Strategies help to have infinite willpower – 01/24/2023 – Equilibrium

We all face difficult days that seem to come to test our self-control.

Let’s say you’re a barista, for example, and some of your customers are particularly rude and demanding, but you manage to stay elegant when serving them.

Or you may be finishing up an important project and need to stay focused in silence, without distractions or distractions.

If you’re on a diet, maybe you’ve spent the last few hours resisting the cookie jar.

In each of these cases, you used your willpower—the ability to avoid short-term temptations and ignore unwanted thoughts, impulses, or feelings, as psychologists define it.

Apparently, some people have much greater reserves of willpower than others. They find it easier to control their emotions, avoid procrastination and stay true to their goals, always seeming to control their behavior with an iron fist.

In fact, maybe you know some lucky people who, after a hard day’s work, still find the motivation to do something productive like exercise.

Our reserves of self-control and mental focus are apparently shaped by mindset.

And recent studies suggest powerful strategies for anyone to increase their willpower, with immense benefits for productivity, health and happiness.

empty the ego

Until recently, the prevailing psychological theory held that willpower is like a kind of battery.

You can start your day with a full charge, but whenever you need to control your thoughts, behaviors, or feelings, you drain some of that battery power.

Without the possibility to rest and recharge, these resources are dangerously low, making it very difficult to maintain your patience, concentration and resistance to temptations.

Laboratory tests apparently provided proof of this process. After asking participants to resist the temptation to eat cookies held on a table, for example, they exhibited less persistence in solving a math problem because their reserves of willpower had been depleted.

Coming from the Freudian term that designates the part of the mind that is responsible for controlling our impulses, this process is known as “ego depletion”.

People with strong self-control may have greater initial reserves of willpower, but even these eventually become depleted when put under pressure.

But in 2010, psychologist Veronika Job published a study questioning the foundations of this theory. She presented fascinating evidence that ego depletion depends on people’s underlying beliefs.

Job is a professor of psychology of motivation at the University of Vienna, Austria. She began the study by designing a questionnaire for participants to rate a series of statements, following a scale from 1 (totally agree) to 6 (totally disagree). The questions included:

• When situations that challenge you with temptations pile up, it becomes harder and harder to resist those temptations.
• Intense mental activity depletes your resources and you need to replenish yourself afterwards.
• When you have just resisted a strong temptation, you feel strengthened and can withstand new temptations.
• Your mental toughness feeds on itself. Even after strenuous mental effort, you manage to keep doing more.

If you identify more with the first two statements, you are considered to have a “limited” view of willpower. But, if you are more in agreement with the last two statements, then your view of willpower is considered “unlimited”.

Next, Job gave the study participants some standard lab tests to examine their mental focus, given that focus depends on our reserves of willpower.

Job concluded that people with limited mindsets often perform exactly as would be predicted by ego depletion theory.

After performing a task that required intense concentration (such as laboriously correcting boring text), they found it much more difficult to pay attention to a subsequent activity than if they had rested beforehand.

People with unlimited vision showed no signs of ego depletion. They did not exhibit a decline in their mental concentration after performing a mentally exhausting activity.

Apparently, the study participants’ mindset about willpower was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they believed that their willpower was easily depleted, their ability to resist temptation and distraction quickly dissolved. But if they believed that “mental toughness feeds on itself,” that’s exactly what happened.

Job quickly replicated these results in other contexts. Working with Krishna Savani of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, she demonstrated that beliefs about willpower apparently vary from country to country.

They concluded that limitless mindset is more common among Indian students than in the United States, which was reflected in tests of mental toughness.

In recent years, some scientists have questioned the reliability of laboratory tests of ego depletion. But Job also demonstrated that people’s mindsets about willpower relate to many real-life scenarios.

She asked college students to complete questionnaires about their activities twice a day over two non-consecutive weekly periods. And, as you might expect, some days were much harder than others, leading to feelings of exhaustion.

Most participants recovered to some extent overnight, but those with unlimited mindsets actually saw their productivity increase the next day, as if they had been energized by the increased pressure.

Again, it seems that his belief that “mental toughness feeds on itself” had become his reality.

Other studies have shown that willpower mindsets can predict students’ procrastination levels before exams and their final grades.

Participants with unlimited vision wasted less time. And when facing the high pressure of their classes, students with unlimited vision also showed better ability to maintain self-control in other areas of life. They were less likely to eat junk food or spend on impulse, for example.

Those who believed that their willpower was easily depleted by their work were more likely to commit these addictions, perhaps because they felt that their reserves of self-control had already been depleted by academic work.

The influence of mindset on willpower can also extend to many domains, such as physical exercise.

Navin Kaushal, professor of health sciences at Indiana University in the United States, and his colleagues have shown that mindset can influence people’s exercise habits.

Those who hold limitless beliefs about willpower, for example, have an easier time mustering the motivation to exercise.

And a study by psychology professor Zoë Francis at Fraser Valley University in Canada found surprisingly similar results.

After following more than 300 participants over three weeks, she concluded that people with a limitless mindset are more willing to exercise and less likely to eat junk food than people with a limited mindset.

It is telling that these differences are particularly pronounced at night, when the demands of daily tasks have begun to take their toll on those who believe their self-control can easily wear out.

How to increase willpower

If you already have a limitless mindset about willpower, these findings may satisfy you. But what can we do if we live with the belief that our reserves of self-control are easily depleted?

Job’s studies indicate that simply learning about these cutting-edge scientific studies by reading short, accessible texts can help change people’s beliefs, at least in the short term.

Apparently, knowledge is power. If that’s true, just reading this article may have already started to build up your mental toughness.

You can speed up this process by telling other people what you’ve learned. Research indicates that sharing information helps to consolidate our own mindset shift. This phenomenon is known as the “talk is believe” effect and it also helps spread positive behavior among people.

Lessons about the limitless nature of willpower can be learned from childhood.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, both in the United States, recently devised a children’s book to teach preschoolers the idea that exercising willpower can be energizing, not exhausting, and that self-control it can increase the more we practice it.

Children who heard the story showed greater self-control on a “delayed gratification” test that was administered afterwards, compared with their peers who had heard a different story.

The test offered them the possibility to pass up a small gift at the time to receive a larger gift later.

A helpful strategy for shifting your mindset can be to recall a time when you worked on a mentally taxing task for the sheer pleasure of it.

It might have been a task at work, for example, that other people apparently found difficult, but that you found rewarding. Or perhaps a hobby, like learning a new song on the piano, that requires intense concentration but seems simple to you.

A recent study concluded that practicing this type of recall naturally shifts people’s beliefs towards the limitless mindset, as they can see evidence of their own mental toughness.

For more evidence, you can start with small self-control tests that bring about a desired change in your life – such as avoiding junk food for two weeks, staying away from social media at work, or showing more patience with an irritating loved one, for example. example.

Once you’ve proven to yourself that your willpower can increase, it may become easier to resist other types of temptation or distractions.

You cannot expect a miracle to happen right away. But, with perseverance, you should watch your mindset change, and with it, your increased ability to control your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Thus, your actions will propel you towards your goals.

Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Worklife website.

This text was originally published here