How Willpower Fails You

if you really want your life to be easy you don't even need willpower all of the progress that you want in life is overcoming your internal stuff it's to actually control these other four variables in order to make self-control effortless what we need is a lot of people live very high friction lives that means that they rely on their willpower to overcome the other parts of themselves this is a battle you can win but it is a war you will lose because one day your willpower won't be there you'll run out eventually now this is

a very common problem so as we go through life we realize I need more willpower and everyone says be disciplined be have willpower because it's things like willpower desire willpower helps us sometimes but desire motivation ambition this is what drives us but the challenge is that as we start to exert willpower sometimes we'll get this burst of activity where I'm working really hard and it works great for a week and then all of these old patterns start to emerge so how do we understand this stuff should I use willpower should I not use willpower is

it good or is it bad so in order to understand this we need to understand human behavior and then we will see what role willpower has and then we will also see why a yogic perspective and doing things like getting rid of all of your ambition actually helps you in the long run hey all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health and so we start by understanding what literally is meditation how does experience shape us as

human beings how do we strengthen the Mind itself as an organ and so by understanding our mind we understand a very very simple tool a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today so when a human being acts there are five sources of action within a human being the first is desire I want something right so there's an internal motivation that kind of goes in a particular particular direction the second

reason that we Act is a habit so there's a lot of action that happens within humans that is automatic the third reason that we Act is an emotion so if we look at what what is the reason we have emotions emotions are sources of information and sources of motivation so if I'm walking down the street and I see I don't know a giant snake this triggers an emotional reaction that causes me to run away or run forward and try to hug it depending on what my emotion is and then there is some kind of other

let's just call it an internal motivation because there may be other things within us things like ambition right so ambition is you can maybe uh describe it as a desire but let's just say that there's like kind of this fourth category so when I say that there's an internal motivation and desire these are two different things what do I mean by that what I'm talking about is neuroscientifically so if you look at your desire to do something there are two parts of the brain that are active one is your nucleus succumbent this is the pleasure

or dopamine Circuit of the brain so when you feel like playing a video game it's not like ambition it is the nucleus succumbent is telling you hey we want to spurt a dopamine let's do this pornography Doom scrolling playing video games eating healthy food all of these trigger the nucleus succumbent but what we know is that some amount of motivation or the desire to act does not come from the nucleus succumbent in fact there are parts of our brain this is more of the serotonergic system which Longs for things like fulfillment contentment security that's not

the nucleus of okay so we literally have two parts of the brain this is maybe the anterior singulate cortex as an example the serotonergic system versus the dopamine system and both of these will drive our Behavior okay so now what about willpower because I said there's five right so now let's understand willpower willpower is used to override the other four willpower comes from our frontal loopes so let's say I have a desire to eat a hamburger so the nucleus cumbin is telling me let's eat a hamburger let's get give me some dead dopamine give me

some that dopamine son and so my frontal loob step in restrain that impulse and then sometimes we have this other serotonergic circuitry which drives us in a particular direction like I want to be ambitious I want to accomplish a lot and then we're our frontal loes can still rein that in so the frontal loes control the other parts of our brain this is willpower and so now we run into a problem because the Neuroscience research tells us that willpower is a fatigable finite resource that usually gets replenished when you go to sleep okay so we

know this because we know there are a lot of studies that show that it is hard to use willpower to make the right decision when your frontal lobes are exhausted so if you think about eating healthy it is easier to eat healthy in the morning than it is at night when you're fatigued right so you can like you pack your lunch in the morning you go to work but then by the end of the day you're exhausted you're tired so let me play video games let me eat unhealthy food so we know that willpower runs

out and it has to run out right because this is the other way to think about it which is that if it never ran out then doing willpower for the first five minutes would feel the same as 10 minutes uh 10 hours later you could constantly exert willpower and if it was not a fatigable resource everything would be easy but we know it's a fatigable resource there's a really great experiment on this which I'll touch on very quickly which is what I call the cookie and beat experiment so two groups of people were given an

impossible task like it's like a puzzle like a maze that doesn't actually have an exit you can't get from the entrance to the exit or the center or whatever and they basically saw how long until people give up and what they did is they actually had a really interesting condition so the the maze is unsolvable but while they're waiting for the maze they're sitting in a waiting room and there there's two plates of food there there's the control condition and then there's the experimental condition in one room there's a plate of chocolate chip cookies and

in the other room there's a plate of boiled beets and the participants are told you are not allowed to eat this food this is for someone else so in the chocolate chip cookie condition people didn't eat the food but they had to resist eating the food whereas in The Boiled beets there's no resistance so what they found is that if you had to resist the chocolate chip cookies you gave up on the maze faster than if you had to resist the Beats because there's no resisting the Beats there's nothing to resist there's no desire and

so in the beat condition their willpower was less drained so we know that willpower is a fatigable resource but what about this whole idea of okay it's a a muscle to be trained absolutely just because it's a a fatigable resource does it not mean that it is not a muscle it's not a muscle it's neurons but what we know is you can train a part of the brain so I think about willpower is as a battery but you can increase the size of your battery by doing things like meditating by doing things like emotional regulation

techniques right so we literally have things that will teach I'll teach these people uh skills in ADHD or addiction Psychiatry when I'm working with patience where I will teach them how to restrain their emotional impulses and as they practice they get better at it but if you are using willpower every single day to restrain your desires restrain your Ambitions restrain your habits and restrain your emotions you will burn out in fact if we look at why burnout is so big in the world today it is because we are using so much willpower we are relying

on Willpower to constantly restrain the other parts of ourselves this is also why meditation is booming because because everyone is realizing my battery is too small so I need to strengthen it and so what ends up happening we strengthen our battery we increase the reserve of our willpower but every day is a fight you all get that we have so many bad habits to begin with that we are using willpower constantly doesn't work this is what leads to burnout so let's understand how to make things easy remember willpower is only necessary when it needs to

override one of these other things things so what the yogi says is that the real way to live life is not to use a bunch of willpower or discipline do you all get this so they have a lot of willpower certainly but when they're sitting in the caves in the Himalayas every day the reason that they're able to do that day in and day out the reason that they're disciplined is because they have actually decreased the strength of the other four so understand this if I have a very strong desire I need this much willpower

to overcome it but the small desires that I have the less willpower that I need right if I have a very strong habit I need a lot of willpower to overcome it but if I reduce the size of my habit The Willpower necessary is low in the yogic system what the yogis realized is that you should absolutely strengthen your willpower but what you should really do if you want to make life easy and be in full control where you need a small amount of willpower to overcome anything you need to make your desire smaller you

need to let go of your emotions you need to actually even get rid of habits and crazily enough you need to get rid of your ambition so as you become more desiress the amount of willpower needed decreases and then something really cool happens because now you are no longer restraining yourself so all of the progress that you want in life is overcoming your internal stuff right so I want to eat a hamburger I mean my my body wants a hamburger or my tongue wants a hamburger but something up here restrains that pulse using willpower and

so the real way to to make this work right so this is what I work do with my patients who have who are addicts or even people who want to exercise and stuff like that is when I have patients who exercise very regularly I ask them how much willpower does it take they say very little they don't need a whole lot so I was working with a professional swimmer for example and he said after 20 years of swimming I still hate how cold the water is when I first get in so they need 5 Seconds

of willpower in order to do their full workout and that is just to get in the pool the rest of it is easy so what we advocate for if you really want your life to be easy and you don't even want willpower you don't even need willpower it's to actually control these other four variables decrease your desires regulate your emotions alter your habits and get rid of your ambition and then what happens and this is what really confuses people because they say isn't my ambition what motivates me no I mean yeah sort of right but

the whole point is that when you have ambition the other parts of your brain are like we don't want to do this your nucleus succumbent is like no [ __ ] you serotonin system and by the way there's an inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin where if you engage in a bunch of dopaminergic activity your serotonin levels actually go down right this is why you can have so much fun I can do a bunch of drugs I can play a lot of video games but then I won't feel content or fulfilled at the end of

the day whereas I can work out I can eat healthy I can work hard I can learn an instrument and at the end of the day I feel good about myself those are two opposite systems actually not technically but practically in order to make self control effortless what we need is for very little control to be exerted does that make sense the more control I have to exert the more effort it's going to take so what we really want to do if you're struggling with willpower is we want to use willpower so this is what

I'd say the right way to do it is to treat willpower like salt in food so if we use a ton of it it's bad if we have none of it it's bad we need just the right amount of willpower depending on the dish and in General we want to try to use as little as possible or we're going to need some that's the right way to think about willpower when you want to move in the wrong direction that's when we need willpower so the real solution to this answer is to stop wanting to move

in the wrong direction in the first place let go of your ambition replace it with Dharma practice emotional regulation techniques or digest the source of your emotions where do these emotions stem from why am I feeling so negative notice your Vasa your Habit in the mind learn how to rewire that habit that's that's rewiring vasas but this is how to understand willpower is that it's something that should be used as a last resort or sprinkled in throughout the day and then if you work on the other four dimensions of behavior then you won't need willpower

what a great question what if I want to do nothing let's understand this no one wants to do nothing this is a incorrect diagnosis of the problem it is impossible for human beings to want to do nothing and you may say but Dr K I wake up and I don't feel like doing anything how do you spend your day do you just literally sit there and stay in bed sometimes the answer is yes but usually it's no so let's understand even if you sit and and lay in bed all day that's what you want to

do right so let's say I get up and I go to the bathroom and then once I get up from the bathroom then where do I go I go back into bed why do I go back into bed because I want to be in bed so the first thing to understand is that when people say they want to do nothing they don't want to do nothing they want to do very specific things that are not something I want to play video games I want to stay in bed I want to get high I want to

drink I want to sleep I want to be alone I want to not see anyone these are all wants so the first mistake that we make if you do nothing is you have to realize that you have very powerful wants it's not that you have an absence of desire in fact what you have is desire that is way too strong because you have a very strong desire to not see another human being you have very strong desire to procrastinate how do you know know you have a strong desire to procrastinate because if you try to

do work your mind will tell you I don't want to do this so how do we fix this problem there are a couple of things to do the first is to realize that it isn't that you don't want something it is that you are too much of a victim to your wants your wants control you you don't control them and this is why people try to find motivation so this is where like they make a very very very simple mistake which is that everyone says how do I find motivation in life that's not a solution

that's actually a problem let me explain why see if I a slave to my wants my only success in life is if I happen to have the right wants if I want to work out then I win if I want to eat healthy then I win if I want money more than I want pleasure then I win so what we try to do is we try to create particular wants we try to craft wants that move us in the right direction but we are still a Slave slave to our wants we're not actually conquering our

desires we are just hoping that my desire is in the right direction and this is actually what happens to people right because their their desires one day they wake up and they're like oh thank God I want to work out today thank God oh my God how do how can I be this motivated every single day but the problem is that this isn't sustainable because this motivation will disappear over time because today you wake up motivated tomorrow you're not going to wake up motivated this is why gym memberships are so popular the first week of

January because I wake up and I want want to do this so I'm going to do it so if you guys really want to conquer this I'll give you all a really interesting technique so what we want to do is be free from desire entirely and we think that conquering desire means conquering our bad desires I I'm going to force myself to eat a salad even when I want to eat a a sandwich let's say right I'm going to force myself to work out even though I feel like sitting on my ass the cool thing

about conquering desires is you can conquer it both ways so one really interesting exercise that I'll give to people is think about something you're motivated towards that's positive and then restrain that by 50% oh my God I feel so excited today I'm going to do eight hours of work don't do eight hours of work do four hours of work do less oh my God I want to eat so healthy I'm going to go to the grocery store and I'm going to buy a bunch of healthy food because I'm motivated to eat healthy don't buy a

bunch of healthy food cut it in 50% even the positive things in your life do less of them I know super crazy yes absolutely because the whole point is that we do not want you doing the positive things in your life because you wake up one day and you feel like doing it that's the wrong Compass because that means that if you wake up tomorrow and you don't feel like doing it you're not going to do it the whole point is to get control of the compass not hope and pray that it's in pointing in

the right direction one day and pointing the wrong direction the other day this is why people one step forward one step back see a lot of people who are stuck in life if you are stuck in life this is probably the problem the only problem and you say I make some progress and then my progress Slips Away I make some progress and the progress Slips Away the reason that that happens is because you are a slave to yourself and if you want the right thing on one day you'll do it if you don't want the

right thing the next day you won't do it this is the problem is to gain control of yourself and it's so hard to overcome my desire for something dopam energic it is easier to overcome my desire for something positive but we never practice ractice that so we're never fighting against a level one mob we're always fighting against a level 10 mob an addiction I need to overcome my addiction no one is talking about overcoming little things or even things that are quote unquote good for you setting a Target and sticking to it even when you

feel like doing more today I'm going to go to the gym for 45 minutes at the 45 minute Mark I don't feel like I want to do more but I'm going to restrain myself see do you ever restrain yourself when you're moving in the right direction of course not you're only restraining yourself when you're moving in the wrong direction so you're not practicing restraint and that's very hard this is what we call the rubber band mechanic okay in gaming we have this idea of a rubber band mechanic which is how like things like games like

l or DOTA whatever they'll have a rubber band mechanic so that things don't snowball we have this in real life too the rubber band mechanic in real life is I run really really really far in a positive direction and then I snap back so imagine that there is a tree and there is a rubber band tied between you and the tree and the further you run away from the tree the the more elasticity increases in the rubber band the harder you snap back right so how do you get away from the tree you have to

take off the rubber band that's the way to do it you have to sublimate the desire start acting outside of your desire so do something for the sake of doing it not because it gives you some benefit and this is where our whole society will say I don't want to do that I should have a reason why why I do something I'm studying because I want an a I'm exercising because I want to be sexy no one is acting for the sake of action and then what happens the moment that you stop acting for the

sake of action you make yourself a slave to your desire and then you just hope that your desire moves in the right direction so do something completely worthless the more worthless things you do the more of truly nothing that you do the better you will be in life I'll give you all just a simple example I am going to empty this cup of pens and then I'm going to put them in that's what I'm going to do we're going to do it again one at a time let's go and then you will say to me

but Dr K that's a complete waste of energy you're not accomplish anything that's the [ __ ] point I am removing accomplishment from action and then you are in full control see if you do if you have the ability to do something that is completely worthless you will that's everything because there's no benefit there's no dopamine there's no serotonin there's no ambition but there's Freedom there's control separate motivation from action if you separate motivation from action you'll be in complete control of your life to act because you decide to not because something in here tells

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