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How to Improve Willpower: 10 Ways to Regain Your Strength
Get More Sleep
Sleep deprivation makes you weak and tired. It has a direct impact on your focus and decision-making, whilst slowly exhausting your source of energy.
Sleep between 7.5 and 8.5 hours a night. A good rest makes it much easier to deal with daily activities and challenges.
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Get More Sleep
Sleep deprivation makes you weak and tired. It has a direct impact on your focus and decision-making, whilst slowly exhausting your source of energy.
Sleep between 7.5 and 8.5 hours a night. A good rest makes it much easier to deal with daily activities and challenges.
Meditate
Meditation improves your attention, focus, self-awareness, and lower your stress levels.
Meditating for even just a few minutes every day will help you to clear your head while activating the areas of your brain related to decision-making and emotions.
Develop Good Habits
When we are stressed, we tend to unconsciously fall back on ingrained habits, whether they are helpful or harmful.
Creating good habits helps you get through stressful situations without affecting your willpower.
Exercise and Eat Better
It’s easy to give in to temptation, feeling guilty about yourself afterward.
A good meal and regular exercise can decrease the desire for smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, and increase healthy eating and emotional control. Look for activities you enjoy, such as jogging, cycling, swimming, martial arts, etc.
Change Your Environment
Our environment has a great influence on our behavior. For example, if you mute and put away your phone while working or studying, you will be less tempted to look at it.
Associate your environment with a specific task. Re-arrange everything you want to focus on, and keep away the things that take away your concentration.
Eliminate Unnecessary Decisions
We make many decisions on any day, from the most simple, like what to eat for lunch, to important ones.
Create the habit of performing some activities without having to rely on your willpower. For example, previously packing your clothes in order to avoid excuses for not exercising.
One Step at a Time
Sometimes the complexity or importance of the task is overwhelming.
Break down the task into as many manageable parts as possible, organizing them in a logical sequence. This guarantees that you will never put yourself in a state of willpower depletion.
Self-Compassion
Self-compassion works much better than self-criticism when we have to deal with failures, or not reaching a certain goal.
People who exercise self-compassion tend to develop a willingness to learn from their mistakes. They find it easier to recover from setbacks and pursue positive change.
The 2-Minute Rule
The 2-Minute rule is a great way to break the first and most difficult barrier of procrastination: getting started.
Make the following deal with yourself: you’ll do it for just 2 minutes. Most of the time you will continue with whatever you are doing.
Dark Chocolate
In the event of an emergency, giving in to a piece of chocolate is not a bad thing.
The small energy boost from dark chocolate will help you to focus on the decision.
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What willpower is
The willpower response is a reaction to an internal conflict. You want to do one thing, but know you shouldn’t. Or you know you should do something, but you’d rather do nothing.
How willpower works in the brain
The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us with things like decision-making and regulating our behavior, needs to be looked after.
Feed your brain with good-quality food so it has enough energy to do its job and get enough sleep.
Willpower is finite
Willpower is like a muscle—it can get exhausted by overuse, but we might be able to strengthen our willpower by training it.
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Habit matching
When planning on building new habits, one easy way to integrate them into your everyday routine is by actually adding them to an already existing habit.
Therefore, choose one habit y...
A step at a time
Once you have made up your mind about taking on a new habit, you might as well start getting used to it. Just remember that we have, as humans, the tendency to work better without pressure and when taking one step at a time.
Therefore, start by creating small habits and get used to them and you will see how easy it is to build long-lasting routines that will make your life easier.
Practice makes perfect
When having taken the decision to introduce in your routine a new habit, it is very important to remember that practice makes perfect. Consequently, wait no more and start doing even if just a bit every day. You will eventually succeed in adding a new habit while feeling proud of yourself for being consistent.
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How Memories are Formed
- Create a memory. Our brain sends signals in a particular pattern associated with the event we're experiencing and creates connections between our neurons, called s...
Effective Ways to Improve Your Memory
- Meditate to improve working memory. Take a pause to empty your mind and to reduce stress.
- Although still debatable, drink coffee to help improve memory consolidation.
- Eat berries for better long-term memory. Berries contain flavanoids, which appear to strengthen connections in the brain.
- Exercise not only to improve memory recall, but also to enhance cognitive abilities.
- Chew gum to make stronger memories. It is proven that it increases activity in the hippocampus. It also increases heart rate which causes more blood to flow in the brain.
- Sleep more to consolidate and easily remember memories.
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Protein rich meals
The brain is a decision making muscle and needs to be sufficiently fed to provide the necessary willpower.
Eat meals at regular intervals. The meals should contain healthy proteins, ve...
Slow and steady
Willpower can be increased, but it is a slow and gradual process (just like increasing muscle mass).
Real change requires one small start at a time.
Dark chocolate
Sometimes we are in a position where we need to make a quick decision, and it feels tough.
Take a bite of dark chocolate to help boost your willpower.
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A Low Success Rate
New Year Resolutions typically show a low success rate, as 10% of them actually succeed.
The reason for this low rate might be our basic instincts and temptations: people give into te...
Willpower
Willpower, while important, isn't the only thing required for success.
Emotions
Our emotions motivate us more than willpower.
If we are generous, fair and co-operative, we have an invaluable tool to motivate us to complete our goals. If we cultivate good character, compassion, and honesty, it leads to a better chance of success in our endeavors.
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The reasons we crave junk food
- The sensation of eating the food: what it tastes like, what it smells like and how it feels in your mouth.
- The blend of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates t...
How craving are stimulated artificially
- Salivary response: the more a food causes you to salivate, the more it will cover your taste buds.
- Rapid food meltdown: this tells your brain that you’re not full, even though you’re eating a lot of calories.
- Calorie density. junk foods are designed to convince your brain that it is getting nutrition, but to not fill you up.
- Memories of past eating experiences: When you eat something tasty, your brain registers that feeling and will bring it up in the future.
Building better habits means changing your environment
Most people think that building better habits or changing your actions is all about willpower or motivation. But your environment has an incredible ability to shape your behavior.
Nowhere is this more true than with food.
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The Pace of Growth
Whether it’s emotional, philosophical, interpersonal, or professional growth, people are not growing at the same pace.
Some people move light years if you don't talk to them for a couple o...
Stay Challenged
By staying challenged you do not slip into the dangerous comfort zone. You can stay challenged by:
- Doing anything that you don't know how to do.
- Doing more than you have time for.
This makes your brain cells work in creative ways for you to figure out new things and how to incorporate them into your life.
Big Goals
If your goals are mediocre and small, you will slip into distractions and routine work. It's always better to have an audacious goal.
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How To Be An Active Listener
- Ignore internal and external distractions (thoughts and sounds).
- Listen to the content of their speech and their specific wording.
- Listen to ...
Selective Listening
Means to focus on a few key words and ignore the rest of someone's communication.
It often manifests as one gets distracted by external stimuli like random sounds or movements, and internal stimuli such as one's own thoughts and feelings.
Active Listening
Means to fully concentrate on what is being said rather than passively absorbing it.
It's not just remembering the content of what was said, but using empathy and seeking to understand the complete message, including the emotional tones conveyed. It builds rapport, understanding and trust.
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Our lung capacity
It's the total amount of air that your lungs can hold.
Over time, our lung capacity and lung function typically decrease slowly as we age after our mid-20s. Also, some medical conditions ...
Diaphragmatic breathing
This is also known as belly breathing:
- Relax your shoulders and sit back or lie down.
- Place one hand on your belly and one on your chest.
- Inhale through your nose for 2 seconds, feeling the air move into your abdomen and feeling your stomach move out. Your stomach should move more than your chest does.
- Breathe out for 2 seconds through pursed lips while pressing on your abdomen.
- Repeat.
Pursed-lips breathing
It slows down your breathing, making it easier for the lungs to function and improves the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide:
- Inhale slowly through your nostrils.
- Purse your lips, as if pouting or about to blow on something.
- Breathe out as slowly as possible through pursed lips. This should take at least twice as long as it did to breathe in.
- Repeat.
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