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Willpower is a combination of courage, mental stamina and determination -- and you can train it. Here are science-backed strategies to strengthen your self-control.
Willpower is a combination of courage, mental stamina and determination. The good news is willpower can be learned and strengthened. Here are my favorite science-backed strategies to increase your willpower.
You need to be mentally strong to prepare to meet your goals. As humans, we have tremendous capability. We can solve complicated problems, dream and imagine new possibilities and learn complex skills. But most of us spend our time doing the same mental activities over and over again.
We underutilize our brain power.
We skim Facebook instead of delving into our next big work project. We watch Netflix instead of learning a new skill. We flip through magazines instead of writing the next Great Novel.
Why? Because achievement is a lot of work! Pushing our mental boundaries is challenging, uncomfortable and exhausting.
Willpower is what gets us through. People with high willpower:
- Get more done
- Achieve greater success
- Are above average in their abilities
- Stand out from the crowd
I want to delve into the science of willpower – how it works and what you need to do to get more of it. I will be using the incredible research from our Science of People book club book, The Willpower Instinct, by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford University psychologist, who ties willpower to our health, happiness and productivity.
One honest note before we start. A lot of the book’s framing rests on the idea that willpower is a limited fuel tank that drains as you use it – an idea psychologists call “ego depletion.” It is a useful way to picture self-control, and I will use the muscle metaphor throughout because it makes the tips easy to act on. But you should know the evidence has gotten shakier since the book came out. When 23 labs ran a large pre-registered study designed to reproduce the original depletion experiments, they could not find the effect, and the popular claim that a sugary snack refuels your willpower does not have solid support either.
So treat the “tank” as a helpful picture, and only that – the science no longer backs it as a hard rule of the brain. The good news is that almost every strategy below works whether or not willpower is literally finite, because they are really about designing your habits and your surroundings so you lean on raw self-control less in the first place.
#1. The Willpower Challenge:
Before we get started, I want you to think of your willpower challenge. McGonigal encourages readers to think of 3 different willpower goals. Fill in the blanks and use these as you read the tips below.
What do you want to do more of?
I will ___________________
What do you want to do less of?
I won’t _________________
What longterm goal are you working towards?
I want __________________
Now that you have your challenges in place let’s talk about how to tackle them.
#2: Self-Knowledge
To increase your willpower, you have to know a little bit about yourself. This is all about increasing your emotional intelligence.
To succeed at self-control you need to know how you fail
Dr. McGonigal
Willpower is about doing. It’s also about knowing your trigger points, your mental traps, and your habits. So let’s do some self-exploration.
Oh yeah, and get real.
It’s time for brutal honesty. Don’t worry; it’s just you reading this post. I won’t tell anyone if you have ever eaten cake out of the trash can or gone to the gym for a workout but really just took a steam or haven’t counted carbs if you ate them standing up.
Watch out for false confidence: the people who believe they have iron self-control are the ones most likely to walk straight into temptation. Researchers call it the restraint bias. Trusting yourself to resist is exactly what stops you avoiding the trigger in the first place. The smoker who is sure one puff won’t hook them again. The dieter who keeps the cookies in the house “to prove” they don’t need them.
We tend to overestimate most of our abilities. Have you ever seen a high school talent show? Everyone (even if they don’t admit it) thinks they are going to win. Please self-evaluate with the following questions:
- Where do you most often ‘give in?’
- When do you most often ‘give up?’
- What exhausts your willpower the most?
#3: Two Toned Brains
Here’s the model The Willpower Instinct runs on: willpower behaves like a muscle that tires with use.
Most of us have felt something like it. You hold it together all day, then cave the second you get home. The idea is that self-control gets fatigued the way a bicep does after too many reps, and that it lives in a specific part of the brain – the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles planning and impulse control.
Now, the caveat from the intro applies here most of all. The “willpower is a tank that drains” idea is exactly the piece that large replication studies could not reproduce. So read this section as a handy way to picture why self-control feels harder when you are tired and stressed. The biology behind it is far from settled. What we can say with confidence: fatigue, stress, and low mood really do make it harder to stick to your goals. The muscle is just an easy way to remember that.
McGonigal explains the metaphor like this:
We have two brains: an impulsive pleasure seeker and a wiser achiever. The pleasure seeker wants treats, fun, and entertainment. The achiever wants to make good long-term decisions, which are dictated by willpower.
The more our pleasure seeker is tempted by candy bowls in the office, a friend asking to play hooky, and pings from our Words with Friends game, our achiever’s brain has to rein us in. After a while, that muscle gets tired of saying no. This is why, by evening, you binge eat ice cream after saying no all day. The willpower part of our brain gets tired when we use it too much. That is because it is constantly fighting the pleasure seeker. We need willpower to make good long-term decisions. Without it, we would be eating candy all the time, watching TV, and never working out. So, willpower is a biological instinct that evolved to help protect ourselves from ourselves.
Temptation and stress hijack the brain’s systems of self-control.
You make small self-control decisions all day long, and you barely notice them – what to eat, whether to check your phone, whether to hit snooze, whether to open that one extra browser tab. By the time you sit down to do the hard thing, you have already made dozens of little calls that pulled on the same well.
That is the real, practical takeaway from the muscle model, and it holds up even if the “tank” does not: the more decisions and temptations you face, the harder self-control feels. So one of the smartest moves is to face fewer of them.
One easy place to start is learning how to say no, so fewer things ever get onto your plate.
#4: Gaming the System
You can actually game your two-brained system. Here’s how:
- Remove as many small exercises in willpower as you can. Get rid of the candy bowls. Ban notifications from your social networks. Do not go to the kitchen before dinner.
- Make your important decisions during high-willpower moments. For example, my everyday willpower challenge is to work out. By evening, I am wiped out and want to crash on the couch. So, I have a system where I text a friend in the morning (high willpower moment) to meet in the afternoon for a hike or tennis. I also book my workout classes ahead of time (and pay upfront) in the morning when it’s easy.
- Recharge between the hard stuff. McGonigal recommends meditation, slow breathing, extra sleep and time outdoors. Whether or not that literally “refills a tank,” these are some of the best-supported ways to lower stress and steady your mood, and a calmer, rested brain simply finds self-control easier.
#5: Strengthen Your Muscle
If you treat willpower like a muscle, you can train it – and the training itself pays off no matter what is happening in your brain. Just like doing reps at the gym, you can ‘tone’ your self-control by practicing it in small doses. Banish that mental cellulite! McGonigal makes it clear that our brain actually puts on the brakes before we reach empty. It’s like when your gasoline light comes on– it comes on as a warning, but you know you still have several miles left. The brain is the same way. Take running for example. Let’s say you are on the treadmill and your legs begin to burn and your brain says, “I’m at my limit, I better stop!” In actuality, you could go further, but your brain is playing it safe. When you are training for a marathon, you tell your brain, “Nope, I am going one more mile!” And you do. And you get stronger. And you run faster next time.
You can do the same thing for willpower:
I want you to be a mental athlete.
- Next time you are tired or are about to give in, see if you can go one step further.
- Commit to one small habit that you will do every day: meditate, call a family member, throw one old thing out
- When you are ready to give up or give in, think about your want power. Tie your current activity to a longterm goal or value. That can often give you the motivation to push a little farther.
An important lever for increasing your willpower is learning how to be more productive.
#6: License to Sin
I am so guilty of license to sin. This is when you do something good and so you give yourself permission to be bad. Do these sound familiar?
- I worked out extra hard, now I can have an extra portion.
- I ate great yesterday, I can have this sweet now.
- I finished all my work, I can have one cigarette.
This license to sin happens when goals are being associated with “being good,” and so it becomes tempting to indulge in a reward. The only way to stop this behavior is to untie goals from ‘being good.’
“I have been good, therefore I should be rewarded.”- Instead: “I have met my goal. That feels great!”
This means tying your goals or actions to longterm desires or values. Or seeing the intrinsic benefits of an activity like getting endorphins when you work out (not license to eat more) or cooking dinner with your family means more quality time (not license to watch more TV).
#7: “What the Hell” Effect
The What the Hell effect is treacherous for goals. It’s when good intentions fail, and resolutions fall by the wayside. The What the Hell Effect happens when we start to slip on our goals, and our willpower fails, and so we begin to feel like a failure. As a failure, we think, “Oh, what the hell!? I might as well give in…” This happens because the moment we slip on a goal, we feel guilty and self-blame. This self-shame triggers your body to want a dopamine hit (the pleasure chemical) so it can feel better. This means you now want more dessert, cigarettes, Facebook, and french fries even more.
The answer: Self-compassion.
Surprisingly, McGonigal found that when people forgive themselves for missing the mark occasionally, the more quickly they get back on track. People who wallowed in guilt tended to spiral into a cycle of indulgence and shame–losing their grip on self-control.
- Next time you slip up, let it go. Chalk it up to a one-time event and move on.
#8: Your Future Self
I think this is one of the most fascinating studies I have ever read:
When we are asked to think about ourselves, certain parts of our brain light up. When we are asked to think about our future selves, different areas of our brain light up. Which areas? The same areas we use to think about other people.
In other words, we treat our future selves like another person.
We think about our future selves like different people. We often idealize them, expecting our future selves to do what our present selves cannot manage.
Dr. McGonigal
How does this affect willpower? In great and terrifying ways. We tend to borrow credit from tomorrow. Our inability to clearly see the future (we think we will be more like someone else later) leads us into temptation and procrastination. I love these questions to test how much you are relying on your future self:
- Are you waiting for a future you?
- How will you be different in the future? Will your goals be easier to achieve?
- Do you think magically about how you will be, what will happen and what comes next in the future?
When making decisions, do not over-commit your future self. Start now, don’t wait. Don’t defer choices and actions to sometime down the line. Hold yourself accountable to a timeline and stick to it.
One More Idea: the book encourages readers to picture their future selves in vivid detail, enjoying the payoff of the good choices they are making now. The more real and specific that future you feels, the easier it is to make a decision today that the future you will thank you for. So don’t just think “I should save more” – picture yourself at 65, comfortable, unworried. That version of you is the one you’re actually deciding for.
When you think about future decisions for your future self, do you often find yourself putting them off? Get your procrastination under control with our guide.
#9: Willpower Infected
Willpower – and the lack of it – can be surprisingly contagious.
Think of the five people you spend the most time with. Where would each of them land on willpower? Do they hold to their own goals, or do they talk you out of yours? There’s no formula that averages them into a score for you. But the habits around you set the default, and going along with the room costs you no willpower at all.
If you have some major goals in your life or you want to reboot your willpower, you have to think about who you are spending time with.
- Who are the mentally strongest people you know? How can you be inspired by them?
- Who triggers you to lose willpower? How can you minimize their effect?
- Can you ask for help? Who can keep you accountable?
#10: Never Say, “I Won’t”
Don’t think about a purple bicycle. Don’t! Really don’t think about it!
The more we are told not to think about something, do something or try something the more we want that something. McGonigal says we should stop saying “I won’t” and instead give ourselves permission and freedom of thought. Studies of brain activation confirm that as soon as you give participants permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress that thought becomes less likely to intrude in the conscious awareness.
Willpower is not about suppressing thoughts, it is about changing action. It is not about shaming your brain into action, it is about inspiring and accepting it.
Guilt and shame over your setbacks lead to giving in again, but self-forgiveness and self-compassion boost self-control.
You are wonderful the way you are. Now it’s time to build on it. Think about how you can be your best self and how willpower can help get you closer.
- START: What’s one thing you could do right now to have greater success?
- STOP: What’s one thing you could stop doing right now to improve your quality of life?
Do you have one stop and one start? Good! To give yourself extra motivation, give yourself more reason to act on these:
- What’s one benefit you will get from your start / stop?
- Who else will benefit in your life from your start / stop?
- What’s the first step to your start/stop?
#11: Stack Tiny Wins to Supercharge Willpower
Big goals rarely fail because you lacked one giant burst of willpower. They fail in the small moments. So flip it around and win the small moments on purpose.
Pick a micro-goal tied to your big “I want” and make it almost embarrassingly easy. One sentence of the novel. A five-minute walk. One glass of water instead of the soda. What you’re building here is the streak.
Each tiny win gives you evidence that you are the kind of person who follows through, and that identity is what makes the next choice easier. Do the small thing today, then do it again tomorrow. That is how self-control actually compounds.
Action Step: Choose one micro-habit right now, something you could finish in under two minutes, and do it before you close this tab.
BONUS: The Science of Goals
Maybe willpower isn’t your problem. Are you setting goals correctly? Take our free goal-setting class now.
