5 ways to fix your willpower

We're facing a willpower mismatch. Here's why, and 5 ways you can boost your willpower.

It’s that time of year when three of the seven deadly sins hit the peak of their powers:

• Gluttony: Eating holiday dinners that are the caloric equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, or drinking like Motley Crue at parties.

• Greed: Buying too much stuff during Cyber Monday sales.

• Sloth: Sleeping in instead of working out in the cold garage.

Whether you fall to or fight off these temptations comes down to one thing: willpower.

At its most basic level, willpower is what you use to make good decisions, not easy decisions.

Scientists have spent decades studying willpower—why it matters, why some people seem to have it and others don’t, and the conditions that build or break it.

I don’t think we need science to tell us that people who do more smart stuff fare better than those who do more dumb stuff, but research consistently finds that willpower is a superpower:

• A study in the Journal of Personality¹ found that more willpower is associated with better mental health, better grades, stronger relationships, and less addictive behaviors.

• A study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization² found that people with greater willpower earn more money and have better overall health and well-being.

• A slew of studies³ found that people who exhibit high self-control are viewed as more powerful and are more likely to be conferred power than those with low self-control.

The good news: You can build more willpower. New science is showing that willpower isn’t fixed, and improving it is easier than you might think.

Here’s our roadmap for today:

• Why willpower is a powerful predictor of your health, wealth, and ability to navigate modern life.

• Why we’re facing a “willpower evolutionary mismatch” between our ancient brains and the modern world.

• The “battery effect” — why your willpower changes throughout the day.

• Five science-backed methods to overhaul your environment and boost your self-discipline instantly.

Quick housekeeping

• Our Black Friday sale is still on until the end of today. Get 20% off an annual Membership. If you’re already a monthly Member, fill out this form after claiming your discount, and we’ll manually refund you.

• In case you missed it:

  • On Wednesday, we looked at the research around whether one big meal leads to weight gain, and how to avoid holiday weight gain (the most critical time of the year).

• Shoutout to our partners:

  • Maui Nui: Give the gift of good nutrition. Maui Nui’s gift sets are beautifully packaged and made from ethically sourced, nutrient-dense venison. Try the Stick Starter 6-Pack at $39 each. High-protein, low-calorie, and wildly clean.

  • Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. They’re trusted by pro sports teams, the U.S. military—and Two Percent. Momentous is running its Black Friday sale, with up to 40% off. Check it out here.

  • GOREWEAR. I used GOREWEAR gear on my annual Thanksgiving run. Specifically, the CONCURVE 2-in-1 Shorts. EASTER gets you 30% off your first GOREWEAR purchase. It’s pure Gear Not Stuff.

Audio version

I asked the science journalist David Silverberg to break down the topic of willpower for us. His work has appeared in BBC News, The Washington Post, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, and more.

Here’s David:

Many psychologists dub willpower “a human’s greatest strength” because it helps us make decisions that benefit us in the long run.

But you’ve probably noticed that your own willpower is inconsistent.

It’s like, why are you sometimes great at resisting dessert and working out early in the morning, and other times you’re hammering Oreos on the couch at night and hitting snooze the next morning?

Before we explain why—and how to build more willpower—it’s good to know some quick history. It may help you not be so hard on yourself.

It’s plausible that people today have to exercise willpower far more often than we used to. In the past, humans had far fewer temptations.

There wasn’t an excess of fatty and tasty food around. We couldn’t doom scroll instead of doing productive things. We didn’t need to force ourselves to exercise, because life gave us plenty of movement.

That is to say, evolution prepared us for drought, hunger, and danger—not Wi-Fi, Oreos, and infinite entertainment. Today, we might be facing a “willpower mismatch,” where our brains evolved to have only so much willpower—and our modern and comfortable world pushes our willpower system to the brink.

This mismatch also explains why willpower waxes and wanes across the day.

How Willpower Changes Across a Day

Think of willpower like your phone battery.

• You wake up fresh and start the morning at 100%.

• But by 2 p.m., you’ve had to respond to a bunch of unnecessary emails and eat a salad instead of a burger for lunch, and your willpower is at 47%.

• By 9 p.m., you’ve had to use it even more—more emails, a workout, etc. Your willpower battery is dead, and you find yourself with the Oreos on the couch.

Scientists have a word for this: the “willpower depletion” effect. I spoke to Meng-Yu Liang PhD, a willpower researcher, who backed the idea that willpower is a limited cognitive resource.

She told me, “Willpower can ‘run out’ temporarily and then recover, and people may differ in how much they have or how quickly it recovers.”

In a recent paper⁴, she described the battery analogy above, calling it Weak Axiom of Revealed Preferences, or WARP. It explains that we often make bad choices not because we’ve changed our minds, but because our mental energy is tanked and our willpower resources are depleted.

5 Ways to Improve Willpower

Liang laid out a few strategies that help improve our willpower the most. They add horsepower to an ancient willpower engine that struggles to keep pace with the modern world.

1. Change your environment, not your mind

Let’s go back to the idea of the “willpower mismatch” and how our ancestors only had to exercise so much willpower because there weren’t many temptations.

We can mimic this today by simply changing our environment. Liang told me, “Small barriers drastically reduce the willpower needed to resist impulses.”

That is to say, building the right environment changes the amount of willpower you have to use. If you’re low on willpower and the thing that tests your willpower isn’t there—dessert, doom scrolling, etc—you won’t have to worry.

Get creative with this based on what taxes your own willpower. Here are a few examples:

• Delete addictive apps or use Clearspace. You can’t doom scroll X and drive yourself crazy if X isn’t on your phone or has barriers to entry.

• Rid your house of “trigger” foods. If you find yourself drawn to Oreas late at night, just throw them away.

• Avoid the situations that test you. Alcoholism recovery groups have a saying, “If you spend enough time at the barbershop, you’ll eventually get a haircut.” The point is to teach people who are early in sobriety that they shouldn’t go to bars or hang out in the places they used to drink. You can use that logic for any situation.

2. To build willpower for good habits, make the first step tiny

Two Percent reader

Bradley Bertoniere

wrote a book called One Single Pushup. In 2018, he was a new father and found himself looking in the mirror and wondering when he’d become overweight. He didn’t overhaul his life by jumping into the deep end.

He did a single pushup and situp. The next day, he did two of each. The day after, three of each. He rode that daily momentum—slowly adding more reps and exercises—to working out every day for five years straight. In turn, he lost the weight and became fit.

He wrote: “The aggregation of marginal gains takes over and your life becomes unrecognizable.”

This works. When we want to build new habits, we often start with grand ideas. For example, starting a new and restrictive diet like keto or running an ultramarathon.

But Liang says this often backfires because it asks far too much of a willpower system you haven’t built.

Instead, Liang told me, do like Bradley as and make the first step easy, then slowly add from there. “Small wins build momentum without exhausting internal resources,” she said. This leans on Liang’s research, showing small wins don’t drain willpower. They build it.

• Take a 5-minute walk.

• Stretch for 1 minute.

• Write one sentence.

• Do a single pushup.

3. Set rules

Liang calls these “implementation intentions.” It’s a fancy word for rules. The idea is that you decide before the choice arrives. For example:

• “Meditate for three minutes every day at 7am.”

• “Walk five minutes for every five minutes I spend on social media.”

• “Always order a salad at restaurants.”

• “Any time I want to eat Oreos, I eat 10 raw baby carrots first.”

• “If I crave a drink at night, I make tea first. If I still want the drink after the tea, fine.”

• “When I finish dinner, I immediately brush my teeth so the kitchen is closed.”

• “If I want to buy anything online, I wait 72 hours. No same-day purchases.”

4. Make things take longer

The faster we can do a behavior, the more likely we are to do a behavior. We can use this psychological quirk to our advantage.

Whenever you’re facing a decision that challenges your willpower, try to draw it out.

• Add Clearspace to your phone, which slows down access to habit-forming apps and shortens the time you can use them.

• Delete your food-delivery apps, so you have to re-download them each time.

• Put snacks on the top shelf or in the garage—somewhere you have to work to reach.

• Log out of Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon, so you have to type the password each time.

• Keep your phone in another room when you’re working. The walk interrupts the impulse.

• Take your credit card off of autofill for online purchases (and use the 72-hour rule above).

Go deeper: Michael wrote more about this idea in this post.

5. Find a “bigger why”

The researcher Roy Baumeister says having a strong “why” is a key strategy for building willpower.

By identifying a good reason why you’re exercising willpower in the first place, you become far more willing to endure hardship.

A good example of this is why people quit smoking. Quitting just for the sake of it rarely works. But people are far more likely to quit if they get a scary health diagnosis, or realize that they need to provide for their family and recognize that smoking could lead to illness or death, which would stop them from providing.

My aunt, for example, quit smoking so she could afford karate lessons for my cousin when he was a kid.

Or there’s our case of Bradley, who realized losing weight would make him more useful for his family.

This phenomenon is also why Baumeister identified religion as a powerful motivator for willpower: It provides followers with clear moral codes, rules, and routines—e.g., what to eat and how to spend money—that guide their behavior. That simplifies the decision-making process.

Ok, now back to Michael.

Thanks to David for the post.

Have fun, don’t die, will power,

-Michael

1. Tangney JP, Baumeister RF, Boone AL. High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. J Pers. 2004 Apr;72(2):271-324. doi: 10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x. PMID: 15016066.

2. Cobb-Clark, D. A., Dahmann, S. C., Kamhöfer, D. A., & Schildberg-Hörisch, H. (2022). The predictive power of self-control for life outcomes. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 197, 725–744

3. Wu, S., Smallman, R., & Smith, P. K. (2024). Self-control signals and affords power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 127(6), 1189–1214

4. Simon Grant & Meng-Yu Liang & Sung-Lin Hsieh, 2018. “Costly Self-Control and Limited Willpower,” IEAS Working Paper : academic research 18-A009, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.