Bigger Leaner Stronger

by Michael Matthews

  Minimizing the negative side effects of stress in your life not only helps you maintain a healthy level of self-possession but also opens the door to improvement through “exercising” your discipline.

  And how do you do that—exercise and improve your resolve? Keep reading to find out!

  Key Takeaways

  Anything that causes stress, whether mental or physical, drains our supply of willpower and reduces our capacity for self-control. And anything we can do to reduce stress in our lives and improve mood, improves our self-control.

  The same people who use food, alcohol, television, shopping, and surfing the internet as coping strategies for stress often rate them as ineffective for reducing stress levels.

  The next time you face a willpower challenge, deliberately slow your breathing to about 10 to 15 seconds per breath, or four to six breaths per minute.

  Taking time to properly relax every day not only reduces stress hormones and increases willpower but helps preserve health as well.

  Aromatherapy is a couple-thousand-year-old method of reducing stress and promoting relaxation, and the easiest way to incorporate this into a daily relaxation routine is to use a diffuser.

  Both giving and receiving a massage can relieve stress, reduce pain, anxiety, and depression, and increase immunity.

  Regular sex reduces anxiety, stress, and depression and improves mood, happiness, and resilience.

  Our perception of stress as harmful is what really gives it teeth. That is, getting overly stressed about stress is what really pushes us into the mud.

  If you sleep too little too regularly, you’ll find yourself more susceptible to stress and temptation and lacking the mental energy needed to keep your good habits in play and your bad ones at bay.

  Nighttime light exposure suppresses your body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness.

  A good rule of thumb is to keep light after dark as dim as possible, and sleep in complete darkness.

  Reducing or eliminating your nighttime exposure to blue light in particular is an effective way to preserve healthy levels of melatonin production.

  The more time we spend with our devices, the worse our mental state will likely be.

  Classical music can sharpen your mind, engage your emotions, lower blood pressure, lessen physical pain and depression, and help you sleep better.

  Green tea and walking—especially walking in nature—are powerful stress busters.

  Regular hot baths are healthful and restorative.

  Exposing yourself to a constant barrage of bad news, scare tactics, and morbid reminders of your mortality increases the likelihood of overeating, overspending, and other willpower failures.

  Regular exercise reduces cravings for both food and drugs, increases heart rate variability, increases resistance to stress and depression, and even optimizes overall brain function.

  In many ways, regular bouts of stress are conducive to your overall health and well-being.

  It’s not a stretch to say that the overall quality and longevity of our lives is going to depend heavily on how well we can relax.

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  14

  Use It or Lose It: How to Train Your Willpower

  The greatest discovery of my generation is that you can change your circumstances by changing your attitudes of mind.

  —WILLIAM JAMES

  You’ve probably heard that willpower is like a muscle.

  That it only has so much strength, and every time you “flex” it, it becomes a little bit weaker, until finally, it fails.

  If that’s true, it would also mean that you could train your “willpower muscle” like a physical one and make it stronger and more resistant to fatigue.

  Scientists are still working to see how correct this hypothesis really is, but we all do seem to “run out” of self-control juice at some point, leaving us especially susceptible to temptation.1

  This is one of the reasons why researchers have observed that, regardless of the types of tasks performed, people’s self-control is at its highest in the morning and steadily declines as the day wears on.2

  (You can use this knowledge to your advantage by doing your toughest and most unpalatable work and tasks, including working out, first thing in the day, when your will is strongest.)