Willpower is for losers

Systems that acknowledge emotions and cravings are what actually wins

Willpower: “control exerted to do something or restrain impulses”

A lot of hustle porn influencers, fitness influencers, athletes and more say you need to put in 26 hours a day, outwork everyone else with %110 effort and you will beat every one else in your sport. They then say you need to use your willpower to make yourself work that hard and if you don’t, you’re a loser.

This is a one way street to failure with any long term project. If you are using willpower long term to make something happen, you will fail. The real key to “working” that much is to make it feel enjoyable and automatic.

If there is something about what you want to do that you don’t enjoy, it can eventually derail you from ever doing that. If you deny it while you try to do it because you really want your goal, then your subconscious mind will stop you from doing it and you won’t even be aware of why you are stopping. Procrastination is not a time management issue, it’s usually an emotion management issue, about reasons we deny to ourselves.

Driving with the parking brake on

If you have to continuously use your willpower to achieve something, it’s much like driving with the brake on. You go much slower, you burn a lot more gas, you have way less control and you might eventually burn out. In order to drive well, you have to figure out how to turn off the brake.

Willpower is there to actually help you brake in small situations, and should only be used in small amounts of time in appropriate situations, much like driving. The less you use the willpower brake, the more efficient your driving becomes, the less energy you use overall and the more driving you will accomplish with the same tank of gas.

Willpower is a limited resource

There is a hypothesis out there that willpower is a limited resource. Some studies showed that willpower consumed glucose and got replenished when you consumed more glucose, and gets harder to exercise willpower the more tired you get.

Others disagree although, because willpower appears to increase if you have more positive emotions about the task, have feelings of autonomy and control about it, don’t believe it is a limited resource, exercise using your willpower more and even increases when you put sugar water in your mouth but do not drink it!

I think both sides are actually correct in this case, because willpower is ultimately one part of your mind that wants to do something fighting against another part of your mind that does not, and the less you fight against yourself, the less ‘willpower’ you consume. It is this fighting, or ‘braking’ that consumes energy, and by managing your feelings about it reduces the amount of fighting you are doing internally. So by changing your beliefs about what you are doing, you change your emotions and thus change the amount you fight against yourself in doing something.

You exercise your willpower when your logical brain tries to force your emotional brain to do something you it doesn’t want to do.

How to ‘increase’ your willpower

So according to limited willpower naysayers, this is how you increase your willpower:

1. Have more positive emotions about the task. This makes sense because it’s you fighting your emotions and feelings about something is the entire exercise of willpower in the first place.

2. Have feelings of autonomy and control about the task. This also tracks, because if you feel like you have control over what you are doing, it is ultimately your choice to do that thing. Thus the likelihood you will fight your own emotions about not wanting to do something is reduced, because you are more likely to want something that you chose to do, otherwise, why did you chose to do it?

3. Avoiding being coerced by someone else to do a task. The inverse of autonomy, a great way to not want to do something emotionally is for it has be forced upon you by someone else.

4. Believe willpower is an unlimited resource. If you believe you have smaller limits about something you have bigger limits about, your emotions will feel that doing more of something that is limited is a waste of your time, and thus create a resistance for you to do that thing. So if you believe that willpower is limited, your emotions about exerting your willpower will make you need to ironically start exercising your willpower more to continue working.

5. Put sugar water in your mouth and spit it out. This one is complicated! The body needs time, often hours, to extract energy from food. But you’ve probably noticed how you seem to instantly have more energy when you eat energy rich foods within a minute or less. This is a very low level brain system that evolved to manage your energy output in response to your energy input so you don’t starve to death. If the brain knows that it has guaranteed energy inside of it, it becomes safe to ‘release’ energy to the body, and it does this through many mechanisms, one of them being taste.
   
   You are essentially unlocking energy already in your body by tricking a very low level part of your brain. This although, has limits, because your lower level brain is just as clever as your higher level brain, and will eventually learn the sugar water you put in your mouth is bullshit on some level, or induce high cravings to swallow, which again, will make you need to consume more willpower to stop yourself.

Fighting against yourself can get deep

As the sugar water example shows, what ‘fighting against yourself’ means can reach very deep levels. Fighting against yourself can mean fighting against systems that try to regulate your hunger by giving you cravings for foods, feelings of pain, worries about the future, fear, negative emotions, positive emotions, temperature, your capacities, your nature and more.

On top of this, the human brain is very good at ignoring things it doesn’t like and tends to avoid negative emotions if it can. This means that the things you are fighting against can be things you are completely unaware of on some level. If you are trying to make yourself do something, and you just do not know why and are incredibly frustrated with yourself as to why you cannot, this is often the reason why. You can be avoiding a thought that makes you feel unpleasant. These can often be pretty stupid things too.

You can fight against yourself to even floss

One example I love to use is brushing your teeth twice a day and flossing. Many, many people do not do this basic 5-10 minute a day total exercise. It’s mindless, it’s easy, it’s not hard, and if you do it, you do amazing things for your health, mood, future pain at the dentist, social life and more.

But many do not do this. They know it’s stupid that they don’t, and are often sheepish when they say it, most often time flossing, and sometimes not brushing a second time. The floss sits on their bathroom counter, untouched. Sometimes they are exasperated with themselves and they don’t understand why. But the reasons why are often embarrassing so, they subconsciously avoid thinking about it. Those emotional reasons can be:

1. It’s boring, I’d rather be doing something else

2. It’s gross, I do not like putting my hands in my mouth

3. It hurts, I have to wash my hands 2 more times today, and my skin feels pain if I do it too much. I’ll feel gross if I don’t wash my hands before and after flossing because I put my hands in my mouth, so I must wash if I floss.

4. Putting moisturizer cream on my hands to soothe my skin after washing them sucks. It makes my hands all goopy for 15 minutes and puts a residue on anything I touch. I don’t like the fast drying creams because they make me feel bad in other ways. I don’t like how the goopyness annoys other people in my house because they feel it on anything I’ve touched and it makes it I have to clean my keyboard a lot.

5. It’s loud / bright, and it will wake up other people in my house, and then I’ll have a big fight with the people I woke up

6. I don’t want to brush my teeth soon after a meal, I’ve heard it damages it or stains them and that makes me worry.

7. I feel tired, I don’t want to do something I don’t enjoy when I’m tired early in the morning and late at night.

8. Doing it later at work is annoying, because I don’t have a toothbrush there!

Look at all of those complicated emotions! For brushing your teeth! No wonder so many people don’t floss. They’re also pretty embarrassing to admit to most people, even to yourself, so better avoid thinking about it too! It’s kind of childish, don’t you think? So why floss and deal with all of that emotional pain? Or I’ll just willpower myself to floss, because it’s important and ignore all the stupid emotional reasons why I don’t.

No wonder that smart toothbrushes exist

Or you can work with your emotions and your nature and actually brush your teeth without willpower:

1. So I don’t have to put my hands in my mouth and do things that are gross, I will get a Reach Flosser or Waterpik. I know it’s not as good as real flossing, but it’s an improvement! Now I don’t have to fight against myself to floss.

2. I will look into how much it matters to actually wait to brush my teeth after 30m of eating or to not brush my teeth at all. Oh I found out it’s much worse to not brush at all and it’s not a big deal to brush so soon, so I’m just going to brush when it’s convenient, and even eat a night time snack after so I don’t have to do it late at night and wake up people.

3. I’m going to watch funny TikToks as I brush my teeth, now it’s not boring to brush!

Many don’t get to that stage of acknowledging their emotions, and thus they never floss enough. And this is a very small example!

You lose weight by making it a willpower free exercise

Trying to achieve something even more difficult than flossing your teeth also works the same way. You get rid of the barriers and the internal resistance to achieving what you want by being very forgiving and honest with yourself and removing the barriers that make it difficult.

Weight loss is a great example of this. Only 2%-20% of people maintain their weight loss after several years depending on how much they lost. Why do they fail? Because they try to make it a high willpower exercise, and when that burns out inevitably after a few days or months, they go back to their baseline. It is the classic willpower activity.

To actually lose weight, they need to remove the barriers that make it a hard willpower exercise. People who lose at weight loss use diets that induce strong cravings inside of them, forcing them to fight against their basic ‘don’t starve’ parts of their brain. The people who beat this dynamic are the ones who make their diets not have cravings or other bad feelings and thus do not need to exercise willpower.

Experimental Fat Loss

’s keto diet is a great example of this, for him, it doesn’t induce cravings, it’s convenient, it solves his non-24 hour sleep cycle issue and it helps him lose weight! The Potato Diet that Slime Mold discovered is another example of this.

The successful do the far easier thing of experimenting with their diets until they find one that feels good and works. They worked on the diet itself to make it not have willpower required, and thus increased their chances of success.

A diet that doesn’t make you feel bad is just one part although. They could take cooking classes to make cooking feel easier or not as hard. They could hire a service that makes all of those diet meals that they figure out. They could build a social group of other healthy people, so the environment around them gets rid of peer pressure to eat the dessert. They can think about why they think dessert is special, realize it was about their childhood only getting sweets once a month and let go of that emotion because your an adult now and the sweets are not actually that special.

Once they established a willpower free system around them, losing the weight become inevitable. And working on the system while being forgiving with yourself is far easier than fighting your cravings trying to white knuckle willpower your way through a diet that doesn’t work well with you.

More about willpower

Willpower is for unproductive Losers

I subconsciously copied the title of this post from

Joseph Everett (WIL)

‘s post. It’s also a great resource on how to properly avoid using your willpower, but comes from an anxiety, distraction & reducing options angle more. Which are all great concepts you should incorporate in your skill of making systems to achieve your goals without willpower.

My angle comes from a low level cravings, psychology, burnout and emotions standpoint, which I haven’t seen much out there. These things also trigger willpower in other ways and all of these tools will help you achieve your goals.