The Willpower Instinct (book)

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🔼Topic:: Will Power (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Willpower can be increased - Situations that demand willpower exhaust this finite resource, but as any physical exhausting case, we can have more willpower by either increasing the total amount (of energy we have), or to train better (acting requires less energy), or both. Increasing energy is through healthy lifestyle of sleeping and exercise, train better is through having smaller wins for momentum and more designed environment.
2. Alignment is critical - Have moments to pause and consider what you are doing, make sure that you focus not on your results, but on who you are and who you want to be, and the process that will get you there.
3. Be compassionate to yourself - Resisting temptations is hard, and when we are self criticizing, it only leads us further down the rabbit hole of negative behavior. Acknowledge that you made a mistake, forgive yourself for it, and focus on next time and how you can do it better.
4. Make it easy - There are ways to make decisions easier. Either through gamification, commitment devices, thinking about future self, or using others as a way to be more accountable.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? The book is filled with examples and opportunities to implement the content of each chapter in our daily lives. The chapters are organized nicely and its easy to follow along.

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong... At some point it feels like the author is trying too hard the make the language simple and approachable, like she's talking to a child, with unnecessary examples like fighting a tiger, etc...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

🖼️Outline

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Intro

Goal Setting is not enough, we all need willpower to commit to our plans. The first step would be to understand when and how it works, and also when it fails.

INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101

• the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control.

I Will, I Won't, I Want: What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters

Willpower is our way to act according to "I will, I wont, I want". Willpower is the result of our primal survival mechanisms, which can sometimes work against us, but to succeed, we must work "with" it, not against it. Life as Flow The brain has the remarkable capability of adjusting based on what it does, like a muscle, so by training our willpower we will become better at it. Allostasis the first step in improving our willpower is to have Self-awareness, understand when it fails and when we use it.

I Will, I Won’t, I Want: What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters

• To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want.
• People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it.
• Though our survival system doesn’t always work to our advantage, it is a mistake to think we should conquer the primitive self completely.
• Part of succeeding at your willpower challenges will be finding a way to take advantage of, and not fight, such primitive instincts.
• You need to recognize when you’re making a choice that requires willpower; otherwise, the brain always defaults to what is easiest.
• When your mind is preoccupied, your impulses—not your long-term goals—will guide your choices.
• Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do.
• Every willpower challenge is a battle among these different versions of ourselves. To put the higher self in charge, we need to strengthen the systems of self-awareness and self-control.

The Willpower Instinct: Your Body Was Born to Resist Cheesecake

Willpower is a finite resource, and there are ways to make more of it. Willpower is Limited

1. Pause and plan - whenever you are in a situation that requires willpower, Pause, breathe, and think about what you want to do. Self Reflection
2. Exercise regularly to make you healthier but also with more willpower exercise
3. Sleep at least 7 hours a day, and have relaxation moments during the day Sleep

Willpower will always be finite, so accept that you can't control everything, and pick your battles wisely. Acceptance

The Willpower Instinct: Your Body Was Born to Resist Cheesecake

• The fight-or-flight response is one of nature’s greatest gifts to mankind: the built-in ability of your body and brain to devote all of their energy to saving your butt in an emergency.
• The most helpful response will be to slow you down, not speed you up (as a fight-or-flight response does). And this is precisely what the pause-and-plan response does.
• Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered.
• When the sleep-deprived catch a better night’s sleep, their brain scans no longer show signs of prefrontal cortex impairment.
• To preserve both your health and happiness, you need to give up the pursuit of willpower perfection. Even as you strengthen your self-control, you cannot control everything you think, feel, say, and do. You will have to choose your willpower battles wisely.
• To succeed at our willpower challenges, we need to find the state of mind and body that puts our energy toward self-control, not self-defense.

Too Tired to Resist: Why Self-Control Is Like a Muscle

We supposedly have a paradox. On the one hand, willpower is limited. The brain has developed to add checks and balances and have an "energy budget", that's why it will shut down our willpower abilities if it thinks that we are starting to run low, saving energy for "when it really matters", so somethings things like consuming sugar can increase our willpower levels. But this could also indicate that a sense of fatigue is not our true limit, just a failsafe. This also shows that cases where people make bad decisions are not because they are irrational or unaware, they are just fatigued Burnout. But in the long run, willpower is a muscle like any other muscle, which means that training will make it better. By practicing small acts of willpower regularly, we can improve our willpower capacities in the long run. Start Small

Too Tired to Resist: Why Self-Control Is Like a Muscle

• People who use their willpower seem to run out of it.
• self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely,
• If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength.
• What appears in our modern world as a loss of control may actually be a vestige of the brain’s instinct for strategic risk-taking. To prevent starvation, the brain shifts to a more risk-taking, impulsive state.
• committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower.
• we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are.
• people who are free to choose anything most often choose against their long-term interests. Research on the limits of self-control suggests that this is not because we are innately irrational, or because we are making deliberate decisions to enjoy today and screw tomorrow. Instead, we may simply be too tired to act against our worst impulses.
• We cannot control everything, and yet the only way to increase our self-control is to stretch our limits.

License to Sin: Why Being Good Gives Us Permission to Be Bad

in cases of willpower tests, we often encounter various forms of Moral Licensing, the fact that we did (or are about to do) a good thing, no matter how small, can give us an excuse to do something bad, no matter how big. This is also combined with the Halo effect, that seeing a virtuous signal in something can make us forget its negative implications, like a "fat free" cookie that we will consume endlessly since it allows us to forget the high levels of sugar.

To reduce cases of moral licensing, we need to do 2 things:

1. Ignore the progress and focus on the system - instead of patting ourselves on the back each time we make progress, we simply must continue to focus on our inputs, our habits and rules to keep our behavior on the right track. Trust the Process.
2. connect our identity with the goal - change starts from the inside out. Moral licensing is more common when we feel that doing good is "forced" on us, that our true desire is to avoid it and "trick the system". Only by recognizing that we who really are is the person who wants to continue to do good, can we avoid moral licensing.

License to Sin: Why Being Good Gives Us Permission to Be Bad

• moral licensing. When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad.
• In the moment of temptation, you need your higher self to argue more loudly than the voice of self-indulgence. However, self-control success has an unintended consequence: It temporarily satisfies—and therefore silences—the higher self.
• focusing on progress can hold us back from success. That’s not to say that progress itself is a problem. The problem with progress is how it makes us feel—and even then, it’s only a problem if we listen to the feeling instead of sticking to our goals.
• When we want permission to indulge, we’ll take any hint of virtue as a justification to give in.
• Anything that lets us feel like we have done our part—so we can stop thinking about the problem—we will jump at.
• Moral licensing turns out to be, at its core, an identity crisis. We only reward ourselves for good behavior if we believe that who we really are is the self that wants to be bad. From this point of view, every act of self-control is a punishment, and only self-indulgence is a reward.

The Brain’s Big Lie: Why We Mistake Wanting for Happiness

dopamine is the driver of our motivation. It is generated by the Expectations of rewards. Its stronger when the reward is uncertain or the conditions for getting it are unknown. It gives us the will to want certain things, but its' not directly linked to happiness. It is also likely that once we achieve the reward, we will feel empty or depressed, and even anxious while chasing the reward.

We can use dopamine to our advantage by Gamification or introducing rewards to our good behaviors, which will generate better motivation than ambiguous long-term advantages. Unfortunately, we can't just shut off dopamine for "negative" things such as food, drugs, social media, etc... This will also not make us content, but rather depressed or apathetic. We might still enjoy things, but we won't have the motivation to start doing them.

The Brain’s Big Lie: Why We Mistake Wanting for Happiness

• We are driven to chase pleasure, but often at the cost of our well-being. When dopamine puts our brains on a reward-seeking mission, we become the most risk-taking, impulsive, and out-of-control version of ourselves.
• dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy. It doesn’t mind putting a little pressure on us—even if that means making us unhappy in the process.
• We humans find it nearly impossible to distinguish the promise of reward from whatever pleasure or payoff we are seeking.
• When we free ourselves from the false promise of reward, we often find that the thing we were seeking happiness from was the main source of our misery.
• When our reward system is quiet, the result isn’t so much total contentment as it is apathy.
• What the Hell: How Feeling Bad Leads to Giving In
• where we turn for relief matters. The promise of reward—as we’ve seen—does not always mean that we will feel good.
• Terror management strategies may take our minds off our inevitable demise, but when we turn to temptation for comfort, we may inadvertently be quickening our race to the grave.
• We may think that guilt motivates us to correct our mistakes, but it’s just one more way that feeling bad leads to giving in.
• If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong.
• it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability.
• the promise of change—like the promise of reward and the promise of relief—rarely delivers what we’re expecting. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on.
• we must avoid the common trap of using the promise of change to fix our feelings, not to fix our behaviors.

What the Hell, How Feeling Bad Leads to Giving In

Stress usually has the opposite result of what we expected, stress can often lead us to do more of the bad behavior, because in times of stress, our mind will direct us to what it expects to bring us calm and happiness, usually things like food, shopping, drugs, any type of instate gratification Escapism.

Similarly, feeling Guilt after a bad behavior usually only makes us more likely to repeat it. We have the "what-the-hell" effect, knowing that we have already crossed our line, it doesn't matter by how much.

A third tactic is to have a Clean Slate, promising ourselves that "next time we will do better". This is also a trap since usually we do these promises to solve our pain or disappointment, not to fix our behavior. So the expected result is failing at that new promise, which will lead again to stress and guilt.

These are our usual methods of "terror management", which are the ways we deal with negative emotions. However there is a better solution. Self-compassion resolves us from these negative emotions, and lets us see more clearly what has happened, and how can we learn from that. it allows us to feel that What we do is not who we are. Forgiving ourselves, remembering that everyone has bad days and relapse sometimes is to only way to get back on track.

Putting the Future on Sale: The Economics of Instant Gratification

the main reason why we usually choose short-term gratification over our long-term goals is that we have Present Bias, which means that we value the future less than we do the present. Possible ways to combat this are:

1. have commitment devices - Have Commitment Devices that will force you to act in the way that would support the "future you", like losing money if you don't reach your goal, or spend too much time on social media
2. Have the "10 minute rule" - whenever you are about to fall for temptation, tell yourself you'll do it in 10 minutes, and use those 10 minutes to reflect if you really want to do this. Delay Gratification
3. Connect to your future self - we tend to over-commit when its future self that's going to pay the price, but under-commit when its present us on the line. The more we feel that future self is the same as us, not a remote perfect version, or a stranger, to more likely it is we will be able to make decisions that are good for both versions of "you". harmonious self

Putting the Future on Sale: The Economics of Instant Gratification

• If the tempted self, with its reversed preferences, is allowed to do what it wants, the result will ultimately be self-sabotage.
• we are more likely to save our present selves from anything too stressful, but burden our future selves like we would a stranger.
• To make wiser decisions, we need to better understand and support our future selves. And we need to remember that the future self who receives the consequences of our present self’s actions is, indeed, still us, and will very much appreciate the effort.

Infected! Why Willpower Is Contagious

we tend to imitate others. Whether is it due to our Mirror neurons, or our desire for social acceptance Social Environment. We tend to act based on what we think others will appreciate or at least accept, and usually the best proxy is what we think others are doing. That means that: a. bad behavior can spread just as easily (and sometimes more easily) than good behavior b. the more we are socially close to someone, we will imitate his behavior more c. social salience matters - the more the behavior is visible and wide-known, the higher the chances it will be imitated. Visibility

When others don't behave according to the norm, we tend to use shame as a social correction tool, to inform and deter others from breaking the norm. However, as we seen previously, shame and negative emotions can only set us back to do the harmful behavior again. Therefore, the answer is positive reinforcement and pride. Rewarding positive behavior is a good way to spread it.

Infected! Why Willpower Is Contagious

• our individual choices are powerfully shaped by what other people think, want, and do—and what we think they want us to do.
• Both bad habits and positive change can spread from person to person like germs, and nobody is completely immune.
• goal contagion is limited to goals you already, at some level, share.
• When we observe evidence of other people ignoring rules and following their impulses, we are more likely to give in to any of our own impulses.
• It is not enough to come into contact with a person who is a “carrier” of the behavior. Your relationship to that person matters.
• Our sense of self depends on our relationships with others, and in many ways, we only know who we are by thinking about other people. Because we include other people in our sense of self, their choices influence our choices.
• If we want people to have more willpower, we need to make them believe that self-control is the norm.
• Rather than shame people for their willpower failures, we would do far better by offering social support for willpower successes.

Don’t Read This Chapter: The Limits of “I Won’t” Power

Trying to control our thoughts usually has the opposite result. The law of reverse effect Not only that we tend to think more about the thing we're trying to avoid, but even more likely to do it. So trying to suppress thoughts about temptations is not helpful and even harmful. The solution is:

1. to be mindful of these thoughts without judgment. Judgment will lead to anxiety and stress, which we have seen that it has negative effects. By surfing the urge, the craving will have less effect on the long run. mindfulness
2. Also, we can try and focus on the positive - thinking about what we can do instead of what we don't want to. Optimism

Don’t Read This Chapter: The Limits of “I Won’t” Power

• We estimate how likely or true something is by the ease with which we can bring it to mind. This can have unsettling consequences when we try to push a worry or desire out of our minds.
• thought suppression doesn’t just make it more likely that we’ll think something—it makes us compelled to do the very thing we’re trying not to think of.
• self-awareness, self-care, and remembering what matters most—are the foundation for self-control.

Conclusion

Final Thoughts

• Self-awareness is the one “self ” you can always count on to help you do what is difficult, and what matters most.