Mind the Habit

When President Kennedy asked Dr. Wernher von Braun what it would take to build a rocket that could carry a man to the moon and bring him back safely to Earth, von Braun answered him in five words: THE WILL TO DO IT

I wrote this quote, which I heard over and over from the late Bob Proctor (a unique example of persistence), because from my experience I realised that most of the habits we perform, especially those that are not tiny anymore (like 30 mins meditation), require a certain amount of willpower, or conscious thought, to start the behaviour, every single time we perform them.

Let me explain with some examples..

Driving a car: how many times have you found yourself not even remembering which way you took to get to work? Or do you remember thinking about starting the engine? Or reversing in your driveway? This is a typical habit, an automatic behaviour. But you decided to get into the car to drive it, right? This decision is an expression of willpower, even if minimal, but it is!

Meditating: I have been meditating every morning, for the past two years, and I have never found myself saying: “Wow, how did I end up sitting here, leg crossed, on the yoga mat?” That is because every single time I meditate it is a conscious decision I make, although it’s performed in a planned environment, at a certain time, in the same place and position. This is a routine, an action or task performed in a specific order, but it’s driven by the willpower to do it.

I honestly believe that willpower always plays a fundamental role in both habits and routines, especially at the start of the behaviour, which then can carry on automatically.

Is willpower a limited resource?

For years has been repeatedly said, and written, that willpower is a limited resource and it’s not on a will call, therefore you’d have to carefully use it at your advantage when it’s at its full potential. For this reason it’s advisable to start the day (the morning) with the hardest task, the one that requires the most willpower to overcome its challenge.

The idea that willpower is a limited resource comes from a study by psychologist Dr Baumeister, which concluded that if you have to resist a hard thing (like eating freshly baked cookies) the quantity of your willpower will diminish, making engaging in another difficult task very challenging. He and his colleagues hypothesised that the availability of glucose to the brain is the resource that is limiting willpower. They demonstrated the truth of this theory with another experiment, in which they gave glucose drink to the participants between two, or more, difficult tasks, noticing that their willpower will remain constant, without any drop in performance.

If we think about it, it makes sense that willpower is a limited resource, in fact in the morning you feel more energetic than at the end of a working day. In Italy we say: “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca”, which means that the morning is the most precious time of the day.

Even schools activities are concentrated in the morning hours. There must be a reason behind it.

But….

A more recent study, by psychologist Dr Carol Dweck (author of the bestseller book Mindset https://amzn.to/47t2360), has demonstrated that willpower can be replenished during the day and it’s not a limited resource.

The conclusion of Dr Dweck’s experiment was that what is important is what we believe to be true.

If we believe that willpower is a limited resource, it is going to diminish from task to task.

If we believe that willpower is an unlimited resource, we can take more difficult tasks in succession without diminishing our performances.

In both cases the results were independent from a glucose drink or a placebo one. Glucose drink can indeed replenish our willpower, only if we believe that glucose is the physical resource that is limiting willpower.

On a physiological level, tenacity and willpower reside in the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex, an area of the brain which, as other parts of it, is subjected to neuroplasticity, therefore we can increment our willpower, like a skill.

One of the best way to stimulate brain neuroplasticity is through exercise. Hence the importance of a good morning routine, with exercises that can boosts your willpower for the rest of the day. To get the best result, we should do exercises that create “resistance”, by increasing their difficulty, or by doing new exercises.

Tenacity and willpower are involved in starting or in resisting a behaviour, so I came to believe, through my personal experience, that are very much part of habits: we need them to create good habits and we need them to break bad habits.

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I’d like to end this article with a quote from a book that I am currently studying, which is about the power of visualisation and the law of attraction: The Master Key System https://amzn.to/3FENccL

You can be what you will to be.

Charles Haanel