Did you finish everything you planned to accomplish today?
Or fritter away time on Netflix, Facebook, and other meaningless bullshit?
You start every morning with the best intentions. Which makes it even more frustrating when you’re trying to fall asleep at night, regretting how much time you wasted.
What gives?
It’s easy to blame fate, bad luck, or horrible bosses. But that’s the low-hanging fruit.
If you’re looking to understand what really separates the winners from the losers, it’s willpower.
When Life Isn’t Going The Way You Want, Look Here
If you feel a little down on yourself right now, understand I’m not throwing shade in your direction. I’m writing this for myself as much as anyone else.
Most of the times when my life isn’t going how I want, a lack of willpower is to blame.
I hate to say it, but I need this reminder often.
I might stay diligent for a while. But it only takes a few days for things to slide. I pig out on some fast food. Stay up late working on a project I should have finished earlier. Then, before I know it, I’ve strayed from most of my good habits and fallen into a cycle of negativity.
Sound familiar?
This is the exact problem I’ve set out to understand. I’ve wondered why I can’t just rely on the discipline I’ve built up over the years. Why do I have to constantly check myself to keep things from sliding back down to Mediocre Town?
Why You Must Build Willpower – or Regret It Forever
What is willpower anyway?
There are tons of different definitions online. But I see it as a combination of these two things:
- The ability to follow through on your plans
- The ability to forgo short-term pleasures (that don’t vibe with your ideals) for long-term gains
Psychologists have spent decades working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out which characteristics are the best predictors of success.
All that research has led them to two major factors: intelligence and willpower.
Most of us would love to be smarter. But the bummer is that intelligence is mostly innate, We can push our limits through study and hard work, but not beyond the genetically-defined boundaries we’re working within.
Willpower is different.
It’s more akin to a muscle – one that you can flex and develop over time.
In other words, it’s entirely within our power to build willpower. Imagine a chalice sitting right across the table from you. And in this chalice is the nectar of the gods – the very thing that separates superhumans from the mediocre masses.
All you have to do is get up, reach across the table, and claim it.
Training the Willpower Muscle
All right. So willpower is a muscle.
The question becomes how do we train it?
I’m going to stick to the basics. You know, squats and dead lifts kind of stuff. What are the most important things to remember to make the biggest improvements?
Here are 10 of them.
1. Recognize You’re at War
This is the most important step. You can’t afford to look at building willpower like you would any other skill to pursue halfheartedly.
You have to realize you’re at war.
Remember how I said willpower is like a muscle?
Well, if you aren’t flexing it, that muscle deteriorates just like all the others. Not pushing yourself sets you up for a long, painful slide down into mediocrity.
We are on a battlefield, you and I. Our enemies are legion. A binge session on Netflix. A friend asking you to chill out instead of work. That inescapable pull to collapse on the couch.
These enemies never sleep, and they never let up. Each little battle might not seem important, but the casualties of losing them add up. Before you know it, your willpower has wasted away to nothing.
Every day offers the chance to finally get serious. Or keep putting off your dreams for “later.”
If you aren’t truly ready to change your life, better to bookmark this post and circle back later.
2. Identify Your Enemies
Building your willpower is war.
Now that we understand the nature of our undertaking, let’s turn our attention to our enemies.
They’re lurking in every shadow. They’re external: the boss you hate, the spouse who doubts, the delicious twist of fate that leaves you stranded on the side of the highway. They’re internal too. Those little whispers of self sabotage and doubt.
We have a lot of enemies to contend with, but they attack us in just two ways. They wear us down by:
- Surfacing as resistance to doing something we need to do (work, gym, etc.)
- Appearing as temptations to derail us (eat like crap, sleep in, etc.)
Every time we feel one of those sensations, our willpower steps in and tries to get us on track.
A lot of people think that this muscle is limited. It can only lift so much before it gives out – and you give in to those temptations. That’s why it’s easier to knock out a hard task at the beginning of a day than the end of one.
We’re already spending a ton of time exercising our willpower. Some researchers found that we spend around four hours a day resisting temptations. And that doesn’t even include making decisions!
3. Pursue One Big Goal at a Time
Because willpower isn’t something we can ever master, our best bet is to do whatever we can to strengthen that muscle.
Think about how you’d do this in the gym. You wouldn’t just swagger in there and try to bench press double your body weight on the first day. If you attack too aggressively, you’ll burn out and end up injured.
Progressive resistance is the name of the game here. We’re aiming to push ourselves and build up our willpower gradually. Which makes it a hell of a lot more likely we’ll stick with the program.
We have to set our egos aside and pick up the little pink weights if we need to.
Here’s how I’m doing this. I’m picking one aspect of my life I want to focus on as my top priority. Currently it’s writing – and turning that writing into a thriving career. For you it’ll probably be something in the Big Three (health, finances, or relationships).
I’m not saying maintaining all of those things is impossible. But we should have one top goal at any given moment. This might mean making sacrifices in other areas. I’m not as fit as I want to be right now. I don’t spend enough time with friends.
If you can juggle every aspect of life and keep everything perfectly balanced, more power to you! Leave a comment so the rest of us mortals can learn from you.
4. Meditate
I’ll go ahead and admit I suck at this.
I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t seem to make this habit stick.
Meditation is a trope on those feel good self-improvement blogs. Supposedly practitioners can cure their ailments, forgo sleep, exist forever in the moment, and even cure cancer!
I’m joking, of course. But meditation is attributed to so many benefits I’ve lost count of them.
It can even help build willpower by improving focus, impulse control, and self-awareness. One thing I’ve noticed about meditation (on those rare occasions when I do it) is how it expands the “window” between having a thought and responding to it.
So I can see how valuable this would be. If you notice those unhealthy impulses before you give in to them, it’s easier to change course before any damage is done. Each subtle correction builds your willpower just a bit more.
5. Change Your Environment to Take Willpower out of the Equation
One thing I’ve noticed about willpower failure: it often comes down to choice.
Do you take action to improve your life? Or give in to that temptation?
There’s always choice involved. And the more you make, the easier it gets to choose poorly.
But what if you stacked those choices in your favor?
Instead of forcing yourself to make certain choices, you change your environment to avoid them altogether.
Imagine how this might work. Most of us who work on a computer always have a choice to keep working or hop onto social media. Every moment becomes the host of a subconscious battle. It can get exhausting in a hurry!
But if you tried one of those fancy internet blocker tools to cut off the problem sites?
Now you don’t have to make that choice anymore. You free up mental energy to be creative and pursue a better life.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Considering how subtle changes to my environment will help me eliminate bad options and give me better ones.
I’m sure there are a few ways you can do the same.
6. Kill the People Pleaser
This guy is my nightmare.
He’s the laugh at bad jokes, go along just to get along mask I wear. All too often, I find myself letting him run the show. And what happens? My goals and preferences are swallowed up by others’.
(This is probably why I’m so attracted to antihero characters. They do what they want. Fuck everyone else and their expectations.)
Maybe this sounds familiar to you.
But if we want to maximize our willpower, we have to kill the people pleaser!
Changing the way you behave and present yourself – just to be more pleasing to someone else – is exhausting. It’s a minute by minute psychological toll from which it’s hard to recover. With your willpower worn down, it’s easier to make bad decisions in other aspects of your life.
I don’t have many practical tips how to kill the people pleaser – other than to just notice him whenever you can. Feel that sensation in your body? That subtle tension? Take a few deep breaths, relax, and remember that other people are hardly even noticing anyway. They’re too wrapped up in their own thoughts to care.
7. Stop Lying to Yourself and Track Your Progress
Even if we’re honest with others, we have a tremendous capacity to lie to ourselves.
Everything we experience gets filtered through the lens of our personalities. Even seemingly concrete memories are skewed versions of actual events. Hence the wildly inaccurate nature of eyewitness testimony.
“Reality,” as it were, is open for interpretation.
We want to feel good about ourselves. So it’s only natural that we’d lie if that’s what it takes to do that. We tell ourselves we’re doing better than we really are – despite zero concrete record to support us.
This is something I learned about a year back. My perception of how hard I worked, how long I slept, and how well I ate was woefully inaccurate. But I didn’t realize it until I started writing that stuff down.
You can do the same. This doesn’t have to be a huge chore; it can be as basic or complicated as you want it to be. Pick one aspect of your life you’re trying to improve, and record your performance day in and day out.
The results will surprise you. Once the cold slap of reality wears off, it’s easier to take action and improve.
I’m with Peter Drucker on this one:
What gets measured, gets improved.
Until you know what the baseline is, it’s next to impossible to build willpower!
8. Avoid Stress – and Get Better at Managing It
Stress and willpower have a… complicated relationship.
They’re kind of like Superman and Lex Luthor. When Superman is kicking ass, Lex is scurrying away with his tail between his legs. And vice versa.
Cortisol, the hormone made in the body when you’re stressed out, ties them together.
When stress increases, so does cortisol. And high cortisol levels absolutely wreck your willpower.
That’s why we have to avoid stress whenever we can – and manage it well in all the other cases.
We have to sleep enough, eat enough, and exercise. Self-care (which seems to mysteriously disappear whenever I’m writing a new novel) helps keep our willpower muscle limber and well-rested.
You can also willingly expose yourself to stress, which acclimates your body to handle it better.
Hormesis is the term. The idea is to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to increase your body’s stress-management capacity. Cold showers are my nemesis. But they leave me with a ton of energy, a better mood, and a stronger immune system. All thanks to the gradual exposure to stress.
Go slowly with this to make sure you don’t overdo it. You have to confront an uncomfortable truth: your willpower might be so shoddy because you crumble in the face of the slightest stress. You can change that!
9. Say “I Don’t,” Not “I Can’t”
Building willpower isn’t exactly the sexiest idea.
Most of the time, it feels like a real drag.
There are already so many rules life imposes on us. Why impose even more?
But just a subtle change in language can alter how you feel about the process.
For many people, building willpower is entering the world of “I can’t.”
I can’t eat pizza. I can’t sleep in. I can’t screw around watching clips of Conan’s “Clueless Gamer” on YouTube. It’s boring and restrictive.
“I don’t” is powerful.
Whenever you can, change the way you talk to yourself. Shift the I can’t to I don’t.
This is powerful. Instead of framing the process as a series of restrictive choices, you frame it as becoming a completely different person.
10. Forget Everything You Heard About Willpower Being Expendable
Wait… what?!
Didn’t I just rant this entire post about willpower being limited – a muscle you could train but will eventually get depleted?
Bear with me here. While some researchers accept that position, buying into it ourselves can be unnecessarily limiting.
A 2010 Stanford University study found that rejecting the belief that willpower is limited actually makes it last longer than believing it is. So, even if the willpower is like a muscle that gets tired throughout the day, refusing to see it that way will help you in your quest for a better life.
Sounds strange, I know. But the mind is incredibly powerful. Think of this as the willpower placebo effect.
Pay the Price
The most important ingredient separating you from your dream life?
It isn’t money, fame, or your friends’ approval.
It’s willpower.
Willpower gives you the ability to actually do what you say you’ll do. While everyone else slacks off and watches their dreams drift by, you’ll be grinding. Executing. Getting shit done.
Training this is a lifelong endeavor. There’s no better time to start than today.
Is there a price involved?
Of course. But there always is. You either pay the price to build willpower now, or you pay the price of regret until you’re dead.
It’s up to you.
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10 Ways to Build Willpower From the Ground Up – Corey Pemberton