If you struggle with resisting temptation, you are not alone. As consumers, we have been conditioned to always choose the easy option. Get that Double Big Mac meal. Make another impulse buy on Amazon.
Fortunately, this process can be reversed. You can learn how to increase willpower. Once you do, all areas of your life will dramatically improve.
Learn why willpower is akin to a muscle, how you can increase it, and at what times of the day you will have the most willpower available.
What Is Willpower & Why It’s Important
Willpower is a superpower. It allows you to override your emotional impulses with your rational mind. This way, you can resist temptations and achieve your long-term goals.
Let’s say you want to lose weight. So, instead of getting your customary donut on your way to work, you buy an apple. This decision goes against everything that your limbic system wants you to do. It is telling you to get that Bavarian cream treat and ride that sugar high. Damned be the consequences.
The only thing standing between you and another uptick on the scale is your willpower. Your rational mind has the power to stay your hand. So, you exercise your self-control — you pass the Krispy Kreme store and walk inside a healthy deli.
Without willpower, you have nothing. You are now a plaything of your impulses. One minute, you want to stuff yourself. The next minute, you want to buy something outrageous. Then you feel like having unprotected sex. Then you wonder what smoking crack cocaine is like.
This might sound overly dramatic — but it is not. What I just described is the reality of most people alive today in the West. That is why obesity, consumerism, STDs, and drug abuse are running rampant. As a society, we have unlearned how to harness willpower.
Why Willpower Gets a Bad Rep
In our current culture, willpower gets a bad rep. We are supposed to not force things:
- “Go with the flow.”
- “If it’s not fun, stop doing it.”
- “You are already perfect the way you are.”
That kind of nonsense.
Willpower is the key to getting anything done, even your passion projects. No matter how excited you are about a goal, there will be aspects about it that you don’t like. To succeed, you will have to push through.
It is this combative spirit that makes willpower suspect to the vanilla zeitgeist. The notion of fighting — even if it’s just fighting yourself — has a negative connotation. We are supposed to hug everything out.
Do not let this deter you. You must embrace willpower. It is the rocket fuel that you need to make your projects take off. There is no alternative to grit.
The Mechanics of Willpower
You need to understand how willpower works, so you can make the most of it.
1. Willpower Is Limited
The first thing we need to understand about willpower is that it’s a limited resource. It works like the battery of your smartphone. Once it is used up, you are done for the day.
Here are some activities that deplete our willpower:
- Restraining yourself. Not eating that donut or not having that beer — especially if everybody around you is indulging — will cost you.
- Getting upset. When you allow somebody to annoy you, your willpower is rapidly getting depleted (especially if you lash out at them).
- Ignoring distractions. Try working on your thesis with your phone next to you. Every notification will eat away at your willpower.
- Making decisions. Whenever we have to make decisions, our willpower goes down. This is even true for rather insignificant decisions like what to wear.
- Doing work. Any physical or mental work uses up our willpower reservoir. The more complex the project, the higher the cost.
Do any of these activities for long enough, and you will run out of gas. You won’t get any more productive work done until you recharge — typically after a full night of sleep.
This is a truth that most people do not want to acknowledge. If we have a limited amount of willpower, it means we have to choose. This we cannot have. We want to have it all. So, we go on pretending willpower is limitless.
But willpower doesn’t care. It’s a limited resource either way. If you kid yourself about its nature, you will simply accomplish nothing.
If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
Russian proverb
I cannot tell you how often I encounter this in my coaching practice. Clients will come to me explaining how they want to build that million-dollar business, get ripped, travel the world, date the model, etc.
When I explain to them that willpower is limited and that they have to choose, they refuse. “I am extremely driven, you will see.” So, we try it their way. They borrow against their willpower until they must admit defeat. Then we do it the right way. Which is to acknowledge that willpower is limited — but then work on expanding your willpower reservoir. Which brings me to my second point.
2. Willpower Can Be Trained
Willpower is a muscle that can be trained. If you carefully overexert your willpower muscle, it will adapt. It will become more powerful. The key is to go small. You must only work the muscle enough to provide a stimulus for growth, but not so much that it breaks down (which is what everybody does).
This way, you can indeed accomplish much more in life than the average person. If everybody else’s willpower battery caps at 40 percent, but yours goes up to 80 percent, this will give you a massive edge. Each day, you will make many more smart decisions than the average person. Over time, these smart decisions will pay massive dividends. You will be almost impossible to catch up with.
Note that training your willpower muscle is skill-specific. If you discipline yourself to go to the gym each day for two hours, it doesn’t automatically mean you will also sit down to practice the piano for two hours each day. That’s a new skill and a new willpower pathway to develop.
However, having gone through this process once will help you in a new context. The best practices for managing your willpower stay the same. You at least take that advantage in strategy with you.
Let’s look at what these best practices are.
How To Increase Willpower in 14 Steps
Here is a game plan for “How to increase willpower,” so you can accomplish more in life.
1. Manage Your Sleep
Sleep is how we replenish our willpower. If you are always well-rested, your willpower battery will be fully charged at the beginning of each day. You will be more likely to make smart decisions. But if you miss out on sleep, it’s the reverse. Your battery will only be partially charged and your bad decisions will compound quickly.
Understand — you cannot borrow against sleep. No one can. The more you ignore this truth, the more ineffective you become.
To always get deep, restoring sleep, pay attention to these best practices:
- Always keep the same bedtime, even on the weekends. Your body needs that regularity. You will fall asleep faster, sleep more deeply, and need fewer hours per night to feel fully rested.
- Always get plenty of sunlight during the day, especially right after waking up. This is to calibrate your circadian rhythm as well as support important immune functions, like vitamin D production.
- Don’t look at any screens for at least an hour before you go to bed. Exposure to blue light close to bedtime will mess up your circadian rhythm. Consuming social media with its quick dopamine hits will further keep you alert.
2. Eat Right
The relationship between food and willpower is a curious one.
In a world where fast food is omnipresent, it takes a lot of willpower to stay away from it. If you are used to processed foods, not getting that slice of pizza will take a Herculean effort.
But keep eating healthy for long enough, and it eventually becomes effortless. You have successfully reprogrammed your taste buds. Now you crave your grilled salmon and steamed broccoli.
As a result, you will have more energy, and more energy means more willpower. This makes it even easier to keep eating healthy and making other smart choices. It’s a virtuous cycle.
But the opposite is also true. The less willpower you invest in resisting unhealthy food choices, the less willpower you will have in the long run. You will constantly feel tired and irritable. It will negatively affect your every other decision. Now you are on a downward spiral.
3. Use the Time After a Meal
The best time to make difficult decisions or get important work done is in the mornings. Your willpower reservoir hasn’t been depleted by anything else yet.
The second best time is after lunch. Eating infuses us with energy (= calories to burn). Also, it is a pleasurable and oftentimes a social experience. It takes our minds off things. For these reasons, we tend to have another willpower spike right after lunch or dinner.
Plan for this. If you have a busy day ahead of you, schedule your most important tasks right after waking up or right after a meal. Make use of your biological willpower rhythm.
4. Do Quick Recharges
The number one way to recharge your willpower is sleep. Get a good night’s sleep, and your willpower battery will be full again.
Having said that, you can also partially recharge your willpower battery throughout the day:
- Take a nap. This is the next-best option after a regular night of sleep. A good nap will give you a bar or two back.
- Meditate. The third-best option. Meditation allows you to quickly recover from anxiety, decision-making fatigue, etc.
- Taking a walk. Not as recharging as the other options, but great for clearing your head. You will look at problems more objectively again afterward.
5. Create Processes
Every little decision you need to make eats away at your willpower. Some examples include:
- “What should I wear today?”
- “Where should I go for lunch today?”
- “Which exercises should I do at the gym today?”
- “What items from my to-do list should I tackle today?”
By itself, each of these decisions seems miniscule. But they add up. Over the course of a day, we have to make hundreds of these trivial decisions. In sum, they will leave you exhausted.
This is why you must create processes. If you have automated procedures in place, you will free up willpower. This willpower can now be invested in projects that will make a difference.
Here are some ideas from my own life:
- As an extreme minimalist, I wear the same outfit every day. No mental bandwidth is wasted on choosing what to wear or shopping for new outfits.
- I cook the same handful of meals all the time. This simplifies shopping and food prep. I rarely spend more than 15 minutes on either.
- I do the same bodyweight workout routine every week. No need to travel to the gym and wait in line for the machines.
- I collect all my to-dos in a central productivity system (read about it here). One look at my lists, and I know what to do that day.
6. Clarify Your Goals
If you don’t know what your goals are, you will waste willpower. Vice versa, the clearer you are about your objective, the more willpower can work its magic.
To clarify your vision, you must write your goals down. The simple act of putting pen to paper will force you to articulate your ideas.
Be as specific as you can. “Become successful,” is not very specific. “Start a media agency and grow it to seven figures in the next five years,” is a lot more specific.
7. Tackle One Goal at a Time
It is okay to have more than one goal. For example, you might want to build a media agency but you might also want to compete in powerlifting. However, it is not a good idea to tackle more than one major goal at a time. If you are currently working 12-hour days a day, don’t sign up for that competition next month. By splitting up your willpower over two projects, you won’t do either of them justice.
8. Build Habits
Habits are a way to reduce the willpower post of a certain activity.
Let’s say you are trying to establish a writing habit — every day, you want to write 500 words for your blog. Initially, this will be a slog. You will come up with all kinds of excuses, like “I don’t feel inspired today,” or, “I should clean the apartment first.”
To overcome this resistance, you must invest a tremendous amount of willpower. On a scale of 0–100, you might have to spend a 70. That’s a lot. You won’t have much willpower left for anything else.
But something curious happens the longer you keep at it. Very slowly, the willpower cost goes down. In the first 3 months, you go from a 70 to a 60. Three more months go by and you are now at a 50. Another half a year passes, and you are suddenly at a 30.
This is the magic of habits — eventually, they become almost effortless. They are just something you do every day, like brushing your teeth.
9. Take Small Steps
What everybody does is start big. They sign up for the gym and work out for two hours every day. They start a reading habit and commit to reading 50 pages a day.
In the beginning, when you are still high on enthusiasm, this might work. But as that enthusiasm wears off, you start to skip days. Then you skip some more. Then you stop altogether. You have run out of willpower.
To succeed, you must do the opposite of what everybody is doing — you must start small. Start so incredibly small that the willpower cost to you is almost nothing. Do one push-up a day. Read one paragraph in a business book.
Keep doing this for a week, no matter how silly it feels. In week two, go up to two push-ups or two paragraphs. In week three, make it three push-ups or three paragraphs.
At the end of the year, you will be doing 50+ push-ups per day or reading 50+ paragraphs per day. That is significant. These habits will change your life.
Still, people refuse the “start small” approach. That is because they think short-term. They want results, and they want them now.
This is a surefire way to not get them.
When you overtax your willpower, eventually, you will break down. It might take two weeks or it might take two months. But eventually, it will happen.
Nothing is accomplished this way. Yes, you had some quick wins. But now that you quit your workout habit again or stopped reading those business books, you will soon be back to zero.
If you had just stuck with growing your willpower muscle gradually, you would already be successful. But you were impatient and went looking for a shortcut.
Understand — going small is the shortcut.
10. Use Healthy Rewards
Reward yourself when you use your willpower wisely. This will reinforce good behavior.
However, make sure to use healthy rewards. There is no point in rewarding yourself for working out by smoking a cigarette afterward.
For example, I might reward myself for working on my most important task first thing in the morning by going for a massage afterward. Or maybe I will go to the beach for half an hour.
11. Use Punishments
In our vanilla world, we shy away from punishments. There should only be encouragement, never any negative consequences.
Don’t fall for this nonsense. When used correctly, punishments are highly effective.
As a thought experiment, imagine someone put a gun to your head and told you, “From now on, you have to work out every day, or I will shoot you.” How many more workouts would you miss for the rest of your life? Zero. You would be at the gym first thing in the morning, no matter if you felt like it or not.
The real problem with punishments is administrating them. Unfortunately (or fortunately), no enforcer follows you around with a gun.
There are some workarounds, though:
- Make your intent public. Tell all your friends about your plan to practice the piano for an hour each day. Encourage people to ridicule you if you miss your target.
- Get an accountability coach. Same idea, but even more pressure. You are essentially paying someone to kick your butt and shame you.
- Use money as a punishment. Sign up with a service like stickK.com. Every time you miss a habit, you must pay a fine to an anti-charity.
- Find somebody to slap you. If you don’t execute on habit X, they get a free slap. I know it sounds extreme, but it works. Obviously, don’t injure each other.
12. Remove Triggers
Always avoid spending willpower in the first place; it is too precious of a resource. Remove triggers from your environment where you can.
If you know you are prone to snacking, throw out all sweets at home.
If you know you like to get drunk, don’t go out on a Saturday night.
If you know you always argue with Aunt Lily, don’t attend the family dinner.
This is the question you must ask yourself — “Will this activity eat into my willpower without accomplishing anything?” If the answer is “Yes,” stay away from it.
13. Cut Out Social Media
In the digital age, social media is the biggest willpower dump of them all. Any time you feel bored, you reach for your phone. “This will cheer me up again!” you think. But after doom-scrolling Instagram or TikTok for half an hour, you feel worse, not better. You have depleted your willpower reserves even further.
We are not even aware of how much social media eats into our willpower until we finally drop this addiction. But when we do, our world clears up. We feel less anxious. We feel less stressed out. We finally get around to our important tasks. It’s like a rebirth.
Getting there is a challenge, though. Ironically, to free up that extra willpower, you first have to invest a lot of willpower. Getting over your social media addiction is tough. I know, because I regularly help my coaching clients with doing so, and boy, do they struggle.
What works best is to wean yourself off gradually. Start easy. Don’t look at your phone until half an hour after you wake up. So, if you typically get up at 7 am, don’t look at it until 7:30 am. Once you can manage that, go up to 8 am. Then to 8:30 am. And so forth.
This works better than going cold turkey, especially if you lead a busy life. If you have a job, a family, and other commitments, quitting social media overnight will be too much. Take the gradual approach.
14. Make Accountability Work for You
The closest thing to a willpower hack — find an accountability partner.
A study by The American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) found that if you have ongoing accountability meetings with a person, your chances of succeeding with a goal are 95 percent. You are virtually guaranteed to succeed.
It is like outsourcing your willpower to somebody else. It is now their job to kick your butt and get you going. You can focus on the execution.
Obviously, this is where I would like you to hire me as an accountability coach. But even if you don’t, find somebody else to check in with you daily.
For example, if you committed to a daily reading habit, every day, without fail, send a message to your accountability partner — “I read my one page today.”
If that message doesn’t come, your accountability buddy should inquire about what’s going on. Essentially, it must be impossible for you to weasel out of your commitment.
By using peer pressure, you can save on willpower — and get more done.