How Willpower Fails You
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Pickaxe.

If you really want your life to be easy, you don't need willpower. All of the progress that you want in life is overcoming your internal stuff. It's to actually control these other four variables in order to make self-control effortless. What we need is a lot of people live very high friction lives. That means that they rely on their willpower to overcome the other parts of themselves. This is a battle you can win, but it is a war you will lose because one day your willpower won't be there.

you'll run out eventually. Now, this is a very common problem. So as we go through life, we realize I need more willpower. And everyone says, be disciplined, have willpower, because it's things like willpower, desire. Willpower helps us sometimes, but desire, motivation, ambition, this is what drives us. But the challenge is that as we start to exert willpower, sometimes we'll get this burst of activity where I'm working really hard.

and it works great for a week. And then all of these old patterns start to emerge. So how do we understand this stuff? Should I use willpower? Should I not use willpower? Is it good or is it bad? So in order to understand this, we need to understand human behavior. And then we will see what role willpower has. And then we will also see why a yogic

perspective and doing things like getting rid of all of your ambition actually helps you in the long run. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience

shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So when a human being acts...

There are five sources of action within a human being. The first is desire. I want something, right? So there's an internal motivation that kind of goes in a particular direction. The second reason that we act is a habit. So

So there's a lot of action that happens within humans that is automatic. The third reason that we act is an emotion. So if we look at what is the reason we have emotions, emotions are sources of information and sources of motivation. So if I'm walking down the street and I see, I don't know, a giant snake, this triggers an emotional reaction that causes me to run away or run forward and try to hug it.

depending on what my emotion is. And then there is some kind of other, let's just call it an internal motivation, because there may be other things within us, things like ambition, right? So ambition is, you can maybe describe it as a desire, but let's just say that there's like kind of this fourth category. So when I say that there's an internal motivation and desire, these are two different things. What do I mean by that? What I'm talking about is neuroscientifically.

So if you look at your desire to do something, there are two parts of the brain that are active. One is your nucleus accumbens. This is the pleasure or dopamine circuit of the brain. So when you feel like playing a video game, it's not like ambition. It is the nucleus accumbens is telling you, hey, we want to spurt a dopamine. Let's do this.

Pornography, doom scrolling, playing video games, eating healthy food, all of these trigger the nucleus accumbens. But what we know is that some amount of motivation or the desire to act does not come from the nucleus accumbens. In fact, there are parts of our brain, this is more of the serotonergic system, which longs for things like fulfillment, contentment,

contentment, security. That's not the nucleus accumbens. Okay, so we literally have two parts of the brain. This is maybe the anterior cingulate cortex as an example, the serotonergic system versus the dopamine system. And both of these will drive our behavior.

Okay. So now what about willpower? Because I said there are five, right? So now let's understand willpower. Willpower is used to override the other four. Willpower comes from our frontal lobes. So let's say I have a desire to eat a hamburger. So the nucleus accumbens is telling me, let's eat a hamburger. Let's get, give me some of that dopamine. Give me some of that dopamine, son. And so my frontal lobes step in, restrain that impulse. And

And then sometimes we have this other serotonergic circuitry, which drives us in a particular direction. Like I want to be ambitious. I want to accomplish a lot. And then our frontal lobes can still rein that in. So the frontal lobes control the other parts of our brain. This is willpower. And so now we run into a problem because the neuroscience research tells us that willpower is a fatigable, finite resource that usually gets replenished

when you go to sleep. Okay. So we know this because we know there are a lot of studies that show that it is hard to use willpower to make the right decision when your frontal lobes are exhausted. So if you think about eating healthy, it is easier to eat healthy in the morning than it is at night when you're fatigued, right? So you can like, you pack your lunch in the morning, you go to work, but then by the end of the day, you're exhausted.

You're tired. So let me play video games. Let me eat unhealthy food. So we know that willpower runs out. And it has to run out, right? Because this is the other way to think about it, which is that if it never ran out, then doing willpower for the first five minutes would feel the same as 10 hours later. You could constantly exert willpower. And if it was not a fatigable resource, everything would be easy. But we know it's a fatigable resource. There's a really great experiment on this, which I'll touch on very quickly.

which is what I call the cookie and beat experiment. So two groups of people were given an impossible task. Like it's like a puzzle, like a maze that doesn't actually have an exit. You can't get from the entrance to the exit or the center or whatever. And they basically saw how long until people give up. And what they did is they actually had a really interesting condition. So the maze is unsolvable.

But while they're waiting for the maze, they're sitting in a waiting room and there's two plates of food. There's the control condition and then there's the experimental condition. In one room, there's a plate of chocolate chip cookies and in the other room, there's a plate of boiled beets. And the participants are told, you are not allowed to eat this food. This is for someone else. So in the chocolate chip cookie condition,

People didn't eat the food, but they had to resist eating the food. Whereas in the boiled beets, there's no resistance. So what they found is that if you had to resist the chocolate chip cookies, you gave up on the maze faster than if you had to resist the beets because there's no resisting the beets. Nothing to resist. There's no desire.

And so in the beat condition, their willpower was less drained. So we know that willpower is a fatigable resource. But what about this whole idea of, okay, it's a muscle to be trained? Absolutely. Just because it's a fatigable resource does not mean that it is not a muscle. It's not a muscle. It's neurons. But what we know is you can train a part of the brain. So I think about willpower as a battery, but you can increase the size of your battery by doing things like meditating.

By doing things like emotional regulation techniques, right? So we literally have things that we'll teach. I'll teach these people skills in ADHD or addiction psychiatry when I'm working with patients, where I will teach them how to restrain their emotional impulses. And as they practice, they get better at

But if you are using willpower every single day to restrain your desires, restrain your ambitions, restrain your habits, and restrain your emotions, you will burn out. In fact, if we look at why burnout is so big in the world today, it is because we are using so much willpower. We are relying on willpower to constantly restrain the other parts of ourselves. This is also why meditation is booming, because everyone is realizing my battery is too small. So I need to strengthen it.

And so what ends up happening? We strengthen our battery. We increase the reserve of our willpower. But every day is a fight. Do you all get that? We have so many bad habits to begin with that we are using willpower constantly. It doesn't work. This is what leads to burnout. So let's understand how to make things easy. Remember,

Willpower is only necessary when it needs to override one of these other things. So what the yogi says is that the real way to live life is not to use a bunch of willpower or discipline. Do you all get this? So they have a lot of willpower, certainly. But when they're sitting in the caves in the Himalayas every day, the reason that they're able to do that day in and day out, the reason that they're disciplined,

is because they have actually decreased the strength of the other four. So understand this. If I have a very strong desire, I need this much willpower to overcome it. But the smaller desires that I have, the less willpower that I need, right? If I have a very strong habit, I need a lot of willpower to overcome it. But if I reduce the size of my habit, the willpower...

necessary is low. In the yogic system, what the yogis realized is that you should absolutely strengthen your willpower. But what you should really do if you want to make life easy and be in full control where you need a small amount of willpower to overcome anything, you need to make your desire smaller. You need to let go of your emotions. You need to actually even get rid of habits. And crazily enough, you need to get rid of your ambition. So as you become more desireless, the amount of willpower needed decreases. And then something really cool happens.

happens because now you are no longer restraining yourself. So all of the progress that you want in life is overcoming your internal stuff, right? So I want to eat a hamburger. I mean, my body wants a hamburger or my tongue wants a hamburger, but something up here restrains that impulse using willpower. And so the real way to make this work, right? So this is what I do with my patients who are

or even people who want to exercise and stuff like that, is when I have patients who exercise very regularly, I ask them, how much willpower does it take? They say very little. They don't need a whole lot. So I was working with a professional swimmer, for example. And he said, after 20 years of swimming, I still hate how cold the water is when I first get in.

So they need five seconds of willpower in order to do their full workout, and that is just to get in the pool. The rest of it is easy. So what we advocate for, if you really want your life to be easy and you don't even want willpower, you don't even need willpower, it's to actually control these other four variables. Decrease your desires, regulate your emotions, alter your habits,

And get rid of your ambition. And then what happens, and this is what really confuses people because they say, isn't my ambition what motivates me? No, I mean, yeah, sort of. Right. But the whole point is that when you have ambition, the other parts of your brain are like, we don't want to do this. Your nucleus accumbens is like, no, fuck you, serotonin system. And by the way, there's an inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin, where if you engage in a bunch of dopaminergic activity.

your serotonin levels actually go down, right? This is why you can have so much fun. I can do a bunch of drugs. I can play a lot of video games, but then I won't feel content or fulfilled at the end of the day. Whereas I can work out, I can eat healthy, I can work hard, I can learn an instrument. And at the end of the day, I feel good about myself. Those are two opposite systems, actually. Not technically, but practically. In order to make self-control effortless...

What we need is for very little control to be exerted. Does that make sense? The more control I have to exert, the more effort it's going to take. So what we really want to do, if you're struggling with willpower, is we want to use willpower. So this is what I'd say. The right way to do it is to treat willpower like salt in food. So if we use a ton of it, it's bad. If we have none of it, it's bad. We need just the right amount of willpower depending on the dish.

And in general, we want to try to use as little as possible or we're going to need some. That's the right way to think about willpower. When you want to move in the wrong direction, that's when we need willpower. So the real solution to this answer is to stop wanting to move in the wrong direction in the first place. Let go of your ambition. Replace it with dharma. Practice emotional regulation techniques or digest the source of your emotions. Where do these emotions stem from?

Why am I feeling so negative? Notice your vasana, your habit in the mind. Learn how to rewire that habit. That's rewiring vasanas. But this is how to understand willpower, is that it's something that should be used as a last resort or sprinkled in throughout the day. And then if you work on the other four dimensions of behavior, then you won't need willpower. What a great question. What if I want to do nothing? Let's understand this. Now,

No one wants to do nothing. This is a incorrect diagnosis of the problem. It is impossible for human beings to want to do nothing. And you may say, but Dr. K, I wake up and I don't feel like doing anything. How do you spend your day? Do you just literally sit there and stay in bed? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But usually it's no. So let's understand, even if you sit and lay in bed all day, that's what you want to do, right? So let's say I get up and I go to the bathroom. And then once I get up from the bathroom, then where do I go? I go back into bed. Why do I go back into bed? Because I want to be in bed. So the first thing to understand is that when people say they want to do nothing, they don't want to do nothing. They want to do very specific things that are not something. I want to play video games.

I want to stay in bed. I want to get high. I want to drink. I want to sleep. I want to be alone. I want to not see anyone. These are all wants. So the first mistake that we make if you do nothing is you have to realize that you have very powerful wants. It's not that you have an absence of desire. In fact, what you have is desire that is way too strong because you have a very strong desire to not see another human being. You have a very strong desire to procrastinate. How do you know you have a strong desire to procrastinate? Because if you try to do work...

Your mind will tell you, I don't want to do this. So how do we fix this problem? There are a couple of things to do.

The first is to realize that it isn't that you don't want something. It is that you are too much of a victim to your wants. Your wants control you. You don't control them. And this is why people try to find motivation. So this is where like they make a very, very, very simple mistake, which is that everyone says, how do I find motivation in life? That's not a solution. That's actually a problem.

Let me explain why. See, if I'm a slave to my wants, my only success in life is if I happen to have the right wants. If I want to work out, then I win. If I want to eat healthy, then I win. If I want money more than I want pleasure, then I win. So what we try to do is we try to create particular wants. We try to craft wants that move us in the right direction. But we are still a slave to our wants. We're not actually conquering our desires. We are just hoping that

That my desire is in the right direction. And this is actually what happens to people, right? Because their desires, one day they wake up and they're like, oh, thank God I want to work out today. Thank God. Oh, my God. How can I be this motivated every single day? But the problem is that this isn't sustainable because this motivation will disappear over time. Because today you wake up motivated. Tomorrow you're not going to wake up motivated. This is why gym memberships are so popular the first week of January, because I wake up and I want to do this. So I'm going to do it.

So if you guys really want to conquer this, I'll give you all a really interesting technique. So what we want to do is be free from desire entirely. And we think that conquering desire means conquering our bad desires. I'm going to force myself to eat a salad even when I want to eat a sandwich, let's say. Right? I'm going to force myself to work out even though I feel like sitting on my ass. The cool thing about conquering desires is you can conquer it both ways.

So one really interesting exercise that I'll give to people is think about something you're motivated towards that's positive and then restrain that by 50%. Oh my God, I feel so excited today. I'm going to do eight hours of work. Don't do eight hours of work. Do four hours of work. Do less.

Oh my God, I want to eat so healthy. I'm going to go to the grocery store and I'm going to buy a bunch of healthy food because I'm motivated to eat healthy. Don't buy a bunch of healthy food. Cut it in 50%. Even the positive things in your life, do less of them. I know, super crazy. Yes, absolutely. Because the whole point is that we do not want you doing the positive things in your life because you wake up one day and you feel like doing it. That's the wrong compass because that means that if you wake up tomorrow and you don't feel like doing it, you're not going to do it.

The whole point is to get control of the compass.

Not hope and pray that it's pointing in the right direction one day and pointing the wrong direction the other day. This is why people, one step forward, one step back. See, a lot of people who are stuck in life, if you are stuck in life, this is probably the problem, the only problem. And you say, I make some progress and then my progress slips away. I make some progress and the progress slips away. The reason that that happens is because you are a slave to yourself. And if you want the right thing on one day, you'll do it. If you don't want the right thing the next day, you won't do it. This is the problem.

is to gain control of yourself. And it's so hard to overcome my desire for something dopaminergic. It is easier to overcome my desire for something positive, but we never practice that. So we're never fighting against a level one mob. We're always fighting against a level 10 mob, an addiction. I need to overcome my addiction. No one is talking about overcoming little things or even things that are quote unquote good for you.

Setting a target and sticking to it even when you feel like doing more. Today, I'm going to go to the gym for 45 minutes. At the 45-minute mark, I don't feel like I want to do more, but I'm going to restrain myself. See, do you ever restrain yourself when you're moving in the right direction? Of course not. You're only restraining yourself when you're moving in the wrong direction. So you're not practicing restraint, and that's very hard. This is what we call the rubber band mechanic, okay? Okay?

In gaming, we have this idea of a rubber band mechanic, which is how like things like games like LoL or Dota, whatever, they'll have a rubber band mechanic so that things don't snowball. We have this in real life too. The rubber band mechanic in real life is I run really, really, really far in a positive direction and then I snap back. So imagine that there is a tree and there is a rubber band tied between you and the tree.

And the further you run away from the tree, the more elasticity increases in the rubber band, the harder you snap back. Right? So how do you get away from the tree? You have to take off the rubber band. That's the way to do it. You have to sublimate the desire. Start acting...

outside of your desire. So do something for the sake of doing it, not because it gives you some benefit. And this is where our whole society will say, I don't want to do that. I should have a reason why I do something. I'm studying because I want an A. I'm exercising because I want to be sexy. No one is acting for the sake of action. And then what happens the moment that you stop acting for the sake of action is

You make yourself a slave to your desire. And then you just hope that your desire moves in the right direction. So do something completely worthless. The more worthless things you do, the more of truly nothing that you do, the better you will be in life. I'll give you all just a simple example. I am going to empty this cup of pens and then I'm going to put them in. That's what I'm going to do. We're going to do it again. One at a time. Let's go.

And then you will say to me, but Dr. K, that's a complete waste of energy. You're not accomplishing anything. That's the fucking point. I am removing accomplishment from action. And then you are in full control. See, if you have the ability to do something that is completely worthless, that's everything. Because there's no benefit. There's no dopamine. There's no serotonin. There's no ambition. But there's freedom. There's control. Separate...

motivation from action. If you separate motivation from action, you will be in complete control of your life. To act because you decide to, not because something in here tells you to.