You must be mentally strong to achieve your goals. As human beings, we are endowed with enormous capabilities. We can solve complex problems, imagine new possibilities, and learn complex skills, but we repeatedly spend our time doing the same mental activities. Thus, we wear down our mental strength, scrolling through social media instead of starting a big project, watching TV instead of learning a new skill, and flipping through magazines instead of writing.
The reason for this is that achievement requires a lot of work. Forcing ourselves to make a mental effort is difficult, uncomfortable, and exhausting, but it is willpower that allows us to do it, and that is why people with strong will:
- get more done.
- achieve greater success.
- increase their abilities.
- stand out from the crowd.
In this article, we'll delve deeper into the science of willpower, how it works, and what you need to do to boost your willpower. Drawing on the amazing research from The Willpower Instinct, by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist at Stanford University. Dr. McGonigal shows us how willpower is the key to improve our health, happiness, and productivity.
Strategies For Increasing Your Willpower
1. Willpower Challenge
First, think of 3 different willpower goals you want to achieve. Answer the questions below and use them as you read the tips:
- What do you want to do most?
- What would you like to do less?
- What is the long-term goal you are working towards?
Now that you've laid out the challenges you want to win, let's talk about how to meet them.
2. Self-knowledge
To increase your willpower, you have to know yourself, and that requires increasing your emotional intelligence. “To succeed with self-control, you must know how to fail.” - Dr. Kelly McGonigal.
Willpower takes action, but it is also about knowing what motivates you and what distracts you from your work and your habits. So, explore yourself and be completely honest with yourself in the process.
Research shows that people who believe they have a lot of willpower are actually more likely to lose control when faced with temptation. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
This is not a new idea, as we tend to overestimate most of our abilities. For example, in talent competition shows, all participants think they will win. So, use the following questions to do a self-assessment:
- When do you most often "give up"?
- When do you most often "lose faith"?
- What drains your willpower the most?
3. Understand the two parts of the brain
Willpower is a finite resource and it can run out at the end of a long day. It is not a muscle, but just like a muscle, it gets tired after using it repeatedly. This is because the source of willpower is a specific area of our brain called the prefrontal cortex.
McGonigal explains it as follows: “We have two parts of the brain, one that is impulsive and seeks pleasure, and the other is an achiever and wiser. The first wants us to have fun and be entertained, while the second wants to make good long-term decisions, and that is what willpower dictates.”
Whenever the pleasure-seeking department encounters a temptation, such as candy or a chance to go out and have fun, the achiever department has to rein us in.
However, after a while that department gets tired of standing up to the former, so at the end of the day you eat ice cream after fighting all day. The part which is responsible for willpower in our brain gets tired when we use it a lot because it constantly suppresses the part that is looking for pleasure. We need the willpower to make good decisions in the long term since without it, we would eat sweets all the time, watch TV, and never exercise. So, willpower is a biological instinct that evolved to help us protect ourselves from ourselves.
Temptation and stress can mess with the self-control systems of the brain. We don't even notice how often we exercise our willpower. In one study, people were asked how many food decisions they make each day. They estimated that they made an average of 14 food-related choices, while the researchers estimated the true average to be 227. That is, we make an average of 227 food-related decisions per day. That is, we use our willpower only 227 times to choose what to eat. No wonder we are tired.
4. Trick your brain systems
You can actually cheat both parts of your brain, and here's how:
- Get rid of as many small decisions that require willpower as possible. Get rid of candy in your home or office, block notifications from social media, and don't go into the kitchen before dinner.
- Make your important decisions during the times when you have willpower. For example, maybe the task that requires your willpower every day is exercise, and at the end of the day, you will be tired and just want to go to sleep. So, it will be better to exercise in the morning when it is easy, as your willpower is high.
- Renew your willpower. McGonigal recommends meditation, which increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, also breathing, sleeping, and walking outdoors as great ways to recharge your willpower.
5. Exercise your willpower
Because willpower is like a muscle, you can strengthen it, and you can increase its fitness just as you do with your body at the gym, as McGonigal explains that our brain tries to stop us from using our willpower before it runs out. It is like when the light on the gas tank comes on, you know it's a warning but you know when it lights up that you can still drive for a few more miles. Your brain works the same way.
When you're running, for example, your legs will start hurting as a way for your brain to tell you that your body has reached its limits and it's time to stop. But in fact, you can still run more than that, but your brain is careful. When you train for a marathon, you choose to continue even after you reach that limit, and that's how you get stronger and faster.
You can do the same with willpower, train your mind:
- The next time you feel tired or about to give up, see if you can keep going a little longer.
- Stick to one small habit and practise it every day. For example, meditate or call a family member.
- When you're about to give up, think about the strength you want to gain, tie your current activity to a long-term goal or value, as that can often give you the motivation to go a little further.
An important factor in increasing your willpower is to learn how to be more productive.
6. Separate the concept of objectives from the concept of reward
This is what you do when you accomplish something, and then you allow yourself to give in to temptations, and you say:
- I worked hard and now I can rest for a while longer.
- I followed the diet to perfection yesterday, I can eat these sweets now.
- When I finished all my work, I could smoke one cigarette.
It can happen when the goals are associated with you doing a good job, and then it becomes tempting to give yourself a reward. The only way to stop this behaviour is to separate the goals from the fact that you did a good job. So, instead of thinking, “I did well, so I should reward myself.” Say, "I achieved my goal, that feels great."
It means associating your goals or actions with long-term desires or values, or seeing the benefits of the activity itself, like getting endorphins when you work out, it doesn't mean allowing yourself to eat more, or enjoying time with your family over dinner, that doesn't mean allowing yourself to watch more TV.
7. Forgive yourself for failure
When we start to stray from our goals and our willpower fails, we feel that we are a failure, and we say: Because we stumbled, it is better to give up completely, as this happens because we feel guilty, and we blame ourselves when we stray from the path that leads to the goal.
This shame of yourself pushes your body to crave a dose of the feel-good hormone dopamine in order to feel better, which means you will want to eat more sweets, french fries, cigarettes, and surf social media more.
The solution
Self-compassion. McGonigal has found that when people forgive themselves for sometimes deviating from course, they get back on track more quickly. While people who are dominated by feelings of guilt tend to enter a spiral of giving in to temptations, then feeling ashamed, and then they cannot control themselves. So, the next time you make a mistake, forgive yourself, call it a one time event, and move on.
8. Imagine yourself in the future
One study says: “When we are asked to think about ourselves, certain parts of our brains are activated, and when we are asked to think about ourselves in the future, different areas of our brains are activated, and the latter are the same parts that we use to think about others.” In other words, we treat our future selves as someone else.
“We think of our future selves as different people, we imagine them to be perfect, and we expect them to be able to do what we cannot currently do.” - Dr. Kelly McGonigal.
This affects willpower in a terrifying way. As we tend to postpone today's work until tomorrow. As our inability to see the future clearly, and our belief that we will become another person later leads us to succumb to temptation and procrastination. So, answer these questions to test your self-reliance in the future:
- Do you expect to change in the future?
- How will you be different in the future?
- Will it be easier to achieve your goals?
- Do you dream about what you will be like in the future, and what will happen then?
When making decisions, do not rely on your future self, but rather start working now and do not wait, and do not postpone choices and actions, but rather be responsible by setting a schedule and stick to it.
McGonigal also encourages the students to use visualisation to imagine their future selves in detail and to imagine how they would enjoy the benefits of the current good choices they try to stick to. In one study, people who didn't exercise imagined themselves in the future in good health.
After two months, they were exercising more than a group of people who didn't imagine themselves in the future. The more detailed and realistic you imagined yourself in the future, the easier it was to make better decisions now.
9. Surround yourself with strong-willed people
Breaking the rules and losing the will is contagious. So, think of the 5 people in your life you spend the most time with, then rate them on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 represents no willpower at all, and the number 5 represents the enjoyment of amazing willpower. Add these numbers and divide them by 5, and that is the indicator of your willpower because the willpower of others may affect us.
If you have some major goals in your life, or you want to regain your willpower, think about who you spend time with, and ask yourself:
- Who are the strongest-willed people you know?
- How can they inspire you? Who pushed you to lose willpower? How can you reduce the impact of this thing on you?
- Can you ask for help? Who can hold you accountable to force you to act responsibly?
10. Allow yourself to think freely
Whenever we are told not to think about something, do something, or experience something, we want that thing. We should stop saying, "I won't," McGonigal says, and instead give ourselves permission to think freely. Brain activation studies confirm that once participants are given permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress, they are less likely to be distracted by that thought.
Willpower isn't about suppressing thoughts, it's about changing action. It's not about berating your mind until it thinks what you want, it's about inspiring and accepting it. Guilt and shame about your mistakes make you give up again, but forgiveness and self-compassion boost self-control.
In conclusion
You are great the way you are, and now is the time to improve yourself. So, think about how you can be better, and how willpower can get you closer to this goal:
- Get Started: What is one thing you can do right now to be more successful?
- Stop: What could you stop doing right now to improve your quality of life?
To give yourself extra motivation, think of more reasons to work on the above two goals:
- What benefit will you get from them?
- Who else will benefit in your life from them?
- What is the first step to work towards achieving them?
Add comment