Good self-control can both help and hinder attempts to move on after failure

People spend a lot of time thinking about how to achieve their goals, big or small, with thousands of articles, books, podcasts and other media published every year on the subject. Goal attainment is also a frequent subject of academic research: we’ve covered research exploring how we push through discomfort to achieve our aims, balance pleasure and striving, and plan for success to name but a few.

Unfortunately, striving for our goals also sometimes results in failure - and in the face of defeat, we often need to adjust our goals and strive towards something more attainable. Now a study in Motivation and Emotion has found that those who are prone to boredom are less likely to re-engage with new goals – and that having good self-control can be a barrier to moving on from our original goal in the first place.

In the first study, 323 participants completed a scale measuring goal adjustment, which reflects how people react when the goal they are pursuing is no longer attainable. This scale looks at both goal disengagement, which refers to the ability to let go of their goal after they fail to achieve it, and goal reengagement, or how quickly or easily they can focus on a new goal.

Next, they answered general questions about self-control, indicating how much they agreed with descriptions like “I am good at resisting temptation”. They also completed a scale measuring  “if-then planning”, in which people plan in advance to take a particular course of action in a particular situation, in order to help attain their goal (“if it is 9am I will go to the gym”, for example). This scale involved participants indicating how much they agreed with statements like “I plan the concrete actions I will take towards my goal”. Finally, participants indicated how prone they are to boredom and whether or not they take action to avoid boredom when they experience it.

The results showed that people who engage more in if-then planning are worse at disengaging from their failed goals, though they were better at reengaging with new goals. Those prone to boredom were less likely to commit to new goals, and those who had tendencies to avoid or escape boredom were more likely to do so.

The second study used similar measures to the first, but this time participants were asked to think specifically about when a goal of theirs was frustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. They also indicated whether or not they had experienced anxiety or depression symptoms during the pandemic.

This time, people who engaged more in if-then planning didn’t show a reduced ability to disengage from their failed goal; however, they did again show a greater ability to re-engage in a new goal, which the team suggests is consistent with research showing that this kind of planning does not necessarily result in endless striving towards a goal when it becomes “unambiguously pointless”. However, people with better self-control more generally were      worse at disengaging with their original, failed goal. Those prone to boredom were again less likely to re-engage with new goals, and worse goal adjustment was also associated with more symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Overall, the results reveal an important role for if-then planning in reengaging with new goals after failure, and suggest that those prone to boredom are less likely to commit to their goals.

The study also suggests that having high levels of self-control is not always a good thing: sticking to a goal that will never be achieved is actually likely to get in the way of us getting to where we want to be. Thinking about when to keep engaged and when to disengage may therefore be a better strategy than being too focused on something impossible.