In our daily lives, we sometimes need to engage in activities that we do not enjoy, often for the sake of a personal goal. Students, for example, may sometimes need to read textbooks they find profoundly boring, and athletes may need to practice their sports at painfully high intensities to increase their performance. Moreover, many occupations involve tasks that are perceived as monotonous (e.g. assembly line work) or require workers to cope with emotional stressors (e.g. in emergency management or intensive care units). When an activity is boring, difficult, or requires physical or mental effort, persistence in it requires self-regulation (or self-control), 1 that is, processes by which individuals can alter their cognitive, emotional, or behavioural responses in the service of their long-term goals (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). To date, relatively little is known about how people try to promote their own persistence in such everyday activities. Which self-regulatory strategies do they spontaneously use? And how much do these strategies actually help them to persist? In the present research, we attempted to answer these questions while placing them into the larger context of individual differences in trait self-control. More specifically, we investigated (i) the self-regulatory strategies people use spontaneously in their everyday lives, for different activities and when confronted with various demands, (ii) the reported effectiveness of these strategies as a function of demand types, (iii) the extent to which individual differences in trait self-control predict the use of self-regulatory strategies, and (iv) whether, in turn, the use of these self-regulatory strategies can explain why people, who are high in trait self-control, report being more successful in regulating their persistence in a given moment.