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Published:
August 11, 2014

Willpower For Dummies

Overview

Develop rock-solid willpower with evidence-based techniques

Willpower For Dummies shows you how to train, strengthen, and improve your willpower in seven easy steps! Written by a clinical psychologist and cognitive therapist, the book proves that willpower can be learned like any other skill, and provides tons of practical exercises and strategies you can start using today. You'll learn how willpower works inside the brain, and how choosing goals and identifying challenges can affect your success. The book stresses the importance of patience, rewards and being kind to yourself, and walks you through the techniques that will keep you on the right track, even on your worst days.

The mind works in two different ways: the long view and the short view. Controlling which aspect wins out is the key to willpower. Willpower For Dummies breaks this complex science down

into easily digestible bits, written in plain English with a dash of humour. You'll find scientifically robust guidance toward strengthening your willpower just like a muscle, and expert advice on training your brain to work with you instead of against you.

  • Discover the most important factors in building self-discipline
  • Learn how to set goals and how to train your willpower
  • Practice simple willpower-strengthening exercises
  • Employ coping strategies for when you're about to break

Whether you're trying to lose weight, quit smoking or just work harder, rest assured that you can do it—regardless of past failures and false starts. Willpower is not a trait, but a skill. Everyone can learn it, and everyone can make it stronger. Willpower For Dummies walks you through the process, teaching you the skills you need for lasting success.

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About The Author

Frank Ryan is a clinical psychologist and cognitive therapist, specialising in cognition and impulse control. He is also the author of Cognitive Therapy For Addiction, published by Wiley.

Sample Chapters

willpower for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

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.

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Articles from
the book

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.
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.
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.
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.
Being your own willpower coach doesn’t boost your brain capacity or invest you with any special powers, but it does ensure that you maximise the key ingredient of success: willpower. A good coach offers encouragement from the first day the novice athlete shows up for training on a cold, dark morning, long before the athlete has any prospect of winning a medal.
A good night’s sleep helps you get the most from your willpower, but poor sleep, particularly if it’s a regular occurrence, dilutes your willpower. Good-quality sleep also enables you to dream, because you need to attain a deep sleep state for this to happen. (If you’ve been deprived of sleep, you can dream much more quickly because you’re in a state known as dream debt – you’re owed some dream time!
Understanding your personality can help you make your willpower work for you. Recognising and accepting that you’re spontaneous and impulsive, for example, can help you anticipate when your willpower may be challenged. You can use your willpower to bypass going on a shopping spree, in order to save for an adventurous holiday.
Along with good sleep, diet and exercise, one extra ingredient helps boost your willpower: acknowledging your success and celebrating your achievements. Recalling a successful, enriching or happy occasion can kick-start positive thinking, in the same way that remembering one bad outcome can lead to the recall of a cascade of calamities!
Stress saps willpower. In order to use willpower effectively you need to understand stress and how to manage it. Evolution has bequeathed you with a highly tuned system for responding to threats. In a crisis, this aids survival by giving you just three options, sometimes referred to as the three Fs: fight, flee or freeze.
Any endeavour that requires willpower – whether quitting smoking, sticking to that diet or following the latest exercise regime – is prone to setbacks. When you face a setback, as you almost certainly will, you need to look for lessons that can help prevent a recurrence of the unwanted event. Positive emotions create a mindset within which willpower will flourish, while negative feelings compete for your limited supply of 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.
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.
Inevitably, you already do physical and mental activities, so upgrading these into exercise shouldn’t require too much effort or willpower. The difference between activity and exercise is that the latter is over and above your normal level of activity and is designed to stretch you physically or mentally. For example, you walk to the supermarket to do your shopping, but you run around the park to get fit.
What’s the best diet to enhance your willpower? Generally, sustaining glucose levels for longer rather than shorter periods is crucial to maintaining willpower, so you want to eat foods low on the glycaemic index. If, for example, you’re striving to remain a non-smoker, you need the endurance of a marathon runner more than the power of a sprinter.
The first step in preparing to train your willpower (your ability to control your actions and impulses) is to do some basic brain maintenance to ensure that your brain is healthy. Like any bodily organ, the brain requires nutrition to do its job and stay healthy. Brain cells, in common with other cells in the human body, can be damaged by rogue atoms or molecules known as free radicals.
Motivation can compensate for depleted willpower. Whether your goal is losing weight, getting fit or finishing a project on time, reminding yourself of the reasons you committed to your goal in the first instance can recharge your motivational battery and jump-start your willpower. Your willpower needs this motivational power, especially when running on empty.
When you’ve worked hard on something that challenges and depletes your willpower, suppressed appetites and desires can come to the fore. Thoughts such as ‘I deserve a drink/smoke/extra portion/day off work’ can sound plausible, in effect giving you permission to indulge yourself. These are the wrong rewards at the wrong time!
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.
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.
To develop problem-solving skills, you need to recognise the difference between worrying and problem solving. Doing so is easier said than done, because you can easily assume that worrying helps you solve a problem. It doesn’t. Worrying gives you the illusion of control or the sense that you can anticipate and therefore prepare for difficulties in the future.
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.
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