8 Science-Backed Ways to Increase Your Willpower
Willpower. Discipline. Self-control.
If only you had enough, you’d always be able to stick to what you say you’re going to eat. You’d go to bed on time. You’d exercise more.
Just like David Goggins, you’d be running 100-mile races on broken bones!
But you don’t have enough willpower to follow through on any of those things consistently. So you’d like to learn how to get more…
The first thing you should know is that if you overeat, or if you don’t exercise as much as you’d like to, it’s not because you don’t have willpower.
I’ve talked before about how Discipline Isn’t the Answer to Overeating, which I believe is an exceptionally important point to make BEFORE we say anything about increasing willpower.
However, it doesn’t hurt to have a little more.
If you’d like to practice increasing your willpower, here are 8 ways you can do it:
1. Breathe Mindfully
Practice sitting quieting and focusing on your breath for several minutes. This doesn’t need to be a long meditation, you can start with five minutes, or as little as a minute. Notice each inhale and each exhale. You might say in your head, “inhale” on each in-breath and “exhale” on each out-breath, or you might count your breaths silently.
The key to increasing your willpower is to notice the little impulses that come up: an itch on your face, leg, arm, or head. You might notice a sound you want to pay attention to, or impulses to move and shift. But the practice is to sit with each impulse and notice them without acting on them.
2. Breathe Slowly
When you have a craving, typically you can feel yourself growing more anxious and agitated. You might notice your heart rate increasing or your breathing becoming more shallow. What’s happening is that your sympathetic nervous system is becoming more active, and you’re entering what’s popularly called a “fight-or-flight” state. When your fight-or-flight system is activated, you become more impulsive and it feels harder to think clearly.
Slowing down your breathing will activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the calming system sometimes known as “rest-and-digest.” There are many patterns you can follow to slow down your breathing but I prefer box breathing: inhale for a count of four, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold for four.
If you repeat that box four times, you’ll have slowed down your breathing for one minute, which is all it takes to activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
3. Relax
Much of the time I find that my students are either not taking any breaks at all during the day, or the breaks that they are taking aren’t restorative.
For example, doing chores or something else on your to-do list usually doesn’t feel restful. Scrolling on your phone doesn’t usually feel restful. Listening to a book or a podcast when you go out for a walk is going to feel less restful than allowing yourself to walk without any additional inputs.
You might instead try a mindful walk, practicing a progressive relaxation meditation or yoga nidra, or a non-sleep deep rest protocol, such as the ones by Kelly Boys in the Waking Up meditation app. Getting into a deep relaxation state, similar to slow breathing, will help to bring the part of your brain that makes more calculated, less impulsive decisions back online.
4. Practice Forgiveness and Self-Compassion
Studies show that people who are able to forgive themselves, as opposed to beating themselves up after they have a willpower lapse, are more likely to get back on track, and get back on track faster.
A lot of people believe, “I can't be compassionate because if I do, if I stop holding myself to this extremely high standard, everything will fall apart and I’ll be an absolute freakin’ mess.” That's not the case. When we practice forgiveness and self-compassion, and use understanding and kindness in these cases rather than berating ourselves, we are more likely to act in alignment with who we want to be.
Negativity is not motivating, no matter how much you think it may be. And, negative affect can actually increase our desire for immediate gratification. If you’re accustomed to using food, for example, to escape uncomfortable feelings, then heaping on self-criticism, guilt, and shame for a behavioral transgression is going to increase your cravings to emotionally eat.
5. Wait
Once you feel the initial craving hit, wait 10 minutes and see how you're feeling afterwards. If your craving is for something you can see, like a bowl of candy or something that you don't want to eat, try to get rid of the visual trigger for it. In the reverse, if you're trying to get yourself to do something, to get some work done, fold that laundry pile, work out, commit to doing it for 10 minutes, and then let yourself off the hook when those 10 minutes are up.
The key is to actually let yourself off the hook after 10 minutes. If you really still want the food, eat the food. Or if you really don’t want to be folding laundry, stop folding laundry when those 10 minutes are up. It’s important to stay in integrity with yourself.
6. Urge Surf
Urge surfing is all about increasing our tolerance for distress—in other words, urge surfing is increasing our ability to sit with and tolerate uncomfortable cravings and urges. A lot of people have never actually tried sitting with an urge before. When you have a craving, often it feels like it’s going to get worse and worse until you finally explode. Interestingly, the “lifespan” of a craving appears to only be an average of 20 minutes. If you can ride that out, many times it will go away on it’s own—without you having to give in to it.
To start, acknowledge that a craving is what you’re experiencing. Focus on where and how you feel this urge or craving. Maybe you’re feeling tightness in your chest or a strong “pull” in your stomach. Notice the strength and duration of these feelings. Do they come and go or do they get stronger over time? Ask yourself how you’re experiencing these urges and cravings in terms of your thoughts and emotions. And then Give yourself five to twenty minutes to observe and to breathe through these feelings and sensations. During this time, visualize your breath as a surfboard gliding across these thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
7. Acknowledge Your Thoughts Nonjudgmentally
Your brain might be telling you that the only way to get this to go away is to give into it. Or your brain might be saying “if you'd do this, you're a bad person.” That's not a fact. That's just a belief. And so what we can do with our thoughts is just to notice that they're there. “I'm having the thought: if I do this, it's bad.” “I'm having a thought: if I do this, it's the only way to make myself feel better.”
The way that some mindfulness practitioners will describe this is to notice your thoughts like clouds passing in the sky. And when we can create that distance, and stop believing everything that you think, then you can start to push through and see what is fact and what's belief.
Relatedly, a lot of people just want to push cravings away, to get rid of them. But we can use our mindfulness to accept that we're having cravings. And accepting them does not mean that you're just giving in to every impulse, it just means accepting that you have them, accepting that they're there. And accepting that it's normal for them to be there. Accepting that they will always be a part of us that no matter how good you get, and using your willpower, you will always have some impulses.
8. Indulge Mindfully
I believe one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your relationships with food and exercise is to mindfully indulge. Every single person I have led a guided mindful eating session with has told me it sapped the power from the trigger food.
What does mindfully indulging involve? Paying attention to:
What you’re thinking
What you’re feeling emotionally
What’s in your environment
Your internal environment, including hunger, sensations of comfort/discomfort, how your emotions feel in your body
What you can detect with your five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, touch
Mindful indulgence probably seems really counterintuitive to you if you've never done it before. The best example I can give you is mindful eating, but if you choose to skip an exercise session, you can mindfully relax as well.
4 Ways You’re Creating More Willpower Battles for Yourself
Even though the 8 tips above can help you increase your willpower, you will still struggle if you aren’t addressing a few issues that run larger and deeper. If you don’t address these areas, regardless of how much willpower you have, you will continually be creating obstacles that will keep you fighting to be consistent in your desired behaviors.
Restriction
When it comes to your diet, if you feel too restricted, mentally or physically, you are setting yourself up to overeat sooner or later. Restriction is one of the primary causes of overeating.
Using Undesirable Behaviors as Coping Mechanisms
Emotional eating and binge eating are often used as ways to escape uncomfortable emotions. As well, alcohol is often used to cope with stress, social anxiety, and other uncomfortable feelings.
Self-Sabotage
There are many reasons why a person may self-sabotage in ways they’re often unaware of. For example, I have met individuals who wanted to lose weight but who actually were terrified of doing so because they were sexually assaulted in a smaller body and believed their fat made them unattractive and thus was keeping them safe.
Underlying Beliefs
This is another area where there are many different ways a person could be holding themself back, often unknowingly. For example, someone might hold the belief that they don’t have many connections and are lonely because of their body. If they were in a conventionally attractive body and were still lonely, they’d have nothing else to blame it on. In order to protect their self-worth, they engage in unhealthy behaviors, so that their body can continue to be the scapegoat.
Willpower gets a lot of attention and is often touted as the answer to all of our problems when it comes to engaging in healthier habits. But as you can see, it’s not a cure-all.
While I encourage you to try out any of these 8 tips to increase your willpower, when you’re ready to dig deeper and figure out what the underlying causes of your self-control lapses are, the Food Body Self® program was designed for just that.
We go far beyond behavior and self-discipline, uncovering the core beliefs that direct our actions and learn healthy coping mechanisms for uncomfortable emotions so they can no longer sabotage us.
Once you put all the pieces together, you’ll feel more in control than ever before.
References
McGonigal, K. (2012). The willpower instinct: How self-control works, why it matters, and what you can do to get more of it. Avery.