We’ve all been there:
- Having a third helping of dessert at a party
- Telling yourself you’ll just watch one episode and then binge-watching an entire season
- Skipping your workout
- Hitting the snooze alarm seven times
- Losing your cool over a minor setback
- Dropping your new meditation habit after just three days
When self-control collapses in the face of temptation, or when self-discipline is overpowered by the urge to be lazy, you’re experiencing a willpower failure.
Willpower failures are an inevitable part of the human experience. You can reduce their frequency and severity by being strategic about willpower, but you’ll never eliminate willpower failures entirely. Since they’re not going away, you’d better figure out how to handle them. And if you learn to deal with them well, willpower failures can actually be quite useful, which brings us to the first technique …
1. Reframe them as good.
Willpower failures are naturally quite upsetting. When they occur, you know you’re not living up to your chosen identity, and this triggers frustration, guilt, or shame. This reaction, as we’ll see, is not helpful,1 so the first thing I want to do is give you some reasons to see willpower failures as good.
First of all, the fact that you even noticed your willpower failure is a good thing because it means you’re not running completely on autopilot. You’ve developed enough mindfulness to recognize that you had a choice, and that you could have chosen differently. Recognizing your own power to choose is the first step toward exercising greater willpower.
Second, you can’t have a willpower failure unless you’re trying to use willpower. Falling off your diet means you’re at least trying to eat healthily. Skipping a workout means that had you at least planned to exercise. Being disappointed in yourself for getting angry in traffic means you’re at least trying to manage your emotions. Procrastinating on a project means you at least have a project. Relapsing means you’re at least trying to overcome your addiction.
The person who has no projects and who makes no effort to improve himself cannot experience willpower failures. Only people who are working on becoming better can have willpower failures. So willpower failures are a good sign; they mean you’re trying.
Third, remember that willpower is like a muscle that grows when we challenge it. If I go to the rock-climbing gym and succeed at every route I attempt, then I’m not pushing myself, so I won’t improve. But if I try routes that are too hard for my current abilities, I’ll fail, and in doing so, I’ll learn new skills and become stronger. Likewise, if you challenge yourself to use more willpower than you currently have, you’ll inevitably experience willpower failures, but, because you’re pushing your limits, your willpower muscle will get stronger.
In other words, we need to apply a growth mindset to willpower failures. When we have a willpower failure, it’s not the result of our own innate inadequacies. It’s the result of insufficient effort or, more likely, ineffective strategies. Which brings us to the second way to deal with willpower failures well …
2. Learn from them.
“Learn to fail or fail to learn.” –Tal Ben-Shahar2
It’s a well-known truth that failures in business or athletics are important learning opportunities, but most people don’t apply this concept to willpower failures. As with any mistake, if you don’t learn from a willpower failure, you’ll be doomed to repeat it.
Did you slip up on your diet? Okay, what circumstances preceded that slip-up? How can you avoid those circumstances in the future?
Did you just have an unfortunate emotional outburst? Okay, did you notice any signs that a psychological storm was brewing? How can you strategically manage your emotions before they become too strong to control?
Did you “forget” to meditate today? Okay, what excuses did you make? How can you argue against those excuses in order to do what’s best for your future selves?
It might take many failures before you sort out a particular willpower challenge. For example, it took me about a dozen different attempts to quit my marijuana addiction. Each of the failed attempts taught me something about my mind and about addiction in general. I was only able to succeed at quitting after I had internalized the lessons of my repeated failures.
“Like it or not, the main way we learn is by falling flat on our face, just as we did when we first learned to walk. … Yes, failure is frustrating. But it’s also temporary and eventually yields wisdom. We can think of failure as part of life’s apprenticeship. If we were perfect and had all the answers, we’d never get to ask questions, and we wouldn’t be able to discover anything new.” –Kristen Neff, Ph.D.3
Learning from willpower failures requires that we abandon perfectionism and give ourselves permission to be human, which brings us to the third technique for dealing with willpower failures well …
3. Practice self-compassion.
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” –Carl Rogers
What the great psychologist Carl Rogers noticed was the counterintuitive fact that being kind to yourself makes growth and change easier. Conversely, being hard on yourself when you slip up and judging yourself makes growth and change harder.
Although it might seem logical that berating yourself when you have a willpower failure would train you to avoid future willpower failures, that’s just not how the human mind works. I’ll let Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal explain:
“If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong. Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. … In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control. Consider, for example, a study at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, that tracked the procrastination of students over an entire semester. Lots of students put off studying for the first exam, but not every student made it a habit. Students who were harder on themselves for procrastinating on their first exam were more likely to procrastinate on later exams than students who forgave themselves. The harder they were on themselves about procrastinating the first time, the longer they procrastinated for the next exam! Forgiveness—not guilt—helped them get back on track.”1
So why does self-criticism make willpower problems worse? I think the answer is emotional resistance. We tend to avoid things that are uncomfortable. We don’t want to think about them. We don’t want to look at them. And if we’re unwilling to examine our willpower failures, we have no hope of learning from them.
The students who got angry at themselves for procrastinating probably avoided the self-reflection, careful thinking, and future planning necessary to improve, or they might have been incapable of those mental activities because of their emotional state. Self-reflection, careful thinking, and planning for the future are all prefrontal cortex activities, and the prefrontal cortex shuts down when we’re overcome by strong emotions.4 On the other hand, the students who forgave themselves would have been able to calmly examine what went wrong and craft a plan to do better next time.
Furthermore, if you get angry at yourself for a willpower failure, you’ll probably feel ashamed of yourself; you’ll believe that there’s something wrong with you. This is the essence of a “fixed mindset” – the opposite of a growth mindset.5 When you have a fixed mindset, you don’t look for strategies that could help, and you don’t believe there’d be any point in trying harder.5 As a result, you don’t improve, and you reinforce the false belief that there’s something wrong with you.
In reality, of course, there’s nothing wrong with you; no one has perfect self-control. Here’s Kristen Neff, author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself:
“Everybody makes mistakes at one time or another, it’s a fact of life. And if you think about it, why should you expect anything different? Where is that written contract you signed before birth promising that you’d be perfect, that you’d never fail, and that your life would go on absolutely the way you want it to? Uh, excuse me. There must be some error. I signed up for the ‘everything will go swimmingly until the day I die’ plan. Can I speak to management please? It’s absurd, and yet most of us act as if something has gone terribly awry when we fall down or life takes an unwanted or unexpected turn.”3
The notion that “everyone makes mistakes” is so cliché that we consistently forget what it means. It means we should be compassionate with ourselves when we screw up because, if we can’t, we’ll be too wrapped up in feeling bad about our failure to do anything about it. And it means that we should expect willpower failures and plan for them, which brings us to our final strategy …
4. Predict your willpower failures.
Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct, recommends that we try to predict when we’ll fail.
Specifically, she advises us to write down when, where, and why we think our next willpower failure will occur, and then make a plan to prevent it.6 Remember if-then planning from my willpower article? (“If I’m in the situation that I predict will lead to my next willpower failure, then I will use ______ to prevent it.”) Into that blank, insert some willpower strategy, such as taking a microbreak or employing The 20-Second Rule.
When the next willpower failure occurs, you compare what actually happened with your prediction.6
Did you fail in the way that you thought you would? Or in a different way?
Did you fail when and where you expected to? Or in a different, surprising set of circumstances?
Did you forget to implement the prevention plan? Or did the plan simply not work?
Whatever the answers to these questions are, you’re sure to learn something that can help you do better in the future. You can then take this information and use it to predict the next willpower failure.
Making these predictions also helps normalize the experience of willpower failures, which helps you respond to willpower failures in an emotionally healthy way. Rather than being surprised and upset that you failed, you calmly collect the data that this failure offers. Rather than seeing a setback as a sign that you should give up completely, you see it as a sign that you should strategize around this particular failure point.
Recap
Because willpower is so important, dealing with willpower failures well is an essential skill for your self-improvement toolkit. Here again are the four ways to deal with willpower failures well:
- Reframe them as good.
- Learn from them.
- Practice self-compassion.
- Predict your failures.
Rather than beating yourself up for failing, take in the feedback that willpower failures offer and use that information to succeed in the future.
1 McGonigal, Kelly, Ph.D. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Avery, 2011.
2 Ben-Shahar, Tal. Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness. The Experiment, 2012.
3 Neff, Kristen. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow, 2011.
4 MacDonald, Matthew. Your Brain: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly Media, 2008.
5 Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books, 2007.
6 McGonigal, Kelly, Ph.D. “The Willpower Instinct.” Talks at Google. January 26th, 2012.