As nutrition coaches, we’re often asked how to increase willpower, whether it’s practicing restraint at a buffet or working out after a long day of work.
While tackling willpower isn’t (and shouldn’t be) plan A, as this post explains, there is still evidence surrounding four specific practices that help increase willpower you can put into practice today.
What is willpower?
Willpower is the strength of will to carry out one’s decisions. It’s more commonly felt as a competition between two desires.
Willpower can be broken into three categories: I will, I won’t, and I want.
I will eat a salad for lunch today. I won’t have a beer at the summer party. I want to exercise four times this week.
But we know that just because we say we will, won’t, or want something, doesn’t necessarily mean it happens.
One brain, two minds.
Neuroscientists use the concept that, although we have one brain, we have two minds.
The pre-frontal cortex is the front area of the brain involved in decision making, long-term planning, core values, self-reflection, and emotional processing. Its formation matured throughout evolution. Our second mind, however, is referred to by some as our primal brain or lizard brain. This encompasses our desire for things like instant gratification, prioritizing safety over risk, and desiring to expend the least amount of energy possible.
If you’ve ever struggled to choose the fruit bowl over the bag of chips, or folding laundry over Netflix, you’ve felt the tug of war between these two minds.
Depending on our mindset, stress levels, or how rested we are will depend on which mind leads the charge in our decisions. This explains why one day we can be really pleased with our decisions and another day be disappointed.
How to become a willpower machine.
There are four components that can help you get better at willpower. The bad news: you’ve likely heard of them before and you brush them off. The good news: you can start using them today and witness your willpower strengthen.
Get a bigger and better brain by sleeping enough.
The “Better You” mindset is influenced by your brain receiving a healthy dose of sleep.
Willpower researcher Kelly McGonigal shares that simply increasing from 7 hours to 8 hours of sleep helped prepare people when they were confronted with a willpower challenge. Getting 6 hours or less is considered sleep deprivation. (Raise your hand if that’s your normal.)
When our brain doesn’t receive adequate opportunities to run through its sleep cycles, this affects our pre-frontal cortex by limiting its ability to keep our long-term goals at top of mind (literally and figuratively). Because the primal brain loves instant gratification and expending less energy, this mechanism is really good at coaxing you to indulge in ice cream on the couch versus exercising and eating your planned homecooked meal for dinner.
Creating and maintaining a proper bedtime routine to help you get enough quality sleep is paramount to being good at willpower.
Get a denser and better-connected brain by exercising.
Exercise fundamentally changes our physiology and not just our waistline. Brain systems are better connected and energy is used more efficiently when we exercise. This puts our pre-frontal cortex in prime decision-making mode.
While starting an exercise routine seems like it takes more willpower when you start, what we continue to find is that exercise gives back far more willpower than it takes. Exercising is also linked to better eating habits, which in turn provide nutrients and energy to the brain, the home of willpower.
Speaking of…
Adding more plants to your diet helps your brain use energy properly and efficiently.
If the brain doesn’t receive an adequate amount of micronutrients, and if we have chronically elevated blood sugar levels, our brain (and decision-making power) suffers.
It’s interesting to ponder because many in the general population focus on food as a way to manipulate their weight. What many forget is that our eating pattern literally drives our physiology. It impacts things like energy levels, ability to adapt to and recover from our training, sleep, metabolism, hormones, neurotransmitters, and ultimately our capacity to execute on decisions we want to make.
Our ability to do so suffers when we lack plants and other nutrient-dense options in our diet and eat more energy than our body needs over a long period of time.
- Struggle to know how to do this on your own? This is where we come in. Consider working with us.
We don’t like woo-woo, but meditation really does work.
This practice didn’t survive thousands of years without a good reason.
Meditation is a mental exercise that trains your attention and awareness. Lack of awareness around how we’re thinking and feeling can be a major obstacle that prevents us from executing our willpower. How do we know what needs changing if we aren’t aware?
There are various forms of meditation but the primary goal is the same in all of them: limit distractions, bring our focus to the present, and practice awareness of our thoughts and feelings.
Some ways this is accomplished are through controlled breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, visualization, movement (walking, gardening), prayer, focused meditation (counting beads or staring into a candle flame), or your favorite meditation app.
Meditation acts on areas of the brain that modulate the autonomic nervous system, which governs such functions as digestion and blood pressure—functions heavily affected by chronic stress. Through its physiological effects, meditation has been found to effectively counter heart disease, chronic pain, and other conditions. It is also valuable in improving emotion regulation.
Meditation. (2021). Psychology Today.
In summary
These four strategies–sleep, exercise, eating more plants, and meditation–fundamentally change and improve our physiology and willpower capacity.
We suggest picking one from this list, which is enough to notice improvements today. While we recognize and even endorse developing other skills to help our clients improve their relationship with food, start and stay consistent with exercise, and create a healthier lifestyle, executing on any of these four can help you start seeing improvements right away and help you follow through on what you say you’ll do.
Did you enjoy this article? Then you’ll enjoy this book written by stress and willpower expert and health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, which inspired and informed the contents of this article.
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