[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] An example of an ineffective way to use willpower to get in shape is to will yourself to go to the gym two days a week for a year. An effective way is to search for healthy activities that you love and make them a part of your life, letting go of activities you don't like. Or to find people who live active lifestyles you like and spend time with them, at the expense of people who don't live active lifestyles. For…

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] How to use willpower summarizes the previous posts. Use willpower either for brief, self-contained projects that you'll finish before running out of mental energy to sustain it or when it will lead to rewarding emotions that will sustain using it. You already know how to use willpower for brief projects. For longer projects, willpower works best to create rewarding emotions that motivate you to complete your goal. Willpower doesn't work well to complete the project. If you want to get in shape,…

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday's discussion of when not to use willpower -- when you aren't aware of where you are emotionally or where you want to or when you risk reinforcing the beliefs driving countervailing emotions -- implies when to use willpower: the opposite of when not to use it. So the first properties of when to use willpower are When you know where you are and where you want to go emotionally You are aware of the beliefs driving the behavior you're overcoming with…

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] If all you could do was act on whatever emotion was most dominant at any time, you would be purely reactive. You would not be able to choose your actions. Bugs and lizards are purely reactive as far as I can tell. Your reflexes are reactive. So willpower keeps you from being purely reactive. Without it you couldn't choose. Without willpower, thoughtfulness and reflection wouldn't help you because you wouldn't be able to act on them. Some people take pride in the…

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Understanding willpower requires understanding emotions functionally, so let's start there. A functional perspective isn't the only way to view emotions -- exploring and communicating how they feel is another, more relevant to art and music, for example -- but it serves our purposes. I'll stick with it, but I don't mean to imply other perspectives aren't important in other contexts. Emotions, functionally Functionally, emotions motivate you to interact with and change your environment. They also result from your environment, subject to your…

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] I'll be starting what I expect to be a four or five part series on willpower. The series should give an understanding of what willpower is and how to use it more and more effectively to improve your life. Everyone generally knows what willpower is. Some people value being able to use willpower to overcome great challenges. Some people don't know how to use it at all. In all cases, we want to be able to use it more effectively than we…