What determines whether you’ll achieve your goals or give in to temptation? Willpower—your ability to control impulses and resist instant gratification—may be the single most important factor in determining the quality of your life.
This guide explores strategies for strengthening your willpower, drawing primarily from Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, along with insights from Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation and Kelly McGonigal’s work on stress and self-control.
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Why Is Willpower Important?
Our willpower may be the most significant factor in determining the quality of our lives. There are several influential psychological studies that show strong willpower in children predicts positive life outcomes, including in school, health, and financial stability.
Willpower is the ability to control your impulses and resist instant gratification in favor of long-term, delayed happiness. This inner resource is primarily about how you control your attention and is mostly driven by a top-down process where your conscious cognition overcomes your subconscious urges.
According to Willpower, just like a muscle, you can strengthen your willpower through training and practice.
Strengthening Your Willpower
In Willpower, Baumeister and Tierney say that willpower training can enhance both how strong your willpower is and how long you can exert your willpower without running out (your “stamina,” so to speak).
Essentially, anything that disrupts your usual habits and makes you consciously think about what you’re doing could be a good willpower exercise. So, for instance, if you tend to eat quickly, one effective exercise would be to force yourself to take smaller bites and thoroughly chew every bite before swallowing it. Doing so will feel unnatural, uncomfortable, and tedious—and that’s exactly why it will help you build up your willpower.
Personal trainers and martial artists often say that the most uncomfortable exercises are the ones you need the most. You dislike those exercises because they target your weaknesses, but that’s also why they’ll help you. The same holds true for willpower training: The exercises you dislike the most are the ones that will produce the best results if you’re able to stick with them.
Practicing With Your Willpower Through Self-Improvement
However, Baumeister and Tierney say it’s crucial to approach self-improvement strategically—attempting to make too many changes at once often leads to failure, as it places excessive demands on limited willpower resources. Therefore, focusing on one self-improvement goal at a time will make you more likely to reach that goal.
The authors add that—much like how making progress gives you motivation to make more progress—reaching one self-improvement goal will also make it easier to reach other goals in the future. This is because self-improvement is good practice for your willpower. So, if one of your goals seems daunting at the moment, try pursuing an easier one first; working toward that first goal will strengthen your willpower and make you better able to reach more difficult goals later on.
The authors also say that the greatest challenge is maintaining your discipline over extended periods of time. While many people can muster willpower for short-term efforts, sustaining self-control over the long term requires a much greater level of commitment. Aligning your self-improvement goals with your personal values will help you maintain focus and self-control, leading to much better results.
For instance, someone who highly values physical fitness would most likely be highly motivated to quit drinking. On the other hand, someone for whom physical fitness isn’t a top priority would need much more willpower to reach the same goal—therefore, if they try it too early in their willpower practice, they’re likely to become discouraged and give up after a short time. Just like people have to build up their muscles to lift heavier weights at the gym, they have to build up their willpower with easier goals before pursuing goals that will be more difficult for them.
5 Additional Tips for Improving Willpower
In addition to Baumeister and Tierney’s advice, in her book Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke provides five strategies for how to improve your willpower.
#1: Spatial Restrictions
Make it physically harder to engage in your high-dopamine activity. By creating more of a physical distance or barrier between yourself and your object of indulgence, you give yourself more of an opportunity to think twice and interrupt thoughtless or automatic habits of consumption. For example, this could take the form of throwing out your junk food or deleting a social media app.
#2: Temporal Restrictions
Set time limits on when, how often, and for how long you can indulge. This will increase your awareness of how much you are indulging and prevent you from losing track of time and consumption. For example, you could set a timer while playing a video game or only have a cocktail on Friday nights.
#3: Associational Restrictions
Avoid activities that you associate with indulging. Sometimes an activity will remind you of your high-dopamine activity and trigger a craving. By avoiding activities that trigger cravings, you will decrease your frequency of cravings, increasing your willpower and odds of success. For example, someone who compulsively gambles may feel a craving triggered by playing any card game, even ones without betting.
#4: Abstain From Pleasure
To increase your willpower, Lembke recommends that you abstain from your high-dopamine activities for two to four weeks. Repeated indulgence in pleasurable activities induces the brain to balance your seesaw by adding “pain weight.” By abstaining from pleasurable activities—therefore not adding “pleasure weight”—you let your brain recalibrate and take the pain weight off.
However, as Lembke notes, this solution is far from perfect. Abstaining from pleasure requires a lot of self-discipline. The early stages are often accompanied by painful feelings of withdrawal—you’ll have to voluntarily endure this pain without giving into the temptation of relieving it. Once you get through the withdrawal period, you’ll no longer feel the need to indulge.
#5: Use Therapeutic Pain
Lembke also suggests that you intentionally press on the “pain” side of the seesaw to increase your willpower. Because your brain strives for equilibrium, feeling pain will cause your brain to take weight away from the pain side. This will undo the effects of your high tolerance for pleasure, leaving you with a neutrally balanced seesaw and a “normal” default state, instead of a painful default state that compels you to seek pleasure for equilibrium. Lembke recommends finding a safe way to experience physical pain, like regularly taking ice water baths or cold showers.
However, she warns, pressing on the pain lever can itself become an addiction. If you experience pain too much or too often, your brain will homeostatically balance its seesaw in the other direction—adding weight to the pleasure side and making you feel good in response to pain. (This is the reason many endurance athletes feel a high after completing a triathlon.) Be careful not to simply substitute one pattern of indulgence for another.
Amplify Your Willpower With Positive Pressure
We’ve just discussed how to improve your baseline level of willpower. Now let’s examine some strategies for using your existing willpower to its fullest extent; Baumeister and Tierney say that you can do this by putting various kinds of pressure on yourself, which will drive you to do your best even when you may not feel like it.
A Positive Pressure Toolbox
The authors of Willpower provide a number of strategies to bolster your self-control and keep yourself focused on your goals. These “tools” are especially helpful when you’re feeling exhausted or overwhelmed by difficult situations—those are the times when your willpower is the weakest, and also when you’ll most need willpower to keep your self-control and avoid making impulsive decisions.
What the authors describe here is also referred to as eustress. In The Upside of Stress, psychologist Kelly McGonigal explains that there are positive types of stress that trigger what she calls your challenge response, which gets you excited and focused, allowing you to perform at your best. It’s the kind of stress you might feel before giving an important presentation, competing in a sport you love, or working on a challenging project you’re passionate about. This is in contrast to distress, which is negative stress that upsets you and tires you out.
Tool #1: Commitment
One way to generate external pressure for yourself is to publicly commit to a particular goal.
Commitment means making public declarations or promises about what you’re going to do, thereby creating a psychological barrier against giving up. This is because if you do give up after such a declaration, you would disappoint not only yourself but also the people you made that promise to.
Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this putting Skin in the Game. Taleb writes that personal risk of this sort will motivate you to work harder, stop you from getting bored or frustrated as you work toward a goal, and cause you to make more careful decisions. On the other hand, if there are no consequences for giving up on your goal, then the only thing keeping you on task is your own willpower—which, as we’ve discussed, is a limited resource that you should conserve as much as possible.
Tool #2: Routine
The authors say that routine will provide much-needed structure and guidance during challenging times. Even simple daily habits, like making coffee at the same time every morning, help to reinforce your willpower.
Routine is helpful for two key reasons. First, it creates a sense of normalcy and gives you a feeling of control over your environment. This will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed in difficult situations. Second—assuming your habits are productive ones—your routine will keep you on task even when you don’t feel like you have the energy to work toward your goals.
Any kind of routine can help you stay grounded and push through overwhelming situations, but it stands to reason that a routine built around good habits will be the most beneficial. Psychologists and self-help experts have numerous tips about how to replace bad habits with better ones. One simple way to start building a better routine is to come up with an if-then statement that recognizes one of your bad habits and puts a good habit in its place. For example, if you tend to drink too much coffee to power through stressful work days, you might set the intention “If I start feeling tired at work, then I will take a five-minute break to stretch.” This replaces an unhealthy habit (overusing caffeine) with a healthy habit (regular stretch breaks).
Tool #3: Purpose
Baumeister and Tierney say that finding a strong sense of purpose is, perhaps, the most important strategy for reinforcing your willpower. The purpose you devote yourself to could be a lofty ideal like “justice” or “freedom,” but it could also be something more mundane, such as keeping your family housed and fed—everyone is different, so find what motivates you.
A sense of purpose will help you maintain your self-control in extreme circumstances. Believing that you’re engaged in a deeply meaningful task will make you much more willing to endure hardship, and empower you to overcome challenges that might otherwise seem impossible. Furthermore, getting fully engaged in something like your job, volunteer work, or creative pursuits is an effective way to avoid dwelling on your personal problems. This will stop you from wasting mental energy on rumination, and instead keep you focused on what needs to be done.
For instance, say you’re struggling to quit smoking, and you’ve decided that your purpose is to take care of your family. Recognizing that smoking could lead to serious illness or death—thereby making you unable to support your loved ones—will be a powerful motivator to keep you on track when your willpower falters. Also, focusing on your family instead of yourself will help keep your mind off of how difficult and unpleasant it is to break a smoking habit.
Religion Can Be an Effective Tool
In addition to the toolbox above, Baumeister and Tierney say that being involved in a religious or spiritual practice is an especially helpful way to boost and preserve your willpower. This is because religion and religious communities provide guidance, support, and accountability by their very nature.
First of all, religious and spiritual practices reduce the need for willpower by providing their followers with clear moral codes, rules of behavior, and routines or rituals to guide their day-to-day actions. This greatly simplifies decision-making processes and provides guidance in challenging situations, allowing practitioners to conserve their willpower.
Religious practices also encourage self-monitoring, often reinforced by the fear of being shunned by the community and the sense that you’re being watched by a higher power. Furthermore, in some belief systems, a higher power will punish you if you don’t act appropriately. This heightened awareness of your actions and their potential consequences serves as a constant reminder to exercise self-control.
The authors add that, if you don’t hold any religious or spiritual beliefs, there are similar communities in the secular world that could help you in many of the same ways. For example, gyms and martial arts schools tend to value consistency, discipline, and self-improvement, so members still feel pressured to work hard and will be held accountable if they don’t.
(Shortform note: Some studies have shown that religious people tend to be healthier and more satisfied with their lives than their nonreligious counterparts, which suggests that religion is indeed helpful for boosting willpower and thereby reaching your life goals. Notably, however, those benefits were only found in cultures where religion is highly valued. In more secular cultures, such as those found in Scandinavian countries or Japan, the differences between religious and nonreligious people disappear almost entirely. Therefore, researchers have largely concluded that the benefits people experienced weren’t from religion itself, but rather from the social connections and support they gained while practicing their religion.)
Willpower Exercise: Develop a Five-Minute Meditation Practice
According to Kelly McGonigal in The Willpower Instinct, practicing meditation is helpful for strengthening your willpower. Meditation—a practice of quieting the mind and focusing on the act of breathing—is like a shortcut to willpower. When you develop a meditation practice and stick with it, your brain gets better at impulse control. And it only takes five minutes a day.
The research: Studies show that people who meditate regularly actually have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Meditation increases blood flow to that part of the brain, which makes it grow and get more efficient at processing. A larger prefrontal cortex makes it easier to handle distractions and make good decisions.
If you’ve tried meditation before and believe you’re “bad” at it, now’s the time to try again. Consider it an experiment in building willpower. People who believe they are hopeless at meditation are the ones who benefit the most from it. Here are simple instructions for a five-minute daily meditation practice:
- Sit cross-legged on the floor or in a chair with your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands in your lap and straighten your spine. Now focus on staying still, not fidgeting. Do your best not to adjust your sitting position or scratch an itch. By staying in this one position, you’re training yourself not to follow every impulse that your brain and body come up with. Think of this step as the physical foundation of willpower.
- Now that you’re still, close your eyes (or focus your eyes on a single spot on the wall). Pay attention to your breathing. Silently say the words “inhale” and “exhale” as you breathe in and out. Your mind will probably start to wander, but just lead it right back to focusing on your breath. Focusing on the breath ramps up power to the prefrontal cortex and takes energy away from the brain regions that create stress and cravings.
- After a few minutes, stop repeating the words “inhale” and “exhale” as you breathe. Just focus on the sensation of breathing (your belly and chest expanding and deflating, air moving in and out of your nose and mouth) without giving it a name. Turn your attention to the ways your mind wanders, but don’t judge it. Just bring your focus back to your breath. Think of this step as training for self-awareness and self-control.
Pro tips: When you’re meditating, the goal is not to eliminate your thoughts; the goal is to not let your thoughts rule you. As your mind starts wandering and you lose your focus on your breath, simply bring your focus back. Your brain’s training occurs in the practice of coming back to the breath—not necessarily in staying there.
After a few weeks, you may want to increase your meditation time to 10 or 15 minutes a day, but if it starts to feel like a burden or obligation, go back to five minutes. Some people find it’s easier to pick a certain time of day for meditation, like first thing in the morning or right before bed, while others prefer to keep their schedules flexible. See what works best for you
Choose a Willpower Challenge
Choose a specific willpower challenge that you’d like to tackle. As you choose a challenge, keep in mind that self-control consists of three separate functions: I will, I won’t, and I want. Your challenge will fall into one of these categories:
- An “I will” challenge is something you aren’t doing now, but you’d like to make a long-term habit. What do you want to do—or do more of—because you know it will make your life better?
- An “I won’t” challenge is an existing habit you want to break. What do you want to do less of because it’s not serving your best interests?
- An “I want” challenge is a lifelong goal that you’d like to put more effort into, like improving your health or becoming a better parent. You can’t complete this effort in a short period of time—it’s more of an ongoing challenge—but you can take steps in the right direction.
Dive Deeper Into Willpower
If you want to learn more about willpower and how to strengthen it, check out the full guides to the books mentioned throughout this article:
