Mind over matters
Willpower works best with specific resolutions, careful planning
How’s that New Year’s resolution coming along?
Ask fitness experts what they’re seeing right now in their gyms, and here’s what they say: Of the throngs of people who vowed Jan. 1 to get in shape this year, most have long since given up.
It’s the same every year, says Jeff Lawrence, certified personal trainer and owner of Powerhouse Gym in Little Rock. People just don’t have the willpower to get off the couch and exercise or to pass on that third (or 13th) Girl Scout cookie.
What is willpower and how can we get some?
Annual surveys conducted by Harris International for the American Psychological Association found that most adult Americans had made plans in December to change their behavior this year. Survey respondents promised to lose weight, exercise regularly, eat more healthfully or improve their financial status.
The surveys also found many people who said lack of willpower prevented them from reaching goals — one in four in one group of 566 people who were polled online. But a majority of those surveyed for the association believed that they could learn willpower.
And the association says they’re correct. In its report “What You Need to Know About Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-control,” the association reports on research that suggests people can learn the ability to resist short-term temptations in an effort to meet long-term goals.
Furthermore, the report notes that once good habits are in place, people no longer need to draw on their willpower to maintain their behavior — the behavior becomes routine and requires little decision-making from day to day.
Getting to that point, however, would take … willpower.
ATTITUDE AND ACTION
Dr. Joseph Banken is on the board of the Arkansas Psychological Association and is a clinical psychologist and health behavior coordinator with the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Program of the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System.
“We kind of look at willpower as like a muscle, that over time if you exercise the muscle, it gets stronger and you see yourself
as having more successes — you have an image of a more successful person, and you’re more likely to have accountability with other people who have those similar aspirations — so all of that begins to work together to help you be more successful,” Banken says.
Also like a muscle, willpower can be fatigued through overuse, according to the association’s report. Expecting yourself to be able to resist multiple temptations is unrealistic. It’s better to avoid temptations as much as possible.
Banken and Dr. Courtney Ghormley, a clinical psychologist, lead smoking cessation and weight-management classes, respectively. They advise patients to set specific goals, such as losing 10 pounds or working out three times a week, rather than global goals like “I will lose 150 pounds” or “I will become fit” or multiple goals like “I will become fit, I will quit smoking, and I will spend less time on Facebook.”
They also advise patients not to depend on willpower alone to get them through.
“I think when we just rely on willpower we get ourselves in trouble, kind of like the New Year’s resolution — the idea sounds good and we expect the idea to take us through the changes we want to make, and that’s what a lot of people refer to as willpower.
“They kind of set themselves up for failure by not looking at changing their thinking process and actually what they’re doing, and also changing their environment.”
Lawrence says having a plan is just as important as having the will to execute it.
“People have it in their minds that they’re going to make a change, but walking in the door to a gym is not going to do anything,” he says. “I kind of think of it like this: If I tell you to drive to a certain address in Los Angeles, Calif., if you don’t have a map or a GPS, how are you going to get there? People walk in a gym every day with literally no idea how to make the change, and so they get discouraged quickly.”
Ernest Abrams, owner of Body Clinic Little Rock, thinks part of the plan could be finding a personal trainer with the education and experience to help you understand what you need to do to reach the goals.
Hiring a trainer can be incentive in itself to hit the gym. For one thing, Abrams says, trainers are generally paid in advance. “And we have a very strict cancellation policy.
“You’ll find that when people are putting up that money that they have a tendency to go ahead and come to the sessions that they’ve set up for a personal trainer,” Abrams says. “Spending the money will often generate the willpower.”
CHANGING PLACES “What You Need to Know About Willpower” looks at conditions that foster willpower as well as those that thwart it.
For instance, the report notes, people who avoided temptation by stashing candy inside their desk drawers at work were less likely to eat it than those who left the candy on top of their desks.
“If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, well, you don’t want to have cookies in the house, [or] a candy bowl out on the counter because you’re going to eat it. It’s setting yourself up to fail,” says Ghormley, who is also on the board of the Arkansas Psychological Association.
“You want to set yourself up to succeed, and by making modifications to your environment, that can help.
“Don’t have a fridge full of ice cream if you’re trying to lose weight. Get some veggies in there. And then having support — friends who are going to support you, and family who is going to support you in your effort — is real important.”
Thinking ahead about how to avoid temptation can reinforce willpower.
“If you’re trying to lose weight and you know that you’re going to a big birthday party and there’s going to be cake and ice cream and all this stuff, you make sure you plan ahead,” Ghormley says. “You might eat a healthy meal before you go. Make sure you don’t go on an empty stomach, so that you set yourself up for success. You kind of boost up your willpower, if you will, and you can be more successful than if you showed up starving and you wolfed down half a cake.”
FATIGUE AND DEPLETION Although the report asserts that willpower can be strengthened, it also notes that repeated use of “willpower muscle” to resist enticements appears to drain the ability to withstand immediate future temptation. Such depletion also seems to have a physical basis.
Research has found that people who overused the “willpower muscle” temporarily decreased activity in the region of the brain that is involved in cognition. They also tended to have lower blood glucose levels than people who hadn’t overused willpower.
Hungry people have a harder time resisting all kinds of temptations, not merely those related to food.
Abrams tells his clients to make sure they’re eating enough. “They should try to get to three meals, three snacks a day,” he says. This helps keep their glucose levels steady.
BORN TO WIN? So, where does willpower come from anyway?
A study done more than 40 years ago by Walter Mischel, a psychologist now at Columbia University, looked at how preschoolers presented with a plate of marshmallows behaved when told that they could enjoy one treat while the researcher was out of the room or wait until the researcher returned and enjoy two.
The children who delayed gratification then showed the same sort of self-control four decades later when they were re-evaluated.
Researchers later determined that sixth-graders who had problems with self-control — those who were more likely to talk out of turn in class or make rash decisions — were also more likely to use alcohol, tobacco and marijuana as 11th-graders.
But Ghormley and Banken don’t buy into the theory that some people are simply born with more ability to exercise self-control.
“Those kids may have had experience from positive experiences or be taking cues from role models, or they could be positively reinforced or encouraged,” Banken says. “Or maybe they’ve learned that, oh, maybe if I delay my gratification I’ll get more, and some kids may have more insight into that than others, I would think.”
And ultimately, it’s a lot easier to exert willpower when you like what you’re trying to do.
Sheila Mckinnis, a Pilates instructor and co-owner of The Pilates Studio of Little Rock, has been doing Pilates for about 20 years and is passionate about the discipline. But she recognizes that some people aren’t.
“It’s so detailed, it’s so disciplined, there’s a lot of repetition involved in the routine of the movements, so for some people I think it just flat out gets boring,” she says. “I do think that if you don’t have the willpower to keep going through it that you’re not going to get the most out of it.”
Those who don't feel that enthusiasm drift away around the three-month mark.
“I think whatever you’re passionate about you find time to do,” she says, “whether you have the time in your life or not.”