How can we weaken temptations and strengthen our will to act? 🤔
Do you know that saying „out of sight, out of mind”? Turns out that scientific researches prove that wisdom when it comes to fighting temptation and empowering willpower! 💪
:::
Brian Wansink, american psychologist did an interesting research with James E. Painter that he describes in his book „Mindless Eating” 🧐
:::
Gentlemen gave their secretaries chocolates 🍫. Some of the sweets were in a box with a see-through lid where they could see all the chocolates and some of the sweets were in a normal not see-through box.
:::
What do you think, which chocolates tempted more to be eaten? 😅 Of course those with a see-through lid. Women that could see the chocolates were tempted 71% times more! They were reaching for chocolates 7,7 times a day while those women who had „hidden” chocolates reached for them only 4,6 times a day 😋.
:::
You see? Out of sight out of mind and it’s not only about sweets of course! If you need to learn or work late don’t do it in front of a TV, better yet, go to some quiet place 🤫, without TV, without any games or non-scientific books in your sight. Turn your phone off and focus on your task.
:::
Now how can we strengthen our will? 🤔 First of all write down a list of reasons WHY do you want to reach your goal, WHY do you want to follow that dream 📝. This so-called Benefit Card will help you a lot in a moment of crisis 😃
:::
If you’re wondering why bother writing them down and you think „I remember them all easily” I’ll surprise you: in moments of lost motivation it is easy to forget why you want to reach your goal that much 😉. When there is a temptation in eyesight (and within reach of a hand), you’re feeling stressed, tired and/or you’re in a bad mood, believe me, those reasons suddenly fly away and it is so hard to remember those 😬
:::
In those kind of situations Benefit Card might come very useful! Carry it with you everday and read it in any moment of weakness.
Tag: willpower
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 12: Learning how to defer gratification
Last week we’ve talked about deferring gratification – does it apply to you? 🤔 Does your brain demand a reward here and now? 😬 Do you forget about your goal when you see something you want (e.g. a cake while being on a diet) and you easily succumb to temptation? 🧐
:::
Don’t worry! The art of deferring gratification can be learned, same as you can train your willpower 💪.
:::
Try this exercise from Kelly McGonigqal’s book „The Willpower Instinct”: It appears that 10 minutes is not a long time to wait for something we want. Neurologists however discovered that it has great impact on how your brain processes the vision of reward 🏆. If instant gratification is supposed to come after 10 minutes then our brain sees it as future benefit 🔜. Hence the system that processes the promise of a reward calms down and strong biological impulse to instant consummation weakens ⬇️.
:::
In order for your brain 🧠 to think straight try waiting 10 minutes before you succumb to temptation. If after 10 minutes you still want it, take it/do it 😄. Before the time passes though try to think of long-term benefits you’ll get for resisting temptation. If it’s possible, try also creating some physical or visual distance ↔️.
:::
If you need to do something you don’t feel like doing you can also use „10 minutes rule” to help you resist the temptation of delaying necessary actions and to force yourself a bit to do them😉. Try making it „do it for 10 minutes, then you can stop”. Let yourself stop working after 10 minutes – it might turn out that as you already had started you will want to continue 😉. For me, it’s always the most difficult to start working and when I do I usually want to finish so this trick works on me quie well 👍
:::
Try doing that excercise and write down your results. „10 miutes rule” might work great when you don’t feel like working! ☺
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 11: Deferring gratification
What ability do you need to learn/practice in order to empower your strong will and be able to stand up, take that first step and go work on your dreams/projects when you don’t feel like it? 🤔
:::
Please read and let me know if it sounds familiar 🧐. Your friend brings cake to work and you can’t resist. You feel lilke dropping everything and taking an evening off to watch TV instead of work (and you keep doing that everyday)…
:::
Your brain 🧠 demands a reward here and now! You forget about your goal and all the reasons why you wanted to achieve it. You succumb to temptation…🤭😜
:::
Or maybe…? With your last remains of strongwill you leave that cake from friend somewhere out of sight, you turn TV off and and work on your dreams thinking thay each hour spent working gets you closer to your goal 💪.
:::
The ability to postpone pleasures or rewards is called ➡️ ‘deferring gratification’ ⬅️ in psychology. It is crucial to realize long-distance goals because it helps you not to succumb to temptation each time 😉.
:::
Why is it so hard to defer gratification? Because seeing temptation or reward instantly launches more primitive and oldest part of our brain demanding gratification right away 😬. Luckily we also have prefrontal cortex (part of our brain 🧠) that can cool that instant rush because it is responsible for controlling our impulses .
:::
Task for today 📝: think how deferring gratification looks in your case? In what situations is it easier or more difficult to you? What helps you defer gratification?
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 10: What can weaken your willpower
3 mind traps that can weaken your willpower 😳
:::
➡️ 1.Thinking „everything or nothing” 😬
Have you ever thought „I need to do everything from my ‘to do’ list or drop everything”? 🤔
If yes, then you got into „everything or nothing” trap which can have huge impact on your actions and effects (or lack of them 🙄). Thinking like that you don’t see your failures as small errors that you can learn from, you see it as total failure and you might start withdrawing generalized conclusions about yourself like „I’ll never succeed”, „I’m a failure” etc. STOP! ⛔
:::
➡️ 2. Excessive pessimism or optimism „If I haven’t succeeded in 1 year I’ll never succeed” – that’s excessive pessimism when you have only negative thoughts about your future 1👎. Excessive optimism is when you ignore your past attempts and previous experience and keep thinking that „this time will be different, it will be perfect” 👍. For example, you wanted to workout regularly, you’ve had couple attempts at it and failed each time but now you think that you’ll have the willpower and you’ll workout 6 times a week for 3 months 😬. If you know what I’m talking about write all of such examples down. Now try to make each one of them more realistic e.g. „I’ll try to workout more regularly. I probably won’t be able to workout 6 times a week right away so I’ll workout 2 times this week, 3 times next week and keep improving”.
:::
➡️ 3. Exaggeration – You exaggerate all difficulties and make everything sound impossible 🙄. „I won’t make it”, „I never do anything right”.
If you do that write all of those thoughts down and write a counterargument to each one 👍
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 9: Training willpower
I’ve got good news for you – willpower can be trained! 😃
:::
It is often treated like something you either have or not but psychology researches show that you can train your strong will just like your muscles 😃. And nobody was born with a 6-pack, right? 😄
:::
It is great news because those who aren’t scrupulous naturally can train it. You’ve actually already started it by building your plan using your strenghts and weaknesses (steps 5-6) and by creating visualisation (step 7) 😉
:::
Since willpower works like a muscle it has limited source of energy and strength. There are things that empower it 👍but there are also things that weaken it 👎. Your goal is to get to know and, if possible, remove your obstacles to having strong will.
:::
Those most basic ones are stress, tiredness and lack of sleep 😴. It seems so simple, right? Yet you do not always see the connection between those factors and your willpower.
:::
Task for today: Observe and write down 📝(or analyze past experiences if you’re calm and rested today) how stress and tiredness have impact on your willpower: What situations are those? 🤔 What happens then? How do you react? 🧐
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 8: Willpower
How willpower actually works?🤔
:::
Willpower divides into 3 parts:
🔸️Power „I want to” – power to do something even though you’d prefer to avoid it
🔸️Power „I don’t want to” – power helping push temptations away
🔸️Power „I desire!” – power that remembers what you desire in long-term
:::
Willpower is what differs us from animals😉. By forseeing future you are able to not give in to impulses or instincts. We often want to delete lower impulses or some feelings but they are important too! 😉 For example disgust protects you from bad food 🥩, fear from danger ⚠️ and desires help you set goals 😊.
:::
If you want to improve your willpower it is not about fighting impulses but about using them to help you 🙃.
:::
Do you know that sometimes you make decisions on autopilot? 🤔 And that’s good because there are so many of them during a day that your brain would not be able to get to them all! 🤯
:::
Your task for today is to notice that autopilot and improve your self-awarness 😉. Observe and write down the situations when you need your willpower. What thoughts, feelings, impulses appear in those situations? 🤔 Which moments/elements are crucial to making a decision? Noticing them will help you stop that bad autopilot and prepare for those situations earlier. 🤗
:::
If you want to learn more about it I advice you to read Kelly McGonigal’s book „The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It”
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 7: Visualisations
You often hear that imagining success helps you get motivated 💪. Research shows though that it is not imagining success that helps but visualisation of process so imagining the path that takes you to your goal 😉. This way you practice in your mind the difficult path that awaits you and it helps you get ready for its all steps.
:::
What works best on you? A positive ending and what happens when you reach the goal 👍 or negative outcome and what happens if you don’t reach it 👎?
:::
➡️ If positive visualisation is for you (like me 🙃) imagine yourself working hard, reaching next steps towards your goal 📈. Imagine yourself with a strong will and e.g. staying home to work on your business, or whatever your goal is, instead of going to a party 😉. Imagine yourself making smart decisions like getting up 30min earlier in order to workout before work or to meditate 🧘♀️ to begin a new day with a calm mind. Imagine how you feel having picked those wise decisions 🤔
:::
Now imagine yourself at the end of the line, you’ve reached your goal! 🏅 Imagine your friends & family congratulating you on a fullfiled dream, imagine yourself giving some interview to a newspaper on how you managed to get where you are! 😎
So powerful! I usually am so pumped up after such visualisations!
:::
➡️ If you feel more motivated seeing negative outcome and what happens when you don’t succeed imagine yourself e.g. fatter, not earning as much as you’d want and not being able to e.g. give your kids everything you’d want to.
Imagine that your family and friends tell you that your laziness problem becomes more and more serious. You walk into a party and people look at you and gossip. Now imagine how you can avoid those situations. You work hard. You put your goals first. See with your imagination getting an award.
:::
➡️ Now think of your visualisations.
Decide whether you are more sensitive to punishments 👎 or to rewards 👍.
Imagine the proces taking you to your goal– make sure to imagine specific situations.
Write your visualisation down 🖊
Keep reading it when you need it
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 2: What are common reasons of lack of motivation
If you lack motivation the 1st step to take is to wonder what’s the reason behind it 🤔
:::
If you’re a perfectionist your lack of motivation or procrastination may come from the fear that you won’t complete the task flawlessly 🙄. You need to understand that something done is better than something perfect and that you shouldn’t postpone some task over and over 😉!
:::
Here’s other common reasons for lack of motivation:
1. Avoidance of discomfort: when you need to do some task you know it’s unpleasant (e.g. working out) it is hard to get to it because the idea of staying in comfort is more appealing 🤷♀️. In those kind of situations you need to focus on long-term results (e.g. your body after regular working out)
:::
2. Self-doubt: when you think you can’t do something you’ll likely to struggle to get started. In those kind of situations just focus on doing the task itself, don’t think about the outcome of it 😉
:::
3. Being over-extended: when you have a lot going on in life, you’ll likely feel overwhelmed. I tend to be in those kind of situations and the key to getting out of this feeling is to cut down the amount of task/project you have running. Pick max 3 things you want to focus on now and work on those. Cross out the rest or postpone it a bit 😉
:::
4. Lack of commitment to a goal: when you need to do something simply out of a need of obligation but when you don’t really want to do it 🙄. Try to think of some personal benefits for you after accomplishing that task. This will make you feel more commited to the goal.
:::
5. Mental health issues: a lack of motivation is a common symptom of depression. It’s important to consider whether your mental health may be affecting your motivation level. If so, please see a specialist.
:::
These are just a few common reasons why you may lack motivation but naming what is the reason of it is a big step to work on improving your motivation and willpower so go on and think which scenario do you classify in. In next steps we’ll learn how to improve our willpower 💪
Smiley Future – Step 69
Today let’s focus on summing up on your tools which we used for the last 16 months in our Smiley Future 🤗. Which ones became most useful to you? 🤔
:::
Here’s a list of those most important ones:
🔸️ Building a goal with SMART method (step 6)
🔸️ Implementation intention (step 10)
🔸️ Process visualisation with positive or negative outcome (step 11)
🔸️ Training will power: reducing stress (step 17), improving your willpower by breathing (step 18), autoobservation (step 19), beating tiredness and feeling burnt out (step 20), finding the source of your ‘I desire’ power (step 20) – which of those elements did you find most useful?
🔸️ Ways of being good to yourself (step 25)
🔸️ Ways of deferring gratification (step 30)
🔸️ Ways of beating procrastination (step 32)
🔸️ Ways to fight lack of motivation (step 37)
🔸️ Working on your sabotagin thoughts (step 42-45)
🔸️ Observing the impact of emotions on your willpower (step 47)
:::
Which one of those tools helped you most? 🤔
In what way can you use them in the future?
Write down your reflections 📝
:::
Next week: Summing up: Practicing mindfullness
:::
Source: @chodakowskaewa‘s book “90 days – design your tomorrrow”
Smiley Future – Step 68
Today we’re gonna continue summing everything up ✔. I highly encourage you to reflect on what subjects were most important to you, what did you discover about yourself? 🧐 To make it easier here’s a list of the subjects we went through:
🔸️Training strong will
🔸️Mind traps
🔸️Be good to yourself
🔸️Procrastinating
🔸️Deffering gratification
🔸️Sabotaging thoughts
🔸️Emotions vs will power
🔸️Mindfullness
🔸️Practicing gratitude
:::
Which out of those subjects touched you the most, made you reflect most, opened your eyes? 🤔
Will those be helpful in the future? How can you use them?
Write down your thoughts 📝
:::
Next week: Summing up: Your tools
:::
Source: @chodakowskaewa‘s book “90 days – design your tomorrrow”
How to be HAPPY 