I'm about halfway through The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg now, and ever since his note on Keystone Habits, the book has been dragging on for a bit. I'm going to ignore his ramblings on organizational change and focus on the part that stood out to me the most in my reading today: his commentary on willpower and its role in habit formation.
I learned somewhere in High School the analogy that willpower is a finite resource. The more you use it, the more it gets depleted. Somehow, I feel like I internalized this in such a way that because willpower is a scarce resource, it should be conserved to be used when important. For example, I considered it okay to binge on snacks and junk food during exam-time when I had to use my willpower to focus on studying.
The Power of Habit likens willpower to be more like a muscle. The more you use it, he claims, the stronger it gets. This analogy is interesting because if it's more accurate than my idea of a finite resource, then my attitude towards willpower is like that of a man who is afraid that he might need to run someday, so he conserves his ability to run by never running. Of course, muscles being what they are, such a man would soon not be able to run very far at all.
The Power of Habit's suggestion (I had to weave through a good one-sixth of the book before I was able to distill it out) is that we can improve willpower by pre-planning our habits. So for instance, if you would like to get into the habit of ironing your clothes for the next day when you get home from work today, you should visualize in the morning how you're going to feel when you get home, how tired you'll be, and how you'll overcome that tiredness to power through and iron your clothes.
Another way of looking at it is that you would be "priming" yourself into making falling into the routine of ironing your clothes easier.
Here's what you can do: think of a habit you want to develop. It might be ironing your clothes at a certain time, or writing a blog post before bed, or cooking dinner instead of eating out. Visualize the crux moment when you usually give into temptation and ignore the task/chore you need to do and imagine yourself overcoming it. Do this everyday in the morning and hold on to it until you are able to develop the habit.
Here's the affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)
I learned somewhere in High School the analogy that willpower is a finite resource. The more you use it, the more it gets depleted. Somehow, I feel like I internalized this in such a way that because willpower is a scarce resource, it should be conserved to be used when important. For example, I considered it okay to binge on snacks and junk food during exam-time when I had to use my willpower to focus on studying.
The Power of Habit likens willpower to be more like a muscle. The more you use it, he claims, the stronger it gets. This analogy is interesting because if it's more accurate than my idea of a finite resource, then my attitude towards willpower is like that of a man who is afraid that he might need to run someday, so he conserves his ability to run by never running. Of course, muscles being what they are, such a man would soon not be able to run very far at all.
The Power of Habit's suggestion (I had to weave through a good one-sixth of the book before I was able to distill it out) is that we can improve willpower by pre-planning our habits. So for instance, if you would like to get into the habit of ironing your clothes for the next day when you get home from work today, you should visualize in the morning how you're going to feel when you get home, how tired you'll be, and how you'll overcome that tiredness to power through and iron your clothes.
Another way of looking at it is that you would be "priming" yourself into making falling into the routine of ironing your clothes easier.
Here's what you can do: think of a habit you want to develop. It might be ironing your clothes at a certain time, or writing a blog post before bed, or cooking dinner instead of eating out. Visualize the crux moment when you usually give into temptation and ignore the task/chore you need to do and imagine yourself overcoming it. Do this everyday in the morning and hold on to it until you are able to develop the habit.
Here's the affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)
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| The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg |
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