Increase Your Willpower: Why New Habits Can Be Hard to Form

Have you ever tried creating a new habit, such as eating only healthy food, only to find yourself unable to exert the self-control needed to make the habit permanent? It's not your imagination that you "run out" of willpower!

When you try to improve an aspect of yourself, you face a dilemma. The positive change you're making will likely result in increased happiness and well-being. But to create the change, you must exercise self-discipline. Once the new action becomes habitual, your body will spring to action without your needing to think about making the "right" choice. You'll automatically ignore the cookies in favor of celery sticks instead of having to remind yourself that sweets are on your do-not-eat list.

The challenge is that everyone has a limited amount of self-control. If your self-control "muscle" doesn't have enough strength or endurance, you are likely to be unable to exert self-control consistently until your new habit forms. To ensure that you can make your self-control last long enough to cement a new habit, it's important to use effective habit-forming strategies.

Before discussing what strategies to use, let's discuss how self-regulation works. Self-regulation relies on a limited resource and can become depleted. Think of self-regulation as a muscle. When lifting weights, your muscles become tired. However, the more you lift weights, the more endurance you develop. During your first weight-lifting session, you may be able to complete only one set of exercises. After weeks of regular lifting, not only can you repeat several sets of the exercises, but you'll also be able to lift heavier weights.

The same principle is at play when exercising self-control. You deplete your reserves of self-regulation in the short-term by use, but you increase your reserves in the long-term by regularly exercising self-control. In addition, as you exercise self-control in one domain, your self-control improves in other domains. For example, as you become more disciplined about exercise and eating well, you'll find it easier to exert the self-control needed to curb your impulse buying. It’s been proven in the laboratory that people who are told to resist eating freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies give up working on a difficult task much more quickly than those who were permitted to eat the chocolate chip cookies!

How and why you exert self-control will impact how much of your reserve is used, just as some forms of exercise require more energy than others. Self-determination theory (SDT) describes a key to establish a desirable habit without overly taxing your self-control: Your autonomy, which is your willingness and ability to take control of your actions, decisions and life. SDT’s autonomy continuum shows that individuals range from unmotivated (amotivation) at one extreme, through motivated by conditions imposed from outside the self (extrinsic motivation ), to self-motivated (intrinsic motivation ) at the other extreme.

Where you fall on the autonomy continuum influences how much of your self-control reserves must be consumed to perform a certain behavior – in this case, the new behavior that you are trying to turn into a permanent habit. When you perform a behavior because it is in alignment with your own interests, motivations, or values – that is, it's intrinsically motivated – you consume less of your self-control reserves. Therefore, you should strive to establish habit by integrating the new behavior with our own values.

SDT states that we internalize our motivation through our basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. It’s important that you believe that you are free to pursue a particular action, can accomplish the action, and have relationships and social structures that support the action you want to take. This is known as coherence. Another way to internalize your motivation is by finding congruence, which means that the new behavior is a natural fit with other behaviors you've already mastered. Coherence and congruence give you the sense that you're in alignment in all ways … not only among and between your actions and values, but also among and between your body, mind, and culture. The more in alignment your new behaviors are, the less self-control you need to exert to make establish the habit.

Let's look at the example of a healthy lifestyle. According to SDT, if you decide that you want to adopt healthier habits and those healthy habits affirm your own values about yourself, making healthy choices will burn up less of your self-control reserves than if you feel forced into the lifestyle change by your doctor, for example. Likewise, if you believe that you can successfully improve your lifestyles and your have the support of your friends and family, it burns up less of your reserve than if you have a defeatist attitude and your spouse insists on stocking the cupboards with food you can't eat.

Similarly, if you already engage in habits that support your health, such as drinking lots of water, getting a full night's sleep and exercising daily, it will be easier to adopt healthy eating habits . You won't need to exert as much willpower to make good food choices because doing so fits nicely into your healthy lifestyle. However, if you are a couch potato, choose soda and coffee over water, and sleep minimally, adopting healthy eating habits will require a lot of mental focus. You will burn through your reserves of self-control more quickly; therefore, you will be more likely to fail.

So does this mean that you should avoid trying to establish new habits that don't fit with your current lifestyle? Of course not! Instead, be aware of the many factors that influence how much willpower you will need to expend as you implement new changes. If you know that the changes you want to make will require a lot of effort, don't try to establish too many habits at once. Instead, pick a small, specific step and stick to it. For instance, instead of deciding to change your entire diet at once, start by cutting out soft drinks or snacking while watching TV. Above all, have patience! Running low on willpower isn't a character flaw or sign of weakness. It's a normal response in certain situations. Remember that having to exert self-control in another area in your life, such as in a stressful workplace, will reduce your willpower in other areas in your life. If you "fail," say, by gorging on cake one night, assess how depleted your self-control reserve was and what role that played in your decision to make an unhealthy food choice. Then forgive yourself and get back on track with establishing your new healthy habits.