7 Ways To Build Willpower From Daddy Self-Control

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How to resist the temptation, even if you really, really want to? Develop willpower! How the psychologist Walter Michel, also known as the Pope of Self-Control, suggests doing this, we will tell in this post.

In the early 1960s, a Stanford professor and psychologist known as the Pope of Self-Control, Walter Michel and his students conducted a classic experiment on four-year-old children. It went down in history as the Marshmallow Test, or the test with marshmallows.

The bottom line is simple: the children entered the room where the experimenter offered them yummy. The children had a choice: immediately eat one sweet, or wait 20 minutes and get two.

The test results were summed up after 30 years: those children who had enough willpower to wait 20 minutes did better in school in their youth. They were more effective at achieving their goals and better at coping with frustration and stress.

Willpower and the ability to postpone rewards certainly work wonders. But how to develop and strengthen it in adulthood? This question was answered by Walter Michel himself.

1. Fundamental principle

The most important principle of strengthening strength is to make the future more attractive for oneself, "warm up" it and devalue the present as much as possible, "cool" it.

If you love junk food, we advise you to focus on the long-term effects of such a menu. For example, repeating to myself: "I will get fat, and soon summer." If you focus on having fun now ("Ah, yummy!"), Then you are unlikely to be able to restrain yourself.

The most important thing in this matter is clear instruction in case you have to deny yourself something. You need to prepare in advance the phrases with which you will stop yourself.

2. Do not succumb to cheap manipulation

As soon as you start making excuses for your weakness, know that the psychological immune system has turned on. She protects us well from such "responsibility", so she helps to come up with excuses like "I had a hard day", "I was forced", "It's okay if I do it tomorrow" and does not allow us to scold ourselves for a long time.

When you feel like you're starting to justify yourself again, plug your psychological immune system and ignore it.

3. Broken strategy

When people feel they cannot control themselves, they try to take precautions: they remove attractive but unhealthy foods from the house, get rid of alcohol and cigarettes, and do not allow themselves to buy anything like that again.

But if these strategies are tested without a deterrent commitment, without a concrete plan, then they will be as “successful” as striving to start a new life on the New Year. Therefore, always start with a plan.

4. Self-observation method

In order to understand at what moments you cannot control yourself, start a self-control diary. This is a notebook where you can note the moments of loss of control over yourself and the events accompanying them.

In a notebook, you need to record the specific events that caused the stress, and note its intensity.

It sounds simple, but the method works effectively in practice. Forewarned is forearmed. The conclusions from your diary can be used in drawing up the “if-then” blanks, which will be discussed in the next paragraph.

5. Blank "if - then"

If there is a plan of action in a critical situation at the ready, then it is much easier for a person to say "no" to temptation. You need to learn to keep the "if - then" link in your head.

For example: "If I go to the refrigerator, then I will not open it", "If I see a bar, I will cross the street", "If my alarm clock rings at seven in the morning, then I will go to the gym."

The more often we rehearse and apply such plans, the more automatic they become and allow for effortless control.

6. Overestimating harm

The strategy of strengthening willpower, such as overestimating the harm, often works.

In order to make such a reassessment, you need to read and find out all the side effects from your addiction. It is best if you keep a special notebook where you write down all the troubles that may threaten you. You will find that previously irresistible temptations, such as chocolate fudge muffins, suddenly become poisonous.

For quitting smoking, following a diet or controlling temper, negative consequences lie in the distant future. They are abstract, as opposed to a painful rash or gastrointestinal upset.

So you have to overestimate them in order to flesh out (imagine an X-ray of your lungs with cancer and a doctor giving you bad news) and imagine the future as if it were the present.

7. Side view

Let's say your heart is broken. Many affected people continue to relive those horrible experiences, cherishing their sadness, anger, and resentment. As their stress increases, self-control tends to zero, and depression becomes more dragging on.

To break out of this trap, it is useful to temporarily abandon the usual view of yourself and the world around you. You should re-examine your painful experience, not with your own eyes, but from the point of view of someone who sees you from the outside. You can choose any of your acquaintances or even a famous person. For example, the scientist Stephen Hawking. Imagine Stephen looking at you and thinking, "What are his problems compared to the number of universes in existence?"

Try to assess your situation impartially and minimize its significance.

As with any effort to change behavior and learn new skills, the basic recipe is to “practice, practice, and practice” until the new behavior becomes automatic and reward in itself.