Willpower Part I: The Force of Greatness

What are your regrets from last year?

Failing to stick with an exercise program?

Losing a girlfriend because you strayed?

Failing a class?

Hurting a loved one with your temper?

What resolutions have you made for the new year?

Losing 20 pounds?

Getting up earlier in the morning?

Reining in your spending?

Wasting less time mindlessly surfing the internet?

Regrets and resolutions. What do they have in common? Willpower. A lack of and a need for.

But what is willpower anyway? You’ve heard the term before, but it probably seems like an awfully abstract force. You might feel as those it’s something innate, and that some men were born with a larger portion of it than others. It’s something you likely wish you had more of yourself, but don’t have any idea of how to go about it.

Happily, the truth is that willpower is a very real energy–a power source that can be depleted, strengthened, and conserved. And the man who learns how to tap into this fuel and harness his willpower gains some of the most vital knowledge one can possess: how to make of himself and his life anything he wants them to be.
The History of Willpower

    “Self-control is self-mastery. It is kingship over all life. At the center of your being sits yourself. Your seat ought to be a throne. If you are not in control, if there are any forces in your nature that are unruly, that do not acknowledge your sway, you are not the king you should be. Part of your kingdom is in insurrection. The strength of your life is divided. The strong man is he whose whole being is subject to him.” -James Russell Miller, The Beauty of Self-Control, 1911

Like many great truths, the nature and importance of willpower was understood by our forbearers, lost in time, and then rediscovered and refined by modern science.

A focus on willpower originated in the 19th century, around the time of the Industrial Revolution. As people observed the way in which steam could be harnessed and turned into productive energy, their thoughts turned to contemplating the great feats the human machine might be capable of by channeling a different kind of fuel source: willpower.  In a time when a successful life was measured by the pursuit of character and virtue, a man’s “strength of will” or “moral resistance” was seen as the most vital quality for achieving those ends. Regardless of the temptations he was beset with, a man of iron-clad self-control never veered from his purpose and code of honor.  As the captain of his fate, he steered his own course, come what may. No accomplishment in position or wealth could be measured next to the greatest conquest of all…mastery of one’s self.

This celebration of willpower was weakened by the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, which focused on people’s external environment as opposed to their personal qualities as determining their fate. Poverty and crime could be traced to a person’s deficient upbringing and squalid surroundings, progressives argued, not their lack of self-control.

During World War II the term picked up some negative baggage from the release of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. And in post-war America, willpower was relegated to the background by the rising consumer culture—after all, self-control is bad for business. The hippies of the 1960s heralded the maxim of “if it feels good, do it” as a guiding principle for life. And the philosophy of self-help gurus like Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon Hill, who emphasized positive thinking as the way to success, remained popular throughout the 20th century.

In the present time, this year has seen the release of a bevy of books that question how much free will and agency we really have after all. Psychologists and philosophers point to research and studies to argue that humans are highly irrational beings whose behaviors are largely controlled by their unconscious minds.

Yet at the same time, other psychologists have been launching a revival of interest in the concept of willpower and demonstrating in studies that not only does it constitute a real and enormously vital energy, but that one’s belief in it need not involve invariably blaming the victim for their misfortunes (an understanding of willpower can illuminate just how external factors effect the downtrodden), nor put you in the ranks of the cruel goose stepper (having strong self-control is linked to greater levels of empathy and altruism, not less).
The Importance of Willpower

    “That majestic endowment [the Will] constitutes the high privilege granted to each man apparently to test how much the man will make of himself. It is clothed with powers which will enable him to obtain the greatest of all possessions — self-possession. Self-possession implies the capacity for self-restraint, self-compulsion and self-direction; and he who has these, if he live long enough, can have any other possession that he wants.” -William Hanna Thompson, Brain and Personality, 1906

Psychologists have always been keen to find the personal characteristics that correlate to positive life outcomes. While they’ve turned over hundreds of rocks in this search, they’ve only found two factors that consistently lead people to greater levels of happiness, health, and success: willpower and intelligence.

Unfortunately, researchers have yet to discover ways of increasing a person’s intelligence in the long-term; it is an aptitude that is largely genetic and innate.

So when it comes to bettering our lives, that leaves willpower as the only tool within our control.

But what a powerful tool it is.

By now you’ve probably heard about the oft-cited marshmallow experiment in which four-year-old children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow in front of them. The children were told they could eat the marshmallow right away, or wait 15 minutes to receive an additional marshmallow. The children with the highest self-control, those who were able to wait in order to double their white gelatinous booty—grew up to become fitter adults who got better test scores and grades and enjoyed healthier relationships.

In another study which examined 36 different personality traits of a group of children, only one, willpower, later correlated to their college GPA. In fact the correlation between willpower and college GPA was stronger than that between future grades and IQ or SAT scores.

Other studies have shown that people with higher levels of self-control are more emotionally stable and struggle less with anger, anxiety, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse. They also make more popular bosses, have more friends, and are more likely to be in a stable marriage and less likely to get divorced. And all of these benefits hold true even when the results are controlled for things like class, race, and intelligence. The same outcomes were also found when siblings who were raised in the same household were studied. The siblings with more self-control fared better in life than their willpower-lacking brothers and sisters.

    “The strength of your life is measured by the strength of your will.”—Henry Van Dyke

It is easy to see why such a high correlation between your level of willpower and how far you reach in life exists. All success, happiness, and satisfaction are achieved by minimizing your screw ups and maximizing your positive decisions and habits. And the energy that drives your ability to produce both outcomes is willpower. The man with more willpower takes five steps forward and one step back, while the man with less willpower takes two steps forward and then one step back. Thus, it is not an overstatement to describe willpower as the absolute linchpin quality in determining the outcome of your life—whether you’ll be superhuman or ordinary, king or slave, man or mouse.
Understanding Willpower

    “A better definition of the Will, therefore, is ‘the Power Of Self-direction.’”

    “The Will may be now [defined] as a power to choose what the man shall do.”

    “THE WILL IS THE MAN.”

    -Frank Hadding Chaddock, The Power of Will, 1919

Okay, so the strength of your willpower is incredibly important. But to return to the question posed in the introduction…what exactly is willpower anyway?

Essentially, it is a mental energy that allows you to direct your actions in four categories of behavior:

    Thoughts. Don’t think about a white bear! You just thought about a white bear, didn’t you? Willpower helps you focus on what you want to think about, by keeping unwelcome and intrusive thoughts at bay.
    Emotions. You can’t will yourself to feel happy or sad. But you can decide to take actions to change how you’re feeling—“I feel down. I’m going to go for a run—that always lifts my spirits.” And when you put up a front and fake an emotion, like being the rock for someone else when you feel like falling apart yourself, that takes willpower too.
    Impulses. Impulses are things like: “I want to eat that piece of cake.” “I want to punch that guy.” “I want to check my email instead of working.” While there are ways to minimize the number of impulses like this you get, you don’t have direct control over whether they pop into your head. But willpower does help you regulate how you react to the impulse. Will you ignore it or give in?
    Performance control. This deals with how well you can focus and concentrate on a task, how long you stick with something before giving up, how much effort you expend during different phases of an exercise or task, how well you manage your time, etc.

While willpower regulates all these different categories of potential and actual actions, it’s the same supply of willpower that deals with all of them—you don’t have one willpower supply for emotions and one for performance control.

Basically, whenever you have a desire to do something that conflicts with your long-term goals and your core values, willpower is the thing that kicks in and tries to keep you on track. The stronger your willpower is, the better chance of making a decision in line with your goals. Willpower is what allows you to choose your path and to persevere in that path despite obstacles, resistance, and weakness.

While it’s true that our unconscious minds lead us to make choices and behave in ways we are not always aware of and that are not always rational, the sway of the unconscious is greater when it comes to our short-term decisions. Willpower acts as an executive force that looks for patterns and sees the connection between our present behavior and our long-term goals, and then makes course corrections to keep us heading in the right direction. Or in other words, willpower is the skipper of our ship; despite wind and waves that push the ship around, the skipper constantly consults his compass and adjusts the rudder so we stay on course.

I find it useful to imagine willpower in the context of the old image of the devil and the angel sitting on each of your shoulders, but sans the religious imagery. Instead of an angel, imagine Teddy Roosevelt on one side, and Al Bundy on the other. TR’s saying to you, “Bully! Read that textbook!” while Al is whispering in your ear to grab a beer and plop in front of the television. Who will win? Well that depends on TR’s strength relative to Al at any given moment. What determines that strength? A phenomenon called “ego depletion.”

And that’s what we’ll explore next week in the second part of this three part series, when we discuss the finite nature of our willpower supply. Then we’ll finish up with an article on how to strengthen, and even more importantly, how to conserve your willpower for the most important things in your life.

Willpower Part II: How Your Willpower Is Depleted

In the first post of this three-part series, we offered a general outline of the nature of willpower, noting that it is a real mental energy which regulates your thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance control by keeping in check desires and behaviors at odds with your values and long-term goals.

We then compared the battle between your willpower and those unwanted desires to Al Bundy and Theodore Roosevelt sitting on your shoulders in the roles of the classic angel and devil.

We ended by saying that the winner of that battle depended on the strength of TR relative to Al at a given moment. And today we will explore what affects that balance and just how your willpower is weakened, a fascinating subject in and of itself, and one that is a necessary precursor for understanding how to then conserve, strengthen, and harness this vital force.

Willpower: A Finite Resource

In addition to the TR/Bundy image, it is also helpful to think of your willpower like a muscle. All of these qualities of your muscles also apply to your willpower:

    Your muscles become weak and flabby through disuse and a lack of exercise.
    In order to build the strength of your muscles in the long-term, you must exhaust them in the short-term.
    While you can build the strength of your muscles over time, on any given day when you walk into the gym, your muscles have a finite amount of strength–there’s an absolute max weight you can lift before your muscles reach failure.
    If you exhaust your muscles with one exercise, you’ll have less strength and endurance on the next exercise because your muscles will be fatigued. Your muscles need time to recover before they can be fresh again for your next workout.

We’ll come back to the first two points in our final post. Today we’re going to concentrate on those last two, exploring the fact that on any given day you have a finite supply of willpower, and that when you use part of that supply for one thing, you have less of it for others.

How Is Willpower Depleted?

Your supply of willpower is depleted in two ways.

First, by exercising self-control.

Every time you have a desire to do something that conflicts with accepted social norms or with your values and goals, and your willpower overrides that desire and keeps you on track, part of your willpower supply gets depleted. The stronger the desire and the harder it is to resist, the more of your willpower fuel is burned up in the struggle.

The need for self-control kicks in more times a day than you probably realize. In one study, participants were given beepers that randomly went off seven times a day and asked to record what they were experiencing when they heard the beep. Researchers found that at any given moment, 50% of the participants were feeling a desire right when the beeper went off–whether to eat, sleep, have sex, or surf the web–and another quarter of them had experienced a desire in the few minutes preceding the beep. All in all, the researchers found that on average people spend four hours a day resisting desires.

If that number seems high, think of all the desires you may have had in the last five minutes:

I want to eat that leftover pizza. But I’m not really hungry, I’m just bored. Bob just posted a ridiculous and false partisan article on Facebook. I really want to leave a comment telling him about all the errors in the piece, but that will just stir things up for no reason. I shouldn’t be on Facebook anyway, I need to get back to work. I really want to put my head down on the desk and take a nap….

The four hours you spend resisting desires each day doesn’t even include the second thing that saps your willpower: making decisions.

As with exercising your self-control, the harder the decision, the more your willpower supply gets drained. But even a back-to-back series of small and enjoyable decisions will eat up some of your willpower.

While simply shopping around and weighing different choices diminishes your willpower, it’s the moment when you lock in that choice and cast the die that gobbles it up the most. When you lock in one choice, you must reject other possibilities, and humans hate narrowing their options.

The diminishment of your willpower supply through the making of decisions and the exercise of self-control has been named “ego depletion” (for Freud’s term for the self) by foremost willpower expert, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister.

Your Brain on Ego Depletion

So what’s going on in your brain when your willpower energy gets depleted?

When you’re suffering from ego depletion, your brain’s anterior cingulate cortex—the part of your brain that detects a mismatch between what you intended to do and what you’re actually doing—slows down. When your willpower tank is full, and you start getting off track, the ACC is quick to jump in with a, “Hey, hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing? Get your hand off that mouse and put your eyes back on the textbook. We have a final in 2 hours!” But when your willpower muscle is fatigued, your anterior cingulate cortex reacts with a delayed and muted alarm.  The more of your willpower that’s been depleted, the slower the ACC responds, and the more likely you are to give into whatever the next temptation is you’re hit with, especially if the temptations come back-to-back. Then you might get no alarm at all, no voice that says, “You really don’t want to do that.”

It’s as if when your willpower gets low, TR falls asleep on watch, and Al has the run of the place. You can also imagine it like those video games where your health meter declines as you get injured—but if you can run around for awhile without being hit again, the health meter starts to climb back up and replenish itself. Crouch behind something and recover and you’re gold, but get hit again before that breather and you’re a dead man.

The Effects and High Cost of Ego Depletion

What happens to you when TR falls asleep and Al takes the wheel? Two things. Both of them bad.

Not Enough Slices of the Pie to Go Around

The biggest effect of ego depletion is what we mentioned in the beginning when we compared willpower to a muscle–when your willpower gets used up on one task, decision, or goal, you have less it for working on other tasks, decisions, and goals. Basically, the more ego depletion you experience, the less willpower you have to control your thoughts, emotions, and actions. There’s only so much willpower pie to go around.

This can be seen in a study that was conducted with two groups of college students. Both groups fasted before being brought into the laboratory. At the lab, the students were taken into a room and sat at a table on top of which two platters of food had been placed—one filled with warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and the other with raw radishes.

One group was told they could eat all the cookies they wanted–the other that they could only nosh on the radishes. The researchers left the students alone in the room, but watched them secretly through a window. The cookie eaters happily enjoyed their repast. The radish-eaters, on the other hand, were seen valiantly trying to resist eating a cookie while glumly biting into the raw roots.

After their snack, both groups were given puzzles to work on that were actually impossible to solve (they were not told this). The students who had eaten the cookies worked on the puzzles for an average of 20 minutes before giving up. But the radish-eaters threw in the towel after an average of only 8 minutes.

Why did the radish-eaters give up so quickly? They had already used up some of their willpower supply on resisting the cookies, and thus had less of it available for working on the puzzles.

Similar studies confirmed this result; once people use up their willpower on one self-control-requiring task, they struggle and do more poorly on the subsequent one.

This phenomenon is something you probably already intuitively understand and have experienced in your own life.

Take your college finals for example. As you focused your willpower energy on studying, you had less of it for other things, and your hygiene and diet went in the crapper. Wearing jeans and eating chicken breasts was replaced by donning pajama pants, scarfing pizza, and guzzling beer (researchers have found that as counterintuitive as it may sound—at least to those who haven’t been in college for awhile—drinking goes up during finals not down, because of ego depletion). You probably chalked those changes up to stress, but ego depletion is also playing a role—you simply don’t have enough willpower to keep all your impulses in check.

Or you may have noticed that on a day you had to make a lot of tough decisions at work, you found yourself short-tempered with your wife and kids when you got home. Because you had used up your willpower earlier in the day, it was harder to control your impulses later on.

In my own life I can track my state of ego depletion on whether or not I respond to negative feedback on the blog. Being a blogger is of course an awesome job, but one of its drawbacks is that you are constantly barraged with baseless criticism, petty complaints, and inane comments from people who miss the point of an article by such a wide margin, it makes you worried about the future of mankind. In the real world, it would be like having a constant stream of people march by your desk saying, “You’re doing that wrong.” “You misspelled that.” “You’re a idiot.” You’ll invariably feel a very strong urge to confront these critics on why they’re wrong or how they really, seriously need to get a life. But I’ve found that responding is a huge waste of time–the naysayer never changes his mind, which only raises your blood pressure further. So I’ve tried to make it a policy to never respond to pointless criticism, and am generally successful…except when I’m suffering ego depletion. A couple of months ago the launch of our new book fell on the same date we were moving into our first house, and since I was putting my willpower towards those and other important things, I found myself lashing out to any unfavorable comment. I just didn’t have enough willpower left to control that angry urge.

This is why you start smoking again when you get stressed. And why they put the candy by the checkout line in grocery stores; after making all those choices on what to buy, your willpower guard is down. This is why it makes sense that ascetic monks stay single and celibate as well; children are specially-patented willpower-sucking machines (“Do not throw crying baby out window, do not throw crying baby out window”) who would consume the willpower needed to wholly focus on one’s spirituality.

This is also one of the elements that makes rising out of poverty so difficult; the downtrodden have a ton of tough decisions to make every day, leaving them more prone to giving into short-term impulses, even if those choices conflict with their long-term goals.

Risk Aversion

In addition to making it more difficult for you to control your emotions, impulses, and behavior, ego depletion also makes you risk-averse in your decision-making. When your willpower starts running dry, you begin to default to the easiest, safest, status quo option, the one that least locks you into a set path, in order to avoid expending any more mental energy. Your brain gets tired and starts to seek the path of least resistance. You become what author John Tierney calls a “cognitive miser” and will focus on just one factor of a decision instead of looking at the whole picture…”Give me whatever one is cheapest.” “Whatever you think is best.” But these “whatever” decisions may not be in your best interest or in line with your long-term goals. It’s like being tired after a day of shopping for a big ticket item, and when the salesman presents you with the store’s suggested package, you sign off on it, even though it’s more expensive and includes features you don’t actually need.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: Your willpower is a finite resource and when the tank runs dry, you become much more prone to making decisions that distance you from your goals, torpedo your progress as a man, and hurt other people in your life. But as with any force in the world, once you understand how it works, you can become the master of it and learn how to minimize its destructive potential and then strengthen, conserve, and harness the energy for your own purposes. And that is where we will turn next time.

Willpower Part III: How to Strengthen Your Willpower and 20 Ways to Conserve It

In the first post in this series, we discussed the nature of willpower, noting that is a real mental energy.

In the second post, we explored the way in which this mental energy is a finite resource and how it can be depleted through the exercising of self-control and the making of decisions.

Now if willpower is a real, finite energy, the question that naturally arises is this: What can I do to strengthen, conserve, and harness this force to help me reach my full potential? The answer to that question is what we will be diving into today.
How to Strengthen Your Willpower

While there are many ways to conserve your willpower, there’s really just one way to strengthen it.

By working on any goal or habit that exercises your self-control.

Remember when we talked about how willpower is like a muscle, and that just like a muscle, you have to exhaust it in the short-term in order to build its strength in the long-term? When you work to change a habit, you deplete your willpower in the struggle, but over time, the strength of your willpower muscle increases from these exercises, making you better able to take on future tasks.

Your willpower is strengthened not only by tackling big goals, but also by doing anything that gets your brain out of its comfort zone—things like using your left hand instead of your right (if you’re a righty), working on your posture throughout the day, and trying to stop swearing have all been shown to increase the overall stamina of a person’s willpower.

The best part about creating a new habit is that not only does it strengthen your willpower, it also frees up more of your willpower fuel for other things. When a decision becomes a habit, it draws little, if any, willpower from your supply. The more good decisions you can make habitual, the less taxes on your willpower tank you’ll experience throughout the day.

This is why people with stronger self-control actually spend less time resisting desires than those with weaker self-control. By creating good habits, they minimize the number of temptations they’ll be faced with by making as many decisions as automatic as possible.
How to Conserve Your Willpower

Okay, so in order to strengthen your willpower, you need to work towards reaching a goal or changing/creating a habit. But everyone who’s ever tried to do that knows it’s not easy! How do you get enough willpower to strive towards and achieve your aims in the first place?

They key is to consciously conserve this force, keeping it from being frittered away on dumb stuff and saving it for the things that are most important to you. What follows are 20 ways to do that. This is incredibly vital knowledge; the man who learns how to harness this force of greatness is he who reaches his goals, makes better decisions, and progresses farthest in life.

Note: Some of these points are interesting and important topics in and of themselves, not only as they concern willpower, but life in general, and we had so much to say that the first draft of this post grew into a truly epic tome. So a ton was cut out (it’s still long though!), but we will be revisiting many of these points with their own in-depth articles throughout the year (a comprehensive post on goal setting will arrive next week, in fact). In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about the very fascinating studies that back up the efficacy of these techniques, pick up a copy of the book this series has been based on: Willpower: by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney.

1. Only work on one goal at a time. If you only take one idea from this post, let it be this: only work on one goal or habit at a time. Because your willpower is a finite resource, when you spend your willpower on one thing, you have less it available for other things. Thus when you try to change multiple habits at the same time, what you’re doing is allocating just one sliver of your willpower pie to each goal. The result is not surprising: failure in most, if not all of them.

Instead, you want to funnel as much of your willpower fuel towards one thing as you can. Changing any habit is like driving an auto up a very steep mountain—the engine on your willpower-mobile needs as much power as possible to get to the top and over the other side without puttering out and sliding back.

2. Make changes during periods of calm. If your willpower is a finite resource, then you don’t want to attempt big goals and habit changes when you’ve got a lot on your plate. These stressors will suck away your willpower, leaving you without enough of it to reach your big goal.

3. Make your goal as clear and specific as possible. While some cynics scoff at those who make New Year’s resolutions, the resolvers get the last laugh; people who make formal New Year’s resolutions are ten times more likely to reach their goals than those with the same aims and motivation, but who never clearly articulate their aims.

Hoping to reach a goal without clearly defining it is like trying to find a place by simply driving around; you’re not sure exactly where you’re headed and thus fruitlessly burn up your fuel—or willpower.

4. Set things up on autopilot. When I wrote this post about how to stop mindlessly surfing the internet, I recommended implementing firewall software that blocks you from looking at certain sites at set times. Some criticized this approach as insufficiently manly, arguing that I should just work to overcome my mindless surfing through willpower alone. And that would be a fine idea…if I wanted to make that my one big goal for a time. However, that’s way down on my goal list—I’ve got more important things I’m working on for which I need every possible drop of my willpower supply. So maybe someday I’ll get down to making the ability to resist mindless surfing a habit, but in the meantime, I want to minimize any willpower sucks in my life by making that an automatic decision.

5. Don’t make big decisions on an empty stomach. The glucose in your bloodstream is part of what fuels the energy source of willpower, and it comes from any food you eat that contains carbohydrates. Exercising self-control depletes relatively large amounts of this glucose, and when glucose goes down, so does your willpower. No food=no glucose=no willpower=risk aversion and poor decisions.

This is why you should never go into anything important—a meeting, an interview, a test–on an empty stomach. And why you shouldn’t schedule say, a pitch meeting, right before lunch if you want to increase your chances of getting a yes.

If you need your glucose hit right away, eat something sugary, as this will get the glucose into your bloodstream and to your willpower supply quickly. But if you have time, eat high protein, low glycemic foods—the glucose will take an hour to get into your bloodstream, but you’ll avoid a sugar crash and such foods are better for you in general.

By the way, this connection between food, glucose, and willpower is one of the reasons dieting is so difficult. To shed pounds you need to eat less, and to eat less you need willpower, and to get willpower you need to eat. This conundrum explains why willpower has been shown to be more effective for making improvements in areas like school and work rather than one’s waistline; people with high self-control are in fact only slightly better at maintaining a healthy weight (they do exercise more, but this has much less effect on one’s weight than diet does). Willpower experts thus recommend trying to lose weight by making very subtle changes to one’s diet instead of drastic reductions.

6. Make to-do lists. Once you finish a task, your brain largely forgets about it. But unfinished tasks have been shown to stick in your head and jangle around. Your brain hates loose ends and will keep nudging you to do something about them.

The problem with these loose ends camping on your cranium is that they’re subtly eating up your willpower. They’re like so-called “vampire appliances,” appliances that are plugged in all the time and suck up a little bit of electricity even when you’re not actually using them.

To un-plug your vampire to-do’s, you simply need to take the loose ends out of your head and put them down on paper. The classic to-do list can really work wonders for your willpower. Be sure to make your list of to-do’s as specific as possible—as GTD guru David Allen puts it, you need to figure out your next action on something. So don’t write: “Plan trip.” Write: “Search for best airline fare.” And once you cross that off, your new next action would be “Buy tickets.” And so on.

7. Make a precommitment. You’re doing a Paleo-diet and eating only things like meats and veggies. Your friends invite you out to a restaurant, and you think, “That won’t be a problem. I’ll just get a steak.” But when you arrive and sit down, the waiter brings out a basket of warm, freshly baked rolls, and you shout, “Hot damn! This must be what heaven smells like!” And in the blink of an eye, you’ve stuffed two rolls in your mouth.

What happened to you in there? You were so sure you could handle the temptation. But you fell victim to what’s called the “hot-cold empathy gap.” When you’re contemplating a scenario from your easy chair, you underestimate how difficult resisting the temptation will be in the heat of the moment.

To prevent the hot-cold empathy gap, you need to make a “precommitment,” the creating of a contingency plan so that when you’re in the heat of the moment, and decide to give in, the option of giving in isn’t available.

For example, if you’re going to go shopping with someone, but you don’t want to spend any money, don’t bring a credit card, or bring a set amount of cash.

If you’re trying to cut down on your alcohol consumption, keep your house spirits-free.

And if you’re a Paleo guy, tell the waiter as soon as you sit down not to bring over the rolls at all (hopefully you have very understanding, or gluten-allergy-suffering friends).

8. Create routines.

If you have a set schedule for the day and a regular routine, you don’t have to dither about what you should be doing at any given moment. “It’s 10:00 pm—time to start reading for 30 minutes before bed.”

9. Build self-awareness through monitoring.

Self-awareness simply means consciously knowing what you’re doing each day, and it’s tightly linked with self-control.

Most people are pretty good at hiding themselves…from themselves. They have only the vaguest idea of how much time they’ve wasted surfing the internet, how much food they’ve eaten, and what they’ve spent that month. But if you don’t know where you’re at in a certain pursuit, there’s no way you’ll reach your goal; you won’t know what you need to change, how far you’ve come, and how far you have to go.

So look for ways to monitor, gather data, and “quantify” your life. Keep a food diary of what you eat each day. Weigh yourself every morning (while you may have heard weight loss gurus tell you this is a bad idea, studies have shown that those who weigh themselves daily are more successful at shedding the pounds). Use websites like Mint.com to keep track of your finances, and apps that track how you spend your time online. And so on. The more clear reminders you have of both your progress and your backsliding, the more likely it is you’ll stay on track.

10. Set up an accountability system. It’s not only helpful to monitor your own progress, but to have someone else looking over your shoulder as well. Keep yourself accountable by making a bet with a friend, setting an appointment to work out with a buddy, posting your progress publicly on a blog or on Facebook, or using a site like stickK.com.

11. Tackle the tough things first.

Throughout the day, you’re going to be exercising your self-control and making decisions, which will slowly deplete your willpower until eventide. So tackle your most important tasks as soon as you can in the morning, when your willpower tank is full and fresh. When taking a test, do the hardest problems first, and save the easy ones for later. And forget that notion about not going to bed angry with your spouse—nighttime is the worst time for arguments; your willpower is low, your capacity for impulse-control is diminished, and you’re likely to say things you’ll regret. It is absolutely amazing what a good night’s sleep will do—problems that felt all-consuming the night before will seem completely insignificant when you get out of bed. If you and your wife need to have an important discussion, do it in the morning…ideally after you’ve both eaten breakfast.

12. Get enough sleep and take naps. Sleep refreshes your willpower supply. So don’t skimp on getting your zzzz’s at night, and take a nap between one self-control exhausting task and the next.

13. Limit your choices. You already know that having too many choices creates restlessness. But it also saps your willpower as well. As you might remember from last time, your willpower takes the biggest hit when you lock in a decision, but it also gets burned up simply through the process of shopping around and weighing different choices. With all that browsing, you might think you’d end up with the best choice, since you sifted through so many options. But the shopping lowers your willpower, which makes you risk averse and unwilling to make a decision that shuts out other possibilities. Basically, this means that in the pursuit of perfection, you end up with nothing, instead of something that wasn’t flawless, but would have made you happy.

This is why speed daters have better luck finding a partner than those who use online dating sites; drowning in choices, the latter get stuck in perpetual browsing.

Instead of endlessly shopping around, figure out a criteria for what you want, and when you find something that works for you, stick with it– whether it’s a product, a church, or a lady friend.

14. Don’t try to work or make important decisions when you’re sick.

When you’re sick, your immune system uses a bunch of your body’s glucose to fight off the infection. It pulls that glucose from everywhere, including your willpower supply.

15. Distract yourself.

In the first post in this series, we talked about a study done with children who were told they could eat the single marshmallow in front of them, or wait 15 minutes to double their prize. Many of the children were able to hold out for that second marshmallow with a technique even a four-year-old can understand: distracting yourself. They focused on something else other than the marshmallow.

Turns out the old maxim was right: idle hands are the devil’s romper room. This is something I’ve seen over and over in my life—when I’ve got a lot of time to kill, and only the temptation to think about, I give in. But when my life is filled with activity and friends and interests, I’ll forget about whatever it is I’m supposed to be avoiding.

16. Keep yourself and your surroundings tidy and clean. There is a strong connection between external order and the strength of your willpower. In one study, some of the participants were taken into a neat lab, while the others were placed in a messy one. Those in the latter group exhibited less self-control: they ate less healthy snacks, gave up quicker on tasks, and were more likely to take a small amount of money up front, instead of waiting a week to increase the payout.

So if someone ever says, “Why are you making your bed? It’s pointless.” You can now answer: “Because I’m building my willpower, foo!”

17. Surround yourself with those who have similar goals. The people you surround yourself with have a big impact on who you become. Whether it’s smoking, weight, happiness, drinking, even study habits and GPA, research has shown that your group of friends influences your behavior–for better or worse. If you and your friends are all working towards the same things, it’s a lot easier to stick with it. But if you’re the lone man out, always swimming upstream against what all your friends are doing, you’re going to use up more of your willpower, and be more likely to struggle and fail.

18. Keep it out of sight and out of mind. Researchers found that office workers ate 1/3 more candy when the bowl was sitting out in the open than when it was placed in a drawer. Why? Because every decision we make depletes our willpower, and every time the workers passed the bowl, they had to decide not to take a piece, and each decision wore away at their willpower until they eventually gave in. And this is true for a great many things–not just bowls of candy. For example, don’t study in your dorm room if you’re going to have to keep resisting the urge to crawl into your bed and take a nap.

I’ve found the opposite is true as well: in sight, in mind. If you place a book you’ve been meaning to read by the john or a kettlebell by the couch, you’ll be more likely to pick them up and use them.

19. Delay gratification instead of nixing it altogether. Cutting something out of your life entirely increases the desire for it (forbidden fruit!) and increases the degree of binge if you finally give in, while postponing a pleasure both diminishes the strength of the craving and allows you to be satisfied with less when you do indulge. This is why it can be very effective to allow yourself one cheat day a week on your diet where you get to eat whatever you want, and why the Pomodoro Technique (working for 45 minutes straight and then taking a 15 minute break) can help you study more effectively. When you know you have a scheduled break/indulgence coming up, it becomes much easier to stick with a program without feeling overwhelmed by what you can’t do or have at the moment. (Of course this doesn’t work with things you want to go cold turkey on—don’t schedule one day a week where you smoke 5 packs of cigarettes).

20. Have a higher purpose. Having a higher purpose helps conserve your willpower because the structure and path it provides makes many of your decisions, if not automatic, then at least a lot clearer. This is one of the reasons there is a strong correlation between having strong self-control and being religious (this link is also due to the greater monitoring the religious get–both from God and fellow congregants, and the way the requirements of faith give the willpower muscle plenty of exercise through things like prayer, meditation, fasting, service, ect.).

The non-religious can get the same willpower-conserving benefit of living a purpose-driven life; they just have to work harder to create their purpose from within. This is done by eschewing instant gratification for honest-to-goodness ideals, and finding a reason for your goals deeper and less fleeting than the superficial. Do you want to get in shape for the ladies, or to become superhuman? Do you want to do well at your job to make big bucks, or to leave a legacy?