willpower instinct PDF

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Book Summary : The willpower Instinct by Kelly Mcgonigal Willpower instinct is a book for anyone who wants to understand the reasons behind human temptations, addictions or motivations. I am writing this book summary to revisit the key lessons of the book again and share these powerful insights Self-control determines your will power and in today’s world self-control can be a better predictor of success, determinant of leadership qualities and important for healthy relationships. Willpower can be of 3 types: 1. I won’t power 2. I will power 3. I want power Willpower is driven by the prefrontal cortex of human brain which pushes us to do the harder things. Human brain has evolved over a period of time and some of our primitive instincts like having a sweet tooth which helped us survive in past by accumulating extra body fat are now posing humanity a health risk. The good news is that brain’s latest evolved self-control system could be used to override such desires. Different part of our minds may have completely opposite desires, the key lies in understanding both and using the same to our advantage. Rules of Willpower: 1. Know Thyself (Increase your self-awareness): Humans have the power to search their soul for self-understanding. We need to be selfaware and recognize when we are making a choice that requires willpower. For eg:- A smoker need to recognize the moment of craving and how one moment can lead to a cycle. If we are distracted than we are most likely to give in to our temptations. This is why, distracted shoppers are more susceptible to in-store promotions. Meditation improves our willpower as it makes us more self-aware. 2. Pause and plan response: What determines our success at willpower challenges? We all possess a “willpower reserve”. Anything which causes stress on our mind or body can affect our willpower reserve. There are activities which can help you build your willpower reserve like meditation, physical exercise, good sleep and quality time with family and friends. Lack of these activities can make us vulnerable to stress, cravings and temptations. Be cautious chronic self-control could be bad for your health as it will sap-up all your willpower reserve and leave you high and dry. 3. Willpower is like a muscle: Self-control deteriorates over a period of time. It is like a muscle. Using it can be tiring and no rest can result in running out of strength completely. It is optimum to plan our “I will” willpower challenges during those periods of the day when we have maximum willpower. Brain may still consider our sugar levels as an indicator of body’s energy. Thus, our primitive instinct is to favour short-term thinking and impulsive behaviour when our blood sugar drops. We also binge on sugary foods during this time. Exercising small willpower challenges helps in strengthening our willpower muscle. We have a natural tendency to think about short term gains and so it requires enormous amount of collective self-control to prevent future disaster. This is the main reason that people are unable to understand climate change intuitively.

4. Moral Licensing effect: When we do something good we feel good about ourself and we often give permission to ourselves to do something bad. Because of this moral licensing self-indulgence is seen as a reward for virtue even if it goes against our goals. We need to be cautious about the moral licensing trap. So, focus while working towards our goal should be on “I did that because I wanted to” not on “I did that, great, now I can do what I really want”. 5. Mistake wanting for happiness: Brain has a reward system which releases dopamine when it recognizes promise for reward. But we mistake this arousal as happiness while a dopamine rush can’t create happiness but it creates desires to work towards something. Being mindful of the same can prevent us from binging for the next episode of our favourite series, or next video on youtube. If we are to have self-control than we need to distinguish between real meaningful rewards from false addictive rewards. 6. What the hell effect: Feeling bad can lead us to give in further. When we do something about which we don’t feel good or feel some guilt, we start giving us a license to do it again as having done it once makes us feel that doing it again is not going to make any difference. What the hell effect is a cycle of indulgence, regret and greater indulgence. To break the what-the-hell cycle the key is self-compassion – to be supportive to oneself especially in face of stress and failure. Because it is forgiveness not guilt that increases accountability. 7. Delay instant gratification The longer we have to wait for reward, the less it is worth for us, this is called delay discounting. Becoming self-aware of our own triggers for gratification and putting them out of sight can keep them from tempting our mind. A 10 min delay may make brain think a reward as future reward. For our “I will” challenge we can use ten-minute rule to overcome the temptation to procrastinate. For our “I won’t” challenge every time we have temptation to give in we can remind ourselves to push for 10 more mins. 8. Willpower is contagious! Both bad habits and good ones can spread from person to person like germs and nobody is completely immune. When we see people nearby who are physically fit, wd also tend to mirror them. Or we see somebody working towards a certain goal our propensity to work towards the same goal increases. This is called goal contagion. So, it makes sense to have people around who could be role model for your willpower challenge. Self-control is influenced by social proof 9. Limits of I won’t power Thought suppression doesn’t work and the best strategy to become better at such challenges is to stop trying controlling thoughts and emotions and then they will stop controlling you. It is difficult to control all what comes in our mind, but we can choose what we want to act upon. Key takeways: Willpower is not a personality trait but a skill which all of us can develop. Self-awareness increase our chances to become better at our goals. Understanding our brain is important, and we should not fall in its common traps.

Totally recommend reading the book, it can help immensely in setting right goals and achieving them....