The good news about willpower

As I have mentioned in a few threads in this forum, I have been doing some research into the psychology of behaviour, motivation, and change.

One of the most encouraging things I have read is that willpower is not absolute; it can be trained, much like a muscle.

On the positive side, this means that the more you successfully practice willpower, the easier it becomes. That's why sometimes you can look at someone who has been successfully improving their fitness for a long time and think "I could never be like that; I just don't have the willpower." You have it, it's just underdeveloped right now. Time, practice and challenge will strengthen your willpower. Start small and progress. You wouldn't go into a gym for the first time and try to lift the heaviest weights in the room; you work up to it.

On the flip side is that, just like a muscle, our willpower can get fatigued from constant use. Experiments where people were made to do things that required willpower, like resist a delicious food, found that afterward, their performance on other willpower related tasks was lower than the control group who did not have to face the first willpower challenge. Practically, this means the more times you have to use willpower in a day, the less you have left in reserve. I think anyone who has come home from a long stressful day at work and dived into a pint of Haagen Dazs can relate to this phenomenon.


I think some of the ways this information can be applied to weight loss or fitness are:

1. Start small with new habits. If you want to exercise, pick a small, reasonable goal, and when that becomes easy, increase it. If you are trying to change your eating habits, again, start with something easy, build your "willpower muscle", and then move on to the next challenge.

2. Don't resist temptation, avoid it. Why deplete your willpower by forcing yourself to always have to make a conscious choice to do the things you need to do to get to your goal? If there are no chips in the cupboard, you can't eat chips (unless you go to the store, but store chips are still easier to resist than right-in-front-of-your-face chips). If you don't go home to change between work and the gym, you can't sit on the couch and turn on the TV instead.

3. Go easy on yourself, especially at first. If you just joined a gym for the first time, would you look at the biggest guy in there and say to yourself "why can't I just lift what he lifts? There must be something wrong with me" There is nothing wrong with you. If you don't train your willpower, it will be weaker. It doesn't have to stay that way.


I know some people reading this will think to themselves "that's a bunch of BS; just get up and do it, already". The thing is, these are the "big guys at the gym"; the ones who have been practicing willpower their whole lives (or at least for some time)and have developed it to a point where it's easy to make the right choices in the face of temptation. Are the rest us weak? Well, technically yes, right now we are; but the point is that by accepting our starting point and building from where we are, we can become stronger.

To some, this may sound like an excuse. I say it's only an excuse if it stops you from even trying. If you can't lift the big weights because you aren't strong enough, use the small ones. Accept yourself and start where you are.

PS, in case you want to read more about this, I recommend starting with "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, and "Making Habits, Breaking Habits" by Jeremy Dean.