There’s also good evidence that we can indeed increase our overall willpower by “training” it with regular, small acts of self-control.
Studies show this can be accomplished in various ways, including eating fewer sweets, tracking spending, correcting our posture, refraining from swearing, squeezing a handgrip every day, and using our nondominant hand for various tasks.3
What we’re really training here is what psychologists call the “pause-and-plan response,” which involves pausing before we act, noticing what we’re about to do, and choosing wisely.4
By doing this, we can better condition ourselves to successfully navigate the many irritating moments in life where we have to resist sweets, fight emotional impulses, ignore shiny distractions, compel ourselves to do things, and even make trivial purchase decisions, all of which seems to pull from the same willpower reserve.5
So, let’s discuss several effective ways to consciously train our willpower and self-control in much the same way as we train our muscular and cardiovascular capacities.
Don’t Fight the Urge, Ride the Wave
You’ve just hit the couch after a long, tiring day, and your mind begins to wander.
Suddenly, a glowing pint of ice cream materializes, and your salivary glands snap to attention. No, you say to yourself, anything but ice cream! Don’t think about ice cream!
The commands don’t work, though. The harder you try to banish the vision of the cold, creamy dessert, the more it dominates your consciousness and nervous system. Finally, the only way to extinguish the desire is to spoon the stuff down your gullet.
The problem in this scenario isn’t the fall into the quicksand, but rather the forceful attempt to escape. What should you have done instead?
Research shows that a willingness to think thoughts and feel feelings without having to act on them is an effective method of dealing with a wide variety of challenges, such as mood disorders, food cravings, and addiction.6
On the other hand, trying to suppress negative thoughts and feelings, like self-criticism, worries, sadness, or cravings, can lead to greater feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression, and even overeating.7
In other words, instead of “fighting the urge,” if you can “ride the wave” until it crests and peters out, cooler heads can prevail.
This isn’t hard to do, either. When a disturbing thought or longing appears, face it calmly instead of trying to forcefully eject it from your mind. You don’t have to contemplate its meaning or read into it. You just have to accept that it’s there and play it down as something unimportant that will fade.
“Riding the wave” is particularly relevant to dieting, as research shows that the more you try to suppress thoughts about food, the more likely you are to struggle with cravings and binge eating.8
A much better strategy for dealing with hunger and cravings can be found in a study conducted by scientists at the University of Washington to help people smoke fewer cigarettes.9
The strategy starts with noticing and accepting the undesirable feelings. Then, remind yourself that while you may not always be able to control where your mind wanders, you can always control how you respond. Finally, before indulging in whatever has your eye, remember the goal that’s at stake and why you committed to abstaining in the first place.
You can use this formula as a “surfboard” for riding out the waves of wish and want until they crash and dissolve.
A simple way to implement it in your life is to put a mandatory 10-minute wait time in place before you allow yourself to act on a craving or other impulsive urge to do something you know you shouldn’t.
This may not seem like much time, but research conducted by scientists at Princeton University shows that it can make a big difference in how you perceive the situation.10
The wait not only gives you time to pause and reflect on the matter, but it also tarnishes the allure of immediate gratification. By pushing the reward just 10 minutes into the future, you can disarm its most effective weapon for undermining your intentions.
This strategy can be used to overcome “I will” challenges as well.
If you’re dreading something you know you need to do, commit to doing it for 10 minutes and then decide whether to continue. Chances are, you’ll find that once you’re in motion, you’ll want to keep going.
Do It for (Future) You
I want the works
I want the whole works
Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises
Of all shapes and sizes
And now
Don’t care how, I want it now
Don’t care how, I want it now
Those words were sung by Veruca in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and if you listen closely, you can hear millions of people softly singing along every day.
They want it all, and they want it now. Food, entertainment, money, love, abs, you name it. We live in the age of instant gratification, and it appears to be a race to the bottom.
The rub with rewards is this: the longer we have to wait for them, the less desirable they become. Economists refer to how much we “discount” a reward’s value based on how long it will take to receive it as our time preference.
People with a high time preference discount heavily and care far more about immediate satisfaction than long-term rewards or consequences. Those with a low time preference, however, exhibit the opposite behaviors, caring more about future pleasure and foregoing immediate prizes to maximize it.
Some people discount the future more steeply than others, and studies show the higher someone’s time preference is, the worse their self-control will be.11 Because of this, they’ll also be more likely to behave impulsively and have problems with addiction.
That helps explain why consumer credit card debt is soaring, why fast-food joints are far more profitable than gyms, and why millions of people still light up cigarettes every day. When it comes to the crunch, one bird—or Big Mac—in the hand is often worth many more in the bush.
Like most positive and meaningful things in life, fitness is very much an exercise (pun intended) in time preference.
How much discomfort are you willing to endure now to get that bigger, leaner, and stronger body? How many immediate rewards are you willing to refuse in pursuit of larger, delayed ones? How well can you keep your eyes on the horizon?
One powerful way to lower our time preference and increase our chances for long-term success is to change how we view the nature of today’s and tomorrow’s rewards.
For example, if I gave you a $200 check postdated a couple of months from now and then tried to buy it back for $100 today, would you accept the deal? Probably not.
What if I gave you $100 now and tried to buy it back with a $200 postdated check? Would you make that deal? Again, probably not. Why is that?
Simple: we don’t want to lose something we have, even if we’re going to gain something of greater value later.
Psychologists refer to this as loss aversion, and it’s a trap many would-be dieters in particular fall into.12 When we’re hovering over a doughnut, it sure seems a lot more desirable in the moment than a little extra weight loss at some indistinct point in the future.
We can turn this psychological quirk to our advantage, however, by reframing willpower challenges. Research shows that by thinking about the future reward at stake first and how giving in now will sacrifice progress toward it or some part of it, we can lower our chances of acting against our best long-term interests.13
For instance, when you face the prospect of putting down a pile of piping hot pizza with all your favorite toppings—for the third time that week—you could take a moment to imagine having achieved your ideal body composition.
The more vividly you can experience this, the better. Really feel your rippling abs, bulging biceps, and powerful chest. Envision how y1our new c
lothes fit you, and how proud you are whenever you catch a glimpse of your new body in a reflection.
Then think about how digging into the pizza will mean giving all that up and watching your body bulge and bloat. Chances are the big grease wheel will suddenly look a lot less appetizing.
You can also institute the mandatory 10-minute wait we spoke about before indulging in an undesirable activity. If 10 minutes of waiting (and visualizing the long-term rewards at stake) isn’t enough to squash the desire to indulge, then allow yourself to, but not before the 10-minute mark.
Another highly effective way to change your time preference is a strategy called precommitment, which entails taking action now to strengthen your dedication to a behavior and ward off any underhanded attempts at self-sabotage.14
Much like how Ulysses instructed his men to lash him to the mast of their ship to ensure he didn’t fall prey to the beautiful songs of the sea Sirens, you too can create systems to protect you from your lower self.
With the right precommitment strategies, you can put safeguards in place that make it much harder to fail. These safeguards consist of anything you can do today that makes it difficult and uncomfortable to change your mind tomorrow.
By being proactive like this, you’ll find it easier to keep your impulses and feelings under control and stay on course.
For instance, if you have trouble with procrastinating on the internet instead of working, you can download a program called Cold Turkey (www.getcoldturkey.com) that allows you to block specific websites and applications or turn your internet off altogether for a set period of time.
If sticking to a diet is your struggle, you can precommit by throwing out all tempting junk foods in the house and not rebuying them, preparing healthy lunches to bring to work every day, or putting money on the line on a website like www.dietbet.com.
If you want to precommit to exercising regularly, you can pay for an annual membership at your gym instead of going month-to-month, sign up for an online coaching service, or recruit a friend to join you in your journey.
Another tool that has helped many thousands of people precommit successfully to all kinds of goals is the website www.stickk.com.
Stickk allows you to set a goal and time frame, wager money, and decide what happens with it if you fail. (It could go to a charity, for example, or even an organization you don’t like, which can be a stronger incentive.)
You can also designate a “referee” who will monitor your progress and confirm the truthfulness of your reports, and you can invite supporters to cheer you on.
Let’s All Get Fat and Jump Off Bridges
According to several studies, just 10 percent of people eat enough fruit and vegetables to meet their bodies’ most basic nutritional needs, and just 20 percent exercise enough to preserve their general health and well-being.15
What do they do instead?
32 percent eat fast food at least one to three times per week, 70 percent eat more sugar than they should, and 30 percent would rather do housework, file their tax returns, or clean out their garage than give time over to working out.16
Statistics like these are supposed to “scare us straight,” but they can actually have the exact opposite effect because they remind us that “everyone else is doing it too.” And when that’s the case, how wrong can it really be?
Even if you’re not inclined to think this way, don’t assume you’re immune to the underlying psychology. It’s comforting to think that we’re not like that, that we singularly chart our own courses in our lives, uninfluenced by how others think and act. This simply isn’t true.
Extensive research shows that what others do—and even what we think they do—has a marked effect on our thoughts and behaviors whether we realize it or not, especially when the people we’re observing are close to us.17
When we’re not sure how to think or act, we tend to look at how other people think and act and follow along, even if subconsciously. We’re all instinctively drawn to the idea that there’s safety in numbers.
In the world of marketing, this effect is known as “social proof,” and it’s used in myriad ways to influence us. This is why customer reviews and testimonials are vital to every business (“if all these people say it’s good, it must be good!”), why companies pay exorbitant sums to secure celebrity endorsements (“if David Beckham likes it, it must be good!”), and why media mentions are so powerful (“if Forbes has featured it, it must be good!”).
This also occurs naturally in our everyday lives. Whenever we tell ourselves behaviors are acceptable because other people are doing them too, or because of how “normal” they are, we’re using social proof.
According to research conducted by scientists at Dartmouth College, we can pick up anything from temporary solutions to long-term habits this way, and they can come from people we do and don’t know, including even characters we see in movies.18
The reality is mindsets and habits are far more contagious than most of us realize. For example:
Those with obese friends and family members are far more likely to become obese themselves.19
The more a student believes that other students cheat on tests, the more likely they are to cheat (even if they’re wrong).20
The more people believe that others underreport income on their taxes, the more likely they are to cheat the IRS themselves.21
The more teetotalers hang out with people who drink alcohol, the more likely they are to start drinking too.22
The more nonsmokers hang out with smokers, the more likely they are to take up the habit.23
The more time people spend with those who feel lonely, the more likely they are to feel lonely themselves.24
Even if overeating, drinking, or smoking isn’t your thing, seeing others indulge in these vices can encourage you to give in to your impulses as well.25
Seeing someone overspend might subconsciously trigger you to overeat. Hearing about someone skipping class might help you justify skipping your workout. Reading about someone cheating on their partner might make it more acceptable for you to cheat on your diet.
We’ve all heard that we’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with, and an abundance of scientific evidence says this is true to one degree or another for every single one of us.
Even if we don’t directly adopt the negative attitudes, ideas, and behaviors of those we’re around most, their mere presence will act on us in insidious ways, making it harder for us to do the things we want to do and become the people we want to be.
I’ve made the mistake of keeping a number of “toxic” people in my life for too long for one reason or another, and the blows and bruises I’ve suffered as a result have taught me that no matter how close you might have once been to someone or how interesting or “fun” they might be, there’s a point where their fellowship is no longer worth the price.
Remember this when you begin your fitness journey, because such people are always the first to criticize and question it—and anything positive you might want to do, for that matter. I have a hardline policy for these types of folk—an abrupt and decisive parting of ways—but whatever you do, just don’t let them stop you.
Fortunately, positive attitudes and behaviors are contagious as well. If we surround ourselves with people who are generally upbeat, uplifting, and possessed of higher than average willpower and self-control, we too can “catch” these traits.26
In fact, research shows that simply thinking about people with high levels of self-control can temporarily increase our willpower.27
So, whether you tend to struggle with diet and exercise compliance or not, you can make your life easier by doing three things:
Limit your exposure to instances of people failing willpower challenges.While this is generally good advice, watching others lose control can increase resolve in some people by prompting them
to view such lapses as threats to long-term goals, not as tempting invitations to follow suit.28
I happen to be one of these types of people. Other people’s failures make me want to work harder to succeed, not waver and lose resolve.
In fact, I view much of what most people consider “normal” as highly negative and undesirable. So much so that I believe that a reliable compass for decision-making is to first ask what “most” people would do in such a situation, and then considering the merits of doing the exact opposite.
Join forces with at least one person who’s on the same path as you and making progress.You don’t even have to physically make the journey together. Regular email check-ins can be enough to feed, and feed on, each other’s success.
Read or listen to stories about how others have gotten fit.This is one of the reasons I interview men and women on my podcast who have used my programs, products, and services to transform their bodies and lives.
I hear from listeners every week who write to tell me how motivating they find these interviews because they reinforce my promise that everyone listening—including you—can do it too.
The Trap of Being “Good” and “Bad”
Have you ever told yourself that you were “good” when you did what you needed to do or stayed strong, but “bad” when you procrastinated or acted impulsively?
Have you ever used “good” behavior as permission to be “bad”?
Of course you have. Of course I have. Of course every human who has ever lived has.
Scientists call this moral licensing, and it can powerfully undermine our self-control. When we assign moral values to our actions, they become fodder for our desire to simply feel good (enough) about ourselves, even when we’re sabotaging our long-term aims or harming others.
By being “good,” we reckon, we “earn” the “right” to be a little (or a lot) “bad.”
For example, if someone basks in the glow of having exercised and stuck to their meal plan for the day, they might find themselves oversleeping and overeating the next day while still feeling virtuous, guilt-free, and in control.
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