Mental toughness is just as important as physical toughness. Strong Willpower is paramount to success in our society. However self control is often not as arduous as it is made to seem. It essentially boils down to practise. And with practise we can become perfect at it.
From the book, I learned that strong willpower comes from both physiological and psychological reasons. It is not a matter of our mind only. Add to this evolutionary traits we have picked up, and you have a recipe for even weaker willpower. We are more susceptible to failing in our willpower challenge when we are physically exhausted. On the other hand with the right mindset, even the most dificult of challenges become easy.
In her book The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal talks about the centers in our brain which are responsible for willpower and self-control. She writes about how the human has evolved. Instead of gradually removing old harmful traits, our minds have kept adding new behaviours which conflict with the old traits. Thus every person, is made up of two selves—an older, intrinsic self, and a more evolved self. Every willpower challenge boils down to a battle between the two. The self that wins, dictates the success or failure of our willpower challenge.
While our primitive selves prefer short term rewards, our evolved selves prefer to wait for the long term.
Lets take an example. Why is it so hard for most people (including me), to resist chocolate? It is because our brain is designed to binge on foods with high sugar content. Why? simply because high sugar translates to high carbohydrates, which means more energy. While such a simple analogy would help if we pictured man of primitive times where food was scarce. Sugary foods would give us energy and keep us alive.
But is the same relevant today? Unfortunately we have progressed from the days of food scarcity. For the most of us we no longer need to worry about food scarcity. So what would happen if we start binging on sugary foods? Since our bodies are well nutritioned, they would only convert these sugary foods to fats. This is an extremely unhealthy practise. This why we suffer from rampant rates of obesity in present times. Its because we have made our fondness for such foods, our weakness.
So you see the quintessential sweet tooth, is actually the primitive brain at work—striving to hoard energy for difficult times.
I have also learned how some of our psychological mindsets make us more susceptible to temptation.
For example, we have a tendency to picture our future selves as superheroes. Not only are they more focused they are also more able. They are capable of solving even the most difficult problems with ease. Sadly this is never true. Our future selves our just like us. Maybe a slightly more able, but that comes from experience.
The question is why do we put such high responsibilities on our future selves. It helps to know that internally we perceive our future selves as strangers, and so it becomes easier for us to dump our responsibilities on them. This is the single reason why we keep procrastinating, and putting of tasks. Internally we are all damsels in distress, waiting for our futures selves to rescue us.
If these points made sense to you, I am sure the rest of the book will make sense too.
I will quickly jot down some points that I learned from this book.
Willpower is a combination of three powers — I will, I won't and I want. If you are consistently failing in your willpower challenge try to frame the challenge in a different manner. For example If you are trying to give up smoking, instead of saying 'I won't smoke', you could frame the challenge as 'I will lead a healthy life'. Studies show that 'I will' tasks are easier for our brain to follow as they motivate us more.
Willpower is like a muscle. The more you practise using willpower, the better you will become at it. But just like muscles, the willpower muscle may get fatigued, and occasionally fail. Don't be disheartened by this, as it is only too natural.
Don't make your willpower challenge into a moral battle. Instead of thinking about whats right and whats wrong, focus on your goals. This point is so important, that I may just as well quote the author
Thinking in terms of "right" and "wrong" instead of remembering what we really want will trigger competing impulses and license self-sabotizing behaviour. For change to stick, we need to identify with the goal itself, not the halo glow we get from being good
The "halo" she is speaking of is the good feeling we get when we accomplish a part of our challenge. Its wise not to get distracted by this feeling, as it gives us the permission to go easy on ourselves.
Do not mistake wanting for happiness. Our brains of mistake the promise of reward, or desire, for happiness itself. It helps to remember that giving in to these desires wont give us the happiness we get from meeting our goals.
Feeling bad leads to giving in. When you fail at your willpower challenge, simply accept it and move on. Feeling guilty about your failure will only tempt your brain to search for sources of relief and feel weaker. In short it will give us the permission to binge.
Do not put your future on sale. We have a tendency to tone down our future rewards, so that it gives us permission to chase our short term goals. The author terms this as self-discounting.
When we contemplate the future, our imagination fails us in predictable ways. Faroff rewards seem less compelling, so we choose immediate gratification
Your social group matters. Science shows us that when we are in a social group, we tend to imitate the behaviour of others in the social group. If you are constantly failing at your willpower challenge, try to mingle with a group that believes in the same goals. This may seem intuitive enough, If you wish to quit smoking don't surround yourself with smokers when they smoke
Self Awareness. Realise that we cannot control the thoughts that come into our minds. It is only natural for our minds to be flooded with thoughts about a million things. So it may so happen that you will find yourself thinking about some temptation you wish to avoid. Trying to suppress this thought will only backfire, and make you want to have it more. Instead be patient and realise that we can only control our actions, and instead of suppressing on the desire, focus on what you will loose if fail in the challenge. Self-Awareness is key to mastering self-control.
For each of the points given above, there is roughly an entire chapter. This article is only a small iota of the book, that I have covered. It is always best to read from the book, than from an article about it.
If you are struggling with a personal challenge or if you felt that this article helped you, be sure to check out the book at goodreads.com