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Summary:
Willpower isn’t something you have or don’t have. It’s something you develop.
In this first of a 4-part video series, we talk about a couple of ways we can fatigue our willpower and one way to strengthen it.
Here’s how we can fatigue our willpower:
1 – Resist what we want but can’t have. In a study, researchers asked subjects to sit in a room with freshly baked cookies. The researchers told one group to eat them. They told the other group not to eat them. After sitting in the room for several minutes, the subjects then tried solve an unsolvable puzzle. Those who did not resist eating the cookies had more willpower to persist in trying to solve the puzzle. Those who resisted the cookies gave up on the puzzle very quickly.
2 – Have more choices. In a second study, researchers took shopping fanatics on a shopping spree. The researchers gave the first group two choices for every article of clothing. They gave the second group multiple choices. Then each subject tried to solve an unsolvable puzzle. The shoppers who had fewer choices had more willpower to work on the puzzle.
To strengthen your willpower you can”
1 – Wait. By putting yourself into a situation to challenge your willpower, and then forcing yourself to wait, your willpower will become stronger.
Transcript:
Hey there! This is John Gibson, creator of the Bod-e-Volv Bod-e-Transformation Coaching Program and today I want to talk to you about willpower. Now everyone kind of blames willpower for why they can’t do X, Y or Z. They struggle with cravings because of their willpower or a lack of willpower.
They can’t work out, because they don’t have the willpower to go, or whatever it may be. Now, willpower is a real thing. And you may have heard that willpower is similar to a muscle, that it can be fatigued or something like that. And to be honest that’s true. All of the research based on willpower shows this. That it’s just like a muscle. So it can be fatigued, but along with that it can also be strengthened.
Now let me share with you one story or one study that actually kind of shows this. What these researchers did is brought some people into this room. And they were really, really… what’s the word… cruel to them. They actually brought them in after having baked some cookies in the room. So the whole room smelled like chocolate chip cookies. And they had a plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting there in the middle of the room on this coffee table. Now, one group of people who came into the room were told, “You can eat the chocolate chip cookies”.
The other people who came into the room were told, “You cannot touch the chocolate chip cookies. You are supposed to eat this little bowl of radishes”. So they had to avoid eating these chocolate chip cookies and these radishes I’m going to guess they probably didn’t really want to eat. And they were told that the study was to… kind of look at taste and their taste perception and things like that.
So, here these are… these people are in there about 15-20 minutes with these chocolate chip cookies. One group was able to eat them; the other group had to resist eating them. And they actually have a footage of these people like… reaching down, grabbing a chocolate chip cookie and smelling it, and putting it down. Or kind of turning it over, looking at it and setting it back down. No one ate any cookies, but they were all kind of doing something with it or watching it, or you know… look away and kind of glance back at the cookies and things.
So, they were all challenging their willpower. And as soon as they finished, the researchers came in and said, “Great, the study is over.
But hey, we have this other survey we’d like you to take and be kind of”… you know they’re all college students and want to convince them all to do it and they said “Well, we’re kind of comparing college students to high school students and so far, high school students have actually showed to be smarter in this little puzzle we have. So we want to see if college students could be smarter. “And so we’re building on their ego so all these college students would say “hey, yeah. We’re going to do that survey.”
And so the survey was that they had to do a puzzle. And the puzzle was impossible to complete. There was no way, no possible way to solve it. And they just wanted to see how long these people would actually sit there and work on that, because this also taxes willpower.
And they’ve found is that those people who were able to eat the cookies were actually able to spend about 20 minutes on the puzzle before they gave up. Those who had to resist the cookies, they were only able to spend about 9 minutes on that puzzle.
Now, we could look at this and say “well, don’t give… you’d better not give in to the cookies and eat the cookies then it is to actually… avoid the cookies when it comes to doing puzzles or something like that”. The idea is, those people who had to resist those cookies had to exercise their willpower. Then when they went over to the puzzle, they continued exercising their willpower, because their willpower is saying, “hey, you don’t want to be here with this puzzle, but you can go on a little bit longer”. And so that’s kind of what their willpower was. The longer they pushed to do that puzzle, the harder they were working their willpower.
So from this study and few other studies that I’m going to share with you, we see that willpower is not like… we don’t have willpower for avoiding certain treats. And then we don’t have a separate willpower for not killing our kids when they start acting up. And we don’t have another willpower for… doing with our spouses or our significant other.
We don’t have separate willpowers. We have one willpower. And that willpower is fatigued by different things we do throughout the day. You see, another study wanted to look and see what else could tax our willpower. So avoiding cookies good, this is one way to do that.
But another study took these people who loved the shops. So this is their passion. They’d love to go out and shop. And they said to these people, “Hey, we’re going to take you shopping. Here is X amount of money – I can’t remember how much they gave them, but it was a lot of money – let’s shopping!” And they took them all out, but what they did is they had one group where they said, “When we shop, we’re going to give you two choices of shirts. You know, hold up two shirts, you have to choose which one you want. And then we keep moving on the next item of clothing… or kind of work our way around until you spend all the money you want”. And in the other group they said, “What we’re going to do, we’re going to hold up 68 choices of shirts or pants or whatever, and you can choose which one you want. Now, thinking about that… honestly you would think that the more choices you have, the better you would feel, because hey, we want choices, right?
To have as many choices as possible. But what the interesting thing they’ve found with this study is, as soon as they’ve finished shopping, they had to do another puzzle that was unsolvable. They wanted to see how long they would do that. And they’ve found that those people who had only two choices were able to longer on the puzzle. And those who had more choices, struggled on the puzzle. They didn’t have the willpower to continue.
So another thing we find is making choices itself, just having more options, taxes our willpower. Partly because… here’s what’s happening. You’ve got six options, when you make one choice, what you’re saying is “I’m now not choosing these other six” and while making that choice lot of times we go “well, this one looks good, but this one over here also look good.” So we kind of narrow it down, but we’ve already made a choice to narrow it down to maybe 2 or 3 and now we have to narrow it down again, and we have another choice and inside we’re kind of saying, “Well now, I’m giving up this one.
So because I’m choosing this, I’m giving up these other ones.” And we keep doing that until we eventually make that final decision. But that taxes our willpower. So there’s a lot of things that can tax that, and fatigue that.
Now to give you an example of things that can actually tax your willpower is resisting things. So resisting that cookie, or resisting something that you want and not getting that. So if you love to shop, resisting going shopping. That can tax your willpower.
The other is actually giving into things that we don’t necessarily want. So for example again, if we have a cookie sitting here and you’re sitting there saying I don’t want this, saying I don’t want this, saying I don’t want this, you’re already taxing your willpower by saying I don’t want it. But when you eat it, you also tax your willpower. You may think, “Well, if I give in to it, then my willpower won’t be as bad”.
But actually, once you give in to it, you tax your willpower because internally now you’re saying, “I shouldn’t have eaten that. Why did I do it? Why am I so weak?” You’re kind of beating yourself up. So… it goes over to the next one.
Another thin that taxes willpower is actually you beating yourself up over something. So if you were just to eat the cookie and just say “you know what, that’s fine. That’s no big deal.” It doesn’t tax your willpower as much as if someone were to say “Oh, why did I do that?! Why am I so weak?” You know, also we’ve got traveling. Traveling taxes our willpower, because it’s a stressor on our body. And then we’ve go lack of sleep, when someone doesn’t sleep, as well their willpower won’t be as strong.
You might notice when you have a poor night’s sleep, the next day you give in to cravings more. And then lastly, one of those is also being forced to do something that you don’t want to do. So for example, if you go to work out, but you don’t want to go to work out, but you’re doing it, that’s also taxing your willpower, because you may feel like “well someone’s forcing me to do it” or “I’m doing this because I’m supposed to do it” instead of doing it because you want do to it. That will be taxing your willpower also.
So, important thing to understand with everything I’m saying is if you feel like you have a weak willpower, that’s not necessarily true. You don’t necessarily have a weak willpower; you just have a fatigued willpower. It’s been taxed so many different ways. To give you an example, I got an email from someone the other day, who’s in my Body Valve coaching program. And her email was asking a question “Okay, during my menstrual cycle, I just can’t resist my cravings, my cravings are awful, and I constantly have cravings”.
And part of that also is for her, which she kind of shared some information about her menstrual cycle, but she doesn’t sleep very well during her menstrual cycle. She has horrible cramps. She seems to be under a little bit more stress during that time also. So by adding those three things on there, so not sleeping very well, having these cramps, having pain, which again taxes her willpower, eventually she’s going to give in to cravings, because she has those extra things going on, on top of her normal struggles that she has, the normal stresses and strains on her body.
So, willpower is necessarily weak. Your willpower may not be necessarily weak, but it may be just fatigued. So, there are certain ways we can strengthen it. For example, just like with your muscles, we want to go and get them stronger. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re weak. It just means that we need to go and get the muscles stronger. So to do that, we go out and do some strengthening exercises. We lift weights; we challenge those muscles so they do get stronger.
Now the willpower can be strengthened in a similar way. We need to challenge our willpower. So one way that we can do that, one of the easiest ways, is to wait. That’s it. Just wait. So let’s say you have a craving for a cookie, and instead of giving in to that craving, you save yourself. Okay, I know that I’m eventually going to give in to this craving. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to wait 15 minutes, and in 15 minutes, then I’ll go ahead and eat that cookie. So just by saying I’m going to wait, will strengthen your willpower, because… I mean you’re still giving in. That’s fine, there’s no big deal to that, but by waiting, now you’re telling your body “hey, I can do this”. And it’ll actually strengthen your willpower a little bit more.
For example, I don’t know if you heard the marshmallow study. And with the marshmallow study what they did, is they had these young kids, I think they were around 5-6 years old or something, and they came in, brought them in this room, and put a marshmallow in front of them and say “hey, here’s this marshmallow right now, you can eat it now if you want, or you can wait 15 minutes and we will give a second marshmallow”.
And so you got this kid… I mean imagine this, these kids, some of these are kind of sitting on these chairs, they’re just rocking back and forth, and they’re just staring at this marshmallow, because they want to have a second one. Others are distracting themselves, writing on the wall or whatever, they’re just… I think it was a cinderblock wall, and they’re kind of tracing things. Others singing a song or just avoid eye contact with the… Okay, marshmallows don’t make eye contact. But they avoid looking at the marshmallow. And then, others would just give in.
Now, what they’ve found… first they wanted to see how interesting it was, what did these kids have to do. Those kids that were able to resist, what did they do? And part of them they distracted themselves. Now, years later they came back and kind of looked at these kids, see how successful were they doing in life.
And what they found is, those that were able to resist the marshmallow at a young age, were also able to prolong satisfaction in other areas of their life. So, when it come to like financial situations, they can either say “you know, I can take this money now, or I can wait a little bit longer and get more money later on. I can prolong that satisfaction for a little bit later so that maybe I can get something bigger and better. “And they became more successful doing that. As opposed to someone else who would give in to that instant gratification right away.
They would you know, if they could, have enough money to buy a new iPod, they’d run out and buy it right away. Whereas, those who could resist would say, “You know, I want this iPod. I have enough money for it, but I want to save my money for something more important, something bigger, something better. So eventually I will get that iPod”. And they were able to become more successful doing that. Again, they were able to strengthen their own willpower, just by waiting.
So one thing you can do, I mean I make this a deliberate challenge, make this what some people would call a willpower challenge, deliberately set something out and say okay, I’ve got a ball of my favorite treat. For me it would be Oreos, I love Oreos. I try to avoid them as much as I can, otherwise I’ll eat them too much, but I love Oreos. So one thing I could do, would be to put a plate of Oreos out in the middle of my kitchen, and say “okay, can eat these, and I can eat these today, but I’m going to let them sit there, and I’m going to wait until tonight to eat those. Or I will wait an hour to eat those.” How long you feel you could handle, something that will be a challenge for you, but tell yourself to wait.
And just doing that will strengthen your willpower. So again, to strengthen your willpower, you need to deliberately fatigue it, just like you would your muscles. To strengthen your muscles, we have to deliberately fatigue it through strength training. So do the exact same things. Deliberately fatigue your willpower.
So, hopefully, I recommend doing this maybe later in the day, when your willpower is already fatigued from all the stresses of the day. But also so you don’t lash out to your family members or anything. But challenge your willpower. And that way, your willpower will get stronger and stronger and eventually you will be able to avoid some cravings and some things like that.
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