Why Willpower Fails to Change Eating Habits

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Related Episodes:

• Part 1: Eating Behavior Triggers
• Part 2: Making it More Difficult
• Willpower and Your Thoughts

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Full Episode Transcript:

Why Willpower Fails

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I recently spoke at a world-wide Habit Coach Summit and my presentation was on Why Willpower Fails to Change Eating Habits.

It went really well, especially considering I am not great at public speaking. I wanted to bring the talk to you, but in a way that is applicable to you.

Alright, so how many of you wish that you had more willpower? I’m guessing you’re probably nodding your head “yes.”

But what if you didn’t need more willpower to eat healthier, exercise more, get better sleep, all the things? Sounds lovely, right?

So it’s one thing to NOT NEED to rely on willpower and have other tools at your disposal, but importantly, why WOULDN’T you want to rely on willpower to change behaviors or habits?

Bc it takes a lot of mental energy. Sometimes, especially on a weekday afternoon, that mental energy is at an all-time low.

So, when it comes to individual behaviors, willpower can be enough sometimes, more so maybe when it’s in the earlier part of the day when haven’t had to make as many decisions yet, causing decision-fatigue, but when it comes to changing habits, willpower alone isn’t quite enough.

That’s because of the automaticity of habits, having to do with the strength of the neural pathways. Neural pathways are just communication loops formed with neurons (which are nerve cells), neurotransmitters (also known as hormones), electrical charges, and a few other things.

Your brain loves forming them, bc brains love to conserve energy and building these neural pathways, building habits, is a great way to do so. The human brain has been doing this for a very long time, so it’s an expert.

These tiny pathways are incredibly powerful, so willpower alone will not be enough to disrupt them. But an individual behavior that has NOT become a habit (that neural pathway hasn’t developed and strengthened yet) is easier to change with willpower.

Today’s talk is about habits, but behaviors are of course a crucial part of habits.

So first I want to define what willpower is. With all of the standard definitions that I found, I condensed the definition into: willpower is mental effort used to resist an urge. An urge to do something for short-term gratification. If you were to sum it up on one word, it’s self-control.

Ex. Using mental effort or self-control to resist the urge to eat the pizza a sales rep bought for the entire office when you brought a salad to work already. That’s one behavior that’s not necessarily a habit yet, so that might be easier to resist the urge, right?

Resisting the urge to eat the candy bar you always eat at noon every day for lunch in your office, not so easy. That’s because eating that candy bar is probably a habit. It’s a behavior that has been done over and over in the same time and place. That’s all a habit is.

So, as most if not all of you know, when you are trying to break an eating habit or any habit, you are essentially trying to decrease the frequency of the eating behavior and you really need to break down or weaken the behavior, to make it less likely to do automatically.

And of course, to form a healthier eating behavior and then habit, you’re trying to strengthen the behavior and increase the frequency (as well as do the behavior at the same time, place, or in the same circumstance/situation), so those neural pathways, the communication between the nerve cells, start building and becoming faster.

Now, there are a lot of different things that make an eating behavior occur.

You must have an external trigger, meaning something in the outside world, OR an internal trigger, meaning a feeling within you, your thought about that trigger (Yes, there is a little teeny tiny quick thought that occurs in your brain when you experience a trigger), the feeling that that thought generates in your body (with EH, that’s typically an urge or craving, right?), and then you have the behavior itself.

When this behavior has become a habit, this all occurs very quickly.

So, when I say trigger, I just mean something that sort of cues or prompts you, also known as an activator. For eating, that may be the smell of pizza that the sales rep bought for the office. Or it may be seeing the doughnuts in the break room at work.

So you may smell the pizza (external trigger, cue, prompt, activator), then have a thought like, “Mmmmm, I want pizza.” That might then create the feeling of a craving within your body.

Yes, cravings or urges are just simply feelings in your body. By feelings I mean emotions. What? So yes, a craving or an urge is an emotion. It’s something you feel internally, inside your body just like any other emotion.

That craving then drives the action (behavior) of going into the pizzeria and buying and eating a slice.

To sum that all up that would mean that there is a trigger (either external or internal), a thought about the trigger, which then generates a feeling in your body and that feeling then drives the behavior, which would be either an action, reaction, or inaction. And of course, the behavior then leads to some sort of a result.

So if you’re trying to use willpower alone to try to resist the urge, that’s just trying to change one component of that sequence.

Because you’re not changing that whole sequence of events from the start or changing multiple parts of the sequence, you’re going to have a much more difficult time.

In the case of an eating habit, you’re trying to use mental energy to overcome a very strong sequence of events. That really strong neural pathway.

So much so, that fatigue will typically set in. And when you’re using your mental energy for lots of other tasks for the day, it’s going to be really easy to give in once you’re fatigued.

You ‘ll just get exhausted and be more likely to give up. Either give in to instant gratification or even give up the entire long-term goal.

Whenever something is difficult, it’s so much easier to give up, right? Sometimes that’s because you feel like you’re failing, and sometimes it’s just because when something is difficult for a long time, it’s really uncomfortable and it’s tough for humans to do uncomfortable things, especially for long enough time required to get the desired results. A long enough time to actually break a habit.

When you’re just trying to use willpower, mental effort, to resist that urge or that feeling in your body to do that behavior, it’s like swimming against an ocean current.

Or when you’re just trying to use that mental effort to do an action that is VERY different from what you’ve been used to doing, it’s like swimming against that ocean current.

So what do you do instead? Well, there are several things, but one of the easiest things to start with, is to decrease the triggers as much as possible, to really just set yourself up for success.

Looking at what you can control more easily right now is going to really help with the eating habits. It’s going to make it so that you have as much help as possible and can change as many of the parts of that whole behavior sequence as possible.

A simple way to control the environment and set yourself up for success would be to decrease the triggers as much as possible if you want to decrease certain eating behaviors or habits. Both external and internal. External will be easier typically. Especially initially, bc it’s an action you can take now.

That trigger can be internal, like stress or boredom too (think EE), so can also work on decreasing stress or the boredom. Now of course that may take a little more time, so that’s why decreasing that external visual or olfactory trigger is useful, because it’s quick and immediate.

So, with the example of the Donuts in the break room, if you put them out of sight, or you walk a different route so that you don’t have to walk by the break room multiple times a day and see them out of the corner of your eye, you’ll be less likely to be triggered by that.

Also, if you make the behavior more difficult to do, you won’t have to use that mental energy quite as much. So, this could look like putting the Donuts up on top of the refrigerator in the break room.

Oftentimes, when you decrease the trigger, you’re also making it harder to do the eating behavior itself. For example, if you decrease the visual trigger of the doughnuts in the breakroom by putting them on top of the refrigerator, you’re also making the behavior or grabbing a doughnut more difficult to do, right?

Decreasing the trigger (and making the eating behavior more difficult to do) could also look like making it a habit of making a detour to avoid walking by that break room. Or, putting the ice cream in the back of the freezer behind the bags of frozen veggies.

Of course we still know it’s there, but it puts a little pause, so that it gives you that moment to make a more deliberate decision, rather than that more automatic reaction.

Just making the Trigger less obvious, or the behavior itself a little bit more difficult to do, helps disrupt and weaken that whole behavior sequence. And when you weaken that sequence, the frequency of doing the behavior decreases of course, which starts chipping away at the neural pathways involved in the habit.

Also, when you control the environment as much as possible, you’re not constantly in this situation where you are trying to resist this urge, meaning rely on willpower to NOT do the action of reaching out for the doughnuts and eating it or eating a few.

Because you and I both know you can try and just cut that doughnut in half and tell yourself you’re only going to eat half and that you’re going to use willpower to resist that second half, but how many of you find yourself going back for that second half still? Guilty.

And just a side note, you’re asking your brain to make the decision twice here. To resist the second half of that doughnut the first time AND the second time.

And because resisting requires so much mental effort, so much willpower, you’re not doing yourself any favors if you only take half, but then leave the doughnuts on the breakroom table in an easy to see and easy to reach location.

Whether you want to not eat any doughnuts or only eat half a doughnut, you HAVE to set yourself up for success, by controlling what you CAN control right then and there.

Now, real briefly, if you’re trying to increase the consumption of a specific food (like healthy foods), you want to do the reverse. Create or increase a trigger (serves as a reminder) and make the behavior easier to do.

Once you start addressing multiple parts of that behavior sequence, instead of just relying on willpower to fight an urge or force a certain action or inaction, you’re much more likely to change the eating habit. When you also address the thoughts and feelings behind the actions or inactions, you start becoming the person who no longer has those certain eating behaviors. You become a new version of yourself.

Alright so that’s what I have for you on why willpower fails to change eating habits.

Join us for the Ending the Emotional Eating Cycle free workshop that is on Thursday January 26, at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. There will be a replay available, so if you can’t attend live, sign up anyway. I will send you the replay if you’re signed up. also, it’s very common to have the thought that if you can’t make the live workshop, then why bother signing up.

However, you will get just as much value from watching or listening to the replay. So, if that time and date don’t work for you, then sign up for the workshop, get the replay, and watch it at a time that does work for you. Sign up at https://katemjohnston.com/workshop. You can also find the link on this podcast episode page.