Hello Friends!
Have you started diet after diet after diet and decided the only reason you cannot successfully make a healthy lifestyle change is because you lack the willpower to stay on track? You may start out strong but resisting the temptation over and over again leads to you “fail” the diet and give in. Do you feel a flush of emotion-guilt or shame- wash over you? You failed. You lack the willpower to stay on the diet.
What is willpower?
Many psychologists term “willpower” as the ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations to meet long-term goals, the capacity to override an unwanted thought, feeling or impulse, or a conscious, effort to regulate oneself.
Let’s break these 3 definitions down: The first one is delaying gratification, resisting short-term temptations to meet long-term goals. This sounds like a diet especially if denying yourself the foods to lose weight. Short-term temptation for long-term weight loss. In the beginning of the diet, your willpower is strong. Whawhooo, You don’t need carbs!
The second one is the capacity to override an unwanted thought, feelings or impulse. For example, you’re at work and it’s someone’s birthday, you smell the fresh baked cookies in the break room. You immediately override the thought to indulge in cookie sharing.
The third one is a conscious, effort to regulate oneself. Everyday you are presented with tempting foods through work, as you drive home, at the grocery store, on social media, or through TV. Everyday you choose to regulate yourself because you’re on a diet.
Did you know you can deplete your so called “willpower”?
Have you ever felt at the end of the day, you make poor food choices?
Your body, specifically your brain, relies on fuel. The part of the brain responsible for controlling behavior and decision making is fueled by blood glucose (also known as carbohydrates). This section of the brain is called the Prefrontal cortex, which is right behind the forehead, and essentially controls “who we are”. Now couple this lack of fuel to the brain with sleep deprivation and/or being distracted-by our phones, social media, work obligations. This influence on the brain can lead one to be subjected to impulse. Resisting impulses may diminish one’s strength to withstand the next temptation. This can become a vicious cycle.
You may find yourself in this cycle and blame YOURSELF because you have weak willpower. Willpower is like a muscle, it has to be strengthened. Trying something new is always scary at first because you’re afraid you’ll be “bad” at it, the more you start repeating the processes, the easier it becomes. The same can be said about willpower; however, the focus on willpower as the culprit, it is worth noting, is convenient for diet culture and how diet culture wishes to keep it. As long as you blame yourself for your diet failures, you are less likely to look for the social impediments that are actually undermining your progress.
How to strengthen your Willpower:
This is similar to changing your behavior, which could apply to a lot of areas of life, not just “willpower”. Here are 3 ways to kick-start:
- Self-Awareness: Are you on auto-pilot? Do you go through your day not noticing the details? Have laser focus on certain areas of life but limiting your view on the big picture? Building self-awareness can keep you in touch with the many though processes you have per day. For example, have you ever kept track of how long you’re on your phone? Kept a food journal? Monitored how much water you drank throughout the day? How long you watch TV at night?
- If you haven’t, try it. What do you experience? What is the reaction? Self-Reflect on the activity you chose to monitor. How does this benefit you in your life?
2. Meditation: Don’t write it off just by reading the word. When you’re in a crisis, hurry, or pure freak out mode, has anyone told you to take a deep breath? It works! The next time you perceive yourself losing “willpower”, take a deep breath or five. This will help decrease the “fight or flight” reaction caused by the sympathic nervous system and allow you to rely on the “rest and digest” reaction caused by the parasympathic nervous system. This helps alleviate the stressed caused by the current situation.
3. Get Physical: It is hard for people to get up and get moving in current times but research as shown that getting movement in at least once per week will help transcend you into better physical activity habits. Take it one notch further and get in “green exercise”- this is exercising outside.
- To note: exercise doesn’t mean lifting weights or going on a long run. It means walking around the block, walking your dog, or doing a body weight movement flow in the grass.
Most importantly, everyone is going to experience stress. Living in a state of stress may lead you down the path of reward seeking, which is a different area of the brain then decision-making or controlled behavior. Now there’s no way to avoid life stress; however, the promise of reward doesn’t equal satisfaction. The next time you get stressed and want to “reward” yourself with a bad habit, remember, having self-compassion with yourself instead could lead to greater self-control and increased motivation. It reminds you that you still have the willpower to achieve the long term lifestyle changes.