Faisal's Notebook

Recent Notes

Willpower

3 min read

Sources

  1. Alok M. Kanojia, “Psychiatrist Breaks Down Willpower” - 2024-12-20

Introduction

Plenty of people heavily rely on willpower to overcome difficult aspects of their lives. However, this approach is unsustainable; therefore, we should use a different approach. Before we can use the other approach, we must first understand the 5 sources of our actions:

  1. Desire
  2. Habit
  3. Emotion
  4. Internal Motivation1
  5. Willpower

Willpower

Willpower is a finite resource used to override the 4 other sources of action and restrain their generated impulses. Although it is finite, it can still be replenished after sleeping. For this reason, we often find that willpower is more dependable in the morning than at night—it replenishes after sleep but decreases as time passes.

Making Self-Control Effortless

Increasing Willpower

Even though willpower drains the more we use it, it is possible to increase the resource of willpower we have so that we can use it more. Things like meditating and emotional regulation can increase the amount of willpower we have.

Willpower Efficiency

We cannot exhaust a lot of willpower to resist the strong influence of desires, habits, emotions, and internal motivation on our actions because this will cause a burnout. Instead we should cultivate much weaker desires, habits, emotions, and internal motivation so that we will need much less willpower to overcome them.

4 Ways to Weaken the Influence of the Other Variables

  • Minimize desires
  • Regulate emotions
  • Alter habits
  • Eliminate internal motivation (or ambition)

More Control/Resistance Applied = More Effort to Exert. We have to use willpower to drive our actions but, at the same time, we should use the smallest amount so that we could lessen the effort spent to overcome the other dimensions of behavior.

Motivation: The Wrong Solution

Many people believe that they need to build motivation to overcome their desires. As a result, they spend a lot of time looking for ways to find motivation in life. However, this is the wrong approach to solving the problem: being controlled by your desires implies that your success in life is determined by the rightness of your desires.2 The issue here is that motivation fades away, thereby making the approach unsustainable.

The proper way to overcome desires is to free ourselves from them entirely, regardless if they are good desires. We should do less of both the positive and negative things our body wants us to do. This is because our actions should be driven by what we have to do and not what we feel like doing—the latter will make our actions dependent on whether we are in the right mood or not.

TIP

Practice restraint even at the smallest level. Even if we feel like doing more to maximize the positive effects, we should restrict our actions to the target we set.

Do something for the sake of doing it and not because of its potential benefits

Footnotes

  1. Internal motivation emerges from the serotonergic system and longs for things such as fulfillment and security. In contrast, desires emerge from the dopamine system and compels you to play videogames, eat healthy food, and browse social media. ↩

  2. For example, you can only be healthy when you only crave healthy food. ↩

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