insert_linkLiving in Monotony and Progress-Deficiency?
Don’t be the victim of scarce self-control and discipline; there are ways to improve your willpower such that you finally get the motivation to make progress towards utopia. In this article, we will be discussing willpower tricks as well as busting poisonous, self-defeating myths.
In fact, everybody suffers from resistance. It’s those who can handle it, however, who are able to do what others can’t be bothered to do. This is the secret to succeeding in life, since there’s little competition when you’re willing to do what others aren’t.
Whether or not it seems feasible to you, there are ways you can boost your self-control and discipline–provided you supply the determination. And if for any reason you don’t have that, remind yourself of the reasons for developing self-control and discipline. Here is my comprehensive motivational list of determination-reasoning:
- Defeat the competition
- Infinite bragging rights
- Have the potential to be insanely successful, that is, more than anyone else
- Never again feel guilty for underachieving
- Dominate the world
- Never again be laughed at for not having the self-control and discipline to be worth anything
- Laugh at everybody else because they are not nearly as successful as you
- Achieve anything
- Pull ahead of the race
- Become rich
- Live in a surplus of satisfaction
You’ve now developed that burning desire to become too superior for your feeble friends. (Congratulations!) As such, you are abundantly ready to receive the real deal. But first, we must understand the underlying, all-powerful law of willpower.
insert_linkThe Fundamental Law: Willpower is Finite
Indeed, this goes for everyone; nobody has an unlimited quantity of willpower, and, yes, this includes you, Phil. The amount of willpower allowance you have been given for the day reflects precisely how much self-control and discipline you could potentially exercise.
Think of this concept as one frightfully large butter tub: the store for your willpower for your day, regardless of whether you approve of it. Although, I don’t think there’s anything better than a butter tub for storing my willpower.
With this in mind, whenever you draw willpower from your butter tub, your supply obviously diminishes. This could include forcing yourself to do a dreaded piece of work, going outside to exercise, and staying away from junk food every so often.
For the upcoming part of this article, we will outline some of the tips you can employ to overcome this issue.
Despite the misconception of many mere mortals, you’ll never need infinite willpower. This may seem like some black magic, though I assure you it’s not. It is possible to benefit from exceptional self-control and discipline in face of the finite willpower law.
Therefore, we should shift this question:
“How do you have so much willpower, yo?”
…to this:
“Like yo, how do you manage your willpower exceptionally exquisitely such that you are able to do things that are otherwise difficult to accomplish for a mere mortal, not unlike myself?”
Evidently, the secret we all deeply require—how does one manage their willpower effectively?
insert_linkStop Wasting Away Your Precious Willpower
Having established the law of willpower, we must act in accordance with it in a way that benefits us. That is to say, all will be in favour of us assuming we spend our willpower conservatively.
There is a multiplicity of ways by which one can deplete their willpower—some being wiser than others. Your objective, as somebody who wishes to be frugal with their willpower, is to stop unnecessarily depleting said willpower.
Now let us feel the follies of poor willpower expenditure.
insert_link1) Making Needless Decisions in Daily Life
Every single day, you will invariably spend time making avoidable decisions. This can immensely suck the life out of your willpower butter tub like a sickly donkey drinking from an empty bucket of water. Note that while a few fun decisions are acceptable, a surplus of decisions will finish you off.
Allow me to iterate some wasteful decisions you may encounter in daily life:
1. Choosing clothes for the day
2. Deciding what to do in your unplanned time
3. Choosing what butter to eat in bulk today
You could, for example, pre-determine what clothes you are going to wear for each day. Moreover, the key to effective decision-making is to make the decision automated.
Perhaps you will employ a system, so you know exactly what clothes to wear for each day and/or situation. In an extreme scenario, you might only own one set of clothing, and wear that every day. Similar advice goes for deciding your activities in unplanned time and choosing between butter.
On the other hand, you could simply adopt whatever item of clothing you see first for the day. Whatever floats your boat; nobody will mind, mind you.
No matter how trivial a decision may be, it always comes at the expense of willpower.
insert_link2) Stressful Environments Result in Unintended Effects
Unfortunately for you, these stressful situations, that we all know and love, are not free; willpower is lost—you should know this by now. In accordance, try to avoid stress.
Stress can, in fact, be a critical component of maximum human performance, meanwhile, it may not be so useful when: you are experiencing stress in excess, unnecessarily, or while perceiving it negatively.
You see, when you are stressed, your brain seeks rewards which is inevitably damaging to thy ability to control thyself.
Know this key point well—write it in your cookbook.
insert_link3) The Bad Foods Kill Self-Control and Discipline
Oh yes, don’t think there’s any escaping this one, for we all know unhealthy food is bad. But were you aware that they can actually diminish your butter tub of willpower? Oh yes!
It is for the reason that your willpower is affected by your glucose levels in your blood. As a result, I urge you to completely cut out foods high in glucose (sugar). This includes chiefly the high-caloric dense foods:
- Chocolate bar
- Cake
- Energy drinks
- Pudding
- Chocolate egg
- Biscuit
- Cookie
- Sugar
- Sweetness
- But not butter: we love the butter
To clarify, the reason why you would want to utterly remove sugar-dense products from your diet (and house) is to eliminate temptation. Fighting temptation also destroys willpower, and you don’t want any chance of accidentally eating more than you intended to.
Furthermore, I know a worthwhile book with tips to help you manage your diet, as well as countless other areas of life. In this book, there are many useful and fascinating tips, so ensure you have a pen and paper! You will find this will help you on your journey towards self-control and discipline.
insert_linkStart Investing Your Willpower Wisely
Willpower is finite—a fact we’ve covered earlier. For this reason, one must know when and where it is most appropriate to spend willpower. Or, rather, invest it.
In the last section, it has become clear that we mustn’t waste willpower. Likewise, we must decide how to go about exploiting it to our advantage. This is investing it—and there is solely one invaluable way of doing so.
insert_link4) The Number-One Expenditure of Willpower
Habits; the formation of habits is the utmost indispensable way by which you could exert your willpower. You’re probably never going to get something done consistently without a definitive habit.
To emphasise the importance of habits, all successful people need them. Moreover, it is the consistency that matters, not infrequent yet herculean efforts.
Having said that, if you want to be successful, you must form habits accordingly. Firstly, identify habits which are crucial in your life to reach your goal. Secondly, scrape all the willpower out of the butter tub in order to enforce this new habit.
You shall find that after however many times you practise this habit, it begins to become automatic; thus, no significant amount of willpower constitutes this display seemingly of self-control and discipline. Nevertheless, the secret, as we all know, is effective management of willpower.
However, to ensure an effective implementation of habits, nail down one new habit every, say, 6 months. Less intense habits can take shorter than 6 months, of course. You’re good as long as you remember to form one habit at a time—you won’t be able to exert adequate willpower at once.
Well-crafted morning rituals are particularly effective for innumerable things one would want to achieve.
insert_linkHow to Increase Your Willpower, Self-Control, and Discipline
To recap, we’ve covered the ways willpower can be depleted (and how to use it wisely). We will next cover some of the most effective ways of increasing your daily willpower allowance. After all, who doesn’t want a larger butter tub of willpower?
insert_link5) Do Some Cool Meditation
Meditation—the right type of meditation—can bring immense benefits to your life. I must say, the concept does bring up images of extreme spiritual rituals, for me at least. Despite this, meditation doesn’t have to be spiritual at all.
Introducing Vipassana meditation.
As a matter of fact, there has been ample scientific research for why Vipassana meditation is a great self-control strategy. This potent breed of meditation consists of observing your body and breath in the present; being aware of the mind wondering away and focusing your attention back at the present moment.
You can obtain guided meditation audio here or, even better, you could use this out-of-this-world meditation headband. The headband, being especially ideal for beginners, senses your brainwaves and adjusts its meditation audio accordingly as you become distracted. Hence, it’s super-crazy stuff though definitely worth it for comprehensive meditation.
insert_link6) Get the Sleep You Need to Be Mentally Strong
The sheer importance sleep is something that is not emphasised enough today. While many people sleep deficiency results in tiredness, they do not understand the true significance of sleep. For example, do you know how much sleep you should be getting?
It turns out that sleep also affects willpower, like food. Therefore, if you aren’t sleeping enough, you will find yourself with too little willpower. This means less sleep does not necessarily mean more time for productivity, as performance, self-control, and discipline will take a hit.
I could not cover everything about sleep here: sleep is an incredibly vast and fascinating subject. Nonetheless, you could learn a lot more about sleep with yet another valuable book. I recommend this read for the useful, proper-research-based tips and tricks everybody needs to know and understand.
insert_link7) Put Yourself Under Peer-Pressure
Do you want to get things done? Have the discipline to bring some pressure upon yourself. It’s no wonder that we all get things done when there’s a deadline, or we are given responsibility. I’ll have you know that.
An effective way of summoning your inner, concealed willpower entails making others monitor you; if you fail to carry out your goal, shame will come at you as swiftly as Christopher the Troublesome Little Badger.
Luckily, I possess a good few suggestions for how you might embrace this self-control strategy:
- Make many people aware of your objective.
- Make a bet with a friend: oblige yourself to give them money if you fail, but they don’t give you anything if you succeed.
- Encourage your friends to use disciplining methods—whatever’s necessary—to make you work.
- Ask your family to take away your possessions, one by one, for each failure.
insert_link8) Exercise Your Willpower Like a Muscle
This is it: the last self-control strategy to build your self-control and discipline. Whereas before I’ve described willpower as a butter tub, now we are perceiving it as a muscle. And how do muscles work?
I’ll tell you. When you exercise the muscle, the muscle grows. Likewise, when you don’t exercise it, it will vanish.
Self-control and discipline is indeed a muscle—no doubt about it. As a consequence, an underutilisation of your willpower leads to a smaller daily allowance. We do not want this, clearly, so why not exercise your willpower like a muscle?
You could:
- Use your non-dominant hand for regular everyday activities like scooping the butter out of the tub.
- Discipline yourself not to use informal language such as “yo,” “yeah,” and “payment the butter and subscribe to the blog.”
- Set yourself engaging challenges to test your true abilities.
insert_link9) Exercise Your Real Muscles Like Willpower
Another way of boosting your supply of willpower is to get some exercise. Not only does this relieve stress—which harms willpower—but it is a brilliant method everyone should employ. Go get exercise, now!
Several hours a week of good exercise can go a long way with self-discipline…
Being one with nature can help you, too. Immerse yourself in the fragile thickness of the local woodland. Also, this is another way of alleviating your stresses in addition to increasing your productivity
insert_linkBut This is Not All
That concludes the list of 9 helpful nuggets of information about willpower today. However, this is not the complete resource of everything one could possibly retain in memory on the subject. If you want to learn more and enhance your life further, take a peek at these splendid books on the very subject of willpower:
Furthermore, if you’re interested, I have an article about free will—divergent from willpower—purely for fascination.
You also might not have heard from the social medias: the butter has melted—enormously—expanding its presence over to the Steem platform. So, you can see me on:
It’s very good. Destined to improve, too.
