HMN 2025: Relying on willpower is a losing proposition

Do you give in to temptation and choose short-term fun, or do you resist it and pursue long-term value?

This broad question of whether we can exercise self-control concerns many areas of our lives. Our health includes avoiding tempting sugary foods for a healthier diet. Our finances involve rejecting tempting but frivolous purchases in favor of long-term investments. In our business, we often have to deal with tedious and unpleasant tasks that are integral to our daily work. Our personal relationships sometimes require difficult conversations and avoiding the temptation to stay in a cozy but unworkable status quo.

But despite the quasi-heroic status associated with these acts of self-control, I tell you that they are ultimately futile. Instead, there is a much more effective and unfortunately overlooked way to ensure that you make choices that benefit your long-term goals.

Self-control: Willpower too often declines

Self-control is a celebrated trait, and it’s not hard to see why. It was found to be correlated with academic success, Higher Income, Better Health. In fact, the famous “marshmallow test“A classic example would be placing a preschooler alone in a closed room, giving him a tasty piece of candy, and challenging him not to eat it for 15 minutes in order to get a second piece of candy. Success on this task has been found to be correlated with success in later life. .

But keep in mind an important insight. A common way for many of us to define self-control is to equate it with willpower. Think of an experience that virtually all of us can relate to. Committing to focus, I sat down to complete an important project. But a few minutes later, my phone rings. It takes 20 minutes of scrolling to take a quick look. Frustrated, you scold yourself for your lack of willpower. Sound familiar?

Moreover, many of us know someone who has excellent focus and does not fall into the various dopamine traps that constantly sabotage us. It’s easy to admire willpower because it’s so vivid. The regret we feel for giving in to temptation is so immediate that it naturally heightens the act of resistance.

There is nothing wrong with respecting willpower. It is a noble trait. But it is also a finite resource. Consider the following questions:

• Place a cookie jar full of delicious treats on the table. How long can you go without eating it every morning?
• Subscribe to daily marketing emails from your favorite retailers. How long can you resist buying things you don’t need?

Even if your willpower is iron-clad and you can heroically resist these temptations 10, 20, or even 100 times, there will always be that 101 moment that will break your resolve.

Beyond Willpower: Change Your Situation to Eliminate Temptation

So what should you do? Fortunately, there are much more effective ways to stick to your long-term goals without constantly testing your willpower. That means avoiding temptation altogether. The key variable we should focus on is not how well we can resist temptation, but rather whether we are in situations that keep us away from temptation.

• What if, instead of resisting the urge to eat those delicious but unhealthy snacks, you never put them in your pantry in the first place?

• Or do you subscribe to marketing emails “just to see” and instead avoid them altogether?

These methods eliminate a major limitation of exercising willpower. Instead of working on myself to suppress my unwanted impulses, I have now shifted to avoiding the situation entirely.

In fact, research shows that people with great self-control actually less likely to You find yourself in a situation where you have to make an effort to suppress your desires. In other words, successfully sticking to long-term goals does not have to do with actively resisting the temptation to veer towards short-term distractions, but rather with not facing them at all.

In this case, please note that sometimes our intuition deceives us. While we intuitively admire people who don’t eat cookies despite having a kitchen table full of them, we feel almost nothing about people who have removed all traces of cookies from their homes. . However, the latter are much more likely to experience long-term success.

Build habits for long-term success through delegation

Another way these insights bear fruit is through habits. Habits are things we do automatically.Without thinking — it’s usually a repetition of past actions.

The great thing about habits is that you can make progress on autopilot if you intentionally build good habits that help you achieve your long-term goals. The bad thing about habits is that when we accidentally fall into bad habits, our autopilot takes us further and further away from our goals.

The key to developing good habits is not motivation to achieve long-term goals. In fact, the difference in motivation between successful and unsuccessful people is unlikely to be significant. Instead, the difference may lie in intentionally designing situations that make it easier to do what we want and create the friction and effort to engage in undesirable behavior.

We can do these tasks ourselves, but we can also do them much more effectively by delegating them. For example, consider the goal of attending the gym regularly—“making a habit,” as the saying goes. We can do things to make going to the gym easier, such as signing up for a gym near our home or preparing our workout clothes and gym bag the night before so it’s easier to get to the gym in the morning.

However, it would be much more effective to delegate the burden of going to the gym every day. One way to do that might be to form an agreement with friends who have similar goals. The group can promise to wake each other up in the morning and hold each other accountable for gym attendance. Another way to do this is to hire a personal trainer to provide similar responsibilities.

This insight applies to many areas of life and work. When you feel frustrated that your actions aren’t focused enough on your long-term goals and are too often distracted by short-term distractions, don’t pin your hopes on willpower. Your willpower is a temporary stopgap, a brave human trait that can protect us from trouble, but it is only temporary. The psychology of willpower means that ideals require no use of willpower at all.