Self‐regulation in daily life: Neuroscience will accelerate theorizing and advance the field

Abstract

Self‐regulation often involves foregoing short‐term pleasures and impulses in favor of long‐term goals, such as pursuing a particular career, raising a family, or maintaining good health to promote longevity. Like many other fields in psychology, the study of self‐regulation has experienced some growing pains in the wake of the replication crisis, with previously held theories called into question, including seemingly intuitive phenomena such as ego depletion. Despite these challenges, there is burgeoning interest in characterizing people's experiences of self‐regulation success and failure in real world settings. In this review, I argue that utilizing tools and approaches from neuroscience will yield valuable insights into how self‐regulatory processes are engaged in daily life, which in turn will refine and advance self‐regulation models and theorizing, as well as generate new hypotheses. I also unpack some conceptual and practical considerations when combining neuroscience methods with real‐world assessment of behaviors, such as ecological momentary assessment. With these issues and points for consideration taken together, I hope this review will help pave a fruitful path forward for the field with implications for how we might become better self‐regulators.