I agree that being on life-hating auto-pilot and just continuing to push is an awful way to go through life.
Right. The point is, if whatever you call “willpower” isn’t working for you now, doing more of it is not likely to produce any better results. (Definition of insanity, and all that.)
But then when it comes time to actually develop a new habit (the way real people avoid needing willpower in the long run), they will be unable to get through the first week.
The problem with your hypothesis here is that there are two very different ways to build a habit that can be described as using “willpower”… but the one that actually works is really a special kind of pre-commitment, and isn’t willpower at all.
In the less-useful way, somebody simply “decides” that they’re going to build this habit, and they attempt to deal with conflicts as they come up. So, they haven’t, for example, already decided that if they don’t feel like exercising, they’re still going to do it. Instead, at the point of precommitment, they simply assume they’re still going to feel the same way about their decision all week.
And that’s what I’m referring to as using willpower: attempting to override conflicts on-the-fly by pushing through them.
The type of precommitment that works, OTOH, (and this is backed by at least one study that I know of) is to identify in advance what kinds of obstacles you’re likely to face, imagining them in experiential detail, and preparing for how to handle them.
People who take this approach more-or-less automatically (i.e. without having explicitly been taught or told to do so) are likely to still describe this as “willpower” or “gutting it out” or, “you just have to decide/make up your mind”, or any number of other descriptions that sound like they’re the same thing as using raw willpower to override conflicts as they come up.
Right. The point is, if whatever you call “willpower” isn’t working for you now, doing more of it is not likely to produce any better results. (Definition of insanity, and all that.)
The problem with your hypothesis here is that there are two very different ways to build a habit that can be described as using “willpower”… but the one that actually works is really a special kind of pre-commitment, and isn’t willpower at all.
In the less-useful way, somebody simply “decides” that they’re going to build this habit, and they attempt to deal with conflicts as they come up. So, they haven’t, for example, already decided that if they don’t feel like exercising, they’re still going to do it. Instead, at the point of precommitment, they simply assume they’re still going to feel the same way about their decision all week.
And that’s what I’m referring to as using willpower: attempting to override conflicts on-the-fly by pushing through them.
The type of precommitment that works, OTOH, (and this is backed by at least one study that I know of) is to identify in advance what kinds of obstacles you’re likely to face, imagining them in experiential detail, and preparing for how to handle them.
People who take this approach more-or-less automatically (i.e. without having explicitly been taught or told to do so) are likely to still describe this as “willpower” or “gutting it out” or, “you just have to decide/make up your mind”, or any number of other descriptions that sound like they’re the same thing as using raw willpower to override conflicts as they come up.