Running On Empty

What I want to share with you today is something that you probably already know or at least you've experienced it, but you may not know that you know it. When I tell you what I'm talking about, you may read it and think, "No one has ever explained that to me, but it makes complete sense!" So, rather than make you read too much to find out, I'll tell you now. Did you know that your willpower gets depleted as you use it? In other words, the more you use your willpower, the less you have until you stop using it and allow it to recharge or refill, much like the gas tank in your car.

Now, that may sound odd to you at first, but let me ask you this. Have you ever committed to a new habit or resolution only to find that after about a week or two, you just couldn't do it any more? The obvious examples are diets or exercise. You decide that you are going to eat healthy and you do for the first week or so, but then one day you just can ignore those chips or brownies any longer and you binge, eating the whole bag or pan. Don't worry, you're not alone! Every human has a "reserve" of willpower that gets used up and makes resistance or commitment so much harder. So what then? Are we forever resigned to go through a cycle of discipline and then binge? Well, if you only ever rely on your own willpower, to be blunt, yes. But the good news is that there are ways to keep that from happening!

The key to this equation is that something that becomes a habit, requires little to no willpower to do. You don't have to deplete those stores of willpower every time you exercise if exercise has become a habit for you. So the underlying question or battle is not, how do I get better at resisting these things, but rather how do we create habits in our lives that make resisting or committing easier? When you create positive habits in your life, it will, by necessity, push out or reduce negative habits. And the key to creating positive habits is a little thing call activation energy.

Now I'm going to use my engineering background and get a little nerdy on you, so please forgive me. Activation energy is very similar with static friction or surface tension. It takes much more energy to get something moving initially than it does to keep it moving. If you've ever tried to push a dead car, you know what I'm talking about. You expend most of your energy getting the car rolling and once it's rolling, it doesn't require much to keep it going. Our bodies, and activation energy, operate the exact same way. If you want to create a positive habit, you need to lower the activation energy for that activity and conversely, if you want to remove a bad habit from your life, raise the activation energy level for it. Let's look at an example or two to get the idea.

Let's say you want to start exercising every morning. The activation energy to do that are things like waking up early, getting dressed, and resisting hitting the snooze button. So how do you lower the activation energy? You should make sure to get to bed earlier, you could actually sleep in your workout closes, you could move your alarm clock across the room. Each one of these small things makes it harder for you to go back to bed and easier to actually get up and work out. And in doing that, you are using much less of that willpower we talked about earlier. It's the same reason that experts say to "clean out" your cupboards of all the chips and cookies and fill your fridge with fresh fruits and vegetables if you are starting a commitment to eating more healthy. It takes much more activation energy to drive to the store and buy a box of cookies then it does to open the fridge and grab some carrots that have already been cut.

Spend some time thinking about the habits you want to create or remove from your life and look for ways to raise the activation energy on those bad habits and to lower it for those good ones. You will find that not only are you able to stick to your commitments better, but that you have reserves of willpower that you can use when you really need them!

Source: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor