The phrase 'constrain himself' is correct and can be used in written English.
It is used to describe when someone limits or restricts themselves in some way, often to conform to certain social standards or expectations. An example sentence would be: "He had to constrain himself to act like a gentleman in front of his employer."
Until this point, Dr. Lloyd had been constraining himself to a laptop with a volume of one liter.
But I suspect Englander might have pulled it off if he hadn't constrained himself so tightly within the terms of Carver's scrupulous realism.
Rather, I was shocked — that the director of "American Graffiti" could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie.
Had Mr Eugenides constrained himself to the tale of a pseudohermaphrodite (genetically of one sex but with ambiguously developed genitals), his novel might at least have shed some light on the psychology of gender.
"What do you think?" I'd always felt that he had constrained himself too much to the local scene, that the rest of Nigeria could benefit from a taste of the valor he had to offer.
Mapplethorpe constrained himself to using black-and-white photographs for many of his exhibitions rather than obsessing about color.
When the U.S. president constrains himself in the Sony case to deliver a "proportionate" response, he is effectively letting North Korea set the terms of an attack -- playing ping-pong with Pyongyang.
These are five in number, refutation, fallacy, paradox, solecism, and fifthly to reduce the opponent in the discussion to babbling-i.e. to constrain him to repeat himself a number of times: or it is to produce the appearance of each of these things without the reality.
He himself admits that such a treatise is almost universally neglected by philosophers, and feels himself constrained to justify such a study, which he undertakes with an almost inevitable admixture of religious and theological elements.
