Willpower and Your Thoughts

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Related Episodes:

• Why Willpower Fails
• 5 Best Ways to Avoid Failure with Eating Habits & Weight Loss

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hi, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here with me today to talk about something I know you’ll find so helpful. There is such a common misconception that you need to have really strong willpower to change your eating habits. This is simply not true, which is why I want to talk willpower with you today.

Unfortunately, because it’s a common belief that changing your eating habits requires a lot of willpower, you can fail to change them due to a few reasons. One of which is that you may not believe you have any willpower at all, so you just never try to change them. Therefore, you have the result of unchanged eating habits, right? Another is that when you think you have to rely on willpower to change your eating habits and then that willpower runs out (which we will talk about), you feel like you’ve failed, which leads to unchanged eating habits. Yet another reason is that when you think that willpower is the only thing that enables you to change your eating habits, you’re completely missing out on all of the things that actually DO help you change your eating habits.

So in today’s episode, I really want to do a bit of a deep dive into willpower and how exactly, to get around something called willpower depletion, when it comes to your eating habits, so you can successfully get the results you want when it comes to changing your eating habits. I really don’t want you to fail to change your eating habits because of one of those scenarios I just mentioned. I don’t want you to have the misconception you need tons and tons of willpower to change your eating habits, or that it’s the only thing that enables you to change your eating habits, especially with breaking “bad” eating habits.

Over the years, experts have been debating about if willpower is finite or infinite, meaning a limited or unlimited supply. You may have an opinion yourself of if willpower is limited or unlimited. Many studies have pointed more toward it being of limited supply, hence where the theory ego depletion, eventually came from.

So we’re just going to nerd it out for a hot second. Ego depletion is the theory that you can use up your willpower ability on one type of task, leaving minimal to none for a similar subsequent task. So let me just give you an example. Ego depletion would be using so much willpower to eat a healthy breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, and then having no more willpower left for a healthy dinner. You go through all that effort throughout the day, only to let that willpower “fail you” at night, and end up frustrated when it runs out.

The more willpower you have to exert on the earlier tasks, the faster it runs out, or depletes. An analogy I came up with for ego depletion would be like a car with a full tank of gas. It that car is climbing up a really steep mountain, while pulling a trailer, the tank of gas will be used up pretty quickly and may not get you to your destination, right? Contrast this with a car not pulling a trailer, that is riding on flat straight highway. That car will get better gas mileage, therefore the tank of gas won’t be depleted as quickly, and will be more likely to arrive at its destination on that tank of gas. Hopefully that makes sense.

Now, willpower depletion is extremely similar and is just the idea that willpower can run out, in general. This is why relying on willpower is not effective when it comes to many things, including eating habits of course.

So now I want to ask you a question. I know I won’t be able to hear your response, obviously, but I just want you to answer the question in your mind. So the question is, do you think that YOU have willpower? Just think about that for a few seconds. I don’t know what answer you’ve come up with for yourself specifically, but did you know that everyone has willpower? Everyone.

Now you might think, “well, maybe I have willpower with some things, but not with others.” So that’s definitely a common thought, especially when it comes to eating habits, particularly with sugar, but I want to offer you this. You have willpower even for things you don’t think you have willpower for. There will be some situation where you can summon up some willpower for that particular thing. For example, you might have the thought, “I would never be able to run 3 miles.” Well, if your life depended on it, you’d certainly be able to run 3 miles. This is willpower, specifically willpower that is controlling an action.

So why can’t we just all rely on willpower? Life would be so much easier. We would just be able to do the things that we set out to do, right? The problem is, willpower varies person to person, situation to situation, meaning sometimes you just don’t have control over the amount of willpower you have. Another problem is, willpower requires ALOT of mental energy. With our brains already being overworked, adding willpower on top of that, will just drain your brain completely.

As a career woman, you don’t want to have to use up precious mental energy (or brain power as I sometimes like to call it), when you have so many other things that require your mental energy. This is why I’m going to share one of the ways you can change your eating habits, without having to rely on willpower. That way, you won’t have to worry about depleting it.

So let’s quickly define willpower. I looked at a few definitions and I liked the one in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the best, for the purpose of today’s episode. The Merriam-Webster defines willpower as “the ability to control one’s own actions, emotions, or urges.” Willpower can vary in strength and duration for certain people (there have been studies to demonstrate this) but take it a level deeper, and it can also vary depending upon if it’s being applied to an action, emotion, or urge.

Willpower when it comes to controlling your actions will look like not flipping the bird at someone after they cut you off on the highway. Or it might look like not hugging a stranger out of nowhere. Right? So you’re practicing self-control with your actions in these scenarios.

Willpower when it comes to controlling your emotions, might look like counting from 10 down to zero if you’re feeling angry, so that you can calm down. It could also look like giving yourself some mental encouragement to increase your confidence before an important meeting. You’re eliciting some control over the emotion here, which is confidence.

Willpower when it comes to urges often means trying to fight an urge, which is actually a really ineffective way to try to control an urge, which will be a future episode.

Interestingly, all 3 of these play a part in eating habits too. So the action part when it comes to eating habits, might look like the action of grabbing or NOT grabbing the third slice of pizza, putting it in your mouth, chewing and swallowing, when you really want that pizza.

Emotional willpower might be taking 10 minutes or NOT taking 10 minutes to relax when you’re feeling stressed, so that you don’t seek out a bag of chips to make you feel better.

The urge part is just having a sudden urge or craving for something sweet that gets more intense, that you either fight or allow to pass.

So, if you break willpower down into these three categories, ask yourself what you feel like is the most challenging for you, willpower-wise? Is it having willpower with doing something, meaning taking an action, or is it willpower with controlling your emotions, or willpower with urges? You can probably notice a difference for yourself among the three, right?

Luckily, there are many ways to get control over your eating habits, so you don’t have to rely on willpower, which is what I help women with, in Eating Habit Overhaul, and your thoughts are one of these. Not because of thinking something like “I need to not have that cookie even though I want it.” Or, “I should eat that salad instead of the pizza.”

Your thoughts play a large role with willpower, because getting a handle on your thoughts, eliminates failure when that temporary willpower runs out. Your thoughts make it WAY easier to keep going with the actions you need to take to get the results. They are key to getting around that willpower depletion I mentioned earlier.

Now certainly when it comes to eating habits, or any habits, there comes a point when you’ve repeated a certain action enough times in the same context (meaning same time, place, circumstance) that it becomes a habit and is now on “autopilot.” This is amazing when this happens, because it takes less brain energy, which your brain loves. Your brain loves to save brain energy, and body energy also. However, until you get there, you’ll try to rely on willpower, which never lasts, because why? Because of that willpower depletion.

You’ve probably experienced this before in some way. Either with eating habits, or maybe trying to start a workout routine, or get to bed earlier. I personally have always found it challenging to start a habit of stretching, so even though I have a really great handle on my eating, exercise, and sleep habits, I still have to do this work on other new habits I’m trying to develop.

So, why do your thoughts matter so much with changing your eating habits? It’s because before every action, there is always a thought in your brain. Sandwiched in between that thought and the action, is an emotion or feeling.

So, thoughts end up causing your actions or behaviors, however thoughts don’t go straight to the behavior, there is a feeling or emotion (I use those interchangeably) that occurs in between, even if it occurs just momentarily, as it does in many cases.

It’s a universal understanding among a lot of the thought leaders and scientists of the world that your thoughts cause an emotion or feeling, which leads to an action or behavior (I use those two terms interchangeably).

Brooke Castillo, Master Certified Life Coach and owner of The Life Coach School developed a model that incorporates this, called the self-coaching model, which I won’t get into today, but you may have heard of this model or at least of Brooke Castillo.

So, I just want to give some examples of how thoughts cause feelings, which cause behaviors, so you have an understanding.

You may have witnessed a work colleague storming off after another colleague said something to him or her.

What the colleague said didn’t lead straight to the action of your other colleague storming off. Two things happened in between there. A thought and a feeling. So, it may have been a thought like, “how could she say that to me, that’s so rude!” and then what do you think the feeling may have been? Maybe something like irritation, disgust, or even anger? Whatever the emotion was, that’s what caused your colleague to then storm off. Do you see what I mean here?

So let me give you another example.

You see your favorite band is playing on Saturday night and you call a friend to invite her with you.  Seeing the Facebook Event that your favorite band is playing wasn’t the direct cause of you calling your friend, there was a thought and feeling in between there. The feeling that led to that action of dialing her number, may have been something like excitement, right? So maybe the thought that led to the feeling of excitement was something like “I love that band! I can’t believe they’re playing locally this Saturday night. I should invite Steph to join me.” There is always a thought and feeling that come before an action or behavior.

So, when it comes to eating habits, say you are trying to improve your eating habits because you want to lose 10 pounds. Say you’ve read that deli meat isn’t great for you and you normally eat a deli sandwich and chips for lunch every day at work, but you decide to switch to salads, which you don’t love. You figure that you’ll just eat them because you know they’re good for you, right? You start out going strong with the salads for lunch for 2 weeks straight, every day of the week, including weekends even. Go you! You then get to weeks three, four, and five and really miss that deli sandwich, but you fight through it and rely on that willpower of yours. You use that self-control to keep eating those salads and not switch back to those satisfying deli sandwiches. You push through until week six and then work gets really stressful in the early part of the week. You can’t take eating another salad, so you cave, and run to the deli during your lunch break to get a sandwich and chips.

Have you had anything like this happen to you before? Not necessarily with the deli sandwiches, but a similar situation with a particular food or meal? We all have at some point with something. I certainly have.

So what went wrong in this situation? Certainly, it would have been helpful to know what to do in a stressful situation that makes you want to go back to the delicious food. Also, it would have been helpful to maybe set a smaller goal, like instead of going from deli sandwiches and chips every day to salads every day. These are all part of it, but one important one is the thoughts that led to the feelings that led to the actions. So what kind of thoughts were you having when you were packing these salads for lunch? Maybe something like, “This isn’t enough to eat. I’m going to still be hungry,” or “Ugh, another boring salad,” or “why do I have to eat salads just to lose a few pounds?”

When you have thoughts like these, what kind of feelings do you think they’re going to elicit? Do you think they’ll cause feelings of motivation, drive, pride at caring for your body? No. They’re going to cause feelings of disdain or maybe even boredom or doubt (as in doubting that you’ll be able to keep up with the changes).

This is when willpower kicks in. When the thoughts don’t elicit supportive feelings and it’s tempting to not do the thing you’re intending to do. You try to override that temptation with willpower. You try to use self-control. You use willpower to “fight” through. You use it to resist urges. Until you can’t. Until it runs out. Because you’re a human and willpower will deplete for most humans, unless you’re superhuman. Then, when a challenge comes up and the willpower has run out, it’s very easy to slip back. Especially if it hasn’t become a habit yet. Meaning, it’s not a subconscious behavior yet.

The problem when you slip back, is this. It then leads to the thought that you’ve failed. How hard is it to keep persisting after a thought that you’ve failed? Really hard.

So, how can you use your thoughts to decrease or even eliminate the need for willpower? That temporary willpower you know will run out, thus leading to a negative thought and feeling of failure. You work backwards. You think of the primary feeling that you need to have to drive the actions of continuing to make the eating habit change you’re trying to make.

I recommend writing this down in a notebook if you’re able to right now, as long as you aren’t driving or doing anything you need your full attention for.

So about halfway down the page, write down the specific action or behavior you’re trying to do to improve your eating habits. You can do this with anything. If you also want to start an exercise habit, you can do this as well.  Then, above that action, write the primary feeling or emotion you would need to have to drive that action. Really try to pinpoint it. You can even Google a list of emotions, if you’re having trouble getting specific. If you want, you can also write down a secondary emotion.

So once you have the emotion, write down the thoughts you would need to have to elicit that primary emotion. You can do the same if you wrote down a secondary emotion too. I recommend writing a list of at least 3 thoughts if you can.

Now, this is really important, but you don’t have to 100% believe these thoughts, okay?

I know this is going to sound a little mind-blowing, but sometimes thoughts that are necessary, aren’t 100% believable. If they’re a little believable, that’s totally fine. The reason is this. Your brain is used to thinking a certain way, or having certain thoughts. These are called thought habits. When you are in the habit of thinking certain thoughts or having a certain mindset. Another term for this is Default Thinking.

Just like it isn’t easy to completely change your eating habits instantly, it isn’t easy to change your thought habits instantly either. Especially if the new thought is completely at the opposite end of the spectrum as the old thought. Same thing for eating habits, by the way.

So write down a few thoughts that are either believable or at least somewhat believable, that you think would elicit the feeling or emotion you wrote down. Once you have these thoughts, practice saying them to yourself, either out loud or in your head. When you get in the habit of thinking these thoughts, they start to replace the other thoughts. They start to become your new mindset, at least around eating habits, your body, and food. What you’ll start to notice is that when these thoughts become your new thought habits, you’ll start to feel those more positive emotions more frequently than you did before. They’ll start to replace the more negative ones, which means the negative ones will start to diminish.

When the negative emotions diminish, the journey of changing your eating habits becomes a more enjoyable one. You start finding it to be easy to change your eating habits and stick with it. You find it easy to create results. You feel in control of your results, and your life. This is what we all want right? The sense that we get to choose our paths. That life doesn’t happen to you, but instead, you get to decide. You get to create your life as you go.

That’s what I have for you today on willpower and your thoughts. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Eating Habits for Life, so new episodes come up automatically. Send this episode to a friend who you think is relying on willpower to change her eating habits. You’ll help her out and she’ll be so grateful. Take care and I’ll talk with you soon.