Self-Improvement

January 27, 2024

What is your current purpose right now? The one thing that you are striving towards at this point in your life that you want.

Maybe it is fitness, good grades so you can go to the college you want, a relationship, or maybe you want to start an online business. Visualize that part of your ideal future.

Now think about the constraint. The reason you started reading this is because there is this one bad habit this constraint that is holding you back from your potential.

You aren't going to get to your goal if you have this thing holding you hostage.

If you don’t gain control of your impulses, you won't be able to control the outcome of your life.

Understanding and acknowledging the role of willpower in our lives is important.

But what exactly is willpower? How do you build it?

The truth is that willpower is more of a skill.

It is the ability to restrain your impulses.

Something that can be developed and improved over time, much like mastering a new language or learning how to play an instrument. It's essential not to view willpower as a magic cure-all, as excessive reliance on it can lead to burnout and frustration. The key lies in training your willpower like a muscle, augmenting it with various other strategies for lasting change. By approaching it from a place of understanding, you're setting yourself up for sustainable changes in your life.

This letter will go into detail about how to eliminate the bad habits at the source and learn about the only “secrets” of willpower.

I’ve also put together a page of journal prompts you can use to follow along with this letter if you’d like. I think it will help you take action right away by writing these things out.

I saw a video a while ago of someone saying that to train your willpower you should put the addiction right in front of you and stare at it.

Possibly one of the most brainless things someone could say.

This approach is pointless because it’s unrealistic and it’s also skipping a lot of steps.

We know this is useless because of the famous marshmallow experiment.

The marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification and self-control in children.

In the experiment, a child was offered a choice between receiving one small reward immediately (like a marshmallow) or waiting for a short period to receive a larger reward (two marshmallows).

70% of the children essentially failed the test and chose instant gratification.

Logically, it makes sense to wait to get the second marshmallow right? But most didn’t.

They weren’t thinking about it logically from the lens of their future self. They weren’t thinking at all actually.

It was the craving in their mind that told them to eat the marshmallow after seeing it in front of them.

Now imagine they did this experiment again. But instead, they didn’t put the marshmallow in front of the children.

They told them, you can have one now or you can wait to get two. I’d be willing to bet, that 100% of the children would have passed the test and waited for two.

They would have thought more logically about the benefits of waiting and would have opted to delay gratification. But the moment that the marshmallow, that cue, was in front of them, they folded.

Now imagine how hard it would be for you to stop wasting time on your phone when you have all of your notifications on, color is on, all the apps downloaded and you sleep with it on your pillow.

It’s simply too easy to waste time. You wake up to the alarm on your phone which is right next to you, and you grab it and waste two hours before you get out of bed. Then you come on here and ask how to get rid of your phone addiction.

This is like having one foot in and one foot out. You want to do this thing and you tell yourself that you want to change or that you’re the type of person that does this thing and not this, but you still have your foot outside the door.

This is what happens when you approach the problem going from the outside in and only seeing it on the surface level.

You’re not fully committed to change because you’re underestimating how addicted you are.

You don’t have a true understanding of the situation.

That is why you’re still doing the bad habit.

Approaching this problem from the inside out is how you gain understanding.

Let’s say that you have a problem with watching too much YouTube.

Don’t look at this from the outside in, look at it from the inside out; from the perspective of thought and awareness.

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself”-Abraham Maslow

If you were on a coaching call with me, and you had this problem, I’d ask you this:

What is the thought that you have right before you sit down to watch YouTube?

Perhaps it’s the thought of boredom.

Your mind’s solution to boredom (right now) is scrolling. Instant gratification, dopamine. That’s your backend coding. Your backend code is your subconscious mind. All of your actions are dictated by that backend code and what you believe.

Now as opposed to viewing the problem as watching too much YouTube, the problem is now boredom. We aren’t getting caught up in the outcome anymore, we are focusing on the cause of the outcome.

We all know that focusing too much on the outcome is what causes us to feel stressed. (And stress is what causes most people to indulge in their addictions in the first place a lot of the time.)

This would be you going at it from the outside in. I talked about how you need to form a certain identity before you worry about outcomes in this letter about why you can’t change.

The idea is to shift your perception of the situation. Think about the reason why this is a problem in your life and clearly define it.

What do you do, when do you do it, why do you do it when you do it, what do you do before and after? What are you thinking during all of these moments?

The problem was watching too much YouTube. You do it when you’re bored and have nothing else to do. (Or you may be procrastinating but I’ll talk more about procrastination again in the future.)

So if the trigger is boredom, then we need to deconstruct why you are bored and why you default to doing that activity when you are bored.

James Clear talked about this study that was done on Vietnam War soldiers. When I went back and read this it blew my mind.

They found that 35% of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20% were addicted.

But, when the users returned home, only 5% of them relapsed within one year and 12% within 3 years.

9/10 users completely eliminated their addictions literally overnight. And that’s a hard drug. Before this, it was believed that heroin addiction was a permanent condition.

If you think about the environment they were in, it makes sense that there were so many users.

The constant stress of the 19-year war(for the US), being far from home, surrounded by all of the same people all of the time who also do it and with easy access to it.

Versus when they come back home, a drastic change in environment, they have none of those things. Those things were the triggers.

Before you take any action you need to truly understand this desire and gamify its negative effects in your life.

Why do you want to stop doing this?

What kind of effect is it having on your mental or physical well-being?

It’s probably causing you some other problems in your life. You want to make yourself aware of that constantly. This will help you think more logically.

Does this thing align with my values and my ideal future?

“The future must become present in the imagination of the one who would wisely and consciously create circumstances.” -Bob Proctor

When you are in a situation where you need to make a choice. Think from the lens of your future self, and also think about your values.

Staying conscious of what you want will help you filter out things you don’t want. It will become clear to you what you should do because you are thinking about it logically.

If there was any secret to willpower, this is it. Reread that last section if you didn’t grasp that.

Then think about the benefits of avoiding that thing. What would life be like?

As of 2021, the average teenager spends 8 and a half hours a day using their phone. (You should have seen my face when I saw that.)

Can you imagine what life would be like if you had an extra 5-6 hours? Imagine all the things you could do.

How much money would you save if you stopped smoking?

How much better you feel if you stopped eating so much junk?

How much energy you would have if you stopped under-sleeping and oversleeping?

Scrutinize this desire you have and realize that it isn’t what you want. It’s not who you are but you’re casting votes for that type of person every time you do it.

That should make you upset.

It makes me never want to waste time again.

But, there will be times when the habit gets the best of you and this willpower isn’t enough.

Individuals with strong self-control aren't fundamentally different from anyone else.

Instead, disciplined individuals are better at organizing their lives to minimize the need for intense willpower.

They effectively reduce their exposure to situations that might tempt them.

The best way is to use the previous strategy and then eliminate it at the source.

To get rid of the trigger, we need to identify the environment that promotes this behavior and eliminate everything that may act as a visual, mental, or social cue.

Then optimize this same environment in a way that promotes more purposeful things.

You’ll be surprised how much our environment plays a role in the actions we take.

When you walk into a library, you automatically start to be as quiet as possible. Nobody tells you to be quiet or to whisper, but you do it without even thinking about it.

You can set up your environment (and life)in a way that promotes good behavior in place of bad one. Even if it’s still the exact same spot as before.

I have personally found that the best way to eliminate triggers is to make it as hard as possible to do it in every way. More than you think you need.

The environment that I spend most of my time in(my room) is optimized to eliminate distractions and promote productivity.

My room barely has any decorations.

I make my bed right when I wake up so I don’t want to get back into it.

My PlayStation is wrapped up, unplugged, and out of site. And it has been for a year.

My TV remote is kept out of sight as well, and I also don’t have any subscriptions like Netflix or Hulu.

I sleep with my phone all the way across the room so that I don’t immediately grab it when I wake up.

I purposely put my alarm on my phone instead of the Alexa that way I have to get up and out of my bed to shut it off.

And you may be thinking “Well what if you just start using your phone after you turn the alarm off?”

I haven’t gotten into what I do to eliminate digital distractions.

My phone is on black and white all the time, I haven’t had any social media apps on my phone for literally a year now(though I did recently redownload them), no games, I have notifications turned off on most apps, do not disturb on all the time, and screen limit settings that shut everything down at 7 and don’t turn back on til the morning.

On my computer, I also put on black and white sometimes and I have unhooked to stop myself from getting distracted if I go on YouTube to search for something.

I promote good behavior by having sticky note reminders on my desk telling me to live life on purpose and how I deserve the consequences of my actions and I also have a bunch of books readily available all the time.

A lot of this stuff may seem extreme. I guess that makes me an extreme person but I can’t begin to explain to you guys the mental clarity and drive that you get when you have this much control of your psychic energy.

I’m living life on purpose. And I like it that way. Do things that help you live purposefully and stop doing things that don’t.

I know I target social media a lot but this is not limited to that. Anything can be a distraction. Use my advice and apply it where its relevant. Don’t feel like you need to go without social media for a year just because I did. If that’s your problem, then go for it.

Like I said before, willpower is a skill. The skill of restraining your impulses.

But how do you actually build it? Just like any other skill.

In Ali Abdaal’s new book, Feel Good Productivity, he mentions this term created by Albert Bandura called Enactive Mastery. (I think it sounds cool)

It simply boils down to the process of learning through doing.

The more we do something, the greater our sense of control. The more we learn, the more our skill grows. In turn, boosting our confidence and our abilities.

To relate this to willpower, we can think of Enactive Mastery as repetition and momentum.

Both demand long-term thinking. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.

But repetition and momentum is what gives you power.

Gaining momentum and maintaining awareness when tracking something makes breaking the streak more painful.

The human mind is built to preserve its habits. Once abstaining from a certain action becomes part of your identity through Enactive Mastery, you will strive to maintain it.

Consider someone who takes pride in never having smoked or drank. Even if it may seem egotistical, those who openly embrace this trait are unlikely to break it. They fight to maintain this identity because it gives them a sense of self.

When you start resisting a bad habit, acknowledge your victories and remind yourself of them. Celebrate your success. Over time, you will accumulate these wins and it will become part of your character to abstain from that action. Acknowledge the benefits that come from not engaging in that behavior.

This is how you rewrite the backend code.

Approach this problem with the open-mindedness and humility of a beginner, just like any other endeavor in life.

While you might believe that adopting a "fake it till you make it" mentality could be beneficial, it may be more harmful than helpful.

Embracing humility allows you to start with a clean slate. It enables you to be more comfortable with making mistakes, which are only detrimental if you don't learn from them.

By letting go of the need for perfection or abstinence for a certain number of days, you relieve yourself from undue stress. Replace it with the openness and humility essential for change.

This will only increase your “willpower”

Don't misunderstand and think that it's acceptable to continue harmful habits.

Understand that they're still bad for you and don't treat them like a reward for abstaining for a while. That's the same mindset that led to this situation in the first place.

Your goal is to overcome these habits, not to give in to them. It's easy to fall into the trap of rewarding yourself with the very thing you're trying to avoid.

This would only serve to perpetuate the cycle of addiction. Stay purposeful and focus on your long-term goals, rather than seeking immediate gratification. After all, it’s this short-term thinking that got you into this situation in the first place.

That is all for now. Thank you for reading.

Be sure to check out 14 Days To Purpose to build a journaling habit, gain clarity for the future, and live on purpose with questions you’ve never asked yourself.

Have a great weekend. See ya,

-Abraham