Willpower & How To Get More Of It
Willpower is poorly understood. The term is thrown around a lot, typically when we talk about what is holding us back from achieving some goal. “I just need more willpower” is repeated like a battle cry. But how many of us actually know how to get more? Without some plan for how to increase your willpower, your cries for more are null, void, and sub in as an accidental excuse for addressing what is actually holding you back.
So what is willpower, actually?
If you were asked to define willpower, could you? I’m sure it’s in your vocabulary. You’ve used it in a sentence before. But can you actually explain what it is? It is often thought of as some brute force you muster in difficult situations. Some people have it; others don’t. Kind of like a personality trait.
Willpower is our ability to exert self-control to choose the harder, delayed decision. It is our ability to delay gratification — to say no to the shiny thing dangling in front of us in exchange for the more shiny thing that we have to wait and suffer some time for.
EG, saying no to that cute dress so you can save for a home deposit or saying no to dessert because you want to drop a dress size or getting your ass to the gym because you want to do a pull up or resisting Instagram so you can actually get some quality work done to earn that promotion.
We are so susceptible to things that make us feel good right now, and often hopelessly bad at waiting a little longer for something better.
Individuals with a greater capacity to regulate their attention, actions and emotions are better off in almost every realm of wellbeing — they are happier and healthier; their relationships are healthier and last longer; they make more money and their careers are more successful; they are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict and overcome adversity. So it makes sense that we would want more willpower, or rather to be able to express more of it.
So how do we get more willpower?
Since willpower is influenced by a host of factors, there are many different ways we can go about improving our ability to exert it. I’ve tried to present the following in some sort of logical order, starting with psychological strategies and ending with more tangible practices. Perhaps you want to try all of them, perhaps one or two strategies resonate with you, but I implore you to take action. Your cries for more willpower are pointless, get you nowhere and are honestly kind of annoying.
Improve your self-control by learning how and why you lose control.
When we talk about what causes us to lose control or make poor decisions, we typically point to external sources: the sweets in the pantry, Instagram, Booktopia, Messina, Uber Eats. However, most bad habits, cravings or weaknesses are an attempt to meet a need, whether it’s to reduce stress, have fun, forge connections or to put off something challenging. The driver of lost control is something intrinsic: an internal impulse. What is the thought or feeling that makes you want to do whatever it is you don’t want to do? Get acquainted with this. Do you seek Netflix and take out when you’re stressed? The internal need that needs addressing is mitigating stress. And there are many methods to reduce stress that don’t involve 100’s of calories and a $50 credit card charge.
Identify with your highest self.
Ultimately, what challenges your self control is that part of you wants one thing, and another part of you wants something else. Or more to the point your present self wants one thing (like to watch Netflix or to buy some sweet new shoes), but your future self would be better off if you did something else (went to the gym or saved that cash for that house you say you wanna buy).
What makes us struggle a lot of the time, is that we identify with our present self much more than we do with our future self. Our present self feels like the real us, and our present self feels like it’s suffering or missing out.
Importantly, the present you, the part of you that wants to give in isn’t bad; it simply has a different point of view about what matters most.
Ask yourself: when you think about what challenges your willpower, what feels like the “real” you: the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled? Do you identify more with your immediate impulses and desires or with your long-term goals and values?
Level up my friend. Start identifying with that successful and fulfilled version of yourself. Embody her. You aren’t suffering because you made a sacrifice; you are living in alignment with your long-term goals and values, and man doesn’t that feel better?
Make incremental changes over time.
Almost anyone who has ever worked with me in a coaching capacity has heard me harp on about this. I’ll use this particular example because this is where this comes up a lot: whenever someone wants to improve their health — lose weight, improve their diet, start going to the gym they try to flip their entire lifestyle on it’s head at once. They cut out carbs, commit to 5x sessions a week, start intermittent fasting, walk every morning, and vow to say no to dessert. Four days in, they’ve missed the gym from exhaustion, they’ve caved in to dessert and they missed preparing lunch one day so they grabbed take out from the cafe near work, breaking their carb ban. It all seems too hard and one by one (or all at once) all their best intentions unravel. Two / six / twelve months later, they try the same approach again and to their shock horror, the same thing happens agin. This is literally one of the dumbest things I see and yet the majority of people are doing it. I bet you’ve done it at least once. I have.
A much more effective approach to improve the behaviours that contribute to your overall health is to change one thing at a time. Work on one habit for two weeks (or longer; whatever you need), nail it every single day. Once you’ve nailed it for two consecutive weeks (or longer) without error, add another. Progressively build your new lifestyle little bit by little bit. This will seem like a long slow process, but you really can overhaul your lifestyle like this. It doesn’t take long and best of all, by building the habits slowly, it’s sustainable so you can actually maintain it long enough to achieve your health goals and for the love of God, maintain them.
This feeling that this process is slow is a willpower problem in disguise — it ties back to our ability to delay gratification. Everyone wants results now, if not yesterday. So you may need a little willpower to take your foot off the gas and move more slowly, elegantly and efficiently. But if we can postpone that gratification and make small steps over time, we can have the results we are so desperately yearning for. Or conversely, we can revert to our old trick of changing everything at once and winding up baffled when it doesn’t work.
This step-wise approach has further benefits: each time you pause and choose to do the more difficult but more rewarding option instead of the easiest, you strengthen your self-control and your confidence. You get used to pausing before acting and you reinforce your ability to delay gratification and act in your own best interests. It manifests an incredible positive feedback loop with only positive outcomes.
You are capable of more than you think — learn that.
It is a widely observed scientific finding that self-control is limited by the beliefs that the individual holds about their own willpower; not their true physical and mental limits.
If we label ourselves as someone who is always snacky, someone with low willpower, someone with a rubber arm, someone who can’t say no to a drink or a flashing “add to cart” button — we are much more likely to conform with those labels.
Similarly, our beliefs about what we are capable of largely determine whether we give up or soldier on; whether we take a break or do what needs to be done in the face of a solid excuse or reason not to. So often we take a day off the gym because “our bodies need it” when in actual fact, our body probably could have completed or recovered from the session just fine. Or perhaps you could have completed a mildly less intense session. In either case, you possibly could have benefited from a little more than complete rest.
All too often we use the first signs of fatigue as a reason to skip exercise, procrastinate, take a night off work, or order out instead of preparing a nutritious home-cooked meal. But science is demonstrating that you may have more willpower than those initial signs would suggest. The next time you find yourself “too tired” to exercise self-control or delay gratification, challenge yourself to go beyond that initial feeling.
Like the previous note on building habits incrementally, each time you pause and successfully challenge that initial impulse to give in, you build your confidence and ability to do so again next time. You’ll likely find this hard early on, but in time this will get increasingly easier and your success rate higher.
Proactively manage stress.
Stress seriously dulls our willpower. Think of any times that you’ve acted out of alignment with your goals. In many of these instances, you were probably stressed: uni exam period, work deadlines, family emergencies, a break up, etc. As soon as we are stressed, it’s like we give ourselves complete permission to eat, spend and live like a complete flop. And how dare anyone tell us to behave otherwise — “WE’RE STRESSED!”
Stress dulls our willpower by prompting us to focus on immediate, short term outcomes. This focus is in complete contrast to what willpower and self-control demand of us — that we act in our best long term interests and postpone immediate gratification.
For many of us, we do nothing about our stress until it’s too late — we’ve already ate and drank our emotions and spent $300 online because #retailtherapy. Learning how to better manage our stress proactively is one of the most valuable steps we can take to improve willpower.
I won’t go too deep in to stress management here. It’s not my area of expertise and it could have 100+ articles of it’s own, but here are two simple activities I like that you may like to implement: it’s best to plan stress management tools when you are not presently in a state of stress, so at a time that you’re feeling fine, sit down with a notebook and create two lists:
A happiness menu. A list of things you enjoy doing that make you feel good. Some may be extravagant like going for a weekend away; others may be simple and even seemingly mundane, like drinking a cup of tea in the sun. Do something from this list daily.
A list of stress relief strategies that you can turn to when you’re feeling low. Importantly, these strategies need to be realistic. While getting a massage may be a great stress reliever, you’ll likely bump in to challenges (time, dollars or both) trying to duck out for a massage every time your boss gives you a hard time. I’d encourage a range of options suitable for different times. You can refer to this list whenever you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Take a few minutes to pause and cool off, rather than turning to your usual vices.
Keep these lists somewhere prominent and refer to them daily. The items on the list can help to manage your stress levels proactively, and also respond to stress in a more productive manner that doesn’t completely shit on your goals. When your stress is kept in check, your brain and body is much better positioned for self-control. When we’re in a state of chronic stress, it’s our most impulsive selves who faces our daily challenges.
Stop counting on your future self.
We notoriously over-estimate how great our future selves are. We put things off today expecting that we’ll have more time, energy and motivation to do them tomorrow or next week. When tomorrow or next week come around, to our mortification we are still the same person that is time-poor, low on energy and seriously unmotivated. And we make this mistake persistently — we never learn.
So we need to stop counting on our future selves. A fantastic way to approach this is to view every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. Instead of asking “do I want to skip the gym this afternoon?” ask yourself “would I be happy with the consequences of skipping the gym every afternoon for the next year?” This really drills in to the fact that despite your best intentions, you’re less likely to make better decisions later. You’d do much better to start choosing the harder but more positive options today and building your strength and confidence in making those decisions.
Another great tool to employ here is to record and reflect on each time you postpone something for your future self. You can journal with the following prompts:
What did you tell yourself you could put off and make up for tomorrow?
What effect does this have on your self-control today? Did you find your self-control worsened once you let yourself off the hook?
When tomorrow comes: do you actually do what you said you would, or does the cycle of “doing it tomorrow” begin again?
Adopt a healthy amount of pessimism.
There is a study that I absolutely love, conducted by Tanner and Carlson in 2009. They asked a group of people “how many times per week (on average) will you exercise in the next month?” Then they asked another group of people a similar question but with one important difference: “in an ideal world, how many times per week (on average) will you exercise in the next month?” The two groups showed no differences in their estimates — by default, they were answering the question in an ideal world.
In another group, they tried to prompt more realistic expectations by providing specific instructions: “please do not provide an idealistic prediction, but rather the most realistic prediction of your behaviour that you can.” The group that was given these instructions were even more optimistic about their behaviour, reporting their highest estimates yet.
The experimenters invited this group back two weeks later to report how many times they actually exercised. Unsurprisingly, this number was lower than predicted. People made their predictions for an ideal world, but lived through two weeks in the real world. The experimenters then asked these same people to predict how many times they would exercise in the next two weeks. Eternally optimistic, the participants made estimates even higher than their initial predictions, and much higher than their actual reports from the past two weeks, as though trying to make up for the preceding two weeks that was “unusually poor.”
GUYS, WE LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD! Anecdotally, I see this all the time. Whenever we slip up, eat something we said we wouldn’t, skip a session — we attribute it to something that was a “once off.” I hate to tell you, but these once off events happen all the time. Perhaps they are not always the same thing, but there is always something that makes the week more challenging than would be ideal — there is an assignment due, exams coming, it’s end of month at work, the big boss is coming out, there’s school interviews, the dog is unwell, you’re on your period, you’ve got a party to attend or office drinks are on again. One of these sub-optimal, once off things will come up seriously every week.
Instead of planning for an ideal world where there are no challenges to your food or training, plan for the real world, the one where shit always goes wrong. Predict how and when you might be unable to fulfil or be tempted to stray from your initial plan and best intentions then create a specific plan of action accordingly. Planning for failure in this way is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt.
I encourage you to adopt a healthy amount of pessimism —it’ll make you a realist and help you to prepare for not the worst, but just reality.
“Planning for failure is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt.”
— Dr Kelly McGonigal
Forgive yourself when you slip.
There’s an awful misconception that self-compassion and forgiveness will perpetuate our negative behaviours; that by letting ourselves off the hook we’ll indulge more. This is absolutely not the case. When we beat ourselves up, we are typically more inclined to continue to indulge. “I already f*cked up so I may as well keep going.” If we can foster self-forgiveness, we can adapt an attitude of “I’m human, I slipped up, I’ll move on now.” When we can forgive ourselves, we are much better positioned to move on and leave behind any self-destructive behaviour. But how?
Be mindful of how you respond to your failures, when you cave to indulgence or procrastination. Do you criticise yourself? Do you feel like the setback reveals some flaw in your personality; that you’re weak and incapable? Do you feel hopeless, guilty, ashamed, angry or overwhelmed? Do you use setback as an excuse to indulge further? You could use the following journal prompts when you find yourself dwelling on some “slip up”:
What are you feeling?
If self-criticism is present, what does it sound like? What do you say to yourself? Importantly, don’t rush to escape these negative feelings; just allow yourself to experience them.
What would you say to a friend in your position? What words of support would you offer? How would you encourage them to continue pursuing their goal? Chances are you wouldn’t encourage your best friend to self-sabotage because she’s right, she totally ruined everything.
We are human and we are heavily flawed. We’re going to slip up at times. But if we can learn how to respond to these slip ups, we’ll be much better positioned next time.
Don’t focus on your progress. Focus on your commitment.
I am a big proponent for process goals: specific actions and tasks that you can complete that will lead you to a bigger outcome. EG, a goal of losing 5kg is an outcome goal; a goal of going to the gym 4x per week is a process goal. Setting a process goal means you have identified what you actually need to do achieve a larger goal. While process goals have been shown time and time again to be more conducive to long-term success than setting outcome goals with no milestones in place to get you there; praising yourself every damn time to you achieve or complete a process goal is problematic.
It’s productive to focus on the things you’re doing daily, but don’t praise yourself daily. You aren’t “done” because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your larger goal is.
Research has suggested that a focus on progress can [perhaps surprisingly] be problematic. It’s a widely held belief that making progress on our goals motivates us to keep working for greater success. And don’t get me wrong, this is often times the case, but often it is not. Psychologists know we are all too quick to use progress as an excuse for taking it easy. I know I can be guilty of myself. “Cool my weight has come down. I’m moving in the right direction. Time for a Magnum.” (wtf.)
A more productive approach for appraising your movement towards your goal is to ask “how committed do you feel to your goal?” Research has shown that those asked “how much progress do you feel you have made towards your goal?” are more likely to do something that conflicts with that goal, like skipping the gym than those asked “how committed do you feel to your goal?” Progress makes brain want praise. Commitment reinforces commitment.
What would (insert your role model here) do?
Is there someone in your life who exemplifies the type of discipline or self-control that you would like for yourself? Perhaps this is someone you admire for their achievements, for what they’ve overcome, for their attitude, their consistency or their perseverance? When faced with a situation or circumstances that challenge your ability to act with your best long-term interests in mind, it can be helpful to ask what this person would do. Or alternatively, to ask yourself how you would act if that person were watching you. I personally employ this often. I imagine that my role model is watching my every action. Would he condone this tantrum? Would he approve of my efforts? Could I look him in the eye and honestly tell him I gave it my all — in my work, training, whatever? I find this incredibly powerful.
Be cognisant of moral licensing.
I wrote a whole article on moral licensing. You can read it here. Moral licensing is a type of psychological bargaining, where we tell ourselves we’ve done (or will do) something “good” so therefore we deserve something “bad.” When we morally license, we use our prior “good” behaviour to justify our later “bad” behaviour. Moral licensing can lead us to rebel against our very own values and goals and lead to our own demise. It is worth reading and learning about so you can recognise it in your own behaviour.
Recognise when dopamine is paving your path.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in driving pleasure and reward seeking behaviour. We humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing between the promise of reward and reward itself; the promise of happiness and happiness itself. The promise of reward can be so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy and that bring us more misery than satisfaction. We do this without once recognising that the reward that was promised was never delivered. We continue to be allured by the promise of reward, regardless of whether the reward is ever received. So it’s worth familiarising yourself with how dopamine affects us, our desires and our actions so you can better recognise when you want something for your higher self and for your greater good, or when dopamine is pushing you towards something delicious or shiny.
Dopaminise your least favourite tasks.
On the flip side of that though, we can use dopamine to our favour. I love this one. When there is something you really don’t want to do, spruce up it’s appeal by adding something that send your dopamine neurons wild. When I don’t want to go walking, I walk to my favourite coffee shop for the smell and taste of freshly ground coffee. When I don’t want to clean the kitchen, I also add a barista coffee (there’s definitely a theme here), or a kombucha, a fruit platter, a fun playlist or anything else to make it more attractive. When the psychologist gives me homework I don’t want to do, I burn a delicious smelling candle and make myself a cup of tea (or a coffee, lmao) to enjoy while I take on the task. What are your favourite things that you find yourself caving in to? Add them to the things you hate doing and you may just find yourself less resistant.
Employ the 10 minute rule.
This is a cracker. Depending on whether you’re trying to will yourself to do something or to avoid something, you can either commit to 10 minutes and see how you feel at the end of that, or wait 10 minutes and see if you still want to cave.
Don’t feel like working out today? Just commit to the first 10 minutes of your session. Do your warm ups. If after 10 minutes you’re absolutely miserable and want to bail, cool, you did 10 minutes, better than nothing. Good job. If after 10 minutes you’re feeling good, fantastic, keep going! You’re never going to feel bad for 10 minutes of exercise. We sometimes just need to remind ourselves of that when we absolutely can. not. be. stuffed.
Craving an ice cream or your fav dessert? Sit with the feeling for 10 minutes rather than caving in to the first impulse. If after 10 minutes you still want it, have it bby girl. For best results, go do something in that 10 minutes. Go for a walk or call a friend. If you sit thinking about donuts for 10 minutes, you’re probably still gonna want a donut.
Turn I won’t in to I will.
Most bad habits are an attempt to meet a need, whether it’s reducing stress, having fun or seeking approval. You can steer your focus away from that which you are trying to avoid by replacing it with something else that still meets some need, but is less destructive to your long-term visions. EG. instead of avoiding coffee, decide that you would like to have tea. You’re still taking a break from your day, gaining a little energy, and receiving the therapeutic benefit of sitting down with a warm mug clasped in your hands.
If you weren’t doing the bad habit, what might you be doing instead?
Most of our addictions and distractions take time and energy away from something else we could be doing, something that is perhaps more enjoyable or yields more profound rewards. Refocusing on the opportunity that you are missing can be significantly more motivating than trying to quit the bad habit. For example, scrolling socials on my phone at night doesn’t seem all that bad, until I pause to recognise that is time I could be spending laying in bed with a candle reading that book I’ve been dying to read for months. Similarly, spending that $200 on homewares could be a flight to visit my parents. Only you will know where your values lie, but pausing to reflect on what they are and how and where you are not honouring them can really kick your ass in to gear.
Change your physical environment.
This is certainly not a fool-proof strategy because we cannot always control our external environment. While we can remove our favourite cookies from our kitchen, chances are we can’t remove the birthday cake from the office. So that being said, changing your external environment should always be used in conjunction with some of the earlier cognitive strategies. It is however particularly useful to modify your environment early on in the piece when we are just starting to make some changes and the option we don’t want to choose is typically our default.
So knowing at this point that we are very human and are basically wired to make poor decisions, it can absolutely be helpful to use our external environment to support our flawed selves, rather than relying on our best selves to show up and win the day every day.
There are a number of different ways in which we can change our physical environments to support ourselves:
Remove temptation. This is the classic one people think of. “I want to lose weight so I’ll remove all desserts from the house.” It’s popular for good reason. It does work. You can’t have ice cream if there’s none in the house. And knowing that you’re lazy and flopping on the couch of an evening when you typically want an ice cream, you’re much less likely to drive to the store to buy one than you would be to grab one from the freezer in the next room (or in the case of my small townhouse, within arms reach of the couch). You can apply this strategy well beyond food choices though. If you put your alarm over the other side of the room, you’re less likely to get back in to bed after turning it off than you would be to roll back over after turning it off, still laying in the warmth of your bed. If you leave your phone outside your office, you’re less likely to scroll when you should be typing that report with the looming deadline.
Pre-commit your future self. This involves making better choices in advance and from a clear distance, before your future self is blinded by temptation. Things like packing a healthy lunch so you have a clear winning option at lunch time, scheduling and paying for your personal training sessions ahead of time so you lose money if you cancel, buying portion-controlled sweets and snacks so your serving size is dictated by your rational rather than your craving/dopamine-driven mind.
Exercise regularly.
This is a funny one because often exercise is the exact thing we want willpower for. So for those that are trying to muster willpower for exercise, your exercise now will help you to exercise more later. For those that are trying to muster willpower for something other than exercise, you should still exercise.
The willpower benefits of exercise are immediate and the long-term benefits are even more impressive. That is to say that immediately after exercise, we are better positioned to exhibit greater self control. This is in part why we are better able to bring ourselves to have a healthy dinner or to say no to dessert after we’ve worked out. But similarly, recurring exercise has long-term benefits for self-control. Anything you do to reduce stress and take care of your health – exercise, quality sleep, a nutritious diet, quality time with friends and family, spiritual practices – will improve your ability to exercise self-control.
If you find yourself deciding that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, reframe exercise as something that restores, rather than drains your energy and willpower. It is one of the best things you could do for your future self.
Schedule the things you don’t like doing for when you are psychologically at your strongest.
For most of us, self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day. However, our peak times do vary: while most of us are at our best and most productive first thing in the morning, some of us do our best work in the evening or late at night.
I am learning a language right now and to be honest, I don’t enjoy the process of language learning at all. I find it such a slog. For me to get any quality study in, it’s gotta be first thing in the morning. If 8am swings around and I haven’t studied yet, the odds of me doing any later in the day are extremely low. So for this reason, I schedule my study sessions in for 7.30am each day. I’ve tried after dinner study and I almost always skip it.
To help will yourself to do something you never seem to want to do, track your motivations and self-control over a period of time, then schedule your most important tasks or the tasks you really struggle with completing when you’re at your best. Also pay attention to when you seem to have the least willpower or when you’re most likely to give in. That is useful data too. Depending on your own personal schedule and priorities, perhaps that is when you have your down time. That way, you can have it guilt-free, rather than not being able to enjoy it because you feel remorse that you should be doing something that you’re not. Again, for me I really struggle with training on Friday nights, so I train earlier on Fridays. That way I can enjoy my Friday evenings knowing training is done and I’m free to relax without feeling like I should be doing something.
Establish a meditation practice.
Meditation has a whole host of benefits, of which you’ve probably heard many. If you already have a meditation practice, good for you. If you do not, please keep reading. There is a wide spread resistance to meditation and this is largely built upon a misunderstanding of the practice. Meditation is not sitting still with an empty thoughtless mind. If you have tried meditating and felt you were bad at it, you were still meditating. The goal is not to have no thoughts; the goal of meditations is to be able to observe your thoughts without clinging to or running away with them. In fact, when it comes to developing your self-control, being “bad” at meditation makes the practice even more effective. In meditating you’re doing exactly what you need to do in real life: catching yourself moving away from a goal and then steering yourself back. The “worse” the meditation; the better the practice for real life.
If you’re still feeling a little “yeah nah, it’s not for me” please also do not limit meditation to sitting cross legged against a wall in am empty room. Meditation can take many forms — a physical yoga practice, sitting outside, walking, running, etc. As long as you are engaging with the practice of not running away with your thoughts, you are meditating and a whole host of benefits are on offer to you.
Avoid blood sugar crashes.
Back in hunter and gatherer times, pre-supermarkets and Uber Eats, a low blood sugar level was an indicator of how likely you were to starve to death if you didn’t find something to eat. Therefore, we evolved to have a brain that could bias our decisions toward long-term investment when resources are plenty, but towards immediate gratification when resources are scarce. This was great in ensuring our survival a long time ago, but now in modern western society, this instinct kinda f*cks with us. Declining blood sugar levels nowadays rarely signal impending starvation. But still, when blood sugar levels start to drop, your brain will still favour short-term thinking and prioritise getting more energy over ensuring you make decisions that are aligned with your long-term goals.
This has diverse implications depending on what willpower struggles you have. If they are diet unrelated, don’t let yourself get too hungry. Your hunger will deplete your ability to exercise self-control. If your willpower struggles are diet-related, a) You need to consider this and know that your body will fight against you by driving up your hunger signals to push you to eat, and b) You’d do well to manage your blood sugar levels the best you can.
You might be interested in reading these articles on metabolic adaptation and diet tips that will also help to inform and guide you in this area.
Above all, be mindful.
If you take one lesson away from this article and apply it to your life, make it this: pay attention. Learn to recognise when you’re making a choice, rather than running on autopilot. We make thousands of decisions every day, whether we recognise it or not. The more you can bring awareness to those decisions, the better positioned you’ll be to align them to your values and long-term goals and desires. Viktor Frankl famously said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Viktor Frankl
Mindfulness permits you recognise that space and the choice available to you within in. Learn to pause, think and decide before you respond — to that cookie, the flashing “check out” button, the snooze button, that invitation that clashes with your gym session. You are not a victim of your circumstances, if you decide you don’t want to be.