How to increase your willpower

Willpower is a muscle like any other, and with the right skills this muscle can be trained. Willpower comes down to the ability to direct our attention and focus from things that give us instant gratification (chocolate brownies), to things that are more useful in the future (better waste-line). Willpower is not only something we can learn, but is something many people have not developed thoroughly between ages two and eight. Here's what you should know about how willpower works:

Willpower is resisting the marshmallow

The legendary "marshmallow test" done in the 1970's showed four-year-olds sitting in a room with a marshmallow in front of them. They were then told that "you can have your treat now, if you want. But if you don't eat it until I come back from running a errand, you can have two of them". The room was sanitized of distractions such as toys, books or pictures in order to test the self-control of a four-year-old. Only a third of children were able to wait 15 minutes before being rewarded with a second marshmallow. The kids that were able to apply self-control were the kids best a reallocating their attention. There are three varieties of attention at play when  we pit self-restraint against instant gratification:

1. The ability to voluntarily disengage our focus from an object of desire (looking out the window and instead of the juicy marshmallow)
2. Resisting distraction by keeping our focus elsewhere (creating stories in our mind and keeping our attention with something else than the marshmallow)
3. Keeping our focus on a goal in the future (Focusing on the second marshmallow)

When taking the kids that failed at the marshmallow test and teaching them basic selective attention techniques, such as directing their attention to other activities they enjoy such as colouring or making up stories, almost all of them were able to wait 15 minutes for their second marshmallow.

The best book on self-control
and Focus I've ever read

Willpower is destiny

In a more recent study 1037 children were studied for two decades in order to find the effect of self-control in their lives. In their school years they were tested rigorously and two decades later they measured their success in terms of health, wealth and crime. The better their self-control were the better they were doing in their thirties. Thse who proved to have self-control had sounder health, were more successful financially and were law-abiding citizens.

Willpower is a stronger predictor of financial success than IQ, social class or family of origin.

When children are about two years old they can shift their attention when they get upset with telling them things like "look at that birdie". Attention regulates emotion. The trick is keeping them engaged long enough for their amygdala (part of the brain that controls our emotion) to calm down. By age eight most children should be able to deploy self-awareness to keep everything they do on track. The brain is the last organ of the body to mature anatomically, continuing to grow and shape itself into our twenties. The secret is in exercising our selective attention. Willpower is also something that is easier for us to do in the morning than in the evening, so making difficult choices early on increases your chance of making a better choice.