Give Your Brain a Destination
Reduce willpower strain by setting effective goals.
If you’re like many people on Medium, you’ve already read enough articles on willpower to know that it’s a limited resource. (If you haven’t, here are a few to catch you up: The Best Strategies to Boost Your Willpower, How to Increase Your Willpower, The Science of Willpower.) There’s a maximum on how long you can white knuckle your way through things you don’t want to do.
Most people focus on how to increase willpower. Exercises and strategies you can take to raise your maximum and make yourself more productive. That’s great, and they’re useful exercises, but willpower alone will not get you where you want to go. Finding ways to stay on track without exercising willpower can dramatically shift your progress.
Get Your Subconscious Working for You
You’ve probably heard that you only use 10% of your brain. That’s not true — your whole brain is busy, but you only have conscious control of 10% of what’s going on. The vast majority of judgments, prioritizations, decisions, and actions you make are happening in the background in your subconscious. Many of these processes are running on default programs designed to maintain the status quo.
