How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity

When we've been getting great sleep of sufficient duration... our level of tenacity, and willpower to engage in things that we would not ordinarily engage in by default and our ability to resist behaviors and thought patterns... is much higher. Conversely, when we are not getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis, our ability to call on tenacity and willpower is diminished.

If you hear and believe that willpower is a limited resource, well then indeed, with each subsequent task that you engage in or life event of any kind that you engage in that requires willpower and tenacity, you will have less willpower and tenacity to draw on. Whereas, if you believe that willpower and tenacity are unlimited... well, then you can engage in one challenging task and another challenging task and another challenging task without any diminishment in performance.

Let's say you're already resistance training, you're already doing cardiovascular training, what can you do to build up your tenacity and willpower? ... Pick something that you don't want to do. These are what I call in a very non-scientific way micro-sucks ... You have to pick things that are safe for you, but they suck enough that they require some effort...

I do not know anyone on this planet, I don't care if you're David Goggins or Courtney Dauwalter, there will be days when telling yourself 'just do this' or 'just don't do that' is not going to be sufficient for you to engage in the behaviors or resist the behaviors or thoughts that you need to engage in or resist.

If, for instance, you love cold showers and ice baths, well then it's very unlikely that taking cold showers or getting into an ice bath is going to increase your level of tenacity and willpower further. It might reinforce the tenacity and willpower that you've already built, but it's not going to increase it further. You need to add something or subtract something that makes it harder, not easier, to engage in or resist a behavior.

What this study found was that, yes, indeed ingesting glucose can improve performance on these multiple challenging willpower-requiring tasks. However, the degree to which the glucose-containing drink could improve performance depended on whether or not you believed that willpower was a limited resource and whether or not you believe that resource was glucose.

What's important to understand about this whole discussion about tenacity, and willpower is that the ability to engage the enter anterior midcingulate cortex and to build up its volume, literally, and increase its activity relies on one critical feature, which is that you have to be in some degree of resistance... to engage in that behavior.

If you're sleep-deprived, likewise, if you are a bit sick or run down, if you're in any kind of physical or emotional pain, your ability to draw on tenacity and willpower will be diminished.

Tenacity and willpower can be drawn upon repeatedly without them being depleted if you are clear on your beliefs about tenacity and willpower.

The outcome of these studies was that when subjects are given glucose in between a first hard task that required willpower and a second hard task that required willpower... that their levels of willpower were maintained consistently from one task to the next—and in some cases increased from one task to the next—if they had more glucose available because they drank this glucose drink.

It just so happened that cardiovascular training done 3 times per week for an hour at a time at modern intensity increased the size of the anterior midcingulate cortex.

They showed that rewarding one's self for having gotten through a stressful episode actually serves to increase the capacity to get through stressful episodes in the future.

And to be honest, any time I hear about people saying, 'Well, just eliminate the thinking and just do it,' that is valuable advice until it doesn't work, because when it doesn't work, it simply doesn't work.