Frank Ryan

Willpower evolved to ensure that human beings survive and prosper both as a species and as individuals by enabling them to make tough choices and forego easy options. If goals were achieved when beckoned by wishful thinking and habits vanished with a click of your fingers, you would not require willpower. Willpower entails projecting yourself into the future, often foregoing immediate pleasure or indulgence in pursuit of longer-term and ultimately more valued goals.

Without doubt, from the perspective of willpower, the most challenging personality characteristic is perfectionism. Continually striving for unrealistically high standards and beating yourself up when you fail – the defining features of perfectionism – can combine to drain your willpower. Perfectionism’s weapon of choice is procrastination or simply avoiding doing things in a timely fashion.

Pessimistic thinking styles are closely linked to low self-confidence and low self-esteem. Low self-esteem is a generalised type of low self-worth, based on a perception of consistent, cumulative failure or inadequacy. Low self-confidence and low self-esteem lead to negative predictions about specific performance or capability, such as, ‘I’m sure I can’t get the job done,’ and to general beliefs about your competency and worth, such as, ‘I’m just not very competent.

Willpower is a uniquely human attribute. The pursuit of valued long-term goals such as health, fitness or success entails discounting or ignoring more immediate wants, needs and desires. Managing this double act – maintaining a long-term goal in the face of temptation or the lure of indulgence – is what your willpower is designed to do.

Willpower does not exist or, indeed, flourish in a vacuum. Your willpower will work best for you when you’re in a positive frame of mind, able to fully benefit from the support of friends and family, and able to recognise the unconscious thinking traps or biases that can undermine your willpower. The resources outlined here can help you in achieving this, and will steer you towards creating a personal, social and mental context that will help cultivate your willpower.

Getting the most from your willpower involves ‘dos’ as well as ‘don’ts’. Recognising the limits of your willpower is definitely a ‘do’ because doing so helps prevent you from overloading it. Stressing, worrying and ruminating come under the ‘don’t’ heading because doing so can deplete your willpower and drain your motivation.

When you do summon up your willpower, you can make your dreams come true and your unwanted habits disappear. In both scenarios, having a clear goal is vital to success. A goal guides your thinking and behaviour and enables you to maintain your motivation and focus your willpower. For example, think about: Sitting in a restaurant on a cold Tuesday in December, imagining what it would be like to swim in a sun-drenched pool the following summer, having shed unwanted pounds and slipped into a slinky bikini.

Impulses, whether driving decisions you make or things you do (or, indeed, avoid doing) are the enemies of willpower because impulses arise rapidly before you can mobilise your willpower to override them. Anticipating when your willpower is likely to be tested by impulses and having a plan prepared for the inevitable challenge is essential.

From eating well to getting good brain exercise to planning where you'll shop, the tips you'll find here can help you boost your willpower and achieve your goals! Eat a breakfast of willpower champions Start the day with a nutritious meal. Your brain has high energy demands, especially when it’s using willpower to achieve something challenging or to suppress an unwanted habit.