11 Habits to Increase Your Willpower
11 habits to increase your willpower from “Willpower” by Roy Baumeiste
Improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.
Most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.
“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” — Charles Darwin
1. Set goals
The first step in self-control is to set a goal.
“The man who assumes success tends already to have success.” Norman Vincent Peale
“On the whole, tho I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” — Benjamin Franklin
2. Make a plan
The monthly planners did much better and stuck with it much longer than the daily planners.
Identify the next action for each thing on your todo list.
The simple act of making a plan clears your mind.
Set up your life so that you have a realistic chance to succeed.
3. One change at a time
The more things we try to change at once the greater the chance we will fail at all of them.
If you’re a smoker, don’t try quitting while you’re also on a diet.
Choose one thing you want to change and focus on it.
“Genius is patience.” — Samuel Smiles
4. Eat enough food
No glucose = no willpower.
Controlling your emotions starts with controlling your glucose.
Making decisions uses up glucose.
If you have a test, an important meeting, or a vital project, don’t take it on without glucose.
Eat first. Get some healthy food in your body, wait half an hour, and then the decision won’t seem so overwhelming.
When you eat, go for the slow burn. Foods that are converted into glucose quickly are said to have a high glycemic index.
As the body uses glucose during self-control, it starts to crave sweet things to eat.
When people have more demands for self-control in their daily lives, their hunger for sweets increases.
5. Get enough sleep
When you’re tired, sleep.
Get enough sleep. A rested will is a stronger will.
6. Hold yourself accountable
When you make an agreement and you don’t keep it, you undermine your own self-trust. You can fool everybody but yourself, and you’re going to pay for that, so you should be aware of the agreements you make.
Whenever people focused on themselves, they seemed to compare what they saw with some sort of idea of what they should be like.
When people were placed in front of a mirror or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. They worked harder, gave more valid answers to questionnaires and their actions were more consistent with their values.
Self-awareness involves a process of comparing yourself to standards.
7. Do hard things
Suffering makes the spirit flower.
Things to try to improve self-control: use your left hand, correct your posture, say yes and no rather than yeah and nah, don’t say curse words.
Anything that forced children to exercise their self-control muscle can help strengthen their willpower: taking music lessons, memorizing poems, saying prayers, minding their table manners, avoiding the use of profanity, and writing thank you notes.
“Getting your brain wired into little goals and achieving them, that helps you achieve the bigger things you should be able to do. It’s not just practicing the specific thing. It’s always making things more difficult than they should be, and never falling short, so that you have that extra reserve, that tank, so you know you can always go further than your goal. For me that’s what discipline is. It’s repetition and practice.” — David Blaine
8. Be generous
Charity and generosity have been linked to self-control.
Thinking of others can increase your own self-discipline.
Willpower enables us to get along with others and override impulses that are based on personal short-term interests.
SEALs have the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear, and ask: how can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the “fist” of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others.
9. Be consistent
Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.
Orderly habits improve self-control in the long run by triggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy.
Use your self-control to form a daily habit and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
Workers who produce steadily over a long period of time tend to be the most successful in the long run.
Set aside time to do one thing and one thing only. But you can’t do anything else productive during that time. It’s write or nothing.
Successful people don’t use their willpower as a last-ditch defense to stop themselves from disaster.
10. Love yourself
Every social problem can be traced to peoples lack of self-love.
The greatest love of all is love of oneself.
The key to success is self-love.
11. Never say never
Telling yourself “I can have this later” operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree.
When it comes to food, never say never. Vow that you will eat all of it sooner or later, but just not tonight.
“To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” — Mark Twain
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