Willpower Archives - Farther to Go!

P Is for Perseverance

February 15, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A common explanation for the failure to accomplish something, reach a goal, or change a habit is a lack of willpower (or self-control). If only you had more willpower you could resist temptation, whatever form it might take: a piece of chocolate cake, binge-watching a favorite TV show, surfing the internet, adding unnecessary items to your wardrobe, or even just staying up late when you have an important meeting in the morning.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much. —John Ortberg

It seems like common sense that if you had the ability to say no in the face of temptation, you wouldn’t be in whatever pickle you might be in.

And there’s a bit of truth underlying that belief. Willpower can be both useful and powerful. And yes, some people appear to have more willpower, at least in some situations, than other people. But willpower is an unreliable resource that can be easily exhausted. You can benefit from developing more of it, but it’s not the most effective tool in the behavior-change box.

Don’t Crash and Burn

When you’re bursting with willpower, you feel like you’re faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It feels great in the moment, but the moment doesn’t last. You may find yourself burning out before you get very far and end up abandoning your entire project. If at first you don’t succeed, you might decide it’s not meant to be or not worth the effort. Why bother? Just go with the flow. Or you might chalk it up to being weak, not wanting it enough, or lacking discipline.

It’s important to remember that the unconscious part of your brain has a bias for immediate gratification, which means you do, too. So after the initial burst of energy is gone it’s natural to find yourself distracted, derailed, or maybe even down for the count.

Worse, you may think what happened means something about you or your ability to follow through, which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because multiple failed attempts actually train your brain to not take you seriously. That means your next attempt will be even harder to follow through with than the last one was.

If you recall the story of The Tortoise and the Hare from Aesop’s Fables, you’ll remember the moral of that adventure was slow and steady wins the race.

You could compare the unconscious part of your brain, which is extremely fast and processes 11 million bits of information at a time, to the hare. The conscious part of your brain, which is responsible for exerting willpower and self-control among other things, is like the tortoise. It’s much slower and more deliberate, and it processes only 40 bits of information at a time.

Change the Default

Repetition and perseverance, not willpower and self-control, are the keys to changing your behavior and accomplishing your goals. Repetition means doing the same thing over and over again until it becomes your brain’s default response. Perseverance means steadily moving toward your desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as you go, and taking in at least some of the scenery. Just keep moving at a steady pace until you get where you want to go.

You don’t need to chastise yourself if you get off track. You don’t need to make up excuses. All you have to do is pick up where you left off and keep going.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. —William E. Hickson

It’s amazing how much time and mental effort we put into berating ourselves or trying to figure out what’s wrong with us when we don’t behave according to our own expectations when, much of the time, it’s simply due to the way we’re wired. It would be far more effective to recognize that until we convince it otherwise, our brain is going to keep on correcting us back to our previous path. So falling off the horse is just part of the process. The important thing is to get back up there.

Perseverance isn’t the same as dogged persistence. Sometimes there’s a good reason to stop attempting to do something or at least reassess. On the one hand, you’re more likely to persevere if you’re committed to what you’re trying to accomplish and clear about your desired outcome. On the other hand, that commitment and clarity can help you recognize you aren’t really headed where you want to go—or maybe that you’ve bitten off too big a chunk and need to scale back.

If you want to make any change to your status quo, you have to convince your brain to go along with the plan, and that won’t happen overnight. Getting your brain to accept a change in the status quo as the new normal, for example, requires changing your mental model. That’s probably going to take a lot more perseverance than you’d like or that you expect. You might be tempted to give up when the results don’t come quickly, but that would be a mistake.

Perseverance isn’t flashy or sexy or stylish. It’s often linked with discipline and endurance and sounds like something that’s good for you or that builds character. But it’s the key to creating sustained change. And if you develop the habit of perseverance, you can still use willpower but you won’t need to rely on it to power yourself through. That means your brain will be working for you, rather than against you.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That’s why I call perseverance magic!

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Can You Muscle Your Way to Change?

February 12, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power over us. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to have a salad for lunch, but if you’ve been having burgers and fries on a regular basis, your brain is going to “choose” the burgers and fries. You may want to take a walk in the morning before going to work, but if you’re in the habit of spending that time with an extra cup of coffee and the newspaper, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” for you.

The part of your brain that can image you making—or having made—a different choice is not the part of your brain that makes choices.

The unconscious part of your brain is only interested in making a different choice if your immediate survival appears to be threatened. Your unconscious doesn’t engage in long-term planning or prediction. So even though both replacing burgers and fries with a salad and replacing sitting and reading the newspaper with half an hour of walking might increase your long-term health and well-being, those changes have no impact on your immediate survival.

Besides, you might not enjoy the salad as much as you enjoy the burger and fries—at least at first—and you might not enjoy trading the extra cup of coffee for going outside to take a walk—especially if the weather isn’t all that great, you’re tired, or you woke up late. The unconscious part of your brain wants to pacify you. And if you start paying attention, you’ll discover that you’re often all too willing to be pacified.

It requires very little energy on the part of your brain to get you to do what you’ve done before. But it does require energy for your brain to get you to do something different. So if you do indeed want to change your behavior, you need to persuade the unconscious part of your brain to get with your program instead of continuing with its program.

You might think strengthening your willpower or self-control would be a good strategy for changing your behavior. Perhaps you can muscle your way through. It’s true that willpower might be effective when your motivation is high when you’re first trying to start or change a habit. Motivation is often higher, for example, at the beginning of a new year when we attempt to implement resolutions. But willpower is a fickle and easily exhausted resource, as is self-control. They both draw from the same well—conscious attention.

The Will Is Capricious and Temperamental*

You can’t count on having enough willpower or self-control available when you want or need it. If you’re anxious or stressed, tired, ill, distracted, in an unfamiliar environment, have been trying to solve a difficult problem, or are in love, your conscious attention is likely to be depleted to a greater or lesser extent.

And when you repeatedly try to start or change a habit (make a different choice) and fail, you end up worse off than you were before. That’s because you’re likely to use your lack of success as evidence that there’s something wrong with you. Perhaps you have less willpower or self-control than other people. Or maybe you’re sabotaging yourself. Or you don’t really want to change.

The bottom line is that you think the problem is you rather than the method you’re employing. Maybe you keep trying or maybe you give up. In either case, over time you persuade your brain not to take you seriously when you set out to change your behavior. And so the status quo becomes even more entrenched.

If you want to master the art and science of change, you need to learn how to use your brain to change the status quo instead of going with the flow and allowing your brain to maintain it.

*Cordelia Fine

Note: This is the second in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box in the sidebar under Explore.

Is Coffee Ruining your Life?

July 10, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

This past week, Scientific American online ran an article titled “The Problem of Artificial Willpower.” It was based on a research paper by Torben Kjaersgaard, who is in the Department of Sport Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. Kjaersgaard’s concern is the off-label use of prescription stimulants—such as Adderall, which is normally used in the treatment of ADHD, and modafinil, which is normally used in the treatment of daytime sleepiness caused by sleep apnea or narcolepsy—to enhance motivation. This might not have caught my attention had Kjaersgaard not also targeted coffee.

Kjaersgaard acknowledges that healthy individuals who use prescription stimulants—and/or caffeine—to enhance their performance report increased motivation as a significant effect. This is certainly not surprising. It’s also not surprising that it makes them feel good. What concerns Kjaersgaard is the ethics of motivation enhancement.

In this article I discuss ethical issues of motivation enhancement induced by currently available prescription drugs. I argue that medically enhanced motivation raises questions concerning the ethics of accomplishment and the value of human effort [emphasis mine].

Kjaarsgaard—and the author of the Scientific American blog post, Hazen Zohny—appear to believe that coffee drinkers may simply be masking “the meaninglessness of it all” until, “several thousand of those (caffeine) hits later, you find yourself middle-aged and struggling with a sense that you haven’t quite spent your life as you would have liked.” All because of…coffee.

Zohny wonders if we should really be “using substances that enhance our enjoyment and interest in…pursuits we would otherwise find meaningless and alienating.”

Might we end up leading deeply inauthentic lives, using pharmaceutically-induced willpower to waft through a life that otherwise means nothing to us?

Kjaersgaard is concerned that our lack of motivation for a task or a job is a symptom of a deeper problem, in which case instead of enhancing our motivation temporarily (for example by having a cup of coffee), we should instead stop and re-evaluate the course of our lives. Say what? I’m pretty sure my lack of motivation for some of the tasks I have to do is directly related to the nature of the tasks (I find them boring or otherwise unpleasant, but such is life) rather than indicative of “a deeper problem.” Sometimes it’s a cup of coffee that provides me with artificial motivation and sometimes it’s loud, upbeat music or a brisk walk. Should I give up the music and the walking along with the coffee? I was reassured to see that the majority of Scientific American commenters didn’t buy what Kjaersgaard and Zohny were selling, either, and so I went about my caffeinated life.

However, the next day I came across an even more over-the-top take on the subject in a Facebook post titled “Drugs that Make Us Feel Smart Are Ruining Our Lives.” Yes, that would be Adderall, Ritalin, and caffeine. The author reports that “college students feel amazing when they take Adderall.” He doesn’t object to the students’ use of prescription stimulants per se, but to the fact that the drugs cause these students to be “artificially interested in topics they otherwise wouldn’t care about.”

So instead of finding their true, authentic selves, they bend their will to ace exams they feel no passion for.

Well, I’m sure all colleges would be happy to allow students to take only courses they are interested in—and, of course, students already know what they are interested in at the time they enroll. But no; it turns out that “young people are meant to be discovering their true interests” while in college. So…wait, what?

This bizarre line of thinking is a wacky combination of Puritanism and New-Age nonsense, which is why it makes no sense and is insulting to boot. The idea that everyone not only has the luxury of discovering their “true interests” and spending their lives engaged in pursuing them (all intrinsically motivated), but also the duty to do so is ridiculous. This is the kind of first-world, made-up problem we ought to be ashamed of even entertaining. I would like to be pointed in the direction of any person, anywhere who never wants or could use some artificial motivation.

Mom, is your baby keeping you up at night? Instead of having that cup of coffee every morning, you might want to re-evaluate this whole parenthood thing.

As a former substance abuse counselor, I’m certainly not advocating the unfettered recreational use of prescription drugs. But the use of caffeine and prescription drugs isn’t really the issue.

One issue is that the authors of these articles want us to stop trying to make ourselves feel better, stop trying to “tolerate a long-term circumstance,” stop trying to make ourselves “feel up to the task.” Instead we should “experience the incongruity” and change our lives. This advice seems doctrinaire, heartless, and wildly unrealistic. What if the long-term circumstance can’t be changed?

Another issue is rampant insensitivity to the lives and experiences of masses of other people who are not like them. What about those who are unemployed, hungry, homeless, abused, enslaved, trafficked, live in the middle of a war zone, or are without the basic necessities we take for granted? Is it OK for them to do whatever they need to do to get through the day—and through whatever unfulfilling, uninteresting, possibly dangerous and/or backbreaking work they may be able to find? Or should they, too, be focused on discovering their true interests and true, authentic selves because settling for less would be a cop out?

A third issue is their attempt to impose their belief system on other people. I was glad to see quite a few commenters call out the author of the Facebook article (as did I) on his assumption of the existence of a true, authentic self. I offered the possibility that one’s true, authentic self might be a caffeine fiend. Several others agreed with me. (One person said his true, authentic self wanted to be someone else.)

When a commenter asked what I would consider “evidence” of what I referred to as the vague and nebulous authentic self, someone immediately suggested he read Candide.

Instead of obsessing over finding our true, authentic selves, we might be better off trying to be kinder to each other, cutting each other more slack, and working a little harder to level the playing field for the people, both in our own neighborhoods and on the other side of the world, who would be more than happy to trade their problems for this imaginary one.

And I will most definitely not be giving up coffee anytime soon.