I don’t agree with this willpower is a muscle hypothesis. Relying on willpower is a mistake. Willpower should be the force that begins a commitment to a new thing. After that you want to use other forces to keep you going. And you don’t need to be worried that this minimal usage of willpower will reduce your overall ability to have willpower because the thing that really builds willpower—much more than just blindly exerting it—is being successful.
What I’m essentially saying here is that addiction itself is not the enemy. You just have to pick the right addictions. Get addicted to the process of making long-term changes in your life, improving yourself, and doing what ever it is you truly want to do.
The problem with willpower is that exerting it is exhausting and one day you might not have enough energy to exert it and then, because you’re relying on it, you’ll slip and feel crap about yourself. You may wonder why you even bothered. The author does suggest at least one good alternative: change you environment to avoid temptations. Other good ideas are:
* Repeatedly remind yourself of why you are doing this difficult thing. Write down the reasons and make a point of reading them once a day
* Tell lots of other people about it so that it is embarrassing if you quit
* Make a step-by-step plan with each step being well-defined, easily achievable, and time-boxed. If this sounds like too much BDUF (Big Design Up Front)—I’ve started to hate planning because so often the plans need to change—then only plan up a couple of steps in advance
* Celebrate your successes: document each achievement you make toward your goal: even if it’s just ticking things off your step-by-step plan, have a physical action you perform that represents “Yes, I did it.”
* If behavior change is your thing, tie your behavior change to specific real-world triggers. For instance you can use walking through doors as a trigger to become aware of your posture. This can be difficult because often the triggers don’t exist: the last example does little to help a person who spends consecutive hours programming. But you can create your own triggers with timers, alarm clocks, software that makes use of accelerometers, or simply leave things out and open in your environment or tie bits of string to your finger etc.
* If you’re actively trying to avoid something, come up with something else to replace it. Particularly good is switching from one bad habit that uses up no limited resources to another that does. For instance if you want to stop biting your fingernails, which you can do pretty much anytime, you could take up chewing gum instead. The advantage to doing this is that once you habitually chew gum instead of biting your fingernails you can just stop buying gum.
(A lot of this advice comes from a book called 59 Seconds that has a section on motivation. All of it is based by scientific studies.)
What I’m essentially saying here is that addiction itself is not the enemy. You just have to pick the right addictions. Get addicted to the process of making long-term changes in your life, improving yourself, and doing what ever it is you truly want to do.
The problem with willpower is that exerting it is exhausting and one day you might not have enough energy to exert it and then, because you’re relying on it, you’ll slip and feel crap about yourself. You may wonder why you even bothered. The author does suggest at least one good alternative: change you environment to avoid temptations. Other good ideas are:
* Repeatedly remind yourself of why you are doing this difficult thing. Write down the reasons and make a point of reading them once a day
* Tell lots of other people about it so that it is embarrassing if you quit
* Make a step-by-step plan with each step being well-defined, easily achievable, and time-boxed. If this sounds like too much BDUF (Big Design Up Front)—I’ve started to hate planning because so often the plans need to change—then only plan up a couple of steps in advance
* Celebrate your successes: document each achievement you make toward your goal: even if it’s just ticking things off your step-by-step plan, have a physical action you perform that represents “Yes, I did it.”
* If behavior change is your thing, tie your behavior change to specific real-world triggers. For instance you can use walking through doors as a trigger to become aware of your posture. This can be difficult because often the triggers don’t exist: the last example does little to help a person who spends consecutive hours programming. But you can create your own triggers with timers, alarm clocks, software that makes use of accelerometers, or simply leave things out and open in your environment or tie bits of string to your finger etc.
* If you’re actively trying to avoid something, come up with something else to replace it. Particularly good is switching from one bad habit that uses up no limited resources to another that does. For instance if you want to stop biting your fingernails, which you can do pretty much anytime, you could take up chewing gum instead. The advantage to doing this is that once you habitually chew gum instead of biting your fingernails you can just stop buying gum.
(A lot of this advice comes from a book called 59 Seconds that has a section on motivation. All of it is based by scientific studies.)