The willpower myth
Willpower isn’t reliable—environment is. Make good habits easy and bad ones harder by designing your surroundings. Success isn’t discipline; it’s reducing temptation and friction.
Rethinking Willpower and Habit Formation
It’s a commonly held belief that forming or breaking habits requires a lot of willpower, that those who successfully do so are drawing on a deep well of moral fortitude, and that those who fail must just not have wanted it enough.
And yet this is asking a lot of ourselves. It’s one thing to make a resolution at the start of the year, or after a health scare, when willpower is naturally strong. It’s another to carry through on that resolution at times when willpower is naturally weak, like when we’re feeling stressed out, hungry, or sleepy. And remember that the resolution only has to be made once, but the carry-through has to happen day in and day out, regardless of our emotional state.
Instead of planning to have lots of willpower every time it’s needed, why not plan for willpower to be variable? What would that look like?
An influential research paper from 2009 by Stanford behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg identified three components of behavior: “motivation”, “ability”, and “trigger” (which in later work he renamed “prompt”).
So if we’re looking to move beyond willpower, one way would be to think about how easy or difficult habits are to perform. If we’re trying to eat healthy, we could pre-stock our fridge with healthy snacks. Wash and chop veggies in bulk in advance, so that when a hunger pang strikes, it’s zero effort to grab a single-serving container of broccoli florets or carrot slices.
If we’re trying to quit smoking, we could keep our lighter and our cigarettes in different rooms, so that we have to spend time and effort to collect them, by which time the craving may have passed.
Another is to think about what triggers our behaviors, and how to manipulate those. If we want to start exercising more, we could schedule reminders for times when we know we’re likely to have energy, or we could put our running shoes by the door where we’re sure to see them.
If we want to doomscroll less, we could remove the icons for problematic apps from our home screens. Changes like these may seem trivial, but they can have a surprising impact if well chosen.
Obviously this is not always tidy. If you’re used to drinking with meals or smoking after meals, you can hardly just decide to stop eating. And environmental design doesn’t necessarily make habit change easy in an absolute sense. But by and large, it’s easier to affect the environment within which willpower operates than to try to manipulate willpower itself.
In 2011, researchers gave beepers to 205 study participants in Würzburg, Germany. These devices sent out queries at random intervals asking whether the participants were experiencing a desire, and if so, the circumstances around that desire.
They found that participants who were successful at avoiding undesired behaviors were no better at resisting temptation, but rather that they experienced fewer temptations to begin with, suggesting that they could simply have designed their environments so that they were less likely to carry out the undesired behaviors in the first place.
The lesson is that willpower is unreliable. If your willpower flags and you smoke that cigarette, eat that slice of cherry pie, or decide not to exercise, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means you’re a human being like everyone else.
Be kind to yourself, and think about how you can redesign your environment so that willpower doesn’t matter.
References
Fogg, B.J. (2009) A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Article 40. ACM.
Hofmann, W. et al. (2012) Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 102, No. 6, pp. 1318–1335. APA.