Using willpower (1)

When we want to achieve something difficult, or something that we find hard, we are told to use our willpower. My experience is that this only works if you know that you only need to exert your willpower for a given period of time, even if that period of time may be long. After that, willpower wears out. Willpower is finite, you just have a given amount to use. So if I have to use willpower every day to wake up at six in the morning and go out for a run, you can imagine that I may do it for a while, but that it will be very hard to keep doing it for life. 

It is said that if you sustain an activity for a given amount of time, then it becomes a habit. I think there is a little trick here. It is true that starting something new may require a lot of willpower due to the initial resistance. But the key here is that the resistance must subside at some point so that you do not need willpower, then the activity can become a habit. However, for some, resistance subsides, for others, it does not. What is the difference? The difference is if you manage, by some way or another, to make the activity something fun, to make the activity something that you enjoy.

For me it was very hard, for example, to keep the habit of running. I was just hating it. But I had to do it, because it was Covid times, and I had no other options of doing outdoor sports at the time. So I gave it a go. But I hated it. One of the reasons is because as a youngster I had considered myself an athlete (I was playing basketball), so I was taking running almost as if I was preparing myself for a competition. Preparing yourself for a competitive game without having an actual game is, well, just not fun. Something had to make a click on my head. My attitude towards running had to change if I wanted it to be a long-term activity. The key for me was to learn about "slow-jogging", which somehow is the antithesis of what I was doing: do less than what you can, and it is still an achievement! Doing less than what I can was an achievement! That is for me a complete change of attitude since I am used to always pushing myself to the limit. 

At the end of the day I realized that the only success was to keep the jogging going, rather than how fast, for how long, or how much distance I was doing. Whatever way I was running, it was always very beneficial and very importantly, I could feel the benefits. Feeling how good running made me feel, how much it balanced my daily life, made me enjoyed it enormously. I go to the park, the park is beautiful and I am running, but it feels more like I am taking a stroll. I am enjoying myself.

Then I only use my willpower for very particular moments: for example, there are days when there is a barrier to start running, once I am running it is fine, but it is the actual start that is hard; or when I travel and I need to find a time to run wherever I go, or maybe it is not possible to run, but then when I come back it is harder to run because I have lost fitness; or there are periods that, again, it becomes harder to enjoy running (like when it becomes very dark and windy). 

It is just for the "low" moments that I need willpower, and only a little burst, otherwise, there is no resistance in me, so I can do the activity without having to kick myself to do it.

The same happens with everything: if you want to follow a given lifestyle, like becoming vegetarian, it will not last if you feel every time that this lifestyle is a source of suffering and sacrifice. You have to teach yourself to enjoy it. You have to find your own way. Willpower gets you started, but it will not keep you there for the long run. We do not have so much energy.