In my previous article, I offered four ways to make self-motivation easier, and talked about stacking up advantages ahead of time instead of waiting to come face to face with a difficult situation. Here I’ll cover five more ways to make self-motivation easier: building up enthusiasm, being more mentally and physically prepared to face challenges, getting help from others, learning, and minimizing temptation.

Visualize and find your enthusiasm
When things are going well, I’m not distracted, and I have time to think about what I want to do, I’m often in a good state of mind to improve my motivation, but by definition these low-demand times tend to be ones when not much motivation is needed. I can build up motivation for harder times by using these opportunities to visualize where I’m trying to get and by otherwise spending time thinking about and especially enjoying my goal, whether I’m reflecting on successes so far, enjoying progress, envisioning future payoffs, or planning ahead. The more time I spend thinking positively about my goal, the more accessible positive thoughts about it will be when I really need them. For instance, if I’m trying to learn to play a musical instrument, I can visualize myself playing it and remind myself why I’m putting in all the hard work.

Take care of yourself
When we get enough sleep, exercise regularly, eat well, and use techniques like meditation to aid mood and mental focus, we’re much more capable of being proactive in our lives than when we are tired, inactive, badly nourished, overstuffed, or carrying around a lot of stress. Mood and physical well-being have an important impact on making good decisions, so everything we can do to improve them will tend to improve  motivation, too.

Get support
Connecting with a friend or family member to talk about your goals, the problems you’re running into, your plans, and your successes is a good way to keep your goal more in mind and to process your thoughts about it. Having someone in your corner can also make it more important to to do well and provides more options if something starts going wrong. A person trying to quit a bad habit can go talk to a supporter when temptation seems particularly strong. Someone trying to get a better job can talk through their plans and strategies if they have a sympathetic ear.

Read, learn
Reading about subjects having to do with our goals serves several purposes at once: it gives us more information to use when making plans; keeps our goal more in our mind; lets us try on others’ ideas; and serves as a physical reminder (whenever we see the book) of what’s being accomplished. Someone trying to get fit can learn a lot from books about nutrition and exercise, like The 9 Truths About Weight Loss. Anyone trying to change habits and running into emotional resistance can benefit from books like Emotional Alchemy, The Feeling Good Handbook, or A Guide to Rational Living.

Minimize temptation
Finally, minimizing temptation can be a real boon, at least in the short term, for anyone who’s really struggling with making the right choices. If you’re working on spending money wisely, you can take any savings you have and put it in a CD or some other instrument that makes it difficult or impossible to withdraw for a time. Someone who’s trying to quit playing video games can actually sell the games rather than hanging on to them to play just a little bit now and then.

This approach is a bit of a crutch, and the problem with relying too much on it is that when a situation comes up where there is temptation–for instance, when the person working on spending gets a tax refund, or when the former video game player is staying with a friend who has a top-notch video game system–the strategies to deal with the temptation may not be very well developed. But like all of these strategies, minimizing temptation–if not relied on absolutely–can help make everything simpler.

Photo by James Jordan

Changing habits, making good choices, or really pushing hard toward a goal can get very difficult when it comes time to act. Probably you’ve had experiences, like I have, where good intentions beforehand weren’t enough to force a good choice when the time came. Continuing to try despite not always succeeding is key in developing good habits, but it’s not the only way to be more successful with self-motivation. In fact, there are a lot of things we can do to make self-motivation easier. While you might already know some of these ways, especially if you’ve been reading this site, the reason for this article is to ask the question, “Are you doing everything you can to make progress toward your goal easier?”

To help provide a good answer to that question (and to offer some areas to look at in case the answer is “no”), here’s a list of many ways to make willpower and self-motivation easier. After all, making the task easier usually means getting better results for less effort: it falls into the category of the time-worn advice “Work smarter, not harder.” There are limits to how much willpower we can summon up on a moment’s notice, but there may not be limits to the advantages we can stack up beforehand.

Decide what to do and make plans
Probably the single most important thing any of us can do to facilitate good choices is to understand what those choices should be ahead of time. If the task is studying, then how much studying needs to be done, and when should it happen? If the task is some kind of daily upkeep, like following up on e-mails within the day or keeping the dishes from piling up, what’s the exact plan for how these things will be handled?

Anticipate problems
If you ever find yourself explaining away self-motivation problems by saying “I was going to ____, but ____,” this may be a sign that you need to work on anticipating problems. Someone who’s trying to eat more healthily will be much more successful if they figure out what the options and dangers are before they walk into a party or a restaurant, for instance. Someone who’s self-employed and is trying to get in more work time will want to figure out ground rules for situations like when friends visit from out of town or for how much time–if any–it’s OK to spend doing things like volunteering or socializing during the work day.

Improve your tools and environment
In other posts I’ve gone into some detail about the value of choosing the best tools and setting up an encouraging environment for work on your goal. For example, a more welcoming environment can help a writer write more; having the right software or paper system can help another person organize much more easily.

Prepare
It can help sometimes if we think of ourselves as our own assistants. We have large, important goals, but often moving toward those goals is much easier when we do some grunt work ahead of time. To help facilitate a study session later in the day, try laying out books and other study materials on a table or desk so that starting requires just sitting down. To eat better, shop better.

On Monday I’ll continue with Part II and five more ways to make self-motivation easier.

Photo by Somewhat Frank

Self-motivation and willpower can benefit from learning a lot of different skills: setting goals, tracking progress, repairing broken ideas, organizing priorities; exercising and eating well and trying to get plenty of sleep and meditating to have energy and support a good mood; making rules … and while it’s possible to have willpower without using every one of these tools, the more of them we use effectively, the stronger our willpower is.

One key theme
And yet there’s one simple principle that underlies almost all of these tactics. It’s much easier to state than to follow, but thinking about it helps us keep focused on what willpower means and on what we can do from moment to moment. It goes like this: Think more about the right things and less about the wrong things.

What I mean is that for any goal I might have (for instance, let’s say I was someone who did project proposals as part of my job and wanted to finish three new project proposals by the end of the week), there will be thoughts I could have that will help make that happen (like “there’s a good chance the higher-ups will be pretty impressed if I can pull this off” or “the next step would be doing that competitive analysis”), thoughts that I could have that will get in the way (like “I couldn’t get my proposals done on time the last time, so I’ll probably screw up again this time” or “I hate this work. I just want to go home and eat Twinkies”), and thoughts that won’t have any impact one way or the other as long as they don’t distract me too much (like “These shoes are getting pretty worn out” or “Wow, there’s an albatross outside my window!”). These are right thoughts, wrong thoughts, and neutral thoughts, respectively. The neutral ones we don’t care about, so that’s the last I’ll say of those.

By the way, I want to be clear that I don’t mean that the “right” thoughts are “right” because they are somehow morally better than the “wrong” thoughts. We’re just talking about right or wrong for moving toward a particular goal.

The direct approach
People often seem to talk about thoughts as though we have no control over them, as though they just arise in our heads, stay as long as they want, and then leave without any permission or control on our part. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. We can actively choose to think more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts by reflecting on our own thinking (a process called “metacognition,” which is one facet of mindfulness) and by focusing our attention.

For instance, if I’m trying to play less golf in order to spend more time with my family, and if I then find myself thinking about golf, I can consciously 1) recognize this and 2) select something different to focus my attention on. So when the thought comes into my head “This weather is perfect for golf,” I can then ask myself “Would it be perfect for doing something with my kids, too? What would be fun that we haven’t done in a while?” The more I think about that second, right thought, the less attention I’ll have to spare for that first, wrong thought.

Violence doesn’t solve anything
It’s useful to recognize that “right” thoughts aren’t just negations of “wrong” thoughts. The problem with trying to argue myself out of a “wrong” thought is that the more I mentally struggle with the problem, the more attention I’m giving it, and so the more opportunity the behavior I don’t want has to ensnare me. If I let that thought go and instead focus on letting something else appeal to me, then I can be led away peacefully rather than trying to defeat my own desires in mortal combat.

What tools are good for
With all of that said, thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts isn’t always easy, and it’s not always clear how to do it. Nor is it always easy to focus our attention on our own thinking enough to recognize when we’re getting drawn into non-constructive thinking. To make things easier, we come full circle to the kinds of skills I mentioned at the beginning of this post, skills for making ourselves more resilient, understanding ourselves better, redirecting ourselves more easily, and so on. Feedback loops, rules, tracking, idea repair, and all the other mental tools I talk about on this site help support the process of thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong ones. Regardless of what tools we use, taking charge of our own thoughts leads in the direction of achieving what we want to achieve.

Thinker photo by Rob Inh00d
Albatross photo by MrClean1982

Back in April I talked about this post on the New York Times blog, which seems to tell us that if we exert self-control in one area, it can cause us to have less self-control in other areas. Since then, I’ve come across a lot of information–studies, people’s stories of their experiences, my own experiences, books, and so on–that have helped me understand willpower a bit better. With this more informed perspective, I’d like to come back to the subject of self-control fatigue and ask: does willpower really get used up?

One goal at a time: focus, not fatigue
First, there’s one area where it’s become clear that not fatigue, but focus is the key. In the April post, I said “If we try to push in too many directions at once, we’ll rapidly become fatigued and usually lose our grip on all of the pieces. This is why, generally speaking, self-motivation works best when we work on one and only one kind of goal at a time.” Much information I’ve come across since writing that reinforces my conviction that as a rule, we have much better chances with new goals if we take on only one of them at a time–but because of focus instead of fatigue: if we try to take on two or more new goals at once, our attention is divided between them. This means less concentration on habits for each goal, less thinking about each goal, less recognizing of opportunities, less clarity, less mindfulness, and other kinds of limitations on how well we can really devote ourselves to our new goal. Since accomplishing a major goal usually means changing habits, and since habits are stubborn by definition, we usually need all the focus we can get when we take a new goal on.

Physiological energy and fatigue
The other aspect of self-control fatigue I talked about was physical energy: mentally exerting ourselves toward a goal takes a surprising amount of our available energy (and available blood sugar), which is what the Times blog post was focusing on regarding the study in question. Replenishing this energy with a little sugar fix (some lemonade) seemed to help. This particular point still stands, I would say: it’s harder to push for new goals when we’re tired, although it’s definitely still possible, especially if we’re well-prepared.

Is willpower a reservoir or a skill set?
But does this mean we use up willpower itself and need to regenerate it, or does it just mean that we use up our physical energy and have less of that to use in exerting our willpower? Just to share my current belief–this is nothing I’ve seen tested yet in any study, although that would certainly be of interest to me–I don’t think willpower really does get used up at all. What is willpower, after all? It’s often characterized as being like a reservoir or an electrical charge, something that we have a limited amount of and can use up. In reality, though, effectively exerting willpower isn’t really a matter of struggling against temptation and winning, at least not most of the time: instead, it’s a matter of learning and using the right skills to redirect ourselves. In other words, it requires learning and applying what we learn rather than brute force.

For instance, if I’m tempted to stay up late into the night to watch a movie I just received even though I know I need to be up early the next morning, it might be possible for me to dredge up a stern enough “No!” to force myself, resentfully, off to bed. But it’s definitely possible for me to ask myself questions like “Will I enjoy this movie just about as much if I watch it later?” and “Would it also be enjoyable right now to climb in bed and get some rest?” and “Will I be happier tomorrow morning if I watch this movie or if I hold off?” and “What if I just go get ready for bed, then see if I’m still as keen on watching the movie?”

All of these questions are strategies for looking at my situation in a different–and more complete–way, questions that can help me line up my actions with my long-term happiness instead of with whatever short-term pleasure offers itself–especially since, if I’m patient, I can often get some of the pleasure anyway without such a big cost.

But after that, I deserve to make bad choices!
A special situation that can make willpower seem like it’s getting “used up” is what schema therapy (of which more in future posts) calls the “entitlement schema,” the idea some of us often get that we deserve some pleasurable thing regardless of its effect on our long-term happiness. Having to exert willpower in one area can activate this schema, making it harder to exert willpower later. For instance, a person might think “I didn’t get to have that chocolate cake earlier, so now I deserve to eat this ice cream.” These kinds of statements sound like they make sense, but they really don’t when we examine them, because past good choices don’t make current bad choices any less bad. When I find myself running into problems like these, I try to remember to use idea repair to remind myself what’s really important.

An entitlement schema can make it seem like we’re using up willpower when all we may really be doing is having trouble reconciling ourselves to the good choices we’ve already made. This isn’t fatigue, just an attitude issue.

In the end, our mental resources are finite: we can only handle so much at once. But our mental resources also seem to often be much greater than we expect or give ourselves credit for, and even when it might seem for a moment like we’ve run out of willpower, if we search a little, we may find great untapped reserves ready to carry us forward–lemonade or no lemonade.

Photo by apesara

In gambling, winning streaks are a sucker’s bet, but with willpower, projects, and good habit formation, winning streaks are not only possible: they can be a highly effective tool for making on-and-off success into consistent success.

Why Winning Streaks Help
In matters of willpower, our tendency to see patterns and to get invested in scores and numbers can work in our favor. A winning streak is the kind of system that tends to attract our attention. It’s also a way of harnessing the power of rules.

Let’s say I’m trying to develop a habit of getting to work half an hour early every day. If I’ve been managing to arrive at that time a few times a week, I’ll probably be encouraged, because arriving early on some days is clearly an improvement over arriving early on no days. However, doing something 3 or 4 times out of 5 isn’t a good way to develop a habit: the habit will develop more quickly if I show up at the new time I’ve chosen every single day.

This is where a winning streak comes in: if I have been in at the new time 3 out of the last 3 days, and if I’ve started to keep track, I’m likely to care more about being in at the new time on the 4th day, and then on the 5th. Every time I show up early, my count goes up, and I establish a new record–my “score” gets higher. If I don’t get in early, it ruins my winning streak, and my count is back down to 0.

Small, But Easy to Focus On
If you’re thinking that these kinds of scores are trivial, in some ways you’re right. Yet winning streaks are useful because our brains don’t always pick out the most important information: they like patterns. They also like clear, simple, short-term goals. This is why video games, soap operas, and sports events can be so engrossing to so many people: it’s not because these things are important for themselves as that they offer simple, immediate problems that are either going to be solved or not solved in the short term, along with a structure we recognize and can judge.

A winning streak means we’re not overwhelming ourselves with the requirement to become fluent in Korean or lose 40 pounds or organize the entire house. Instead, we focus on the current day and the current task: learn 10 more Korean flash cards; track all of what I eat for the day, exercise for at least 20 minutes, and stay under my calorie limit; do the next item on the house organization list. If we do the little bit that needs to be done every day, the winning streak is maintained and the days mount up. And if on one particular day things go awry, that’s disappointing, but the new goal is pretty obvious: start over and try to “beat” the old score, the longest previous streak.

My Experience
I’ve been experimenting with winning streaks in my own life lately, and so far the results have been strong, and I’ll be trying them out in other areas.

I’ve have been losing weight and getting more fit for years: I’m down 60 pounds so far, and I’ve become stronger, fitter, and more energetic than I’ve ever been in my life. My eating habits have been good, but typically I’d eat well on average maybe 5 to 10 days in a row, then have one or more days when I got just far enough off track to temporarily stop my weight loss.

Applying the winning streak approach, I started by writing “Day 1” on the pad of paper where I keep track of what I eat, what exercise I do, and what I weigh. My task was to keep my food intake within 1700 calories each day (a level at which I know from experience I lose weight at a healthy rate) and to exercise on every day it was feasible. Each day do these things this counts as a “win.” So far, every single day has been successful. Today is day 24, and not only is this probably a record for me in terms of consecutive “perfect” days for weight loss, but I weigh 7 pounds less than I did on day 1. That breaks out to about 2 pounds a week, the highest weight loss rate that is probably healthy for me. I’ve even been through a number of disruptions during this time–illness, Thanksgiving, a trip out of town, eating out, and so on–but because I was on a winning streak, my attention remained focused on how I could keep on track for each of those days. For Thanksgiving I planned ahead with my family and brought some healthy foods along to the meal myself. On my trip I packed healthy food before I left and chose a restaurant to have lunch in with care. I have no doubt that I would have felt much less motivation to make things work in those particular, difficult situations if I hadn’t been trying to protect my winning streak–and getting motivation during those trickiest times is exactly where willpower needs to shine.

Want to Try It?
If you want to try using a winning streak yourself, you’ll need to know two things first: what your requirements are (exactly what do you have to do to “win” each day?) and what you need to have or know to be able to meet those requirements. For instance, you can’t plan to study Korean every day if you don’t yet have materials to study.

Most habits will benefit most if you do them every day, but if that’s not practical, you’ll want to establish an exact schedule, for instance “every business day” (which would be suitable for a job-related goal) or “every Monday, Thursday and Saturday except when ill.” Write down all the allowable exceptions at the beginning–it’s too easy to change the rules and wiggle out of things if you change the rules in the middle of the game.

Then just write “Day 1” … and start your winning streak.

Photo by cliff1066

Let’s say someone has been working on losing weight, but over Thanksgiving gave up and ate way, way too much. Or they were going to write 50,000 words this November for NaNoWriMo, yet here it is a few days from the end and they’re only 28,000 words in. Or they’ve gone back on a promise, done something they had vowed to stop doing, failed to stick with a new habit that they really wanted to keep up, or in any other way completely wiped out.

Often in situations like this, we’ll start telling ourselves in one way or another that whatever plans we have are now ruined. The promise is broken, the diet has failed, the project has flopped. It’s easy to lose all enthusiasm at this point and give up, to conclude that people who are successful at achieving difficult goals don’t have these kinds of setbacks. That conclusion would be wrong.

It’s true that failures on the way to a goal can cause a more than their share of trouble. If I’m trying to build a new habit, interruptions to the thing I’m trying to make habitual will make it take longer for the habit to form. If I suffer a setback, it can often create additional obstacles, because slip-ups erode momentum in the same way that taking initiative builds momentum.

Yet it’s clearly typical–in fact, I’d hazard a guess that it’s almost inevitable–for a person to have some failures on the way to successfully building a new habit or pursuing a goal if that goal is sufficiently challenging. For example, according to the American Cancer Society, “most of those who attempt [to quit smoking] cannot do it on the first try. In fact, smokers usually need many tries — sometimes as many as 8 to 10 — before they are able to quit for good.”

Another way to put it, as strange as it may sound, is that the kind of person most likely to succeed at a goal is someone who has already been working on it but has failed one or more times.

Yet knowing this probably doesn’t make you automatically feel like a winner. What will do that is getting back to working on your goal right away. It’s easy to fall for reasoning like “I’ve blown it anyway–a little more won’t hurt” or “I’ll recharge my batteries before I take another crack at it,” but that kind of logic is usually flawed, because whenever we let a setback “give you permission” to stick with old, bad habits for a while, or to stop something we were working on, we are strengthening and refreshing the behaviors we don’t want and letting the behaviors we do want fade in our minds. The neural connections we’re building by prolonging the interruption will make it easier to make wrong choices and harder to make right choices. We’re also often doing more damage that will have to be repaired once we get back on track, making restarting even harder.

We can learn from setbacks by analyzing what went wrong and coming up with ways to act differently in future. And we can cut off failures, keeping them to the shortest span possible, so that they become just blips on the graph. In practical terms, all a setback does is take away a little progress and lower our spirits. We can gain that ground back and raise our spirits at the same time by renewing our plans to pursue our goals and not letting the problems claim any more of our lives than they have to.

Photo from Cornell University Library.

The 9 Truths About Weight Loss
by Daniel S. Kirschenbaum, PhD

For anyone interested in weight loss, certain essential questions tend to come up again and again: Are there any shortcuts? What exactly do I need to eat? Do I have to exercise? If so, how much, how often, and in what way? Is it even possible for me to lose weight? What if I lose weight but then gain it right back? Does the process have to be painful? Will it make me happy? Why haven’t I been able to lose this weight and keep it off?

In The 9 Truths About Weight Loss, Professor of Psychiatry Daniel Kirschenbaum tackles–and in my opinion, largely answers–these questions and many others. Kirschenbaum is the director of the Center for Behavioral Medicine and has consulted for Weight Watchers and the U.S. Olympic Team, among other organizations, in addition to coaching literally thousands of clients successfully through the weight loss process. He really, really knows what he’s talking about, and unlike many diet “experts” generally doesn’t have a system to sell. His 9 Truths boil down to something like this: yes it’s hard, but it’s possible if you can find a way to commit to working hard at weight loss consistently and permanently.

In a little bit more detail, here are his 9 Truths, paraphrased:
1. Our bodies are designed to resist losing fat
2. However, the right behavior can overcome this biological tendency so that we can lose weight
3. Weight control is as feasible as any other athletic challenge
4. The three stages of weight control are Honeymoon, Frustration, and Acceptance
5. It’s possible to eat a very low-fat diet and still not feel overly hungry
6. Tracking your eating and exercise habits is key to weight loss
7. Exercising every day (or close to it) is a very effective route to weight loss
8. Eating reasonably can fit comfortably with managing stress
9. It’s easier to maintain weight loss you’ve already achieved than to lose weight in the first place

While I think Kirschenbaum’s book is excellent, I do feel it has some problems, most of them having to do with Kirschenbaum confusing some reasonable but not necessarily essential behaviors he has counseled his successful clients to take with required behaviors for weight loss. Many of Kirschenbaum’s conclusions about weight loss–for instance, that everything you eat “counts,” that the human body resists losing fat once it has acquired it, etc.–seem to be spot on. Others seem to be just his preferred way of advising people to lose weight.

As one example out of many, Kirschenbaum states “Almost all of the thousands of weight controllers with whom I have worked over the last twenty-five years, and who have succeeded at this difficult enterprise, have exercised primarily in the morning,” implying that this timing is important to successful weight loss. Speaking as someone who started losing weight four years ago, who has so far lost well over 50 pounds, and who has never gained back any significant amount of weight in those four years, I feel I should mention that I exercise almost exclusively at night, as do the lion’s share of other succcessful exercisers I know. I won’t debate the relative merits of morning vs. evening, and in fact it may be better to exercise in the morning if you can manage it, but the fact is that exercising very regularly seems to be much, much more important than exactly when you do it.

Kirschenbaum offers a variety of these recommendations that, based on my own experience and/or research I’ve come across, seem to be unnecessary, but the recommendations generally don’t seem to be problematic and are minor in scope. Reading the book with a little skepticism for very specific recommendations but profound respect for Kirschenbaum’s key points will improve almost anyone’s understanding of weight loss.

Kirschenbaum repeatedly talks about weight loss as an athletic goal, which is one of the most positive and useful ways of looking at it I’ve heard. Like a professional athlete, someone who wants to lose weight needs to become profoundly proactive about diet, exercise regime, and motivation. More than that, the goal isn’t to achieve some imagined ideal point and then stop doing anything, but rather to get to one’s highest level of performance and stay there.

Another area where Kirschenbaum shines is in providing solid information on motivating ourselves to lose weight, although he covers only certain facets of this very big subject. This leads into the only other major reservation I have about the book, which is that Kirschenbaum always talks about weight loss as a strenuous and often unpleasant thing to do. He’s certainly right that it takes a lot of effort and goes against the grain for most of our typical behavior, but the image he conveys of successful weight-controllers struggling grimly against an unforgiving biology fails to fully take into account the incredible array of ways we can motivate ourselves, change our thinking, and even take on new beliefs. My own weight loss efforts, which have become better-focused and more effective thanks to Kirschenbaum’s book, are definitely effortful–but they’re anything but unpleasant. For every ten or fifteen minutes of mild suffering at having to wait because it’s not time to eat yet, I get hours of pleasure at having a more energetic, leaner, and more capable body. Kirschenbaum does a great job of showing how and why weight loss is possible; any of us who work at weight loss will have to work on our own (or use resources like The Willpower Engine) to learn how and why weight loss can be enjoyable and fulfilling.

It’s one thing to maintain willpower in normal circumstances, in an environment you can control, after a lot of practice. It’s usually much more difficult to stick to your chosen path when circumstances change: travel, holidays, restaurants, vacations, celebrations, moves, new jobs, and so on. Thanksgiving through Christmas is like a parade of these kinds of issues, at least for anyone working on weight loss. Yet some people get through the holidays maintaining or reducing their weight, in the same way some people can go to restaurants full of unhealthy foods and find the good choices there. How does this happen?

The information in this post is specifically about weight loss, but these tactics work for any kind of challenge to willpower, and apply to sustaining any habit through a hard time. The tactics are 1) commit yourself, 2) get informed, 3) make a plan, 4) throw away illusions, 5) enlist help, and 6) resist attacks.

Commit Yourself
You can either let yourself go on the one hand, consuming huge quantities of food, feeling overstuffed, gaining weight, and possibly feeling unhappy about it; or you can commit to eating modestly and expending a lot of effort, avoiding a lot of foods you’ll probably really want to eat, being conspicuous, feeling much better than everyone else after the meal, and then maybe marveling at your success.

If you do want to eat a lot, probably no one will stop you–but if you’re deciding to eat healthily, you’ll need to commit yourself completely. Habit and tradition are generally too strong to be overcome without real resolve.

Get Informed
What foods will be at the event you’re going to? Which ones might be good choices for you to eat? Find out the calorie counts (or exchanges, etc.) for each one. Whatever system you use to track what you eat, apply it to the things you expect to see at the event you’re going to, so that you know for certain whether or not a sliver of pumpkin pie fits in your plans, or whether the potatoes or the cranberry sauce are a good idea. If you don’t have a system for tracking what you eat, you’ll almost certainly need one.

Make a Plan
If you expect trouble over the holidays, that’s an immediate indication that the habits you already have probably aren’t up to the challenge. So you’ll need to make specific plans for behavior–plans more advanced than a general intention to eat less. Willpower is not a vague energy that you can draw from the æther to apply to different situations by “just doing better”; it’s using mental tools to steer yourself into acting differently than you usually would.

What will you eat? How much will you eat? What will you do if the food you’re expecting to see isn’t there? What will you not eat? What will you say when someone tries to urge you to eat it, since after all, “it’s a holiday” or “it’s just this once” or “Martha made it herself” or “it doesn’t count”? What anti-hunger techniques will you use? (See “24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry” for some options.)

If you want better choices for food, considering making or bringing them yourself. Eating separate food from everyone else takes a little courage and makes you stand out. But it also demonstrates that you’re serious and committed.

Remember that you’ll need to plan for each event you go to, or else make rules that will keep you on the path for all events. It especially helps to have an emergency plan for unexpected events, like when someone brings cake into the office or you’re invited to dinner on short notice.

Throw Away Illusions
You may not need to hear these things, but in case you do: when you’re trying to lose weight, everything you eat “counts.” Your biology won’t care that it’s Thanksgiving. If you don’t get to eat something that looks good to you, you’re not owed any compensation. You don’t get any do-overs except that you can try again the next time an event comes up. Some people at the event may try to make you feel guilty for not eating; if they don’t have to haul the resulting fat cells around, though, they don’t get a vote.

Enlist Help
If you tell people in advance that you’re losing weight and really don’t want to gain it back over during the holidays, they have more of a chance to prepare themselves and to assist and support you. Walking in the door with your own meal in Tupperware when some one’s already gone to the trouble of making your favorite pie can cause trouble both with your relationships and your eating habits. Giving notice in advance can make it easier for others to help.

Not that everyone will necessarily want to help. Some people may feel that your work on your weight is an implied criticism of their own weight. Others may mistakenly think that trying to lose weight means that you think you “need” to lose weight to be a valuable person rather than that you’re just a valuable person who just wants to lose weight. Some people may be offended that you don’t stick to traditions or don’t eat what they’ve prepared. You’ll have to decide whether it’s more important to have their approval or to stick with your own priorities. It’s very easy to go with the approval; that’s the popular choice.

Resist Attacks
It’s very likely that someone will offer you food that doesn’t fit your plans–and maybe even try to insist. In addition, foods have a nefarious and evil way of offering themselves. Plan how you will resist these attacks and remind yourself that they are attacks when they occur (not in the sense of someone else intending to cause harm, but in the sense of posing immediate and real danger to your well-being). It sometimes helps to recognize the attraction before fighting it, for instance saying mentally “Yes, I could have some more mashed potatoes with gravy, and I would probably enjoy them. I ‘m just choosing not to.”

Specific ways to resist attacks are listed in that article on hunger I mentioned.

Holidays and special events aren’t easy to navigate. If, like me, you’re walking into the den of the beast with the intention of coming out lighter on the other side, good luck! Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds. (Added later: want to know how it went? Read the follow-up post.)

Photo by Donna Grayson

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard a lot of advice over time warning me not to push too hard at anything: “You have to ease into it” … “Moderation in all things” … “One step at a time.” It’s folk wisdom, founded in neither exceptional experience nor careful examination of the facts, and in many cases following it will ruin your chances at making any real progress toward your goals.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways that moderation applies. For instance, trying to pay a lot of attention to more than one thing at a time is a doomed approach to making big changes in your life. Also, it’s sometimes necessary to take things in steps for safety’s sake, like not trying to go directly from no exercise program to extremely intense workouts. Apart from that, it’s just plain bad advice, and there are five reasons that’s so.

1. The status quo likes to be kept
The habits you already have, the situation you’re already in, and the choices you’re used to making are deeply ingrained. We’ve piled on connections in our brains to strengthen certain behaviors–these are our habits–and those strong behaviors need a lot of effort to overcome. The people in our lives expect us to act certain ways and may get anxious or even interfere if we change, even if we change in a healthy way. Activities we’re not used to turn out to have complications we haven’t solved yet and requirements we didn’t know about. Even a body that’s used to maintaining or increasing fat stores has physical mechanisms to prevent losing those fat stores too easily. If we want to overcome these obstacles, the most effective approach is usually to push hard–not to try something small and see if it makes an impact, because often it won’t.

2. Habits form much more quickly when behaviors are repeated close together
I’ve mentioned in a post about habit formation that in a study designed to determine how long it took people to form new habits, the only people who were actually successful at forming new habits during the study period were those who repeated the desired behavior virtually every single day. It is possible to form a habit by doing something three times a week or every four or five days, but it will take much, much longer than if you do that thing daily, and the results will take much longer to show.

3. Intense work on a goal provides quicker rewards
One of the problems with trying to change habits or pursue a goal is that often it’s hard to see whether we’re making progress, and if so, how much. This can easily lead to discouragement and apathy. By contrast, if we throw ourselves into working on a goal, the results are faster, more dramatic, and more motivating.

4. Immersion fosters momentum, focus, and smarter choices
When we are very active with something, working hard at it, we become immersed in that activity: we think about it more, we tend to become more committed to it, and we become more aware of opportunities. We also create momentum. For example, a writer who writes every day doesn’t have to spend the first part of each writing session brushing up on what went before, getting plans back in mind, etc.: the memories of the work are fairly fresh and therefore more detailed and easier to access.

When we’re more involved in a goal and therefore thinking about it more, we also make more connections in our minds regarding the goal and think of more ways to further our intentions.

5. Hard work makes goals into rules
I’ve talked elsewhere about how rules promote better self-control. The short version is this: if you have a rule that you’re trying to follow, and if the rule is well-designed, then whenever the rule applies, your choice is both clear-cut and obvious.

Of course, having a rule doesn’t automatically mean you’ll follow that rule all the time, but it does make it much more likely than if you didn’t have a rule. Without rules, we tend to talk ourselves into sticking with the behaviors we’re used to more often, which is not an effective way to change habits or improve our lives.

Doing hard work on a goal every day takes a lot of the waffling out of choices about that goal. For example, if I decide to do 30 minutes of filing in my office every day until my files are pristine, then I never have to ask myself “Should I do some filing today? I don’t know … there’s so much other stuff I need to get done …” Instead, I simply ask myself when I’m going to start. A lot of the nonsense gets brushed aside.

Sound extreme?
Does this kind of no-moderation approach sound extreme? If so, you’ve understood me perfectly. Extreme effort has a much better chance of providing meaningful progress than trying to ease in slowly, and yes, it can be a lot to get used to at first. But if you’ve ever had trouble making real progress toward a goal, ask yourself how hard you’ve pushed. If you’ve tried taking it easy on yourself, consider trying again–and this time not holding anything back. For most of us, going flat out will result in some discomfort, but the same is true even of moderate approaches. With an extreme approach, much of the early effort will pay off even if things aren’t done perfectly, and you won’t be left wondering any more whether change is possible, because you’ll see the evidence in front of you.

Photo by renatela

While we often focus on how willpower operates at the moments when we need it, there are some aspects of willpower that function best if they’re prepared beforehand. A couple of examples might demonstrate what I mean.

Running up against no-win situations
1. A business owner plans a meeting with a prospective client. Knowing that she tends to be late, she resolves to pay extra attention to being on time. On the day of the meeting, she works on her marketing plan for much of the morning before remembering that she has to complete some important work for another client before she goes. She rushes through the task, but by the time it’s done she’s running behind, and she realized belatedly that she still needs to gather some papers before she leaves. She decides she can’t afford the time to find the papers, hurries to the meeting, arrives 20 minutes late, and is very anxious during her presentation–particularly since she doesn’t have the materials she was planning on bringing.

2. A man has recently started to eat more healthily and has resolved not to eat some of the foods that he used to love because his doctor has warned him of the danger of serious heart problems. He decides late in the afternoon to take his wife to dinner and lets her pick the restaurant. At the restaurant they have many of his old favorites that he has been trying to avoid and not much else that sounds appealing. He ends up ordering something that sounds a little healthier than his usual fare but turns out to be pretty much just as bad. His recent successes with healthy foods doesn’t feel so inspiring any more.

When no-win situations can be won in advance
In both of these examples, the individual is relying completely on acting well when the key decision–to leave on time, to choose something healthy–comes. The woman doesn’t consider making special plans to ensure she won’t be late, and the man assumes that eating right means just deciding well when he gets to the restaurant. Yet when the moment of truth comes along, the woman finds she is still busy with another priority, one she can’t set aside, and the man finds he has few good options.

Both of these situations show people who are trying to change habits using a “business as usual” approach. The problem with this is that changing habits by definition means not doing what we’re used to doing. Both the businesswoman and the man who is trying to protect his health are assuming that if they “just try harder” in some indefinable way, they will succeed. “Just trying harder” doesn’t work: what works is trying differently. In these examples, trying differently means preparing.

So how might the situations come out if the people involved prepare? Let’s take a look.

Using preparation to make willpower easier
1. A business owner plans a meeting with a prospective client. Knowing that she tends to be late, she decides to schedule the time she has before the meeting to ensure that she leaves not just on time, but 10 minutes early. She calculates how much time that will leave her in the morning and reviews her obligations. This shows her that she has to complete some important work for another client before she leaves, and that therefore she’ll need to start on that important work first thing in the morning. She would also like to work on her marketing plan, and thinks she might have time to complete that too, but she makes sure she schedules it second just in case. She completes the work for the other client in the morning and sends it out an hour and a half before it’s time to go. Then she sets an alarm clock for five minutes before departure time and begins work on the marketing plan. She’s not finished with the marketing plan when the alarm goes off, but she gets up and gathers her things. She realizes she needs to get some papers to bring with her and spends ten minutes getting them, but since she had built in a small buffer, she still arrives at her meeting a few minutes early, fully prepared.

2. A man has recently started to eat more healthily and has resolved not to eat some of the foods that he used to love because his doctor has warned him of the danger of serious heart problems. He decides late in the afternoon to take his wife to dinner, but realizes that unless they go to a place with something healthy he likes to eat, he might be in danger of ordering one of his old favorites. He talks with his wife and picks a restaurant that sells a lot of deep-fried foods but that also has a salad bar he likes. On the way to pick up his wife he realizes that he should do everything he can to prevent buying something fried, so he resolves to refuse a menu and preemptively order the salad bar. At the restaurant, the waitress tries to press the menu on him just so that he can see all the options, but he insists that he would like the salad bar even before they sit down. He has the salad bar and it’s pretty good, even if it’s not as good as the chicken fried steak and cheddar cheese soup he would usually have eaten. He even chooses to have the vinaigrette instead of his usual ranch dressing. He does eat some of his wife’s french fries, but not very many.

Perfection is optional
In the examples with preparation, both the business owner and the health-minded man still made mistakes. The business owner could clearly benefit from even more planning, and the health-minded man would do better to completely ignore his wife’s food–but both of them were essentially very successful, and their success was based not on somehow summoning up powerful reserves of self-control, but on steering their own behavior through preparation, and on recognizing their limitations.

All that effective preparation requires to aid willpower is a willingness to look into the future and think about the places where we’re vulnerable to fall into bad habits. In some cases, preparation can get us out of impossible situations (like needing to finish a project before leaving but also needing not to be late), and in others it can just make good choices easier (like providing an acceptable alternative to deep-fried food).

There is no substitute for a good choice
Preparation isn’t a substitute for making good decisions, though: the business owner could have chosen to work “just a little longer” on the marketing plan and ended up late after all, and the health-minded man could have taken the menu from the waitress just to avoid seeming unpleasant, then ended up ordering something he ultimately didn’t want to be eating. Good choices here means surrendering to our own priorities, giving up on the idea of finishing the marketing plan right away and being willing to seem a little unfriendly to the waitress if those things turn out to be  necessary for sticking to our goals.

What’s your greatest difficulty with willpower or self-motivation? Is there anything you could easily do ahead of time to tip those kinds of situations in your favor?

Photo by .imelda