Increasing Willpower With A Cool Trick

An interesting new scientific study shows that increasing willpower can be as easy as simply clenching your muscles.  That’s right, folks, for those of you who have clenched angry fists in the face of adversity, you might have actually been on to something.

Clenching Muscles And Increasing Willpower

The study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, showed that a number of different tasks, from sticking your hands in ice-cold water to drinking yucky-tasting but healthy drinks and choosing healthy versus junk food, could be influenced by clenching of the muscles as the task was performed.  There’s some really interesting details about this phenomenon that cropped up during the study.

For starters, it didn’t matter which muscle was clenched.  Hand, calf, bicep, fingers… it made no difference, as long as a muscle was clenched. I found that really interesting.

Next, the clenching had to be done at the moment of self-control in order to increase willpower.  If done too soon before the action, people reported feeling “depleted” by the time they had to exert themselves.

Finally, it didn’t work at all unless the choice actually mattered to the person.  For example, one of the experiments was to drink a healthy but gross-tasting drink.  For those subjects who didn’t give a hoo-hah about their health, there wasn’t any difference in clenching or not clenching.  But for those subjects who identified themselves as “health conscious”, it did make a difference.

What a fantastic study!  To actually show a legitimate basis for the concept of “steeling oneself” for an unpleasant but necessary act, is pretty impressive.  However, there are some significant limitations to using this neat little trick to keep from eating that bag of Cheetos come lunchtime.  The obvious one being, it’s very short-term in duration, so it’s not like you can base an entire comprehensive weight loss program around scrunching up your glutes every time you want a cheeseburger.

What Is Willpower?

If we want longer, more lasting ways to change our behavior, we have to look a little more deeply at what willpower actually is.  It’s one of those things where we don’t really think about the nuts and bolts of the word; we kind of know it when we see it, but if we are asked to dissect it into its core components, we end up sort of scratching our heads and saying “Hmmm.”.

Let’s fix that right now.  After all, I wrote an entire book on neurologically and behaviorally based weight loss, I ought to know a thing or two about willpower, right?  So let’s start by de-mystifying it by spelling out what it actually is.

Simply put, willpower is the ability to NOT do what is a natural behavior.  That’s really just about it.  Think about it.  If you’re a smoker, the natural response to the desire to take a drag is to light up a cigarette.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, when that same urge comes on, you have to exert yourself to NOT light up a cigarette.

If you’re a junk food junkie and it comes time to eat, the natural response is to fire down a cheesesteak and a bag of greasy fries, or some such thing.  But if you’re “on a diet”, when it comes time to eat, you will need to exert yourself to NOT stuff your face with a never-decaying Happy Meal and stick with something healthy.

So really, willpower is just your ability to focus on changing what is your normal behavior, to something that is not your normal behavior.  No big whoop, right?  So why does it seem so hard?  Why do we value willpower so highly?

Focus Is Finite

The answer is pretty simple, really.  We, as human beings, have limits.  You can’t sprint forever; you’ll get tired at some point and have to stop.  You can’t stay up 24 hours a day for months at a time; at some point, you have to sleep.

In other words, we have limits.  And just like anything else, our ability to focus has limits.

How many TVs can you watch at the same time?  I mean, REALLY watch and pay attention to, so that you can follow the story line (if it’s fiction), or the game, or whatever it may be, without losing any of the details?  In neurological circles, this is called channel capacity, but you really don’t need to know that term… just that there is a capacity.

Since there is a capacity to our ability to focus, it follows that there must be a capacity (in other words, a LIMIT) to our ability to focus on changing our behavior, AKA “willpower”.  So there is an inherent, built-in limit to how much we can focus on at any given time, including willpower.  This is a critical point to grasp if you want to understand long-term behavioral change.

This is a necessarily stripped-down summary of these concepts; I devote several chapters to these topics in my book, so forgive me if I have to zip through this due to space limitations.

So what can we do with this information to help us?

Reduce Stress To Increase Willpower

Okay, so we know willpower is really just “focus”, and we have a limit to how much we can focus on at any one time.  What that translates to is, the more you have going on in your life, the harder it will be to focus on changing your behavior (i.e., the less “willpower” capacity you will have).

Here’s the kicker.  Stressful events eat up that capacity to focus like a sponge.

Think about it.  If you hear that a new, hideously savage round of layoffs is about to happen at work, and you get an email from your boss simply saying “We have to talk”, how likely are you to focus on counting calories that week?

Not bloody likely.  Of course not.  Your mind is stuck on something else… literally.  And now, there’s nothing left, no capacity for focus left, to dedicate to changing what is normal or natural behavior for us.  This is why people always seem to “fall off the wagon” during stressful times.

Some stress we can’t do anything about.  Random events do occur, and we do have certain obligations that must be met even if doing so is stressful.  Even if we might be tempted from time to time, we can’t encourage our kids to play in traffic, or tell our spouse to go have a look at what’s in the bottom of that pit filled with lime we just dug in the backyard.  So yes, there are stresses we have no real control over.

But there are also stresses we choose… and there’s a lot more of those in our lives than we’d usually like to admit.  By reducing those stresses, we open up more capacity for change… we increase willpower, or at least, our potential for willpower.

Start asking yourself what really does and doesn’t matter.  Are you sabotaging your efforts to become a healthier you by stressing out over material things?  Killing yourself with the need to “keep up with the Joneses” when you already have plenty?  Taking on more obligations than you should because you’re afraid to say no?

All of these things, all of these stresses, are reducing your ability to act the way you truly want to act and thereby transform yourself into the person you want to be.

A lot of increasing willpower, is about DECREASING the nonsense in your life distracting you from what is truly important… and what’s more important than your health and the health of your family?

So go ahead and clench your fists to get a short-term increase in willpower… but prioritize your life and cut out the garbage in order to increase your ability to change for the long term.

Stay healthy!

Here’s the article citation for the muscle-clenching thingee:  Iris W. Hung and Aparna A. Labroo. From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation. Journal of Consumer Research, 2010; (in press)

For those of you curious about my neurologically based weight loss book (“The Weight Loss Reflex”), here’s the link to the publisher, so you can glance over it at your convenience.