This one is about willpower. Willpower is definitely an overdone topic in the whole lifestyle-improvement-self-help-literature world. But it seems no one out there is saying quite what I want to say about it, so I have to say it myself.

I’ve enjoyed extended periods of time where I feel like I have high willpower and am spending nearly every moment doing the things I most want to do. I’ve also experienced periods of low willpower, where I’ve spent all my free time on TV and video games. And since productivity is very important to me, those periods really sucked. So over the years I’ve paid a lot of attention to what factors in my life tend to bring on and sustain seasons of high willpower. This post contains what I hope are some actionable tips.

What’s willpower?

By willpower, I mean your ability to act according to your sober, carefully reasoned preferences. When those preferences “win out” often on big decisions, we feel like we’re in control of our lives, and we sometimes describe it as high willpower.

There are many different ways to model how this actually works in your brain, and I’m not qualified to say which is correct. We used to think willpower was a finite energy resource, and we could have more of it later if we reserved it now, but that study didn’t replicate. Some believe our minds are composed of subagents that represent conflicting “wills” and need to be addressed and analyzed separately. Scott Alexander recently wrote that it comes down to three biological impulses vying for control of the body: the default preference to not move; the limbic system’s motives like eating, going to the bathroom, and anything conditioned with dopamine; and the conscious preferences. I’m less concerned about which physical model is correct, and more with whether/how I can improve my own experience of willpower.

Are there behavioral steps we can take to increase the likelihood that our conscious desires will win out? I’m not sure. No one’s really sure. It may well be that your willpower level is 100% genetically determined and there’s nothing you can do to increase it. It may be that the whole idea of willpower as a property of the individual is wrong, and really people are just responding to different environments in complex ways. I’m writing this up anyway, on the chance that if some element of willpower can be taught and learned, the following thoughts from my own experience may help.

Why listen to me?

I’ve wanted to write about willpower, but I used to think, what right do I have? I believe I have strong willpower, and my peers have said things to that effect. But no one will be able to verify that, because they don’t know what kinds of pressures (or lack thereof) I’m up against. How do we know it’s me, and not just my comfortable environment? But then COVID happened, and many of our lives were made a lot more similar: trapped in our apartments; no restaurants to go to; no friends making plans. If we’re fortunate, we have jobs and we sit in front of our computers during work hours. But as soon as work hours end, that time is all ours. We were given (forced to accept) a new abundance of time.

And around that time in 2020 I saw a tweet that said something like, “If you don’t achieve your dreams now, it was never that you lacked time, but that you lacked discipline.” Did I achieve my dreams in the Spring/Summer of 2020? I damn well got closer, I’ll tell you that.

During the worst of the COVID lockdowns:

• I woke up at the same time every day, including weekends.
• I worked out (at home) at the same time on designated days, never skipping a planned workout.
• While eating lunch, I’d watch finance educational videos on YouTube. I only watched TV shows while eating dinner, and only because I know I can’t focus well during that time. That was the only entertainment media I consumed.
• I did short meditation and dynamic stretches every single morning.
• I lived by a rule that I wouldn’t connect my phone to the internet until after I’d done my morning routine (I set my phone to automatically put itself into airplane mode every night).
• I tracked my time in certain activities, as I like to do. So for example I know that I spent an average of 4.6 hours per week on physical fitness, 6.6 hours on art projects, etc.
• I planned out virtually all of my free time, week by week and day by day, prioritizing work that would pay off in the future.
• I followed the same night routine every night.

What did I get out of such a regimented schedule?

• For the first time since I was little, I stopped needing an alarm to wake up at the desired time.
• Through those lunchtime educational videos, I learned enough about options trading to later begin hosting a weekly discussion group at work, where I get to learn from some brilliant people. And I am modestly profitable trading options.
• Through the vigilant at-home workouts, I kept my body sharp enough that once the gym opened back up, I quickly got back to my previous level of strength.
• Through the hours dedicated to making art, I made a sizable chunk of new content with which I started an art Instagram account, soon with over 100 followers. And I learned how to make art faster than I ever had before.
• Through the hours dedicated to writing, I composed most of my World of Symbols blog series.
• Through other dedicated hours, I was able to think deeply and thoroughly about what my goals are for the far future, how they relate to each other, how they should be prioritized, and how they can be started at present.
• I also coordinated a permanent move across the country.

I’ll always look back on the 2020 quarantine as a time that I made the absolute most of. I got more value out of it than I even imagined. That’s what I did with my abundance of time. And that’s as good an indicator as I’m going to get that I have high willpower. So let’s get into it!

Willpower compounds

When I’ve been acting with high willpower in the recent past, I’ll be able to continue acting with high willpower, until some outside factor drastically changes my day-to-day life. So really this is the opposite of willpower-as-a-finite-resource. It’s a compounding resource. Every time conscious desire wins out, it reinforces that pattern for the next time. And, sadly, when there are no wins in recent memory, there’s even less chance that the next battle will be a win. Procrastination and laziness compound, too.

In light of this, how should we adjust our behavior? If we’re in a low-willpower rut, we need to prioritize wins. That means setting aside our original priorities—the actual difficult things that need to get done—and instead doing something positive but trivial that we know we’ll get done. No win is too small if it breaks a bad compounding cycle.

More controversially: Even if we’re not in a terrible rut, sometimes it’s still better to not try things, at least not right away. If some particular goal is going to take more willpower than you’re confident you can put out, it may be a bad idea. Because if you fail, it’ll damage the pattern you were building. Keep in mind I am talking about willpower failures, not ordinary failures. Entering an art contest and losing is an ordinary failure—don’t worry about those. But committing to, say, finishing an art piece every day for a year, and then not finishing an art piece every day for a year, is a willpower failure. Those should be avoided.

Our culture glorifies inordinate displays of willpower—the story where the hero suddenly comes up with extreme motivation and achieves things far beyond what they were previously capable of. I think this is a mistake. If these freak moments of extreme motivation are real, they are uncommon. And their emphasis gives us an unrealistic idea of what I believe is the more reliable path from low to high willpower. This talk of motivation brings us to—

Use motivation cautiously

By motivation, I mean the raw emotional experience of desiring something strongly and feeling that you have abundant power to get it.

Motivation is a performance-enhancing drug for your willpower. It works, but most of the time you don’t need it, and you certainly shouldn’t rely on it. Because it’s an emotion, and your mind refuses to experience the same emotions reliably. After repeated exposure, you’ll become desensitized to whatever stimulus used to trigger the emotion. If you find that motivational YouTube videos put you in a mental state that makes working out easier and more enjoyable, then by all means enjoy that, but don’t rely on it before every workout. Those videos won’t give you the same kick after 10+ views, and then you’ll be searching for something else. And if you don’t find it in time, you’ll want to skip the workout. And thus the performance-enhancing drug of motivation can become the enemy of real willpower, if you’re not careful.

That being said, I do use motivation intentionally. There are some tracks on my workout playlist that really hype me up. I don’t play them often, because I know it’s only a matter of time before my mind gets completely used to all the rhythms and hits and drops, and it just sounds normal. But I do put those songs on when I have a very hard lift. In a different vein, I’ll occasionally consume intellectually motivating material, like the famous You and Your Research lecture, to help push me on some of my other goals. But if that lecture becomes too familiar to me, it’ll stop inspiring motivation, and thus it’ll stop helping me act according to my preferences.

Find willpower discounts

There’s no rule that says all the different possible ways of achieving your goal must require the same amount of willpower. Some paths are willpower discounts. If we were still thinking about willpower as a finite resource, then we would say the willpower market is not an efficient market—I can “spend” more or less of it for the same result. 

Example: I’m not a morning person, and usually I need an alarm to wake up. My old rule, like most people’s, was “get out of bed when you turn off your alarm.” That often failed. Why wouldn’t it—my conscious desires have little chance of “winning out” during the time of day when my consciousness itself has barely started. So now I set a second, very loud alarm, in another room, for 15-30 minutes after my phone alarm. When I wake up, I know I have to go turn off the loud alarm in a few minutes. That thought doesn’t escape my foggy mind, because the few times that alarm has gone off, it’s just awful. So I calmly get up, turn it off, and then I must follow my new rule: “don’t get back in bed after turning off the loud alarm.” And that rule is much easier to follow! There’s a world of difference between staying in a comfortable bed vs. getting back into bed after getting up and walking across your apartment. The latter feels like it takes less willpower to pass.

Create smart systems

Often your willpower discounts will take the form of systems that your past self sets up to make decisions easier for your future self. The system does part of the work for you. Treat your future self like an idiot who needs everything laid out for them: pick your workout clothes the night before, make your healthy meals ahead of time, etc. Treat your future self as untrustworthy, and instruct a friend to check up on your commitments later on. This kind of advice is in the mainstream now, so I won’t say more on it. The book Willpower Doesn’t Work covers this topic well.

Create dumb systems

This is something I benefited hugely from during the quarantine period. Turn your tasks into a special ritual just for the sake of being a ritual. Make it arbitrary.

My quarantine workout routine always started with: change into workout clothes, put on sneakers (even though you’re staying inside), turn on all the lights, turn on the fan, open the window, slide the couch over, put on a certain playlist. I did every one of these things every time before starting a workout. As if I had to.

Why? Because your body loves ritual, even if your mind thinks it’s silly. My body was previously conditioned to expect a workout only after getting dressed, going outside, walking down the block, walking into the gym, smelling the gym.. When the at-home workouts became the norm, that whole ramp-up disappeared. No wonder my friend complained to me that now he couldn’t get in the mood to work out. You can’t switch your headspace so suddenly like that—or, we might say, you could try, but it would take a ton of willpower. What I was trying to do with that pre-workout ritual was give my body a set of sensory markers to associate with “workout mode.” Once the association is built, following through with it becomes easier.

Wrapping up

And that’s all I have to say about willpower. But the next post is going to be about a related topic, and that’s goal-setting. If willpower is getting your conscious desires to win out, goal-setting is reasoning about what those desires should be for in the first place.

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