Ep. #126: The Science of Supercharging Your Willpower and Self-Discipline

[00:00:00] What is up everybody. This is Mike from muscle for life, and I’m back with another episode of the podcast. And in this episode, we are going to have a. meandering discussion about willpower and self discipline, and specifically some of the reasons why so many people have so much trouble just doing the things that they know they should do and not doing the things that they know they shouldn’t do.

And then we’re going to shift gears to the practical and go over some simple science based strategies to make it easier for you to do the things that you want to do, and ultimately become the person that you want to be. So here is a little sneak peek of what you’re going to learn in this episode. Why failures of willpower and self control can feel so good in the moment even when they are [00:01:00] blatantly against your best interests or at odds with your plans and intentions.

How you can use the pre commitment strategy to easily increase your stick to itiveness and reduce the likelihood of falling off the wagon. How to prevent decision fatigue from sapping your mental energy and willpower. Why creating a structured personal routine is, I think, one of the most powerful ways to not just increase your willpower, but also your ability to do the big, meaningful things that are going to ultimately define your life.

And more. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by, seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in, so instead I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my fitness book for women, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 150, 000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1, [00:02:00] 200 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average.

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All right, that’s it for the shameless plugging. Let’s get to the show. According to a 2010 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, the lack of willpower is the number one obstacle that people face in achieving their goals. Many people feel guilty about their lack of self control.

They feel like they’re letting themselves and others down and that their lives are in large part, just not worth it. under their control. They report feeling like their actions are dictated by [00:03:00] emotions, impulses, and cravings, and that exerting self discipline ultimately just leads to exhaustion and failure.

Now, on the other hand, research shows that people with Higher levels of willpower do better in school. They earn more money. They make better leaders. They’re generally just happier, healthier, and less stressed. They have better social and romantic relationships, maybe because they know how to keep their mouths shut.

Something I have had to learn myself. And research even shows that people with higher levels of willpower live longer as well. The bottom line is no matter the circumstances, more willpower always trumps less. And regardless of where you and I generally fall in the spectrum, we all have willpower challenges that we have to face.

Some of these are biological in nature. Our desire to eat greasy, sugary foods that our brains recognize as vital to our survival, and others are probably more uniquely ours. What we find tempting, someone else might find repulsive, and [00:04:00] their vices might be about as appealing to us as airline food.

Whatever the details, the mechanics are more or less the same. Our excuse for skipping a workout, again, is remarkably similar to the foodie’s justification for binging for the third day in a row. How you and I might talk ourselves into putting off some important work for just another day is more or less the same as how someone else might ease their guilt of giving in to their cravings for a cigarette or for a drink or something else that they know they shouldn’t do.

And my point with all this is the science here is clear. This internal struggle of self discipline is just part of being human. Why, though, is it such a heavy burden for some people? And why can others just take it in stride? Why do some people give up so easily on their goals and intentions and blissfully indulge in so many self sabotaging behaviors?

While others are very tenacious and resilient and have a lot of stick to itiveness and are also very resistant to impulsive [00:05:00] behavior. These are all very good questions and while I definitely don’t have all the answers, I’m going to share some research and insights that I’ve learned. That have helped me understand the nature of this beast and how to tame it, at least in myself.

And if you’re like me, then you will find that increasing your self awareness and coming to a deeper understanding of how you tick can be incredibly empowering in this case, by better understanding what makes us likely to lose control. We can learn to more skillfully manage our willpower reserves, so to speak, and avoid the, at least most common pitfalls that, drain them.

So let’s start this discussion with a simple concept, and that is a clear definition of what willpower really is. And I’m going to start here with a question. So what do we really mean when we say that somebody has or lacks willpower? Of course, what we’re usually referring to is their ability or inability to say, No.

So they’re supposed to study for an exam, but instead they [00:06:00] accept the invitation to the movies or they’re trying to lose 10 pounds, but they just couldn’t say no to the apple pie. They have trouble saying, I won’t do that. That’s one aspect of willpower, but there are two others and they are, I will, and I want.

So I will power is the other side of. The, I won’t coin it’s the ability to do something when you don’t want to like grinding out that workout when you’re tired or paying the overdue bill or burning the midnight oil on that work project. And the, I want part of willpower is the ability to remember the why when temptation strikes.

That’s the long term goal and the thing that you really want more than the fast food or the credit card debt. Therefore, if you can become the master of your won’ts, wills, and wants, then you can become the master of your destiny. And I know that sounds dramatic, but I really do believe it, because if you can do those things, then procrastination can be licked.

Your worst habits can be dismantled and replaced with [00:07:00] better ones. And even the strongest whiffs of temptation just completely lose their power over you. Now that said, don’t expect these things to come easily. Reprogramming yourself to favor the harder choices is going to be uncomfortable. And you might even find it overwhelming at first because you are going to be naturally drawn back to what’s familiar.

Don’t despair though, because that is completely normal. If you can just stay that course, then the pieces will start falling into place. You are going to find it easier and easier to say no to the distractions and yes to the things that you need to do without getting too frazzled over it. And I know that sounds cliche, but that really is how it works because Research shows that our beliefs, our ideas, our feelings are greatly determined by our actions, not the other way around, as many people think it works.

In other words, if you want to change how you feel or how you think about something or some aspect of your character, no matter how deep seated, the easiest way to do it is to simply Change your actions to align your [00:08:00] actions to the way that you want to think, feel, or be, and the internal environment will conform to those actions because in many ways, we look to how we behave to find out who we are.

And if our ideas or conceptions don’t match our actions, then we’re much more likely to change the former to suit the latter and not vice versa. Now, this can work against us, such in the case of something like honesty. We all want to see ourselves as generally honest people. But if we consistently behave dishonestly, then unfortunately we’re much more likely to just change our conception of honesty or of truthfulness than we are to actually change our behaviors and be more honest and truthful.

On the other hand, we can use this psychological reality to our advantage. So let’s say you want to become the type of person that takes better care of their body. There’s one of two ways of doing this. One way is. First, trying to change your mind about being healthier, trying to change your perception of eating healthy or of exercising and trying to work it out internally before [00:09:00] you actually do anything.

That’s one way. And the other way is simply starting to do the things that somebody that takes good care of their body does, regardless of how you feel about them or think about them. Just do them consistently and then let your Mind conform to your actions and the ladder is far more effective far more effective.

So much so that I would say the former is completely ineffective. So the ladder really is the only way to do it and make it stick. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or, Advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth, so if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I [00:10:00] can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscleforlifefitness, Twitter at muscleforlife, and Facebook at muscleforlifefitness. All right, so now that we’ve established what willpower consists of and what the stakes are, let’s move on to the physiology of desire and why it can sometimes make it so hard to resist being bad.

So a real willpower challenge isn’t just a fleeting, oh wouldn’t that be nice, thought that just disappears as quickly as it came. It’s really an all consuming battle that kind of rages inside of you between good and evil and virtue and sin, yin and yang. It’s something that you. You know what I’m talking about.

We’ve all been there now. Why is that? What’s going on? Physiologically speaking, what you’re experiencing is your brain being fixated on a promise of reward. So once you catch sight of that juicy cheeseburger, a chemical called dopamine gushes through your brain and all of a sudden all that matters in life is that.

Greasy delicious [00:11:00] pile of meat cheese and bun because this chemical it’s telling your brain that you must consume the sandwich now No matter the cost or you’re going to suffer some unknown ghastly consequences and all this happens Subconsciously or unconsciously those aren’t necessarily the thoughts that go through your mind, but that’s what you are experiencing Physically and to make matters even worse.

Your brain is now anticipating this reward, this spike in insulin and energy. So it also begins to lower your blood sugar levels, which in turn makes you crave it even more. And the next thing there you are in line, anxiously awaiting your turn to shove your face full of hamburger. Once you become aware of an opportunity to score some sort of reward, your brain squirts out some dopamine to tell you that Yes, this is the droid you’re looking for.

And this plays up that sweet song of immediate gratification and then plays down any sort of chatter about longterm consequences. Now this chemical dopamine, it isn’t engineered to make you feel happy and content. Its role is to [00:12:00] stimulate you into action. action. And it does this by arousing you, by sharpening your focus, revving up your drive to do something and get your hands on the prize.

Go. That’s it. That’s the carrot dangling. Grab it. Now, dopamine has a stick as well, because when it’s released, it also triggers the release of stress hormones that make you feel anxious. And this is why the more you think about that reward, the more. You want it. The more important it becomes to you.

Now, what you don’t realize though, is that the stress that you feel, it isn’t caused by not having that apple pie or that new pair of shoes or that next trophy and candy crush. It’s caused by the desire itself. It’s just dopamine’s emotional tool for making you obey its commands. Your brain doesn’t care about the bigger picture.

It doesn’t care whether you’re going to be happy 30 pounds heavier or a thousand dollars poorer. Its job is to just identify promises of pleasure and then raise red flags. Even if going after them [00:13:00] is going to entail risky or chaotic behavior and cause a lot of pain. More problems than it could ever be worth.

And ironically really the ultimate rewards that we’re looking for can elude us every single time, but just the slimmest possibility of payoff and the anxiety of giving up the quest can keep you hooked and almost to the point of obsession. And this is why many people find themselves just a few days after some guilt inducing catastrophic failure of willpower, anxiously chasing that dragon again, scarfing down more artery clogging food, racking up more credit card debt, cracking out on more Facebook games, and so forth.

The reality is, anything that we think will bring pleasure kicks this reward seeking system into gear. That could be the smell of the hamburger, it could be the Black Friday sale, the wink from the girl, or some sort of advertisement for, the testosterone boosting supplement, whatever. The point is, once dopamine has your brain in its grasp, obtaining that desirable object or [00:14:00] doing that desirable action that triggered it, can become a.

do or die proposition. Not really, but that’s how it can feel. It’s really no surprise then that eating, smelling, or even just seeing calorie and sugar rich foods makes us want to eat everything in sight. Because remember, there was a time when having an insatiable appetite was vital for survival. After fasting for several days, you’ve finally killed an animal, or you’ve finally you’d better scarf down a huge number of calories to gain the body fat that you need to stay alive until the next feast.

Now the dopamine problems don’t end here either. Research shows that the dopamine release triggered by one promise of reward makes us more likely to pursue others. So if we look at pictures of naked women or men, depending on what your thing is, then we are more likely to make risky financial decisions.

Or if we are daydreaming about striking it rich with our new internet business, then food can all of a sudden become very expensive. Appetizing. And when you consider that in the context of today’s modern world, I think you see where I’m going. We [00:15:00] are bombarded by hundreds of advertising messages and images every day that are carefully engineered to make us always want more.

And, it has been lamented that many of the smartest people in the world are not working to figure out how to advance the species, but instead are trying to figure out how to get us to grow. Click more Facebook ads or get us more addicted to mobile apps and video games. And evidence of this type of environment is all around us.

Food companies, for example, they know exactly how much salt, sugar, and fat to include in recipes to hook us. And they know that a never ending variety of flavors and options prevents us from becoming desensitized to their brands of reward. Video game makers, they know how to carefully craft experiences that can elevate dopamine to amphetamine like levels.

And yes, there is research to back that up. And that also explains a lot of the obsessive compulsive behavior that you see in gaming online shopping contributes to this problem. Constant sexual stimulation and all forms of media does as [00:16:00] well. Facebook, of course, is a. Huge player in this arena and even the aromas that are pumped into stores, hotels, restaurants, fast food joints, and even ice cream parlors are all carefully engineered to communicate to your brain.

Here’s a reward. Here’s a reward. Come get it. And your brain then just wallows in all of this dopamine, like a. Pig and shit. And there you are feeling like you just have to scratch all of these itches. You don’t even know where they came from. You just have to get into action. You have to do it now.

You have to satisfy these urges. So in the final analysis, when you consider just how hyper targeted and hyper stimulated our dopamine neurons are just by living life and going through our routine daily actions, it’s really no surprise that the average person is an overweight procrastinator hooked. Don ice cream, video games, junk food, television shows, and social media, and that it takes a rather dramatic shift in behavior patterns to escape from these traps.[00:17:00] 

The reality is if we’re going to succeed in this new world, then we’re going to have to learn how to distinguish between the false distracting and addicting quote unquote rewards that we’re enticed with every day, everywhere we go at all times, and the real rewards that they’re going to give us. True long term satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment, and that are going to bring meaning to our lives.

So with all that in mind, let’s now shift this discussion toward the practical. What can we do to increase our willpower and improve our ability to navigate This treacherous modern environment that we have to live in every day. So we know that modern life, it bombards us with willpower challenges every day that require us to call on our self control mechanisms and successfully avoid distractions and do the things that we need to do, whether or not we want to and not do the things that we shouldn’t do, no matter how much we want to.

And one of the big hurdles here is research shows that we can at some point [00:18:00] just run out of self control juice. And that leaves us. Susceptible to temptation and impulsive and unwanted behaviors, scientists have observed that regardless of the types of tasks performed, people’s self control is at its highest in the morning and that it steadily declines as the day wears on.

So as you Go through your day resisting sweets and fighting emotional impulses, keeping distractions at bay, compelling yourself to do difficult tasks, or even just making trivial purchase decisions, you see all these things they seem to pull from the same willpower reserve. This theory and the evidence is that underpins it has given rise to the willpower as a muscle metaphor.

Meaning that, your willpower only has so much strength and every time that you train it or flex it, it becomes a little bit weaker. Now, the positive side of the metaphor though, is of course you can train it. So the more you use your willpower muscle. The more it responds like a physical one, it gets stronger and it gets more resistant to fatigue and [00:19:00] research backs this up as well.

It appears that we can increase our overall willpower by performing regular small acts of self control like eating less sweets or tracking our spending, correcting our posture, refraining from swearing or saying offensive things that we know we shouldn’t be saying. Even squeezing a little hand grip every day or using our non dominant hand for various tasks.

All of these things, no matter how trivial they are can train our willpower because what we’re really doing here is we are using what psychologists call the pause and plan response, which involves pausing before we act. noticing what we’re about to do and then deciding to willfully do it or not do it.

See, we can use this research to build our own little willpower workouts, so to speak, that train us in our self control. So for example, you can build your, I won’t muscle by refraining from slouching when you sit or committing to not eating junk food every day and then falling through on it. Or not swearing and [00:20:00] falling through on it.

You can build your, I will muscle by committing to some new daily habit. Like it could be simple. You just be doing five minutes of breathing exercises or, going for a walk outside every day, doing 20 pushups right after you wake up or doing some stretching and mobility work. You can track something in your life that you don’t normally pay attention to.

Like maybe your. Caloric intake or your caloric expenditure, you can look at how much coffee you’re drinking or your caffeine intake and see if that needs to be regulated or, track your time that you spend surfing on the internet or doing other nonproductive activities or finding something in your house that needs cleaning and cleaning.

And you get the idea. There are unlimited options here. It’s just a simple matter of. deciding that you’re going to do something and then following through with it consistently. Now, if all that sounds inconsequential or too basic, you might be surprised how far these little self control exercises can go in terms of increasing your ability to make bigger and bigger changes in your lives, like [00:21:00] adopting a completely new and healthier lifestyle.

Remember that you create your feelings, ideas, and attitudes primarily through your behaviors, and those behaviors can be. Small. There’s nothing that says those have to be major earth shattering actions. A lot of little actions can add up to major psychological shifts. Another highly effective way to train your willpower is to use a strategy called pre commitment, which entails taking action in Now, to strengthen your position and commitment to a behavior and ward off any underhanded attempts at sabotage from future you.

For many people, the best way to beat temptation is to simply avoid facing it in the first place, which is something that I personally have taken a heart in my own life. Many people being on the outside looking in, they think that I have superhuman levels of discipline and superhuman levels of willpower, and I don’t think that’s really it.

I think I’ve just done a good job creating a routine [00:22:00] that allows me to avoid many of the things that draw willpower down and avoid many of the decisions that sap willpower. For example, research shows that the. Average person makes over 200 food related decisions per day. So trying to decide what to eat, when, whether or not to eat something and so forth.

I eat more or less the same foods every meal, every day until I get sick of something. And then I change it and then continue to just eat the same things every day. So I don’t have to think about it. I make very few food related decisions, almost to the point of, I, it almost feels like nothing because I know what I’m eating every single day.

And at what time, and that’s it. I don’t think about it. Another example would be even the clothes that I wear. I don’t think about it. I wear more or less the same exact clothes every day because I don’t want to think about it because I know that if I’m starting my day with a bunch of trivial decisions, that is going to make the rest of my day harder.

It’s going to leave me with less mental energy and less willpower to do the [00:23:00] more important things that I want to do. Another thing that I’ve done well is systematizing my life, creating a routine that I can just stick to. And many people would think that’s very restrictive. Where I wake up at the same time every day, I know that there’s no question whether or not I’m getting out of bed at that time.

And then I’m going to follow a very simple morning routine and then I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to get to the office around a certain time and I’m going to start my work with certain types of tasks. And depending on the day, that might change. But my point is. My life is very structured and rather counterintuitively, this is very liberating empowering because it frees up all kinds of mental energy and prevents me from wasting all kinds of mental energy on things that are really not important on things that are not going to get me closer to where I want to be in any area of my life.

So if you are just instinctively opposed to organizing your life or creating and sticking to a routine, I would highly [00:24:00] recommend that you change that behavior pattern. And of course, the easiest way to do that is to just act differently. And no matter how hard it is. You put together a routine and you just do it every day and then after a bit, it just becomes more natural and you’ll find that your ideas about routines and about being really organized, just change.

You’re just going to feel differently and think differently about it at some point. And the reason why I’m really stressing this is if you don’t do that, what you’re going to find is that. Everything else in your life is going to be harder and especially the things that really matter because the things that are really meaningful in life, they require the most self discipline, the most willpower.

They are generally the type of things that most people don’t want to do. The things that they defer or just put off indefinitely. And what you’ll find is the less orderly. That your life is the more disorderly it’s going to be, and that might sound obvious, but a lot of people that don’t consider that, that the less order that [00:25:00] they have and that they have imposed in their life, the more chaos and disorder, they will be inviting chaos and disorder that is going to pull them in many different directions and leave them generally just spread too thin to really be able to deal with the big things that need to be dealt with to create not just a good body, but a good life.

So anyways, back to the pre commitment strategy. Here’s a good example of it. So let’s say you have trouble with procrastinating on the internet instead of working. What you can do is you can download a program called freedom that turns off your internet for a set period of time. Once it’s off, there’s nothing you can do to bring it back for, whatever the time period is.

There’s another one called antisocial that blocks social networks and email in the same way. Let’s say you have trouble sticking to a diet. You could pre commit to that by throwing out every bit of tempting junk food that’s in your house and not buying any of it again. You could also bring a healthy lunch to work every day to make sure [00:26:00] that you are prepared and that you won’t wind up running down the street to the fast food joint.

Let’s say you want to ensure that you’re going to stick to your workouts. You’re going to do your workouts. Something simple as you could pay for an annual gym membership instead of going month to month. To increase the amount of financial pain. If you stop going another good tool for pre commitment is the website stick with two K’s S T I C K K.

And it was created by a Yale economist named Ian Aries. I think that’s how you pronounce the last name. Areas. Anyways, this website, what it does is it allows you to set a goal in a timeframe, and then you can put money on the line and you can also decide what happens with that money if you fail. So you can have it go to a charity if you want to, that’s one way to do it, or you can have it go to an organization that you don’t like.

And that can actually be a stronger incentive. That’s what Ian has found. So if you set up that, if you fail your goal, then. Then you make it an amount of money. Consider it. I would look at it like gambling, right? Gambling is not fun unless there’s an amount of money on the line that, makes [00:27:00] you feel something.

So I would go about this in the same way, put an amount of money on the line that makes you feel something if you lose it and have it go to the KKK or something like that, if you fail that. That could very well be a stronger incentive than, hey, going to St. Jude’s. And the website also allows you to designate a referee that is going to monitor your progress and confirm the truthfulness of your reports.

And you can invite supporters to cheer you on and so forth. It’s pretty cool and it has helped a lot of people. Anyway, the point is Anything you can do to show right now that you mean business and to make it more difficult and uncomfortable to change your mind later and give up is going to help you keep unwanted impulses and feelings at bay until your new actions change those impulses and feelings and replace them with more positive ones.

Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and [00:28:00] fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. Oh, and before you leave, let me quickly tell you about one other product of mine that I think you might like, specifically my 100 percent natural pre workout fat burner supplement forge. Now, it was designed to be used specifically when exercising in a fasted state, and it helps you maximize fat burning while training on an empty stomach, minimize the amount of muscle that you lose while training in this state and maintain [00:29:00] intensity and fat burning Focus in your workouts.

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