You probably intuitively understand that motivation & willpower are related. Motivation is how we feel about doing or refraining from doing a given task. Willpower is our discipline to do the task regardless of motivation.
Self-awareness around daily actions has also certainly proven to you that motivation fluctuates wildly and is generally outside our control and that willpower is finite but generally within our control. Research backs up that observation.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that willpower is like a muscle in that it fatigues with acute use, grows stronger over time when it’s regularly used to a degree that’s just outside its capacity, and lags when we’re tired, hungry, or otherwise low on energy.
For example:
- Having a rough commute and a high-stress, decision-filled morning makes it harder to do challenging work or make complicated decisions in the afternoon.
- It’s easier to make the bed after having done it every morning for years than if the decision to start doing so had been made last week.
- Whether or not we’ve had enough quality sleep makes it easier or harder to get out of bed in the morning to go to the gym.
- Whether we’re satiated or hungry after work makes it easier or harder to choose healthy options for a snack or dinner.
Since willpower is both (more) controllable and important for every aspect of life, learning to use it efficiently is a useful skill to develop. Of course, once again just like a muscle, research has shown that there are more- and less-effective methods to use willpower and make it stronger.
The less-effective method is to call upon it in the moment a decision needs to be made; that is, using willpower defensively. An example might be walking through the door after work feeling hungry and having to decide whether to eat the bag of chips sitting on the counter or to cut up some veggies to dip in hummus.
While we’ll occasionally need to use our willpower this way forever (because we can’t plan for every possible situation), the more-effective method is to use it offensively in common situations by making pre-decisions for our future selves. Relating to the example above, this might include deciding to not purchase the bag of chips in the first place, cut up veggies on the weekend, and eat a single sliced veggie when you walk through the door after work.
That’s the idea from last week’s B = MAP tip: Whether your motivation is high or low, you’re almost guaranteed to behave a certain way if you pre-decide to take a tiny action—one that’s easy for your ability level and requires minimal time, effort, and, subsequently, willpower—when you’re prompted by a given event.
But there are two more key ideas—echoed in different ways in a variety of books including BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits and Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit—that need to be understood if we want to reinforce new (“good”) behaviors, discourage old (“bad”) behaviors and replace them with new ones, and make the new behaviors “stick”.
The ABC’s of behavior change
In this context, ABC stands for:
- Anchor: An event that serves as a prompt to act. Every action stems from, or is anchored to, some immediately preceding event. (e.g. My phone rang. It’s 8 AM. I’m hungry. That car just cut me off. It’s bedtime. I have to pee.)
- Behavior: The (preferably tiny) action that you take after an anchor event occurs.
- Celebration: Some other little thing that you do immediately after a behavior to create a positive emotion, which helps to train the brain to repeat the preceding behavior. This can be as simple as smiling, doing a little fist-pump, or saying (aloud or silently), “I did a good job” or “That’s like me!”
Key Idea #1
While anchor is effectively another word for prompt and both prompt and behavior were covered in last week’s tip, there’s still a related idea that needs to be emphasized.
Since every behavior is anchored to some event, the first and best way to start a new behavior or quit an old one is to make the related anchor (prompt, cue, trigger, existing routine, or whatever else you want to call it) obvious or invisible, respectively.
Back to my bag of chips vs. veggie example: Leaving the chips at the store makes the anchor for the old behavior invisible (i.e. no bag of chips on the counter at home). Conspicuously placing a note card that says “eat veggies” on the counter makes the anchor for the new behavior obvious.
Tie that together with having cut-up veggies and hummus in the fridge plus a tiny, MAP’ed behavior to eat a single veggie slice when you see the note card after walking through the door after work, and you’ve used your willpower offensively to create an environment that promotes your intended changes.
Key Idea #2
Even if you think you’re fairly data-driven (🙋♂️), research shows that we generally make decisions based on emotion and use data after the fact to rationalize our decisions.
So if you think you can skip the celebration part of this sequence and still be successful, you’re probably wrong. And even if you’re right, emotion is still an extremely important driver of any action, and you’re likely to experience better results faster if you add emotion (via celebration) to the equation.
Most importantly, don’t wait until you achieve a larger goal to celebrate (although you should certainly celebrate then too). Instead, take advantage of the common human tendency for immediate gratification, and celebrate immediately after doing what your past self pre-committed your current self to do!
Putting it into practice
Once again review the healthy behavior that you came up with two weeks ago along with the tiny, related action(s) that you came up with last week.
How can you make the related anchor event more obvious? If there’s a related behavior that you want to replace with this new behavior, how can you make its related anchor event invisible?
Got it? Good. Now go set that up!
Then the next time you do your intended behavior (preferably every day), celebrate immediately and intensely before continuing on with your day.