A Deep Look at Willpower
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The American Psychology Association defines willpower as “is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals”. And while this is very helpful on the surface, there are a few things to remember. First, willpower will deplete over time the more you’re forced to use it. Second, your level of willpower depends on your motivation and beliefs for that goal. Let me explain these two notions further.
Willpower is a mental muscle. And the more you work a muscle without adequate breaks, the more you risk injury from overworking it. The more goals and decisions you’re forced to use your willpower toward, the easier it is to get tired and exhausted in other areas of life. Let’s use three areas as examples: food, finances, and relationships. It’s hard to have the willpower to exercise and eat a healthy dinner if you’re exhausted after work. Being sociable requires a lot of self-control especially in professional settings. If you’re financially insecure, that alone can affect other areas of your life. Most of your willpower is being used toward daily financial decisions. You may have a budget, but you’re likely to overspend on something or neglect other areas of your life because of the stress that financial willpower can cause. Again, it’s resisting daily temptations for long-term goals. This is easier said than done.
With this first point, one way to ease the amount of willpower needed to resist temptations is to automate. If you have portions of your paycheck automatically deposited into a savings account or something similar, then you don’t need to worry about how much to put in every pay period. You’ll be less tempted to overspend and eventually give up. I meal prep and cook on the weekends so I don’t eat out too often during the week and overspend on fast food. It also takes the stress of trying to figure out what to eat after a long day of work when I’d be too tired to cook. Meal prep services can help with this as well. Again, automation is one way to lessen the amount of constant willpower needed when trying to maintain certain positive habits or progress in a goal.
But let’s talk about the second importance. Willpower becomes much easier to maintain if a goal or habit aligns with your beliefs and motivations. For example, if you have negative beliefs about food and health, then dieting will be a big challenge for you. If you harbor negative beliefs and thoughts around money, or see having money as immoral, for example, then having the willpower to resist overspending or not saving enough will again take great effort. You may fall quickly to bad habits, cycling between shame and guilt for those bad habits, get back on track, and then sliding back down again. Our beliefs and motivations are very important in implementing a change or new path in our life.
This is easier said than done, as are many things in life. And when we are forced to make a change, it’s easy to feel lost and frustrated. That internal inquiry of our beliefs and habits can sometimes be a painful process. Other times, it can be enlightening and boost our motivation.
I’ll use myself as an example. I believe in having a healthy diet, so resisting certain foods and meal planning doesn’t take much willpower anymore. It doesn’t take a lot of mental energy. But it’s taken me years to do the same with finances. Saving money and sticking to a budget used to be a painful process, and I would over spend only to be filled with guilt and anger until my next paycheck. And while money is a complex and dense subject, I will say that saving money became easier once I changed my beliefs around it, healed a lot of past trauma in that area, and learned to put money aside before spending it, instead of the other way around. I believe that your beliefs and motivations are more important than simply automating your tasks. In fact, positive habits and tasks become easier to maintain once we adopt beliefs that actually serve us instead of harboring the ones that only leave us more frustrated and angry. I’ll dive deeper into the subject of negative and limiting beliefs in a future post.
One last thing I want to add to this subject. There are many nuances to life and everyone has their own individual struggles. One thing to remember is each of us has our own talents and skills that we can rely on. I know that sounds trite but stick with me. There are three things we need to consider in strengthening our willpower toward a goal. These are our passion and motivation towards a goal and change in life, our emotions and beliefs, and lastly our mental and physical resources we have that will help us along this path. I’ve talked in my last post how having a clear vision of our goal will help fuse our passion towards it. I’ve talked in this post how changing our beliefs helps maintain the willpower to make necessary changes and habits for our goals. But our mental and physical resources paint our current reality and puts this into perspective.
It’s easier for someone with a well-paying job and no debt to save money than it is for someone who is struggling to live paycheck to paycheck. It’s easier for someone with no health issues to stick to a healthy diet than someone who is struggling with their health and relationship to food. We all start life in different circumstances and challenges. To reiterate what I said in the last post, we can only do the best we can with what we have. Of course, our journey will become easier if we’re able to gather more knowledge and resources along the way. This reminds of a quote I learned in college.
“From limitations spring forth creativity.”
I’m not sure who said it, but it has stuck with me ever since. There have been many times in my life where I didn’t have the adequate resources for certain decisions in my life, whether it was money or knowledge. So I was forced to pivot or find another way to reach my goal. These were small changes such as taking the bus when I didn’t have a car, and huge ones as getting therapy when I was going through emotional growing pains. I learned a lot along the way, especially how to adapt to life’s ever-changing demands.
Remember, willpower is a mental muscle. It can strengthen and grow overtime. Positive habits can become automatic. We can get closer to our goals and desired lifestyle. And these allow us to learn more about ourselves along the way. But there is more to the journey of life than simply resisting negative temptations. We’ll continue to explore those other facets throughout this series.
