Habits vs Willpower – Why These Two are Inversely Related

A lot of people start a new task – exercising, reading, tidying the house, etc. – with tons of motivation. After a while, though, that motivation can wane, and it can be difficult to persevere long enough to make that new task into a habit.   

Most people think this happens because of a lack of willpower, and that if their willpower were stronger, they would be able to maintain the good things they are trying to incorporate, or to resist the things they don’t want to keep doing.   

The truth is that change is hard, and if you’ve been alive for more than a few years, you can relate to this. Doing something different takes conscious effort, and replying on willpower to keep us doing the new behavior can be a recipe for failure.   

Willpower is finite, and declines as we go through our day. The more thinking we do, the more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have at the end of a day. Have you ever said you’re going to eat healthier snacks, then found yourself eating the same old unhealthy snacks from the vending machine? Chances are, you meant to pack some snacks at home to take to work (or wherever you are when the urge to snack hits you). But you may have forgotten, or you might have been too tired to do so, and so you had nothing that was healthy when the snack attack hit.   

BUT if you got into the habit of making a healthy snack or two after dinner, for example, or maybe after you washed up the dinner dishes, then you would have that snack ready for the next day.    So how do you develop that habit? I talked about two things that have really helped me to develop new habits in this post: https://steemit.com/life/@sasukhram/two-keys-to-creating-habits-that-last 

One thing that I left out of that is associating the new habit with something else. So, for example, I made my bed right after getting up. The trigger was me getting out of the bed. Likewise, I made sure the sink and stove were clean and clear before bed, so I associated those two tasks with bedtime. I also left a light on over the sink if the two tasks had not been completed, as a reminder to me to do them.   

When you start thinking about it, there is an inverse relationship between habits and will power. When you first want to build a new habit, it takes a lot of will power to get it done day in and day out. As you start to establish that habit, it becomes easier and easier to do until you don’t even have to think about it anymore.    

When our tasks have become habits, they are so ingrained in what we do and who we are that we do them without even considering skipping a day or a week. We don’t have to make a conscious decision each day to shower or drive to work. It’s just what we do – a habit.    

Just being aware of this process helps us stick it out in the early days. So if we’re trying to eat healthier and workout, we know we don’t always have to make such a big effort to go work out or skip the donut for breakfast. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. We know eventually it will become habit to go out for a run first thing in the morning and grab some fruit or fix some eggs for breakfast.    

While we’re in that transition from willpower to habit, we can use tools to make it easier.    Here are a few things we can do and use to help us develop new habits:   

• Use a to-do list or set a reminder to help stay on track.  
• Find an accountability partner who is either working on similar habits, or who will at least hold you to keeping up your tasks until they become ingrained. 
• Set yourself up for success. Even something as simple as laying out your running clothes the night before and keeping your sneakers by the door will make it a little easier to go out for that run.    

Do what you can to help your willpower along until you have made the new behavior a true habit. After that it’ll be easy and automatic and you’ve created a new lifelong habit. 

Do you have any new habits you’re working on that you’d like to share? Or do you have any tips on instilling new habits?