The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint and Self-Regulation

The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint in the Face of Excess

Acting with restraint when impulse pushes toward excess, without that meaning repression or passivity: that capacity is what Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman grouped under temperance in their 2004 classification of positive psychology.

People who lead with this virtue tend to make better decisions over the medium term, precisely because they don’t act purely on immediate impulse.

The Four Strengths That Make It Up

• Forgiveness and mercy: the shift that happens in someone who’s been wronged or hurt, where the urge for revenge or avoidance gives way to more benevolent, tolerant attitudes. It doesn’t mean forgetting the harm, but no longer acting out of resentment.
• Humility/modesty: an accurate, not underrated, assessment of your own achievements and merits, letting them speak for themselves instead of underlining them. It includes being open to advice and ideas that contradict what you think.
• Prudence: a practical orientation toward your own future: thinking through the consequences of decisions and resisting the pull to satisfy a short-term goal at the expense of a more important long-term one.
• Self-regulation: the ability to govern your own actions, impulses, and emotions to fit a goal or standard, instead of reacting automatically to every internal or external stimulus.

Its Usual Signs

• They own their mistakes without over-justifying them, which makes it easier to repair things and move on.
• They think through consequences before acting on impulse, especially in decisions with lasting effects.
• They let go of resentment when it’s warranted, without that meaning they deny the harm they suffered.
• They let their achievements speak for themselves, without needing to keep pointing them out to others.
• They ask for opinions that might push back on them, without treating it as an attack on their judgment.

Knowing Where Self-Control Actually Breaks Down

Buckingham and Clifton, in the same Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) already cited in the virtue of humanity, define a strength as consistent, near-excellent performance in a specific activity, not a single good moment. Applied to prudence and self-regulation, that definition suggests a different approach than trying to have the same willpower on every front: knowing precisely which specific situations your self-control holds up reliably in, and which ones it almost always breaks down in (a certain time of day, a type of decision, the presence of certain people), lets you build structure around those specific weak spots, instead of relying on generic willpower every time they come up. The authors insist that managing a weakness this way (delegating the decision, changing your environment, avoiding the situation that triggers it) frees up energy to sustain self-control where it actually matters, instead of spreading it evenly across every front with mediocre results everywhere.

What Sets Temperance Apart From Indecision

One nuance Peterson and Seligman (2004) highlight is pausing before deciding, especially in decisions made in the heat of the moment or under emotional pressure: someone who fires off an angry email five minutes after reading something that upset them would rarely write it the same way an hour later. That pause isn’t the same as avoiding a decision: temperance, in this model, means deciding with judgment instead of on impulse, not putting the decision off indefinitely. Accepting your own mistakes without dramatizing or minimizing them, with the same ease you’d correct your course, closes the same pattern.