more than a few thousand years of modern civilisation for them to adapt to our new circumstances.

The desire to develop healthier eating habits is also a drive for health and fitness and its ultimate benefits are realised in survival and reproduction too, but this drive tends to be more consciously strategised—it has a more long term view. Anything with a more long term view tends to be a more recently developed drive, as it depends on conscious strategising for its implementation and consciousness is a relatively late adaption in humans. Here is a drive to moderate unhealthy food consumption that is in tension with the drive to gorge on rich foods. 

Then consider that you might be obsessed with losing weight, even though you are of perfectly healthy proportions. What has happened is that you have been infected by social pressure and advertising that has made you feel unattractive and given you unrealistic body-shape expectations. Here too is a drive. Though it builds on a long-embedded species drive—the drive to be sexually attractive—it’s pathological expression is a personal compulsion acquired during one’s own lifetime, from one’s own experiences.

Then finally, let’s say that your father admonished you as a child telling you that you would never amount to anything, and consequently you have internalised in your psyche, whether you consciously remember it or not, a self-sabotaging belief that success is not for you. This manifests as a capitulation to the temptation fo the donut even when, and especially when, you are doing well and success seems assured. This too is a drive.

We could go on but the point is made. Here we have four drives relating to one issue that are in conflict with each other: 1. To indulge, 2. To ensure long term health, 3. To meet an unrealistic societal expectation, and 4. A pathological compulsion to undermine your own success.

How then do we ensure only our most noble drives, the one’s that we really want to privilege, win out over the others? The answer is we create the conditions for the success of our more noble drives. I went through an example in detail back in episode 13. So check that out. In essence, forget willpower. Instead, you must make it as easy as possible for you to do the right things and as difficult as possible to do the wrong things. This is about planning ahead of time and creating the choice architecture that will most likely produce the results you want. It’s about designing your environment. As Nietzsche commends in BGE.200: “proper mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself, that is to say self-control, self-outwitting”. We might be uncomfortable with the idea of going to war with one’s self, but as we’ve discussed, this war is going on within all of us already. The only question is which drives win! 

Incidentally, only humans are subject to this self-war, because their drives are at odds with each other. This is not the case with other animals however. In WTP.259, he writes “one and the same man may swarm with a host of contradictory valuations, and therefore with a host of contradictory impulses. This is the expression of disease in man as opposed to the health of animals, in which all the instincts answer certain definite purposes.”

Why is the human necessarily at war with himself? Why is he divided against himself? The answer is civilisation—see the last episode. St. Paul might put it this way: because he is conflicted between what he wants and what he thinks he ought to want. 

None of our drives are bad, but many of them can be unhelpful, at least sometimes. So Nietzsche commends bringing order and a kind of unity to this anarchy. But how do we identity what I have been calling the noble drives, the ones that we want to privilege? 

The noble drive tends to be more far sighted, more aspirational, more focused on a transcendent fulfilment. They also often involve bearing a degree of suffering—and investment of suffering. Ultimate fulfilment does not come from the pursuit of immediate pleasures, of satisfying every random impulse, in comes in unifying the whole organism towards a single exalted goal. The Noble drives corales and economises all the other drives, putting their energy to work, so they work together towards a single purpose. “A yes, a no, a straight line, a goal”, as Nietzsche outs it in TI.44. The noble drives makes the future better than the past and the present, it generates the conditions of life ascending. The future that the noble drive aims at should be illustrious.  

Enough for today. Next time I am going to take you through a whole range of strategies that are proven to be effective in self-overcoming and we will talk to about how suffering, which can be an obstacle to change, can be sanctified as something valuable, meaningful, and even beautiful.

Join me next time for On self-overcoming part two. And ion the meantime, like the man said, live dangerously.