Who knew depending on willpower could take up so much energy? If you find you are feeling too tired to discover your purpose and live your calling, reducing your dependence on willpower in your life can help free up some much needed energy.
In our book, “SPLASH! Increase Your Life’s Impact,” we talk about an interesting study on willpower. It shows that willpower is like a muscle you can wear out. Test subjects had to resist the temptation to eat fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies for quite a while before they took a test. They did not know that the test was a puzzle that was unsolvable. Researchers measured how long the subjects worked on the puzzle before giving up.
Researchers found that people who had to resist those yummy cookies gave up significantly earlier than people who did not have to resist something so tempting. The willpower people used to resist temptation meant they had less willpower to apply to another problem.
What does this study mean for us? It suggests that we should be discerning about where we choose to use our willpower. Since it might not be readily apparent where we’re using willpower, following is a list to get us thinking:
- Getting out to exercise
- Eating healthy foods
- Avoiding unhealthy foods
- Drinking plenty of water
- Getting to bed on time
- Doing chores and errands
- Remembering to take care of appointments and fulfilling other responsibilities
- Reading and doing other personal development disciplines
- Limiting time on social media, Internet, TV, and video games
When we don’t have systems in place to help us with these things, we will either need to rely on willpower or simply default to the path of least resistance. So it’s helpful to identify where we could use some adjustments in our lives. Then we can start to set up some things that will help us reduce our dependence on willpower.
Basically, there are three ways to reduce our need for willpower:
- Make it easier to do things we should do
- Make it more difficult to do things we shouldn’t do
- Make it easier to remember things
In our book, we offer lots of practical suggestions. Here I’ve included a couple of my favorites.
Reminders
Personally, I live by reminders on my phone, for example:
- Feed, water and relieve my guide dog
- Send out reminder emails to the book study group
- Post my goals to our mastermind group
- Set a doctor appointment
If it’s really important, I might have a calendar event that will remind me as well as an alarm. Smart phones with their apps make it a lot easier to not have to expend energy on remembering things and watching the clock all the time.
Remove Temptation
Honestly, if we have sweets in the house, they won’t last long. We’re better off enjoying those when we go out. Similarly, removing addictive games from the phone or computer can go a long way toward better time management.
These suggestions may seem like small potatoes in the big scheme of things. Remember, though, that the energy we expend is cumulative. The energy we don’t use on relying on willpower can be applied to more important things instead. Our biggest concern is that you have enough energy to apply to discerning your calling and making a real difference in the lives of other people.
Where can you make some adjustments in your life to reduce your reliance on willpower?
