We’ve all been there, walking through the grocery store when we pass the ice cream aisle and our brains automatically perk up and say “ooh, ice cream sounds good right now. Go look!” We walk down the aisle, telling ourselves that we’re just considering it and reminding ourselves of our diet or fitness goals. But then we get to the freezer doors and see that favorite flavor. We stand, staring into that frozen wonderland, and go to war with ourselves. Freud would call it the Id and Superego, modern society uses the metaphor of the devil and angel on each shoulder. Whatever you want to call it, we sit there arguing in our own heads about whether or not to buy the ice cream. 

Naturally we give in to the temptation more often than not. Despite our brains rewarding us for giving in to indulgence we can’t shake the feeling that we lost somehow. We all know people with seemingly iron hard resolve to not cheat on their diets and never miss gym sessions. As we sit down to binge the fourth Netflix series this week, spoon and ice cream tub in hand, we wonder how those people manage to control themselves so well. 

I used to be like that. I still am like that in some areas. But I’ve figured out some tricks that have helped me stick to my goals and implement changes to my lifestyle. I use these strategies to get work done quickly and effectively, keep my chores done, and stay focused on tasks. 

CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT, CHANGE THE RULES OF THE GAME

The first trick I employ is one that I learned while studying psychology. BF Skinner was a behavioral psychologist who is credited with discovering Operant Conditioning. In Operant Conditioning you reward behaviors you want to see more of and punish behaviors you want to see less of. Through his research Skinner eventually decided that free will is non-existent and all behavior and choices are the results of conditioning that has occurred through the course of our lives. When asked how one develops self-control without the ability to make choices Skinner said that self control was contingent on changing the environment we are in to make choices harder or easier to make. 

Moral and philosophical conundrums aside, I took this concept and began using it in my own life. Returning to the ice cream example, Skinner would argue that the ice cream acts as a reward and conditions you to continue choosing ice cream. He would tell you that as long as you engage in the mental battle of deciding whether or not to buy ice cream you will lose. The immediate reward of ice cream, or conversely the immediate punishment of no ice cream, outweighs the long term rewards of eating healthy. There is a whole body of research dedicated to reward potency over time and how the perceived value of rewards changes depending on the time it takes to get the reward, but for now what we are focused on is the fact that the ice cream is just too powerful a motivator to resist consistently. 

So what do we do? We change the rules of the game. Instead of making the battle “ice cream vs no ice cream” what would happen if the battle was “Go down the ice cream aisle vs don’t go down the ice cream aisle?” It turns out that choosing whether or not to turn down a specific aisle is a much easier choice to make and requires significantly less willpower. 

Consider Willpower as a resource you have a finite amount of, like energy. We can significantly improve our day-to-day lives by thinking about creative ways to conserve willpower so that it can be used when needed. Some research is beginning to challenge this notion, but by minimizing the amount of willpower needed to delay gratification in the moment we make individual choices easier for ourselves. 

So the ice cream example is simple and effective, but where else can we employ this trick? Continuing on the trend of maintaining a healthy diet, what would happen if your house had no snacks or junk food in it? When cravings strike it is very difficult to resist them if the snacks are a room over, but by not having snacks in the house at all suddenly to fulfill those urges we have to make significantly more effort by going to the store, spending money, and coming back. 

By increasing the amount of effort required to engage in negative behaviors we decrease the likelihood of failing to resist temptation. We can supplement this effect by also reducing the effort required to engage in positive behaviors. 

POSITIVE MOMENTUM – THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

Another trick I have found useful in maintaining positive habits is what I call the Snowball Effect. I grew up in Montana, and when you get snow 6 months out of the year you tend to try all the things you see in cartoons, like pushing a snowball down a hill so that it will get huge and pick up speed. Turns out this is actually very difficult to do because snowballs are not very heavy when you first form them. You make a fist sized ball and try to roll it and find it is too light to pack on more snow. So you build a sort of mound of snow and then begin rolling that. It’s still too light to roll down the hill on its own. You begin pushing it around, and eventually, when it’s a few feet tall, it can start picking up momentum. Contrary to what saturday morning cartoons depicted, it’s very hard to create an out of control snowball of death.

This is a good reflection of what it is like to make healthy changes in your life. Often we see people who resolve on New Years to “get a 6 pack by summer.” The person in question begins doing sit ups daily, but does not see the results they want. This is like the snowball being too light to pick up any momentum. You have to maintain the effort of growing this practice yourself for far longer than you thought you would. Most people give up here. Some soldier on and realize that their nightly situp routine isn’t doing enough for them. They do some research and learn that diet is a very important component of weight loss. They begin dieting. Now they are building the mound. You stack physical exercise with diet, you’re building the “weight.” Then they learn about the effect sleep has on diet and exercise. More weight. Now they’re adjusting their daily schedule to make time to go to the gym. More weight. 

Each of these things on their own would be difficult to maintain precisely because they need the other areas to be supporting them. The Snowball Effect is about letting one area supplement the other areas to build positive momentum in your life. My diet supports my weight lifting. My weight lifting supports my mental health. My mental health supports my ability to focus and complete tasks. Building positive momentum in one area allows you to direct that momentum to work on others. 

Another way to consider this idea is that you can justify making one good decision despite feeling the resistance to change by considering how it will help support areas you are already succeeding in. Consider your career. It is likely that doing well in your job is important. Let’s say that you do not maintain the best sleep habits and tend to be tired all of the time. One justification for maintaining healthy sleeping habits would be the impact it has on your job. You come to work well-rested and you can work more effectively, which means tasks do not take as much time, meaning the same amount of work requires less effort and energy. 

Better sleep -> Better at work -> Less energy spent at work due to more focus = more energy for you.

Add in regular exercise. Regular exercise will raise your energy level throughout the day, and is often shown to improve sleep quality. So now your sleep is EVEN better than it already was, AND you have added more energy to your day by increasing your working capacity through exercise. Working out benefits your sleep and your job performance. 

Instead of viewing the benefits of a change in isolation, consider how they support something you are already doing. We know a healthy diet is good for our long term health, but often that is not enough of an incentive to maintain healthy eating and resisting the temptation of garbage food. But if you already work out, you can consider the diet as something to supplement your workouts. Link the benefits of the new change to your already existing good habits rather than considering those new changes in isolation. 

You can use positive momentum in one area to motivate you to change another area. The more you make positive changes to your life the easier it is to make new positive changes. Once you get the snowball rolling you can add onto it with less and less effort. Each successive change supports the others both directly and indirectly by reinforcing the new and healthier identity you are building for yourself. 

DISCIPLINE IS A MINDSET OF PROPERLY APPLIED WILLPOWER

Oftentimes people lean on motivation to inspire change because it is self-starting. Motivation comes from external sources more often than not. We become inspired by a video we see or talking to a friend, from seeing others succeed. The main problem with motivation is that it is shortsighted. Motivation gives you short term hope of success but does not address the amount of time and effort needed to reach your goals. In this way it is self-defeating. 

When you start making a new change in your life motivation makes anything seem possible. But once you begin working towards your goal the reality of the distance from where you are and where you want to go is drawn into focus. You begin to grasp how much effort it will really take to succeed as you gain scope and perspective through your efforts. When your 6 pack abs don’t appear in 2 weeks of doing sit ups you start to doubt yourself. Your mind contrasts the new perspective with the short term hope motivation provides and the gulf of effort between you and your goal smothers the motivation. You give up. 

I’ve discussed this idea briefly in another article, but I believe it is the single most important idea in terms of making any change in your life so I will repeat it here. Discipline is not being this Terminator-like human who runs 50 miles a day, meditates under waterfalls, and replaces their diet with nutrient paste for optimal performance. Discipline is the situational application of willpower over time. It’s a habit. Willpower is the ability to resist temptation in the moment. Discipline is continuing to do that over a period of time. If you resist the temptation to ruin your diet once you have used Willpower. If you do it daily, that’s Discipline. 

What this means is that Discipline is a mindset you adopt and a habit you build. When most people hear they need discipline to succeed they think it’s being this stoic, driven person all the time who is constantly vigilant. No, being disciplined is about building the habit of using willpower to keep you on track. It is something that you strengthen over time, not something that you possess or do not possess. 

Anyone can become disciplined. You build the habit of being able to use your willpower when needed by USING YOUR WILLPOWER WHEN NEEDED. Each individual instance of your brain trying to keep you comfortable by telling you to eat poorly, skip the gym, be lazy at work, put off that project until tomorrow, is an opportunity to decide something different. 

People fail to build discipline into their lives because when each of these individual opportunities arrive they focus on having to ALWAYS choose the disciplined option. They experience a single instance of having to use willpower to resist buying ice cream and their brain uses an insidious little trick to stop them. It brings into focus the fact that you ALWAYS have to make this same choice. It highlights that you will NEVER have ice cream again. Under the weight of these considerations most people would crumble. It’s too much to consider all at once. Even though you are experiencing a single moment of choice your brain overwhelms you by multiplying that single choice with every possible instance of it. 

Think of the use of willpower as your resistance to the part of your brain trying to keep you comfortable. Your resistance is a shield. It can block a single direct attack, the instance of choice that you are making at that moment. Your brain’s hail mary, last stand, desperate attack to keep you comfortable is this; By forcing you to consider the time scale of having to make the responsible choice for the rest of your life your brain hopes to overpower your shield with a massive boulder. Your brain makes you consider EVERY instance of that choice immediately. Instead of one single choice of “no ice cream today,” your brain is making you decide “no ice cream” for each future instance of choice. It’s like when Dr. Strange saw each of the 14 million possible futures for the Avengers. Your brain makes you see each possible future instance of choice and makes you decide ALL of them right then. “You want to resist temptation for this one time? Try resisting the temptation multiplied by every possible time from now until you die.” 

If you rely on your shield at this moment you will be crushed. So what do you do? You step out of the way. The boulder; the overwhelming nature of considering having to make the right choice for the rest of your life, is not a battle you can win, so stop fighting it. 

 Discipline is the skill of being able to refocus your mind on the single attack, not the boulder. In the moment you only have to make the choice that is in front of you. You do not have to decide at that moment that you will never eat ice cream again, you do not have to decide that you will always have to work out. You just have to decide to do it once. 

By keeping this perspective of “just do today” you dodge the boulder. Your brain’s attempt to overwhelm you with the impossibility of “doing this forever” fails. I wrote about this before, but I will repeat it again and again. If you can bargain with your brain by saying “we can buy the ice cream next time, but today we’re passing” once, you can do it again. This is discipline. It’s being able to consistently resist temptations until it becomes a mindset. Separate the immediate choice you are faced with and ONLY decide on that, your choice in this moment has nothing to do with any future choices you might make. 

Over time if you continue this practice it will become more and more automatic. Eventually it may even flip so that your brain is now working WITH you rather than against you. You will start to hear that same voice that used to tell you to get the ice cream now shaming you for it. This is when you have truly developed a habit of discipline. 

Do not fight the boulder. Block the single attack.

CONCLUSION

I’ve provided 3 strategies for using your willpower effectively:

1. Adjust your environment to make good choices easy and bad choices hard
2. Compound your successes by using one area of change to rationalize the changing of other areas. If making a new change supports the areas you’ve already begun to improve then you’re using the success you’ve already found as the motivator of new change through support of previously established positive habits.
3. Build a habit of discipline by keeping your focus dialed into the individual choice at hand. Do not let your brain overwhelm you with the idea that you have to sustain whatever you are doing forever. “Just do today.”

By adjusting our environment to support our positive changes through Strategy 1 we create less pitfalls for ourselves which reduces the amount of willpower needed throughout the day and makes individual choices easier. This allows us to employ strategy 2 by supporting an area we have already begun to change through making other positive changes. “I’m already doing all of this work in the gym, changing my diet would help my efforts in the gym” rather than “I’m already doing all this work in the gym, now I HAVE to change my diet too?” Lastly, employ strategy 3 by staying focused only on the individual instance of needed willpower, keep your scope in line by just completing the task in front of you. Tomorrow’s choices are for tomorrow’s you. Over time this will develop a habit of discipline.

Change is not easy, and it is not quick. Patience is vital to the process of change. By learning to overcome the obstacles our brain creates we make the path easier. Stay focused on the day-to-day rather than trying to reach a goal. You do not win a race by hoping the goal will come to you, you win by taking each individual step and adding them up over time.