There’s no shortage of good advice on how to bolster willpower, including one piece I’d be smart to take: Don’t hide your resolutions in a drawer.
Other ideas include keeping goals realistic, planning how they’ll be implemented and enlisting the help of friends and family for encouragement and accountability. These are all helpful tips, but there’s one important thing missing: belief. Specifically, recent studies suggest that when it comes to willpower, we get what we expect.
The new findings fly in the face of previous thinking about willpower, which tended to put the emphasis on power. In this way of looking at things, willpower was seen as a muscle that was easily depleted. Newer research casts doubt on this limited-resource theory and instead suggests that we have as much willpower as we expect to have. In this alternative model, willpower works less like a muscle and more like a placebo.
This matters, because willpower’s importance goes well beyond keeping New Year’s promises. Indeed, researchers find that willpower (or self-regulation) also predicts academic, professional and financial success better than IQ and other aptitude scores. People with lots of willpower work harder, avoid tempting distractions and persist until a task is completed.
Another common belief about willpower is that it is taxing — that exercising self-control or willpower burns a lot of energy. But does it? Not according to Robert Kurzban, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. […] As Kurzban noted, people actually perform better on self-control tasks after vigorous exercise, which burns far more calories than self-regulation does.
None of this means that keeping resolutions will be easy. But willpower is most likely to let us down if we expect it to. Take care with your list of resolutions for 2013. Narrow it to the goals you really care about. Make a plan. Get the support of your loved ones. Seek out accountability. For God’s sake, don’t stuff the list in a drawer. And last, but certainly not least, have faith in your willpower.
Give yourself reasons to believe, despite the sorry statistics and even your own track record. Think back on the many challenges you have mastered, especially when you stumbled along the way. If your goal is important enough to you, chances are you can achieve it, and a little more faith in your willpower could help.