Why Willpower Is A Waste Of Time.
Willpower is defined as the control exerted to do something or restrain impulses. We have all seen it, A gritty, muscular man running barefoot by the sea telling you about how willpower is the only way through, how life is about smashing through walls and jumping over barriers.
I say no walls and no barriers, willpower is overrated and should not even exist in the first place.
Why Willpower Is Overrated.
I love playing videogames, and since I have been indoors due to the pandemic, I have more time to play videogames, more time to play videogames means more time to procrastinate, I wanted to get over the habit of playing video games, so I decided to take all the video games I have and sell them to my cousin.
This not willpower, it is intelligence.
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was an experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in 1972, it was a simple experiment, he brought in a group of young children, made them sit in a room, placed a marshmallow in front of them and they were told that they would get one more marshmallow if they didn’t eat the one in front of them, It is still happening today, not by Stanford but by Kylie Jenner on Instagram.
The children that delayed their gratification and resisted eating the marshmallow were found to be more successful later on in their lives. They had higher SAT scores and ten years after the experiment were found to be more competent as adolescents.
But they did not use willpower.
Instead Of WillPower Use This.
If you watch clips of the experiment on YouTube, you find that the children who were able to resist the marshmallows distracted themselves, they were covering their eyes or talking to themselves to avoid eating the marshmallow.
Before I sold all my videogames, I kept them in a cupboard at my house, I used all the willpower that I could muster but I simply could not resist the pull of my videogames, so I sold them all.
The common thread between me and the children that resisted the marshmallows is that we found a way to get rid of the distraction therefore we did not have to use willpower. The children covered their eyes so they could not see the marshmallow and I sold my videogames so that I could not play them again.
You cannot exert willpower over something that you can’t see. You don’t have to smash a wall, you have to take a different route which doesn’t have a wall.
Here Is Why This Works.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear writes about four cycles of a habit, these four cycles are:
- Cue.
- Craving
- Response
- Reward
Let me explain to you what this means. For example, you work for a big law firm in London, every day at about two o’clock in the afternoon you start to become tired, which is a cue, which gives you a craving for a cup of coffee, you respond by going to a cafe near your office and you get rewarded with a good cup of coffee that tastes good and which helps you to focus on your job.
If we disrupt a cycle or multiple cycles then we can successfully break a habit.
So again it is two o’clock at the firm and you start feeling tired, but, instead of having a cup of coffee, you do twenty rapid push-ups or you take a walk around the office, and after 5 minutes you come back to your desk, refreshed and ready to work.
What’s happened here?
You disrupted the response. The cue, craving and reward were the same but you disrupted the response, instead of a cup of coffee, you went for a walk, that’s it.
The Science Behind This.
Our brain is a product of conditioning, we are conditioned to respond to certain cues and cravings in a certain way, which happens because we have learnt and repeated certain behaviours several times and these become habits.
Pavlov did this with dogs, he started by giving the dogs food, the dogs would smell the food and they would begin to salivate. After a few attempts, he introduced a clicking sound before he gave them food, after a few attempts, the dogs would start to salivate when they heard the sound of the clicker.
Humans are not that different, a glass bottle may remind an alcoholic of alcohol, which forces him to relapse back to drinking excessively. A burning piece of paper may remind a chain-smoker about a cigarette, triggering him to start smoking again.
The Alternatives To Willpower.
The first alternative to willpower is to not have a brick wall to smash through, this is easy and I do this all the time to overcome a bad habit or develop a good habit. If you have an addiction to social media, delete the apps off of your phone, get rid of the distraction, so that you do not have to exert willpower.
The second way is fairly simple, James Clear that there are four steps to creating a good habit:
- Make it obvious.
- Make it attractive.
- Make it easy.
- Make it satisfying.
The first step can be related to cues, make the cues obvious, you are hungry so you decide to eat. The second step can be related to cravings, have a nice fruit bowl in front of you, make the bowl of fruit look good, the third step is to make it easy, so do not keep the bowl of fruit in a different room, keep it in front of you and then make it satisfying, feel good about eating fruits instead of chocolate, associate pleasure with fruits and pain with chocolate.
To break a bad habit, do the opposite of what is written above, for example, get rid of the chocolate in your house, so that when you have the cue for something sweet, the chocolate craving will kick in but chocolate is difficult to acquire since you have not got any at your house, and remind yourself of all the times that you felt fat and unhealthy because of chocolate, this makes chocolate seem less satisfying, so you will stop eating chocolate and start eating fruit.
To conclude this article, you do not need to be powered by tons of willpower, all you have to do is to simplify the problem, to break a habit or to form a good habit, work smartly.
