It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

You should understand that I like coffee–a lot. I may not be one of those people who can tell Sumatra from Ethiopian at a sniff or who grinds it fresh every morning, but I really enjoy the stuff. I used to drink it black–no milk or cream or sugar or whipped cream or cinnamon or Sweet’n’Low. I have long enjoyed the smell, taste, and experience of a cup of coffee–and I haven’t had a drop of the stuff in over a year. For that matter, I’ve also had no caffeinated soda or tea and very close to zero chocolate in a year. It has been a bit of an adjustment.

I’d probably better mention that I don’t think coffee, caffeine, or chocolate are evil: my particular physiology just has a very hard time with caffeine. If I drink coffee, I have to have a specific amount at a specific time every day without fail, or I get headaches. Caffeine also drives up my blood pressure noticeably, makes me itch in cold months, and causes me excruciating pain at any time of year if I’ve been drinking it and then really, really exert myself. For you it might be healthy, but for me even tiny traces of caffeine are very bad. I shouldn’t even drink decaf, because decaffeinated coffee and tea aren’t free of caffeine; they just have less. I may have coffee or chocolate at some point in the future (for instance, if I absolutely have to make a long drive and I’m very tired), but if I do, there will be a price to pay.

So as much as coffee and chocolate appeal to me (especially together), I’m a much happier person not having them–though as you can guess, it hasn’t been easy. How have I kept on the straight and narrow and not even slipped once?

I do have a special advantage in resisting coffee, and that’s that once I finally discovered that it was caffeine that was causing all these problems for me, it was pretty easy to tell when I was experiencing the consequences. The headaches have a special, slightly queasy, all-day quality that is hard to mistake for anything else–even though they don’t come until the second day after a caffeine lapse. So whenever I’ve been tempted to have a cup of coffee, especially when I’m trying to get something important done and feel overtired, dwelling on that consequence and all the others reminds me how important it is to stick with my plan. Perkiness and energy now, sure, but later I get an all-day headache.

What’s interesting is that while this connection is clearer and more specific than most consequences, it’s really not that different from the bad consequences of our other day-to-day bad choices. Spending money we can’t afford now results in not being able to pay for important things later, or getting hounded for months or years by bill collectors. Bingeing on doughnuts for a week makes us carry around a couple of extra pounds day in and day out until we work those calories back off. Giving up on the dishes for a day or two can mean a kitchen that doesn’t get cleaned up until the next time someone stops by.

The encouraging thing is that we can make use of those awful consequences to help our willpower now. Usually when we think of buying something we want or eating doughuts or relaxing instead of doing household chores, the thing in the front of our minds is the short-term pleasure, which makes that bad choice feel good. If we move our attention to the negative consequences instead, then our associations with the bad choice begin to be the pain, discomfort, embarrassment, or tedium we’re buying ourselves in the future. A good motivational approach for almost any situation: when you’re thinking about a good choice, think about the good things it will bring you; when you’re thinking about a bad choice, think about how it will hurt you.

This change of attention isn’t difficult or tiring, it’s just not what we’re used to doing, and this one little habit of focus on the main consequences of a choice can help us do things that might seem next to impossible–like giving up a favorite thing and not even missing it that much. It’s a power well worth having.

Photo by The_Smiths

This week’s issue of Time Magazine includes an article called “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” which manages to be interesting, informative, and painfully misguided.

Stripping the article down to its main points, essentially author John Cloud says:

1. Exercise often makes you hungrier
2. If you eat more calories because you’re hungry from working out, you won’t lose weight
3. Most people who exercise regularly to lose weight seem to be eating those extra calories, so
4. Exercise doesn’t help you lose weight. <– Here’s where the error lies

The only problem described with exercise is that it makes a person hungry. Hunger in these cases is a sign that the body is going to burn some fat if you don’t eat some calories soon, so Cloud implies you should give up on the exercise. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let the fat burn? Yes, this is hard, but if it weren’t, it wouldn’t require willpower, which is what this site is here to help you build.

Cloud also falls into the same two traps as a lot of people who have read about the research that suggests strongly that we have a limited ability to exert self-control. First, he fails to take into account the other research that draws a clear connection between using willpower and strengthening it. That is, he knows about the short-term exhaustion but not about the long-term strengthening.

The other point he misses is that it’s possible to make good choices (that is, use willpower) without using up any of our self-control reserves. Our limitations on self-control appear to have to do with struggling with ourselves, not with simply making good choices. Many of the strategies on this site point to ways we can use willpower without having to fight ourselves over it.

So sure, if you go work out and spend 300 calories, then go eat 500 calories as a “reward” (actually a penalty, if you think about the food’s impact on happiness overall), you won’t lose weight, and may in fact gain it. But it’s still true that weight loss is mainly a question of using more calories than you take in, which means that it’s essential to develop good eating habits and that exercise can help a lot as long as it doesn’t disrupt those habits.

The thing that bothers me most about this article is that I imagine people will read it and then give up, figuring there’s no way for them to win–but I hope I’m wrong. I hope people will read the article, ignore the confused claims about willpower giving out, and understand that to lose weight we just need to make sure we don’t binge on food after workouts. It’s not rocket science, surely. And it’s no surprise the key is self-motivation. Self-motivation turns out to be the key to a lot of things.

A recent article on the Psychology Today site by psychologist Kelly McGonigal, “The Self-Control Costs of Moral Flexibility,” talks about research that seems to show that it’s easier to make good choices when we make a rule of them. For instance, it’s easier to choose to do the dishes after dinner if you’ve made a pact with yourself to always do the dishes after dinner.

In the article, McGonigal says “What’s the best strategy, then, for making moral decisions or sticking to a behavior change? Take a principled stance that sets automatic restrictions on your behavior. Weighing the risks and benefits in each situation may seem like the more logical approach, but it’s more effective for most people to commit broadly and then not reflect on each opportunity.”

So creating rules to follow can be powerful, but there are pitfalls: using rules too much or without thinking it through carefully can cause them to fail or even backfire.

First, keep in mind that we have a limited amount of focus, attention, and effort to spare, and that learning to follow rules (even if they’re terrific rules that we’re coming up with on our own) requires all of these resources. If we try to add on a bunch of rules at once–or even two at once–we may be dooming ourselves to failure. As with new goals, it’s often most effective to get used to new rules one at a time.

Second, watch out for unintended consequences. If you make a rule to eat only at specific times throughout the day, are you piling on extra food at the end of each of those meal or snacktimes because of a fear of going hungry? If you decide to study every weeknight at 7:00, does that mean you’ll pass up a golden opportunity to study at another time because you “don’t have to?” Of course, one way to deal with these problems is to try the rules out, then evaluate how they’re working once or twice a week to see if you might be “gaming” them. Don’t try to reevaluate the rule when it’s time to follow it: by doing that you’d be second-guessing yourself at every step and giving up the whole “no struggle” advantage of rules.

Finally, only make rules for things you want to be doing pretty much all the time. Don’t make a rule that you will sit down for ten minutes at the beginning of every workday to review what you accomplished the day before if you know that at least a couple of times a week, there will be more urgent, important things to attend to as soon as you walk in the door. But this kind of rule problem, too, can be fixed with a little bit of reflection once or twice a week to see how you’re doing.

The idea of making rules about your own behavior may be offputting; if so, it may be more productive to think about taking, as McGonigal puts it, a “principled stance.” Regardless, use this technique to make use of your good thinking now to make good choices in advance and free yourself from some unnecessary indecision.

Photo by Monoglot.

PR Newswire posted an article yesterday called “Research Shows Temptation More Powerful Than Individuals Realize; Personal Restraints Often Overpowered by Impulse” about recent psychological research by Loran Nordgren. That research makes a very useful point: on average, we tend to overestimate how much self-control we have, so we tend to put ourselves in tempting situations more often than is ideal for us. This is an example of an effect Daniel Gilbert describes in his book Stumbling on Happiness, that when we are in one mood, it’s very difficult for us to imagine how we would make decisions in a different mood–and that we generally don’t recognize this is so. When we’re sad, it feels as though everything will suck forever, for instance. In the same way, Nordgren’s experiments support the idea that when we’re calm, we don’t do a good job of predicting how we’ll act if things get crazy (for instance, if someone introduces a big slice of chocolate cake into the picture).

Unfortunately, this piece makes the same mistake that is often made when people talk about running out of willpower: they assume that we should avoid all tempting situations no matter what. In reality, if we always avoid temptation, we miss our opportunities to exercise and strengthen our willpower. We just don’t want to go in the other direction either, and overwhelm ourselves past the point where we still have willpower left.

Brian Harward, a diet and exercise writer at the Cleveland Examiner, posted a piece yesterday in which he argues that “A finish line mindset might work for you if you have lots of willpower and only need to be thin and healthy for a limited period of time.  But if your goal is permanent change, this approach is no good.”

His article makes a great point; I’ll get to that in a moment. But he’s overstating his case in a couple of important ways. First, he describes goals as counter-productive, yet tacitly recognizes their importance when he says “if your goal is permanent change.” Second, he claims that “Eventually everyone runs out of willpower, yes EVERYONE.” And I think he’s right, but only if you define willpower as “forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do.” If you think of it instead as “getting in the habit of making good choices,” then we’re talking about changing attitudes, not struggling against an unbeatable system.

And that’s where Harward’s article really shines, in my opinion. He points out that in areas of life change, like diet and fitness, if you’re looking to simply get to some magical moment in the future rather than changing your life, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot by telling yourself that everything between you and that goal is undesirable and hard, and by not looking to enjoy it. For that reason, despite my quibbles, I certainly recommend the article.

1. Not having a clear goal in mind
Not knowing exactly what you want, or knowing that but not keeping it in mind, makes it very hard to remember what you need to do or why. If you don’t have a clear, short explanation of your goal that you could give anyone who asked at a moment’s notice, talk with a friend or write down your ideas until you can summarize your goals without even having to think about it. Then make sure to tell yourself about your goals regularly.

2. Trying to pursue more than one goal at a time
While it’s not absolutely impossible to pursue more than one goal at a time, doing so dilutes attention, focus, and mental resources. We only have so much time, attention, and effort we can put into changing our lives: trying to do more than one thing at a time is inviting trouble. What’s the single most important goal you have in front of you? Once you’re well on your way with that single, most important goal, it might be possible to get started on a second one.

3. Not being committed
Being committed to a goal means accepting it, taking complete responsibility for it yourself, and being willing to submit to the changes it will require in your life. (See Why Self-Reliance Requires Surrender.) If you’re not fully committed to your goal, feelings of resentment or rebelliousness, or a tendency to blame forces outside yourself for being in the situation you’re in, will block you from moving forward.

4. Failing to plan out specific steps
Knowing your goal is important, but in order to make real progress toward it, you’ll need to know exactly what you expect yourself to do. At any moment, you’ll need to know what the step you’re working on is and what the next step will be when you’re done with that.

5. Not setting aside time
You won’t make much progress toward your goal if you don’t set aside time to work on it. If you just try to fit it in when you have spare time, you’ll find your goal often gets lost in the shuffle.

6. Not keeping up a feedback loop
Having a feedback loop means stopping regularly (at least once or twice a week) to look carefully at what you’ve been doing to reach your goal and noticing what you need to work on, pay more attention to, improve, handle differently, or keep up. Some techniques for doing this include journaling, meeting with a group, blogging, participating in an online forum, or talking with a friend who’s helping you keep on track.

7. Not paying attention to your thoughts
Building willpower or reaching a goal means changing habits, and changing habits means paying more attention to when decisions are arising and what factors are influencing our decisions. Bad choices are very often choices that we rushed past or didn’t think carefully through at the time. Understanding what’s going on in our own minds when making choices doesn’t always get us to make better choices, but it’s a necessary step to getting better and better at making those choices. For one way to become more aware of your choices and thinking, read How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging.

8. Not enjoying the steps
It’s easy to think of the steps we need to take to reach a goal as being painful or difficult, but finding the pleasure in those steps simplifies everything. See Using enjoyment as a tool to reach goals.

9 Not preparing
If we wait until we’re actually faced with choices, we may not be prepared to tackle them well. Some choices even pass by before we realize they were coming, unless we prepare by looking ahead. An example is lateness: being on-time means planning intelligently for when to leave for an appointment and getting everything ready beforehand so that it’s possible to leave at that time. Even for choices we recognize as they come up, we may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to tackle them. Paying attention to broken ideas, meditating, and organizing are some of the techniques we can use to prepare ourselves to do better.

10. Taking setbacks too hard
Changing habits is hard, and doing a difficult thing day after day often means some short-term setbacks or failures. Failure doesn’t need to be a pattern: it can be taken as a learning experience. Consider that if a person is trying to quit smoking, their chances of succeeding are much higher if they have tried and failed to quit smoking before than if they had never tried. Even failure is a step forward. It’s not trying at all that we have to watch out for.

There are all kinds of levels of challenge when it comes to changing our habits. If I’m trying to get along with people better, for instance, there may be times when I’m well-rested, don’t need to be anywhere, and run into someone I genuinely like on a sunny day. Under these circumstances, being a little kinder than usual should be a walk in the part.

But at other times I might be running late for work, having only gotten five hours of sleep because the neighbor’s cat is in heat and was yowling all night, preoccupied with a weird sound my car just started making, and facing an inattentive Downwind Donuts worker who just tried to serve me (and charge me for) a decaf Chococinno Frothy instead of my regular morning cup of high-test. Under the circumstances, maybe a person could be forgiven for being gruff.

But in terms of really changing my habits, that second situation is a far better opportunity–even if I try and fail.

When we change habits, we’re both acquiring new knowledge and reinforcing behaviors. Acquiring new knowledge is just making realizations about how to do a task better, getting information that helps us make better decisions, like: “Hey, if I just take a few deep breaths instead of talking right away, I can usually be pretty civil even when things suck,” and “Maybe I shouldn’t try to smile when I’m really angry, considering how bad that looked in the reflection of myself I caught just now.”

Reinforcing behavior means strengthening neural pathways in the brain that support one particular course of action instead of another. If you find yourself automatically reaching for gum a few weeks after you stopped smoking instead of thinking about a cigarette, or reflexively pulling out class materials as soon as you get home because you’ve been cultivating new study habits, these are examples of having reinforced behaviors to the point of doing them without thinking. Automatically doing things the way we want to see ourselves doing them is the real victory in the course of changing habits: when a behavior has been rehearsed enough, in enough situations, we find that we don’t need any “willpower” per se any more. We’re just making good choices automatically. The harder we work at willpower, the less effort it takes to get good results.

Which brings us back to the worker at Downwind Donuts: of course this guy is much harder to be kind to than the friend we meet on the street. But that also means that we’re having to be more resourceful to act civilly toward him, and having to be more resourceful means we’re forced to try out new things, learn more, and work harder. In other words, changing our behavior when it’s difficult to do so requires more effort for us and therefore pays off more quickly and more powerfully. In the same way that lifting a heavy weight ten times builds muscles faster than lifting something light ten times, rising to challenges does a better job of building desirable habits.

To look at it from a different perspective, getting really good at anything means practicing it well and often, and practicing well means doing stuff that’s hard. Just doing something easy over and over does little to improve our skills.

Besides, what better way to confound inattentive coffee servers than to be friendly with them when they make mistakes? Sometimes disruption is its own reward.

Photo by Brayhan Hawryliszyn

You may not be someone who’s trying to lose weight, eat a better diet, get more exercise, or in some other way make changes to become more fit or healthy–but if you aren’t, you’re probably in the minority (and I tip my hat to you).

For the rest of us, I’ll skip the prolonged introduction and go straight to the useful information. And while you may have already heard this a thousand times, just in case, I’ll mention that the real goal here has to be becoming comfortable with leading a healthy lifestyle. Anything short of that will quickly turn on you and bite you in the butt.

1. Know what you should be eating and keep careful track
Most of us have no idea how much we’re actually eating in a day, and many of us have no idea how much we should be eating if we want to lose weight. Do a little research to figure out what your daily food intake would need to be for you to lose weight, then faithfully keep track in terms of calories or some other good measure, like exchanges. To find out calorie counts for a particular food, a Google search for the name of the food plus the word “calories” usually does the trick. It can be helpful to keep a list of foods you eat often and what their counts are for reference.

Not keeping track of this information means that we remain ignorant of the impact of the things we’re eating, so that the reasons behind not being able to lose weight remain a mystery. If we know the impact of each thing we eat, we then have the information we need to make good choices.

2. Pay attention to how you feel and what you’re thinking
Many of us eat badly in response to stress or other negative emotions, or for very unconstructive reasons, like wanting to be polite or because an unusual food happens to become available. The more mindful we become of what is going through our heads when we’re faced with decisions, the better equipped we are to deal with our own thoughts and emotions instead of to automatically revert to bad eating habits. To really notice our own thoughts, we have to take a step back right at the moment of choice–for instance, just as we’re deciding what to have for lunch or whether or not to go exercises.

A technique that can really help here, once a thought is recognized, is idea repair. Another is something I call “decision logging,” which means jotting down thoughts, feelings, and any other conditions throughout the day that might influence decisions. Doing this for a couple of weeks can provide a truckload of insight into where our feelings and inclinations are coming from, and it can show where the opportunities are to cut off negative emotions before they really kick in. This process can be useful for much more than weight loss, of course.

3. Visualize your goals
Spend some time on a daily basis–even just a few minutes–imagining yourself having achieved your goal, and allow yourself to enjoy the feelings of having done it. It’s much easier to be motivated by positive emotions (even if they come from imagining things) than it is to be motivated by vague inclinations. Negative emotions–guilt, shame, frustration–are lousy motivators, and are unlikely to be able to keep you consistently working on a tricky task for long. Use encouraging visions of the future as a continuing source of pleasure to associate with your process. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the better you’ll do at it. And speaking of which …

4. Enjoy the steps
It’s easy to tell ourselves that exercise is painful and inconvenient, or that eating something healthy is boring. And certainly any process of changing major habits has its hard parts. If we focus on those, though, then again we’re associating negative emotions with our process instead of positive ones, and that won’t get us very far. Instead, it helps to focus, again and again, on the positive or pleasurable parts of the things we need to do. If I’m out running, I can put my attention more on the beauty of the park I’m running through or on the fact that I’m getting a quarter of a mile further than I was getting a week ago rather than on the physical effort or concerns about how I look, for instance.

There is something to enjoy in virtually any good step we take. Even hunger can be enjoyed when we have to experience a small amount of it while changing our eating habits, for instance because of the feeling of success and virtue, or because it’s an indication that we’re doing something that’s working.

5. Set up a feedback loop
Unless we reflect on our successes and mistakes, we tend to repeat the mistakes and only stumble on the successes now and again. At least once a week, and preferably more often, it can be a huge help to reflect on what you did, how it went, and what you want to do in the future. This will help keep you on track.

There are a variety of ways to set up feedback loops. Some commercial weight loss programs offer weekly group meetings and weigh-ins, which can work very well. Buddies can also work well, as can blogs, online forums, and journaling. More public ways of getting feedbacks (like groups and blogs) also can up the stakes for doing well, which can be very motivating to some people (but too much pressure for others). Choose the method that works best for you and make it a priority to do it regularly. If you miss a round of feedback, be sure to include that in the things you consider the next time. In other words, even your feedback loop can benefit from feedback.

6. Cut short arguments with yourself
Many of us are used to looking at choices we really want to steer clear of–often about a food that we don’t need and that would throw off our calorie count for the day–and then debating with ourselves, trying to convince ourselves to follow the virtuous path. But between a piece of chocolate cake and some vague idea of virtue, chocolate cake very often wins, so an alternative strategy is to turn around and walk away, immediately–even if the debate is still going on in your head. You don’t have to convince yourself to avoid something that would be bad for you or to do something that would be good for you if you simply go ahead and take the best available action. Concentrate on the simple physical acts: turning and putting one foot in front of the other, or putting on your workout clothes. These kinds of behaviors can shortcut the endangered decision-making process and help support automatic positive behaviors.

As always, there’s a lot more we could say on this subject, but this is a good start for now. And just so you know: I’m neither a professional nutritionist nor a psychologist. I’m also not qualified in any way to give you personal medical advice.

However, I’ve been studying the factors that go into self-motivation intensively for some time now and have myself lost upwards of 40 pounds while becoming much healthier. Don’t make me post before and after pictures, because I will if I have to. Regardless, I hope you’ll find these ideas useful and comment with questions or about your experiences.

Bike picture by Erica_Marshall
Shoe picture by Fey the Ferocious Feyrannosaur

In recent weeks I’ve taken to watching the Web (through a convenient Google Alert) for blog posts, pages, and articles on willpower, self-motivation, and self-control, and usually I find at least a couple of new ones (other than my own) to look at every day. Occasionally I’ll see a piece that does a very good job of talking about one or two pieces of the puzzle, and once or twice I’ve read ones that have plenty of good advice (I try to remember to link to those, when possible). Often, though, the person posting seems to have seized on one piece of information and drawn some conclusions that are … well, I’m going to have to say “ridiculous.”

A New York Times blog post suggested trying to strengthen willpower by brushing your teeth on the wrong side, because that takes extra effort and the thinking was that anything that takes extra effort is a good way to build willpower. A Psychology Today blog post proposed eating plenty of chocolate to help quit smoking. A recent article from Reuters suggested making lots of “bad” foods available in your house to improve your eating habits, on the idea that having more chances to resist those foods will always increase willpower.

And the ideas in these articles are usually not coming from journalists gone wild: they’re usually coming from scientists who get very involved with one aspect of willpower and make unscientific assumptions about how those aspects should be applied.

Building willpower is not difficult if you’re willing and you understand all the pieces, but it is complicated, and focusing on one piece of a complex problem to the exclusion of others is a dangerous approach. It’s like setting a house on fire to warm it more efficiently. Willpower, like any complex thing, is a balance.

In the above examples, the confusion seems to stem from not balancing the building of willpower with constructive habits and making good use of the willpower we already have. Yes, the more we use willpower, the stronger it gets. However, it’s also true that we have a limited capacity to exercise willpower, and the more struggles we put ourselves into, the sooner we’re likely to cave and start making bad choices. Fortunately, making good choices not only strengthens our willpower over time, it also gets us in habits that tend to make exercising willpower less of a struggle. Brushing our teeth on the wrong side or strategically placing bags of potato chips around the house does not aid us in making good choices: it’s just an artificial approach that can be used to demonstrate things in laboratories. And making bad food choices in order to make better smoking choices is a dangerous strategy because it is doing as much to erode our willpower and good habits, in a general sense, as it is to promote them.

I’ll cut in for a moment here to say that I surely don’t know every single piece of the puzzle either. For instance, I haven’t yet researched hypnosis, which if you go by the stories one hears can have some impressive effects. And I have a lot to learn about meditation, which has been shown in numerous studies (and in my own experience) to be profoundly supportive of the states of mind needed to exercise willpower or achieve goals. So certainly take everything I say with a grain of salt, too. But my goal on this site is to bring together knowledge about self-motivation from as wide an array of good sources as I possibly can, and having found many of those sources already, I am lucky enough to sometimes see where good studies are spawning bad ideas when other studies shed more light on the situation.

Back to the question of evaluating advice about willpower: fortunately, it seems to come down to a certain amount of common sense. If the advice involves making good choices, improving state of mind, or learning how to handle situations better, it’s probably good. And if it sounds too nutty to be true, it probably is.

Photo by KristopherM