Moral Licensing - Why Telling Yourself You've Been Good Is F*cking You Up

“I trained super hard this week, so I can get crunk this weekend.”

“I’m gonna train tomorrow, so I can take some chill time today.”

“I’ve been really good with my diet, so I can definitely have cake tonight.”

This psychological bargaining, where we tell ourselves we’ve done (or will do) something “good”, so therefore we deserve something “bad” is called moral licensing. When we morally license, we use our prior “good” behaviour to justify our later “bad” behaviour.

Why am I talking about this? Anything you moralise is fair game for moral licensing. So when you refer to your diet as good or praise yourself for being good because you’ve consistently hit the gym, you are fair game for moral licensing. If your diet has been good, you’re entitled to a little bad. And if you’ve been good with the gym, baby girl, you deserve a day off.

But isn’t this just balance you say? Hear me out with a list of reasons why moral licensing may be problematic for you:

  • Your food and exercise choices should not be up for moral judgement

  • As humans, we don’t like being told what to do

  • You may give yourself credit for things you could have done, but didn’t or things you plan on doing on the future

  • You will be happy with your choices, even if they are completely conflicting with your goals and values

  • Feeling good about yourself will fuel your own demise

Your food and exercise choices should not be up for moral judgement.

This is not the point of this article and this is an entirely seperate conversation to the one I want to have today but it deserves a primary mention. I’ll say this once: you are not a good or bad person based on what you eat. You are not bad for having a cake and you are not good for eating a salad. Food and exercise behaviours are not measures of moral worth. Assigning a moral tag to your food and exercise has consequences much more far reaching than moral licensing. It opens you up to a world of self-criticism and all of the self-destructive behaviour that can come along with that. In the name of self-control and success in the gym, forget virtue and focus on values and goals. You’ll be much more likely to achieve your long term goals if you make decisions around food and exercise based on their alignment with your values and what you want for your future, rather than what you feel you should or should not do.

As humans, we don’t like being told what to do.

When you make training and nutrition interventions something you should do to be a better person, you will immediately (albeit subconsciously) start working on a list of reasons why you shouldn’t have to do it. Aside from our opposable thumbs, this is one of the qualities that make us most human. We resist rules. So when you tell yourself that exercising, skipping dessert or meal prepping is the “right” thing to do, you’re not gonna want to do it. Conversely, if you told yourself (and believed) that exercising and meal prepping would align with your value of health, help you to achieve your goal of long term weight control, and is not something you must do but rather you want to do for your own personal happiness, fulfilment and betterment, you’ll be much more inclined to follow through, without kicking and screaming with the resistance of a two year old child.

You may give yourself credit for things you could have done but didn’t or things that you [believe] you will do in the future.

These are some of my favourite points about moral licensing because it highlights just how flawed our human brains are. We give ourselves credit for what we could have done but didn’t. For example, we could have eaten the whole pizza, but we only ate three slices. Following this line of logic, we can turn any act of indulgence in to something to be proud of. (Disclaimer: depending on the individual, there is certainly a time and a place where this is a success.) In the same vain, if we plan to go to the gym tomorrow we’re more inclined to let ourselves off the hook today. We reward ourselves for things that we intend for our future selves to do. Whether or not future us actually does those things is irrelevant. The reward has already been paid. Brain is dumb dumb.

You will be happy with your choices even if they are completely conflicting with your goals and values.

Moral licensing is laced in questionable logic. When we morally license, we are able to convince ourselves with such conviction that our self-sabotaging behaviour - behaviour that is instantly gratifying but really does nothing for our long term goals - is a treat that we have earned and deserve. In research, when participants were asked about their licensed indulgences, decisions that are at complete odds with their goals, the participants reported feeling in control of their choices. They reported feeling proud of themselves for earning a reward. Anecdotally, I see this a lot in my team. “I’ve been so good,” they claim “I haven’t slipped up for weeks.” Or “I’ve been training so hard, I so deserved that meal.” When they claim they’ve been so good, that can be translated to: “I could have slipped up every night but I didn’t” or “I could have skipped training everyday, but I didn’t.” It’s worth noting that acceptance with these decisions is a topic for another conversation: I’d rather them be accepting of their choices than drowning themselves in self-criticism. Self-criticism would only create more havoc. However, this sense of entitlement too often becomes our downfall. These questionable lines of logic really interfere with long term progress. If we reward ourselves every time we make a decision that aligns with our long term goals, it’s going to be a long journey of two steps forward and one step back.

Feeling good about yourself will fuel your own demise.

Judging our own self-worth based on our food and exercise choices never has a positive outcome. If upon assessment, you determine you’ve been bad, you’ll be more inclined to throw your hands up, claim “why bother”, it’s too hard, I am not strong enough, I don’t have enough willpower and go grab a brownie. On the flip side, if you decide you’ve been good and that you’re a good person, you should reward yourself, right? According to moral licensing, you’ve earned it. The problem here lies with the fact that there is no one tracking how good you’ve been and what indulgence you’ve earned in result. Instead, all you’ve got is a feeling that you’ve been good or bad, which is a flawed system at best. If the only thing motivating your self control is the desire to be a good person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself. And you’ll be convinced it was a good decision.

So yes, the human brain is flawed and makes some questionable decisions at times. This shouldn’t be news to you. Fortunately, it’s not hard to overcome or at least reduce moral licensing behaviour as it relates to your goals. You can do so with the following:

  • Be mindful of moral licensing

  • Remember your “why”

  • Seperate the true moral dilemmas from the merely difficult

  • Don’t mistake goal supportive action for the goal itself

  • View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices

  • Repeat after me: I believe in my highest self and want to act in favour of that self

Be aware of it.

The first step to reducing the impact of moral licensing is to pay attention to it. Notice how you talk to yourself and others about your pursuit of your goals. Notice when you talk to your friends or family, when you check in with your coach, what you write in your journal and what your self-talk sounds like:

  • Do you say you’ve been good when you succeed and bad when you procrastinate or give in to temptation?

  • Do you apologise for being bad when you do something that doesn’t align with your goals?

  • Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behaviour tomorrow?

  • What effect does this have on your decisions today?

  • Do you actually do what you said you’d do tomorrow? Or do you claim yet again: “tomorrow, for real.”

  • Do you justify your goal-misaligned behaviour with other goal-aligned behaviour?

  • If so, are they harmless rewards, or are they secretly sabotaging your accomplishment of your long term goals?

Remember your “why.”

The next time you find yourself using past good behaviour to justify indulging, pause and remember why you participated in the past good behaviours in the first place. Get deep. Dig to the very bottom of why this goal is meaningful to you. I like the method of the “five fold why.”

I said I’d train 4x per week because I want to lose weight.

  1. Why do you want to lose weight? So I can feel better about myself.

  2. Why do you want to feel better about yourself? So I can be more confident.

  3. Why do you want to be more confident? So I can put myself out there to meet someone.

  4. Why do you want to meet someone? I would like to build a life with someone.

  5. Why?….. You get the point.

Enough with the superficial goals that don’t really mean anything. If your goals aren’t deep and don’t mean anything to you, you’re set to fail from the get go. If you can pull in to your consciousness the deepest reasons why you are working towards something, whatever it is, you’ll be in a much better position to make an informed judgement on whether the indulgence is what you really want, or if it will in fact push you further away from your goals.

I have been training for powerlifting for the last six years. The pursuit of strength is meaningful to me. It’s not hard for me to pull all of my reasons why to the forefront of my mind when I’d rather pour a glass of vino than do my Friday session. I’m less good at being smart with my money. I’ll justify $300 of bed linen because I didn’t get $30 burgers on the weekend (wtf.) Sure my budget matters and the $300 of bed linen will be nice for a while but it isn’t gonna pay my way to Canada.

What are your goals? Now get to the bottom of them. Write them down. Engrave them in your mind. Then consult them whenever you’re tempted with an instantly gratifying indulgence, like the Friday night vino and the fresh linen sheets.

Seperate the true moral dilemmas from the merely difficult.

Hiding a dead body or lying on your tax return may be morally flawed (and illegal). Eating cake however is not. And yet, so many people think of self-control as a moral test. Caving and having dessert, sleeping in or getting drunk on a girl’s night does not make you a bad person. Read that again. Assigning moral value to our goals can lead to immense self-criticism that causes us to lose sight of why we wanted to achieve those goals in the first place. We get so caught up in self-deprecating behaviour and a cloud of negativity that we have nothing left to devote to achieving the goal that was so important to us in the first place. Remove the moral judgement. It has no place here.

Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself.

I am a big proponent for process goals: specific actions and tasks that you can complete that will lead you to a bigger outcome girl. EG, a goal of losing 5kg is an outcome goal; a goal of going to the gym 4x per week is a process goal.  Setting a process goal means you have identified what you actually need to do achieve a larger goal. While process goals have been shown time and time again to be more conducive to long term success than setting outcome goals with no milestones in place to get you there; praising yourself every damn time to you achieve or complete a process goal is problematic. It’s productive to focus on the things you’re doing daily, but don’t praise yourself daily. You aren’t “done” because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your larger goal is.

Research has suggested that a focus on progress can [perhaps surprisingly] be problematic. It’s a widely held belief that making progress on our goals motivates us to keep working for greater success. And don’t get me wrong, this is often times the case, but often it is not. Psychologists know we are all too quick to use progress as an excuse for taking it easy. I know I can be guilty of myself. “Cool my weight has come down. I’m moving in the right direction. time for a Magnum.” (Again, wtf.)

A more productive approach to appraising your movement towards your goal is to ask “how committed do you feel to your goal?” Research has shown that those asked “how much progress do you feel you have made towards your goal?” are more likely to do something that conflicts with that goal, like skipping the gym than those asked “how committed do you feel to your goal?”. Progress makes brain want praise. Commitment reinforces commitment.

View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices.

I love this trick. When contemplating skipping training today, ask yourself how you’d feel if you skipped training every day for the rest of forever. If you made this same decision every day for the rest of your life, how would you feel about that? Would you be living in alignment with your goals and values? Would you be making positive steps towards your goal? Sure, we all have flat days, but we are notorious for overestimating how much more motivated and diligent our future selves are. Hate to break it to you, but your future self is still you. He/she is probably not going to feel like training much more than current you does. We wrongly but persistently expect to make better decisions tomorrow than we do today. Stop doing that by pledging to make the decision you make today again tomorrow.

Repeat after me: I believe in my highest self and want to act in favour of that self.

When you think about your nutrition and training, which parts of you feel like the real you: the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled? Do you identify more with your impulses and desires, or with your long-term goals and values? Do you feel like the kind of person who can succeed, or do you feel like you need to fundamentally suppress, improve, or change who you are? In her book “the Willpower Instinct,” author Dr Kelly McGonigal says:

Moral licensing is at it’s core an identity crisis. We only reward ourselves for good behaviour if we believe who we really are is the self that wants to be bad. From this point of view, every act of self-control is a punishment and only self-indulgence is a reward. But why must we see ourselves that way? Moving beyond the traps of moral licensing requires knowing that who we are is the self that wants the best for us, and the self that wants to live in line with our core values. A simple shift in focus can produce a very different interpretation of our own actions: “I did that because I wanted to,” not “I did that, great, now I can do what I really want.”

— Dr Kelly McGonigal

Believe in your highest self, then do what it takes to cultivate him/her/them.

References.

Fishbach, A. & Dhar, R. Goals As Excuses or Guides: The Liberating Effect of Perceived Goal Progress on Choice. Journal of Consumer Research. 32, 370-377.

Khan, U. & Dhar, R. (2007). Where There Is A Way, Is There A Will? The Effect of Future Choices on Self Control. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 136, 277-288.

Khan, U. & Dhar, R. (2006). Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice. Journal of Marketing Research. 43, 259-266.

McGonigal, K. (2013). The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Penguin Group.

Monin, B. & Miller, D. (2001). Goals As Excuses or Guides. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81, 33-43.

Mukhopadhay, A. & Johar, G. Indulgence As a Self-Reward For Prior Shopping Restraint: A Justification-Based Mechanism. Journal of Consumer Psychology. 19, 334-345.

Sachdever, S., Iliev, R. & Medin, D. (2009). Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners. Psychological Science. 20, 523-528.

Sengupta, A. & Ramanathan, S. (2008). Recalling Past Temptations: An Information-Processing Perspective on the Dynamics of Self-Control. Journal of Consumer Research. 35, 586-599.

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