Introduction:
In order to improve any aspect to your life you must make changes to how you approach and deal with it. Willpower and Discipline are essential concepts to understand when trying to improve your life because they are the characteristics that determine how effectively you can make these changes.
Defining Willpower and Discipline:
In normal parlance, willpower and discipline are used interchangeably to refer to the ability to do what you ought to do rather than what you immediately want to do, such as resisting self destructive behaviors or unhealthy habits. For the purpose of this post I will be defining willpower as the mental fortitude required to consciously change behavior in a way you wouldn’t be able to without applying effort, and discipline as the application of knowledge to create rules and restrictions on behavior. If you are having trouble understanding the distinction consider a person moving heavy object from one place to another. When someone lifts and carries the object the factors which determine how well they do so are their raw physical strength and the form they use to carry the object. By form I am referring to things such as where they decide to grip the object, whether they carry the object on their shoulder or let it hang in front of them etc. Using my definitions, willpower would be analogous to the person’s raw physical strength while discipline would be analogous to the person’s form.
Research on Willpower and Discipline:
One of the most key studies on willpower done was the study on ego depletion by researchers at Case Western University. In the study researchers showed participants a plate of radishes and a plate of chocolates. The participants were split into three groups: one that would be instructed to eat the radishes, one group that would be instructed to eat the radishes and avoid the chocolate, one group that would be instructed to eat the chocolate and avoid the radishes, and a control group which was not shown the food. After initial instruction the participants were tasked with solving a problem that was actually impossible to solve. The results were that the group that was instructed to eat the radishes worked significantly longer on the problem than both the control group and the group that ate the chocolates with the control group working the longest. This showed that expending effort to resist temptation had a quantifiable cost in the form of being less inclined to work on a problem. This means that the study showed evidence that willpower is a finite characteristic that can be depleted when employed much like how a muscle becomes fatigued when used. More studies were done with different things for the participants to resist to confirm this idea.
Another significant finding in these studies is the participants in control groups (ie the ones not shown two options and instructed to choose a certain) consistently outperformed the other two groups in these experiments. This shows that not being exposed to temptation at all depletes less willpower than either resisting or giving into temptation.
Research on “Wants”, “Needs”, and Satisfaction:
Another important concept for this post is determining where to apply willpower and discipline to gain the most improvement in life. There are many different theories for determining what people want most in their life. The two that I found most useful were Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and by Manfred Max-Neef’s fundamental humans.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is displayed as a pyramid with basic physiological needs at the bottom and more abstract needs such as esteem and self actualization at the top. The things lower down on the pyramid are prioritized more than things at the top. This essentially means that when people are lacking in something like food or shelter they will have less motivation for striving for improved self esteem or becoming the best version of themselves. This model is useful because how someone will be more motivated to work on certain aspects of their life compared to others. For example a person who is hungry will be more motivated to get food than they will to work on a project. However this model is limited as is doesn’t provide specific criteria for when a need is met or satisfied. For example a person might have enough food to survive but still feel hungry and thus still more motivated to get food than do other things even though that need should be satisfied according to the hierarchy.
Manfred Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs is a classification of nine needs that are fundamental to human existence. These needs are subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom. In this model the needs are fulfilled by satisfiers. There are different kinds of satisfiers such as pseudo satisfiers which appear to be satisfying a need but in actuality are not doing anything to satisfy the need, inhibiting satisfiers which over-satisfy a given need thus inhibiting the possibility of satisfaction of other needs, synergistic satisfiers which satisfy multiple needs simultaneously, and singular satisfiers which satisfy a specific need without affecting any other needs. This model is useful because it shows how satisfaction of a need can be determined. However this model is limited in that it doesn’t give criteria for why people prioritize certain needs over others.
Applying this Knowledge:
The information on willpower, discipline, and needs, shows that willpower and discipline are finite resources to used in making changes in life. The purpose is to discuss the most efficient way to allocate willpower in discipline.
Identifying Deficiencies in Your Life:
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Manfred Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs together give a wealth of information on makes someone’s life more or less satisfying. Reading more about these two models can help establish what you need to change in your life to improve it the most. If after reading more about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Manfred Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs you still feel unsure about what you most want to change in life one strategy you can employ is to keep a diary and record what you felt best and worst about each day. This way after about a month you will be able to look back and see what you are most often happy about and frustrated about. Thus you have a way of establishing what you want to change most in your life.
Allocating Willpower and Discipline:
As shown in the studies, there is a finite amount of willpower that a person can expend in a given time frame. What this means is that there a limit to how much you can change your life in a given time frame. So given this information, you should focus on changing a small number of things at a time. This will allow you to dedicate the necessary willpower without overburdening yourself and thus failing. Over time the changes you make will seem automatic and require less willpower to maintain thus allowing you to move onto changing other aspects of your life for the better. Another thing to keep in mind is that never being exposed to temptation depletes less willpower than resisting temptation. In order to prevent exposure to temptation in first place will required the use of discipline meaning you should create rules or restrictions which prevent you from encountering temptation. For example if you are trying to lose weight and find yourself passing by your favorite restaurant on the way home from work each day you may apply discipline to take an alternate route home after work thus avoiding the temptation entirely.
