This is probably an impossible question to answer definitively, hence tossing it onto this board. Just looking for something to talk about on a boring afternoon
Often people use “willpower” in the context of quitting a bad habit. I know sometimes I can walk past a donut and not indulge and not care. Sometimes I can walk past a donut and actually reach for it, then stop myself and move on (but I may continue to think about it.) Other times I may find it all but impossible to keep myself from eating the donut, even though-- intellectually, at least-- I know it is bad for me and I know it is something I don’t exactly want to do… but I still do it, and often regret it to some degree later.
It seems on the surface to be “easy” to control your actions, but the reality is a whole lot more complicated.
I read or heard somewhere that scientists are finding that people have a certain reservoir of willpower (and of course different people vary on how much they have), and that if you expose yourself to too much temptation, you use up your reserves (which basically reset after a night’s sleep, I guess?).
I kind of feel that’s true for myself. I have for health reasons switched to a pretty intense diet (no bread, nothing with added sugar, very low sodium, no meat except salmon, lots of vegetables, fruits, black beans, oats, and nuts) and I have had to ask my wife and kids to eat foods that are “forbidden” to me when I’m not in or near the kitchen (and hopefully won’t be for a while, as the smells are tough). I also use a separate fridge and cabinets to help avoid temptation; and I have stopped going to a “Table francaise” that used to be one of the highlights of my week, speaking with others fluent in French, because it meets in a dining hall over dinner.
So I’m maintaining this diet and have been for several weeks now, but I feel like it would not be possible if I were exposed to much more temptation. (You might think I’m not exposed to any, but websites and Hulu manage to sneak in ads for fast food and so on that I find to be a great trial to endure.)
Willpower is quite hard to define. It is your willingness to forgo immediate benefit for greater long term benefit.
A really simple example of this is brushing your teeth before bed. The immediate benefit you forgo is 10 more minutes of relaxing. The benefit is long term dental health.
I can see three things important to willpower:
You have to believe and foresee a long term benefit that outweighs short term benefits.
The long term benefit has to be meaningful to you. All of us would be at least decent instrument players if we had the willpower to practice every day, but not all of us want to.
You need to limit the amount of stresses your willpower will take. No one has infinite reserves of willpower. If you want to limit the amount of alcohol you consume you should keep no alcohol at your home. This helps you reduce the amount of willpower needed to resist a drink.
I’ve found a degree of “self-hypnosis” seems to help. You envision the circumstances, visualize them, run through the scenario in advance in your mind, sort of “role play” it in your imagination. The more times you run through the scenario, with the desired result, the more familiar it becomes to you. In time, it becomes “the real you.”
This is how, for instance, I steel myself to exercise. I just visualize it, so that it becomes a “natural” part of my self-image. It’s not that “I exercise,” but “I am an exerciser.”
AnthonyElite’s notes on making rational assessments of the costs and benefits is also helpful. You figure out what you really want out of a decision.
I think where the “reservoir” idea that Slackerinc was talking about comes in is that for ordinary everyday things like eating, it takes a lot of attention and energy to overcome your surface urges, and eventually that energy can run out. I don’t think it’s a daily thing renewed with sleep, at least not for me. It’s more like, if I want to continue to act in the way my mind tells me, I have to sit down with myself from time to time and remind myself of what I am doing and why I need to do it. And even that doesn’t always work, sometimes I just don’t seem to care enough to do the rational thing.
Maybe I’m just playing a mental games of semantics, but I don’t think of myself as “exercising willpower” as much as “resisting self-sabotage.” I’ve made some commitments to myself about my diet (no wheat, no dairy, no potatoes, no peanuts) because I feel better overall when I don’t eat those foods. Problem is, I LOVE donuts and cheese and beer and potato chips. Eating these things won’t kill me, but I will suffer if I do. The longer I go without eating them, the better I feel. But sometimes, when I’m really stressed out (like this week when my horse was so ill she almost died), I am sorely tempted. But I have to remind myself that, if I do indulge, not only will I still be stressed, not only will the horse still be sick (or dead), but then I will hurt like hell too. It’s almost like doing a cost/benefit analysis at every meal.
I think the donut example is a good segway. What I think happens is that all the while there are processes going on in the brain that lead up to choices. The choice to grab the donut or not is led up to by these processes that may involve reward goals based on sugar/fat delivery items (donuts). If your brain is so consumed by processes that are focused on sugar/fat rewards, your “willpower” has to be stronger in order for you not to just go along with them. So, your willpower is not the absence of these processes consuming your brain activity capacity, it is your ability to have genuine choices regardless of them. I think this kind of thing is more obvious in addicts. Their brain is so consumed with processes geared towards obtaining a fix or drink that when the choice is there to obtain, it is very difficult for the addict to have a genuine choice, or “willpower”. It is only after the brain starts to gradually have less and less of these consuming processes that these choices become easier, but not because they have more willpower, because the brain’s processes have changed.
Yeah, that logic seems screwy to me too. My understanding is that willpower is like a muscle. It can get stronger with practice, and it can get weaker with overuse.
So if you’re trying not to drink alcohol, you can do what Anthony recommends. But that’s not really engaging your willpower. Assuming willpower is like a muscle, the recommendation would be to not overload yourself with too many restrictions at one time. So if you’re working on your alcohol drinkage, maybe don’t burden yourself with a strict diet at the same time. Wait till you’ve conquered your cigarette habit before you start on your diet. Willpower isn’t an infinite resource.
On the other hand, you can build your willpower by exercising it in moderation. I once read about a study that had participants focus on having proper posture throughout the day versus control subjects. The test subjects became better at self-control. So if you’re trying to control your alcohol intake, maybe focus on controlling something easy.
That is a huge assumption which I do not believe is warranted. It’s a neat analogy, but a look at the world around us seems to argue just the opposite. We have abundant information that regularly having to lift or carry things strengthens our physical muscles. Do you have anywhere near that level of evidence for willpower working the same way?
The mass increases in obesity and type two diabetes have come at the same time as we have become more and more surrounded by images of, and convenient and inexpensive options for, tempting but unhealthy food. At the same time, surveys and spending in the diet and weight loss sector indicate huge numbers of people trying to exert willpower to avoid or limit those foods. If your analogy held, this would be like having millions of people surrounded by personal trainers getting them toughened up all the time. But the actual public-health evidence would appear to be quite to the contrary.
I don’t think the obesity epidemic challenges McGonigal’s concept of willpower. First off, we don’t know how much fatter we’d all be if it weren’t for the weight loss industry. Also, you presume that the weight loss industry isn’t part of the obesity problem and that global obesity is simply the result of poor willpower rather something a lot more complex. You’re making a lot more assumptions with this argument than McGonigal is by comparing willpower to a muscle.
If you simply typed willpower into a Google search you would find a few months worth of reading. Lots of scientific types, particularly Roy Baumeister have been studying this for years.
Yeah?? (taps microphone) This thing on??