It isn’t as simple as working out a muscle though. Do you know what happens if you continuously work out a muscle to failure? Progress stalls.
My point is that you cannot expose your willpower to testing at all times or it is bound to fail you.
My alcoholic example fits this well: an alcoholic might walk home and pass 3 bars, exercising his will power not to walk in to any of them. However, when he gets home and there is alcohol in the freezer (he likes icy coconut rum) the availability has overwhelmed his willpower and he drinks.
It isn’t productive, in my opinion, to talk about willpower without talking about realistic boundaries that one would have.
If you were on a boat stranded at sea, with very little water left, and you had to ration it out to last a few days, you wouldn’t swish a little in your mouth just to test your willpower would you?
Flexing willpower is most important in these life-and-death type situations.
Ah, My dad’s alma mater. Certainly a very respectable source — let’s check it out:
I have been eating precisely this sort of diet for several weeks now. In fact, the only thing I eat that could be described as processed in any way is whole-wheat pasta, which has exactly one ingredient: wheat. (Well, and I suppose my extra-virgin olive oil is also technically processed, as is the small amounts of kosher salt I use.) I absolutely feel that it is good for my brain and I feel a general sense of well-being; however, when I see or smell things my family members make, or see ads for fast food or desserts, it is extremely painful and arduous to overcome. I find myself literally scrambling for the mute button and shielding my eyes. (Smells are even tougher.)
Still from your source:
ORLY?
Yes, yes, she does go on to say:
Which would superficially seem to support your argument. But what she goes on to add is a tacit admission that the metaphor breaks down if you try to apply it as the direct analogy used upthread:
Two things. Which things apparently do not include exposing onesself to the temptations that one is trying to use willpower to avoid. To me, that makes the whole analogy moot. It’s great that people can strengthen their willpower, and this is valuable information that could help people do so. But it certainly does not contradict my assertion that avoiding exposure to the temptation is an important part of the effort, rather than being counterproductive as you have intimated.
I learned discipline (which is closely related to willpower) in the Navy. Here’s how I learned to use it – I make rules for myself, and these rules (in my mind) are made of iron. They can be bent, but only for an extremely good reason.
For example – I want to eat less (not diet, but eat less overall and for the rest of my life), so I’ve made a few rules. One of the rules is that 3 days a week, I get soup and an orange for lunch. The other two days I’m flexible and can get a burger or something.
Other rules I’ve made – on weeknights, I’m in bed reading by 8:30, with lights out by 9:30 (I get up at 5 for work). I can snack on a donut or something only once per week. 4 times per week I exercise for 20-30 minutes after work (usually 2 days cardio, 2 days weights).
For my writing, I’ve made the rule that I must write every single day – the only exception is my birthday. Even if I can only write 100 words, or for 20 minutes, because I’m busy and tired, I still must write something (for a novel or story I’m working on) every day.
So, IMO, you just have to make realistic rules that you can follow, and actually follow them. Give yourself reasonable outs, but not too much.
Great article on willpower here, I used it to quit smoking.
In a nutshell, willpower is like your liver, not your muscles. If you want your muscles to get bigger and stronger, you keep working it and exercising and it will get bigger. Your liver, on the other hand, seems to get stronger the more alcohol you drink, but actually you are damaging it.
Every time you give in to temptation, your willpower gets weaker until there’s none left.
Virtually every addict I know also smokes cigarettes. Why? Smoking cigarettes keeps your willpower at zero. You are giving in 10-20 times a day. If you want to strengthen your willpower, the key is to not give in to temptation.
Or (similarly but not exactly the same), the willingness to act in the face of temptation in the manner that, once temptation is removed, you will wish you had acted when it was there.
For me, the best approach is to be, for lack of a better term, as well-connected and undivided inside as one can be. If my self is an integrated thing, rather than having various components that don’t communicate well with each other, then there will be more internal consensus and agreement over which battles we’re going to fight at the cost of some momentary pleasure, and which ones we’re going to conclude can just wait for another time and aren’t going to feel any guilt about.
And having that internal consensus rather than dispute makes it easier to be in touch with the parts of me that are more cognizant of the big picture and what I really want, in the face of what I momentarily want.
ETA (sorry couldn’t resist the temptation ;)):
I tried using a donut as a Segway once, and it turned out to be utterly useless. I should have eaten it instead, but by then it was too dirty.
Read some of the intervening posts, and I just wanted to add something about exercise.
I think the idea that willpower is the opposite of exercise is well documented. The more often you give in to temptation, the harder it is to use willpower to resist it the next time. I believe stress is also in a similar category. People who can handle stress can’t handle it for long periods of time or sometimes snap under the strain. PTSD, for example. Too much stress and too much giving into temptation is bad for you.
On the other hand, exercise is not supposed to do that. If you run until you are exhausted, theoretically you should be able to run longer the next time. If you can lift X pounds today, tomorrow you should be able to lift X+1.
However, this is technically not true. Rest is an important part of any exercise regimen. If you skip rest, you risk serious injury to yourself. My OCD coworker, for example, was ordered by his doctor to stop exercising immediately or risk tearing his rotator cuff and worse, and he wasn’t even doing weight training, just P90X.
Therefore, comparing anything to a muscle implies “the more you use it, the stronger it gets,” when actually it should be “like anything else, too much exercise is bad for you.”
Willpower: the sheer and willful act of absolute self-control I exhibited in not killing my office mate and taking the fantastic kebob lunch he brought back to eat at his desk today.
Ah, you’re arguing with an opinion I don’t have. I see now.
I didn’t “intimate” that avoidance is counterproductive. What I said is that avoidance (or more specifically, removal of the impulse “trigger”) isn’t willpower. I don’t think someone is exhibiting willpower by clearing their cupboards of all sources of temptation. That’s definitely a workable strategy for dealing with impulsive behavior. Probably more effective than anything else, actually. But it’s not really the best test of one’s level of opposition to their impulses, IMHO. Willpower is tested when you’re confronted with an impulse. If you don’t feel the impulse because you’ve extinguished the triggers, what are you confronted with?
To be totally ridiculous and extreme, let’s say a guy cuts off his dick so he won’t cheat on his wife. Is this a testament to his willpower? Or is it evidence of his hard-core resolve to stop his non-monogamous behavior? Willpower and resolve are two different things, IMHO.
To be less extreme, I used to have really bad trichotillomania. I’d pull my hair out by the bunches. Finally, I made the tough decision to cut off all my hair. I went from shoulder-length hair to a buzz cut in a matter of weeks. My hair-pulling didn’t stop, but it decreased significantly. By cutting off my hair, did I exert my willpower? Or was I just very desperate to cure myself of an impulse disorder?
Later, as my hair-pulling returned as a serious problem, I adopted another strategy. I would force myself to be “good” during the day, when I was in public, and then allow myself to pull once I was home. IMHO, this was me exerting serious willpower since I was constantly having to exert my “power” over my “will”. Cutting off my hair, as ballsy as it was, wasn’t even in the same universe as far as difficulty goes.
I think people are reading entirely too much into the “willpower is a muscle” analogy.
And your last sentence is confusing to me. I would tell a person to regularly exercise, within moderation, to develop and maintain physical fitness. I would tell another person to regularly practice self-control, within moderation, to develop willpower. Just as you can go overboard with weight-training, you can go overboard with self-control training. In that way, they are quite analogous.
And just as with fitness, I think everyone has their finite reserve. I can lift weights every day and I’ll never have a body like Ms. Universe. But I will definitely be stronger than I’d otherwise be. And if I do something every day that I don’t really want to do, whether that be walk up a flight of stairs, sit up straight when I’m tired, or eat an extra piece of broccoli, I’m building my resistance to my inner crybaby so that it becomes just a little easier for me to say no to another drink, another cookie, or another barroom fight.
If hardship doesn’t toughen us up, then why do we bother shipping recruits to boot camp? Is that just a big farce? (Maybe it is. It’s not a rhetorical question.)
Just personal and anecdotal experience, but to me, yes, definitely. The more time you spend making difficult decisions, the easier it gets. You build up the functional facility.
I’ve talked to lawyers and judges; their first few days on the job are incredibly difficult and stressful. After that, they start getting used to it. Making hard decisions becomes easier with practice. I also had a nice conversation on this point with an HR specialist who has to fire people a lot.
I won’t say the metaphor with muscular exercise is very good – but I think it is of some descriptive value. You shouldn’t reject it outright.
My birthday is one of the few days of the year I am most likely to do some writing! I make it a gift to myself! (One Christmas, I wrote the big climactic reveal-all-the-secrets scene for a story! Great Christmas present!)
Anyway, definite agreement: willpower and/or discipline entails internalizing the rules. The rules have to come from within. If you feel they are imposed upon you from the outside, you’re more likely to resent them and to turn your thoughts against them. But when they are seen as part of your own personal internal character – they aren’t “yours” as much as they are “you” – they have greater force.
1- priority - how important is it really?
2- new or old - is this a new problem you need/want to address or is an old problem that you need to double your effort to
3- getting it done is better than trying to do it perfectly and, failing
sometimes it is easier to fix than you think:
“After weeks of watching the roof leak
I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board.”
Browsing addictive internet sites and watching TV should also fall into this category.
A good strategy for improving your daily willpower is to start the day doing something productive. Make breakfast, work out, or even make your bed. If you start out by giving in to temptation (checking email, browsing the internet, watching TV), then you’ll start the day by diminishing your willpower. Doing anything productive for the rest of the day will be harder.
I will try to avoid the, ah, temptation to argue with you about what you previously said (or intimated) because that hardly seems productive.
I do find it ironic though that you accuse *me *of arguing with an opinion you don’t hold, and then in the next paragraph tell me that you don’t think my approach (removing temptation as much as possible) constitutes willpower, or an exhibition of same. I really thought I was clear that the whole point was to avoid using willpower, because it is in such limited supply and so easily depleted.
I just realized something else: how much per day do you endure stress/temptation? At my job, I get stress about 5-6 hours a day doing my normal stuff (which is heavy on deadlines, with 10-15 minutes between classes to make emergency handouts or copies,) and then marathon 3.5 hour meetings about pure BS set by idiots who don’t know what they are doing. So, lets say 8 hours a day (not including breaks, lunch, and after work where I’m still stressing about what happened to or will happen tomorow) of fairly max-level stress.
What happens if you jogged 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?
There are some studies that suggest “willpower” can be depleted the longer we resist temptation. The idea is that by giving in to temptation in a small way, we can replenish willpower during the day.
