What can you do to increase your willpower ? How can we enhance this capacity ? Let’s discover some keys that will help you.
We have all had the feeling, at one time or another, that we do not have enough willpower to carry out certain tasks. In these cases, if you find it difficult to make healthy changes to your lifestyle or want to focus on a specific goal, willpower is an essential element to achieve it. Luckily, this ability can be strengthened like a muscle, meaning the more you use it, the stronger it will become. So how can we improve it ?
What is willpower ?
Willpower is about the ability to control or hold back in the face of immediate gratification to achieve long-term goals.
That is, it is a conscious regulation of certain impulses to achieve greater satisfaction over time. Various research suggests that willpower is partly determined by our genetics. However, many people can improve this skill through effort and routine.
How to increase willpower ?
Studies support that willpower is a necessary skill to achieve a goal. Therefore, it implies an essential trait if you want to improve your habits or need to achieve a goal in your life.These are some of the strategies that can help you increase your willpower : 
- Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness is one meditation which allows us to focus on the present moment. Being able to focus on enjoying what happens here and now will allow us to improve our willpower. Various research, in fact, suggests that the practice of mindfulness has allowed us to improve our self-control and, above all, reduce psychological distress.
- Set Concrete Goals and Plans: Willpower is a skill closely related to meaning and purpose. Therefore, to strengthen it, it is important to be very clear about our goals, as well as all the steps we need to take to achieve them. Having a very concrete plan can help us make more intentional decisions instead of acting on our impulses.
- Reduce temptations: Studies suggest that eliminating our temptations can help us have greater willpower. That is, preparing ourselves not to have temptations that make us not respect what we really want allows us to increase this ability.
- Improve your sleeping habits: Sleep is a vital part of improving in all aspects, both physically and mentally. Improving our sleep habits, that is, increasing the quality of our rest, will allow us to focus on improving skills such as willpower.
- Plan ahead: Consider possible situations that could end up diminishing or weakening your willpower. By keeping these factors in mind, you can think ahead about what you can do to deal with it in the best way and stay true to your goals.
- Focus on one goal at a time: Having many goals or objectives at once usually ends up being a very ineffective strategy. The reason is that our willpower is a limited resource, so it is essential to try to focus it on a specific goal and not on many at the same time. Once you’ve turned your goals into habits, you can add another goal.
- Remember the consequences : keeping in mind the consequences that failure to achieve certain goals can entail will allow us to acquire more willpower to maintain them. Remembering these consequences can help us stay motivated as we work to increase our self-control.
- Use your imagination: One way to motivate yourself or improve your willpower is to use our imagination to understand what we can achieve if we follow what we have planned. If you imagine yourself achieving your goals, this will allow you to have more motivation and focus on what we want.
- Understand what you want: To develop our willpower it is important to understand ourselves. That is, if you don’t focus on what you really want in your life, it will end up affecting you and you will lose the motivation to continue focusing on what you are doing. When it comes to willpower, one of the keys to increasing it is to focus on what we really want for our life.
Being able to increase your willpower means better health or greater success in your life. If you have trouble increasing this skill, it might be a good idea consult a professional psychologist for more specific strategies.