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Five Ideas on How to Strengthen Your Willpower

By Operation-Meditation

Willpower is something that we don’t think about very often, but has a profound impact on our lives. Think about it – just about everything you do requires a certain amount of willpower. Even getting out of bed in the morning takes a (very) small amount of willpower. For most people, routine daily tasks are simple enough that they don’t need to look very hard to find the needed will power to get them done. Harder jobs, however, like quitting smoking, can use every ounce we have and then some. This article aims to help you strengthen your reserve of willpower with five simple ideas.

– Use It. Just like a muscle in your body, willpower gets stronger the more it’s used. Try putting yours into action for more simple things so it will be working at full strength when you need to call on it for the big stuff. For example, set a simple exercise goal for every day of the upcoming week. Make the goals easy enough to keep up with, but challenging enough to test you. When you have made it successfully through the week, you will have tapped into your willpower and seen it come through for you. When the next challenge rolls around, you will have more confidence in your willpower to rise to the occasion.

– Put Off Your Habit. Let’s use the example of quitting smoking for this point. Say you normally light up at 5:00 right when you get home from work. Instead of smoking first thing, put it off until 6:00. You will still get your cigarette, but you have to wait an hour longer for it. That waiting period will serve to build up your willpower. After doing that for a couple weeks, try pushing it back to 6:30 or 7:00. When the time comes to try and quit smoking altogether, you will have proven to yourself you have capability of doing it.

– Get Moving. Exercise helps every other part of your being – why not willpower? A regular habit of exercise keeps your willpower running strong by putting you in a good frame of mind. Mental strength goes right along with physical strength – they feed off of each other. Don’t neglect your physical health while working on your willpower. Make exercise a priority and you will see a natural rise in your ability to stick with something and see it through.

– One Thing at a Time. A great way to crush your willpower is to try and conquer the whole world all at once. Our brains can become easily overwhelmed when presented with too much information – and decide to give up rather than take it all on. To combat that tendency, only work on one major life goal at a time. To pick back up with the smoking example, don’t try to quit smoking and drinking at the same time. Choose which one you would like to eliminate first, and focus your energy – and willpower- in that direction. Once you have the first goal accomplished, you will be prepared and motivated to point your willpower in a new direction.

– Meditate. Along the same lines as the previous point, meditation is a great way to keep our minds from going in too many directions. If you are like most people, you might feel sometimes like life is pulling you mentally in a million different directions. By taking some time out to quietly meditate, you can bring a focus and clarity back to your thinking. The feeling of having your mind gathered and centered on you will do wonders for strengthening your willpower.

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