How to stop straining willpower and start living?

Willpower is a myth. It doesn't exist. But you can do well without it.

I wanted to talk about this today after reading the article “How to develop willpower”. I may not even tell you anything new. I'll just pour it from empty to empty so you can see that there's really nothing.

As usual, I want to make a reservation at once: there is no single correct opinion in this area, because we are talking about intangible concepts. There are different worldview models, and they can work for different people. Everyone chooses what suits them personally. However, different worldviews are not equally close to objective reality. The further our view from reality, the more difficult it is to arrange all models so that they do not contradict and work flawlessly in most cases. For this reason, I choose points of view that find as much validation as possible in real life, and not just for me but for others. One of those views I will share with you today. I am sure that there will be much more educated and well-read people who will complement and correct me, and we all, as always, are happy to read the comments. But someone has to start the topic... So let's go.


1. Why is this theme on Habre? I'm looking forward to the "here, again!" The resource is ITIC, and the topics are muzzled with some philosophical. I believe that this problem will be relevant for people of intellectual work for a long time, and therefore Habra will have both demand and supply.

Why are such questions rarely asked by the working class? Mental work is much harder than physical work, and there is plenty of evidence for this. First, this has been repeatedly stated by scientists who have calculated the amount of energy burned by the brain during intensive work. Second, a simple analysis of human behavior confirms that most people prefer physical work. When asked to think, they gasp and gasp, sigh hard and respond in a style: “Oh, this is very difficult for me!” Thirdly, every person who has ever seriously and for a long time strained the brain will confirm that it is very exhausting. Fourthly, fate has given me a wonderful opportunity to compare mental labor with physical labor, and I responsibly declare that working physically is a trifling business, so as not to ruin your health!

I’ve always been amazed at how people can work physically all day long, it’s so excruciatingly boring and uninteresting! True, it turned out that working mentally is even more painful, but this is after. So, I had the opportunity to try myself in such wonderful professions as a builder, carpenter, salesman and taxi driver. Work from the series "Don't hit the lying one!" Physically, hard, of course. But mentally, such work is not stressful if the conditions are acceptable. When you do routine work, your brain goes into a kind of trance, at which point you can mentally be anywhere and do anything. In this mode, working days fly unnoticed and unstressed. All you have to do is show up for work, the hardest thing in this job is to get up on an alarm clock. If it were possible to make money in a taxi comparable to programming without cheating passengers, I would work as a part-time taxi driver with much more pleasure than a programmer.

Many working-class people are envious of office workers making more money without physically straining at all. They have no idea what we are dealing with. Try teaching a carpenter how to program, and you’ll likely see how quickly they give up. I've had that experience. In my case, everyone was to blame, including me, except for him, who did not want to work for his own happiness.

What's going on? Work is basically a form of slavery. Slavery is captivity, akin to imprisonment. Physical imprisonment is the confinement of the body. But the mind is still free to do whatever it wants, even if it is somewhat cut off from an external source of information. They say that you can plant a body, but not a mind. The same thing happens in work. Physical work consumes the body, but not the mind. Therefore, a person can easily withstand it. And she doesn’t worry about procrastination, she doesn’t cultivate the willpower to drag more bags of cement, and she doesn’t write stupid questions on forums like “how to make yourself work 8 hours a day.” At worst, he just gets drunk after work, and again, he doesn't care. It is much more difficult for people of intellectual work. If a hobby has turned into a job, interest has disappeared, and it is still necessary to do it, we are faced with a semblance of imprisonment of the mind. If it were forbidden to think in prisons, it would be like the death penalty. It turns out that many people go to another small execution every day. In this situation, it becomes very difficult with motivation. This is where all this crap with laziness and willpower begins.

2. There is no willpower. Not at all. There is a concept. In fact, it works. Not as an internal mechanism, but as an external instrument of influence.

Look, I'm explaining it on my fingers. We think that we have some power inside us, a kind of will-producing muscle. The will allows us to make a decision. There's a will, of course. We call the will our decision, which determines our future behavior. It is our will to do or not to do something. And the power, where is it? The muscle itself is missing. There is an explanation for willpower as a set of strong synaptic connections in the brain, or a large amount of “gray matter”. But that's all, sorry, nonsense. Scientists have just come to a thorough study of the work of the brain, just began attempts to model it. Current knowledge about the brain is at the level of “here we see some bursts of activity when we light a light bulb in the eye, so it is somehow connected.” It is not surprising to find a correlation between the intensity of the manifestation of will and the presence of “gray matter” in the skull. But the entire human body, and the brain in particular, is much more complex than the amoeba studied along and across (and there are still open questions with them). Just the other day on the hub, Dobrochel left a link to an interesting lecture on dreams - this is so to understand how weak our knowledge about the brain is. Therefore, “will power” is only a model that has only indirect evidence of plausibility. If so, it is worth questioning the existence of such a force.

Willpower was invented long before scientists began to get to the secrets of the brain. This has always been a rather philosophical concept. And only now, when we began to have an idea of what was inside the box, there were more or less clear attempts to tie theory to practice. But these, mind you, are violent attempts. There's the power of the will, and there's the brain. Both work. What, then, does a man do? Trying to find an explanation as to how this is connected. And he does, of course. You can explain, by and large, anything and anything. For example, ancient people explained the origin of natural phenomena, linking them with the gods. Everything seems slender and beautiful: God rides a chariot across the sky. But, nothing but calming such a theory gives us, and therefore it is useless.

3. Who needs to invent a non-existent force? If power is invented, then someone needs it. To understand who needs it, you need to find out who benefits from it. And this is beneficial to anyone who is going to manipulate someone in an openly coercive form. Take a child as an example. Try to make him eat what he doesn't want to eat. Usually in this situation, many people face a problem. We understand that it is necessary, but the child does not want to do it.

Here, running in front, I will say that, generally speaking, one must also ask the question "who needs it." First of all, we need it, because we do not want to face health problems of the child in the future, and we do not want him to face them, which is why we are active. Why does this situation arise at all? Your child’s instincts tell you when to eat and what to eat. The problem may be that we put the child in unnatural conditions for him: fed sweets (where in nature did you see candy trees?), forced to eat not at the moment when he was hungry, but strictly on schedule (have you ever seen the dog said “don’t go out until you finish everything?”), etc., etc. The problem, in general, is not with the child, but with us: we have an attitude that we need to feed the child, but our need did not coincide with his own. This is called “conflict” (interests, desires), it is the very basis of the problem, and I will return to it later.

Okay, what about our kid who doesn't want to eat? Usually some tricks save: motivation, talking teeth, compromises. But the child grows, gets closer to adulthood, where he should study, work, care for others, and much more, and we all understand why (at least we think so). In the end, you need to make the child independent, so that he does not live his life instead of him, and that he does everything he does not want. How do you do that? That's the answer: to cultivate "willpower"! More precisely, to convince him that it exists, that it needs to be developed, and it needs to be actively used. This is a very convenient and easy way to answer the “why” and “why” questions that children love to ask. Adults often don’t know the answers. Thus, the complex process of finding motivation is replaced by a simple template “one must have willpower”. Look at my mom and dad, they don’t want to, but they work. Why? Of course, because it is necessary for survival and existence. Why don’t they want to, but they still do?? Because they have willpower! Dad is strong (obviously), and he has great willpower. Thus, “will power” is conveyed as a stereotype, often by imitation, and acts as a universal solution to a problem. And the problem, remember the name? Conflict! Well done. We solved the conflict with willpower! So we actually didn't allow it, we just do something against it, neglecting one of our desires. The desire we neglect is our own. And the one whose direction we are guided can be anyone's, not only ours, but more often even public, including the opinion of parents, wife, children and all other close and not very close people. But if we neglect the desire of others in favor of our own, this is also a manifestation of will, but we call it selfishness.

What they got: to neglect their desires in favor of social ones is a manifestation of willpower (good), on the contrary, selfishness (bad). Who benefits? Society! Who is he, what does he want from us? Some scientists who study society regard it as an organism and give analogies. Indeed, society is also growing and developing. And he needs to survive. And we are his bricks. It is advantageous for society that we work not only for ourselves, but also for it, otherwise it will crumble, and other more viable kinds of societies will take its place, because in society people are much more prone to survival than alone.

4. It's gone, but it still works? How is it that something does not work? As I said, “will power” is absent as an organ that can be pumped. But there is a concept. A concept is information. All our lives we are guided by information coming from the outside and from the inside. One phrase that establishes a logical connection between the key concepts in our lives can radically change our behavior. The simple belief that “willpower is good” leads to the fact that we begin to act on the pattern of manifestation of willpower to make us feel good. And if we achieve a positive result, this connection between “willpower” and “good” will strengthen, and we will often practice neglecting some desires in order to realize others. This is a typical learning mechanism. But there's really no willpower here. There is a motivation to be good, and that is what makes us neglect the lesser good. In this particular case, this concept will work perfectly and faultlessly. It seems to work – well, wonderful! But there's a big difference in how we call things, whether we call them what they are.

The concept of willpower confuses completely different goals: the satisfaction of one’s own and social needs. Often, both are woven into the same action at once, making it much harder to figure out what we really need and what we don’t need. The same work is a great example, it seems to be necessary for us and society. And maybe society will thank us in return, which means we need it again. Maybe she won't. It becomes very difficult to figure out whether we want it or not, but not us. Misguided decision-making that doesn’t do us well, communication weakens, and we begin to intuitively doubt that willpower is good. In such cases, it is said that willpower is lost. In general, many of you know that many failures weaken willpower, and luck strengthens it. But this is not like how muscles are trained. The latter, on the contrary, train at the limit, sometimes even on refusal. It is the lack of strength and inability or difficulty to perform the required amount of work that stimulates muscle development. But an unsuccessful manifestation of willpower will not strengthen it in any way. And even the work of willpower at the limit, when you give everything to the fullest, and the result is minuscule, is unlikely to positively affect its growth. After all, increasing willpower means not so much a potential increase in rewards as a guaranteed increase in the size of your victims. If you’ve been feeding your dog on a bell and suddenly stop doing it, he’ll stop exerting the will to lift his ass off the mat and drag him into the kitchen. In general, our “will power” also works. But there are other factors as well.

Psychologists (including Eric Berne) divide our mental states into different types: child, adult, parent, sage, etc. From what we are in, of course, depends on our behavior. A capricious child starts off with “I want” and a strict parent says “should.” If a person is in the right state, then he can easily force himself to do what he does not want to do. Not because it benefits him, but because he is in such a mood. In this case, the motivation will be to work out the desired behavioral pattern, the desire to feel yourself in a certain role, in relation to yourself. And these patterns, again, are laid down for us usually in childhood. If an adult father and mother showed an effort of will, then this is how we will imagine what it means to be an adult. In the end, even the banal desire to feel like a full-fledged individual will push us to practice those patterns that we associate with the word “full-fledged”.

As with any intangible concept (love, friendship), it is quite difficult to unambiguously define what willpower is. But if there is a manifestation (if not strength, then at least will), then if you want, you can get to its sources. I am sure you will find other instances of this mythical power.

5. Is life possible without willpower? How to live without it, because you have to do something, otherwise - Kirdyk!

To begin with, (of course, in my personal, albeit deep, conviction) we are not that strong, but in general very weak. Perhaps not everyone is accustomed to the idea that there is no willpower, and I already say that there is no will as such.

Will as a human quality is the ability to make choices and perform actions Quality we are interested primarily when we look at other people, or at ourselves through the eyes of other people. Or objects. If there is a strong pillar, its quality tells us that it will not fall. If the pillar has cracked, it is a weak pillar, it can harm us by falling from above, caused by the influence of the external wind and the reaction of a weak internal structure. The presence of some qualities, of course, does not make this pillar volitional. Everything that happens to him depends solely on external and internal factors, which are relatively easy to calculate. With a person is more difficult, due to the complexity of his internal state. It is difficult for us to estimate it, and therefore it is difficult to predict a person’s reaction to external events. However, his actions are also a reaction to external and internal factors. Under the same conditions, having the same thoughts, a person will almost certainly perform the same actions. If there is a possibility of a choice, what should be the reason for a change in the decision under exactly identical conditions? Except for a random component. Thus, on the modern understanding of physics and psyche, a person is not much different from a pillar. We do not take into account the still unexplained phenomenon of feeling one’s own self, since isoteric explanations will not give us practical use, and the very fact of having this sensation also does not give us anything useful in practice. As for the difficulty of predicting human behavior, complexity does not mean impossibility. In fact, we all make these predictions many times every day, and quite successfully. And the better we know a person, the better we predict their behavior. In general, it turns out that will is a myth as much as willpower, just an abstract concept that describes a set of actions to make a decision, but has nothing to do with freedom of choice.

How can we live with the idea that we have no control over our lives?

First, we do not forget that lack of will does not mean inaction, and the lack of willpower does not mean the lack of opportunity to achieve goals. If you think about influencing yourself, it means that the most important idea has come into your head: control over yourself and your life. We have no influence on whether we have such a thought or not. Not everyone is lucky in life, really. But such a thought has already come to us - alilujah, we are saved, because this thought automatically clings to all other useful thoughts, which leads to the desired behavior aimed at improving our own life. We just continue to play the game of “I make a decision,” but remember that ideas come under the influence of external factors, so you need to draw as much as possible from the outside, and not dig inside yourself. This is another idea that automatically follows from the first, and starts to cling to even more useful ideas. Some people understand lack of willpower as lying on the bed and doing nothing. Their problem is not the lack of will, but the absence of a useful idea, or rather the presence of a harmful idea. The mechanism of action is the same, only another fundamental idea.

Second, treat yourself like other people. We are not much different from others, why would we make an exception? And other people need to be perceived as they are, remember that everyone uses their own unique experience, everyone has their own idea of the world, their weaknesses and strengths, and so on. And most importantly, re-educating a person without his desire is an ungrateful occupation. Learn to get along with people around you, and apply the same approaches to yourself, and then you will get along with yourself. Or vice versa – it is not fundamental.

How do you solve the problem of doing what you don’t want to do?

At one time, I tortured several psychologists on the topic of fighting my own laziness. The answers were depressingly useless. The bottom line is that if I don’t do something, I just don’t want to do it. Attempts to prove that I really want very much, just for some reason can not, led the conversation to a dead end. It was very strange because they didn’t seem to hear me. I don’t know why all this psychology is needed. In the end, I also came to the idea that I just didn’t want to. The concept of “I don’t want to” has become much broader. Psychologists are a strange and completely irresponsible people. Contrary to what I think, none of the few psychologists have ever given me a simple yet effective piece of advice. But, as it turned out, they are able to do very funny tricks: with the help of very template procedures, they are able to bring you to a state where you yourself understand everything, answer all the questions, thank and leave happy. A psychologist at the same time may not understand what you are thinking. It helped, all right.

Basically, you just have to figure out what you want and what you don't want. If you want to but do not, then there is some opposite desire or unwillingness. This is the conflict that we forget to resolve by stepping over ourselves with “willpower.” We can solve the problem by overstepping the opposite desire. However, we can create another, even bigger problem. The ideal option is to find a compromise to meet all your needs. To do that, we need to resolve the conflict. To solve it, you must first see it.

6. We (mostly, probably) are already adults who have embarked on an independent path, and conflicts with parents should be minimized. So I will only talk about the internal conflicts that arise within ourselves.

The problem is that conflicts are not obvious. Otherwise, there would be no problem of willpower at all. We have a desire, often primitive and simple, and we are aware of it and want to achieve it. A lot of money, good health, that’s what many people want. But it is not possible to work a lot and play sports, something seems to interfere. I don't know what. Why is this happening? In addition to consciousness, humans also have a subconscious mind. Consciousness allows you to build very long chains of reasoning, very accurately calculate options. But it's terribly slow. It's the subconscious. They say that it can process a huge amount of information in a moment and produce results. Only accuracy is limping. But the subconscious uses the maximum incoming information to make a decision. Using our intuition, we can often be unaware of why we made this decision. As a result, we get a decision without justification. On the one hand, there is a consciousness trying to justify, on the other hand, the subconscious mind, which simply wants or does not want, but does not comment on it. When the mind and subconscious have different desires, there is an inner conflict. This can happen simply because the mind and subconscious use different sources of information and different approaches to analysis. One such case deserves special attention is when your desires are imposed on you by society and are not really yours. We wanted money and health for our birthday, year after year. We begin to believe this, even find an explanation for this desire (because people tend to look for explanations), and convince ourselves even more. The problem is that the desire isn't really ours, we've just been made to believe we want it. Consciousness is easy to fool. It is more difficult to perform this trick with the subconscious mind, it primitively and clearly knows that we, for example, just want to eat, sleep, drink beer and watch TV. You can have higher subconscious desires, just more often get stuck in the first step. I’m not saying that money and health are bad. But if no one told you this year after year, how would you know? Probably from his own experience, comparing his fortune with money and without, with health and without. And those who are smarter would analyze other people's experiences.

This process of attainment is very important for the birth of a real conscious desire. For example, the experience of visiting hospitals is much more eloquent than the warning of parents that “health can not buy”. Here, of course, an even greater role is played by the ability to learn, draw conclusions, and preferably still on the mistakes of others, and not on their own. Many are simply not taught to learn and draw conclusions on their own, then only the program “willpower” works for them. The second example is the experience of owning a large amount of money and experiencing complete lack of money, much more understandable than talking about money between people who know nothing about it.

It is not always possible for us to gain experience, even someone else’s. In this case, imagination plays an important role. Experience can be experienced by thinking about how it will be. There is even such a technique of self-motivation: imagine the result as vividly and in detail as possible. In the end, you need to thoroughly understand for yourself why you need it or not. The more reason, the stronger the desire.

What this means in the end is that our subconscious mind can embrace and agree with the idea of consciousness. It is as if we bring the conscious desire to the level of the subconscious, which now, having the opportunity to compare both desires, tends to the same thought as consciousness. Everybody agrees, everybody's happy. But, in general, this is not such a problem, because in any case, we often think about what we want, visualize the goal, and the subconscious has every chance to evaluate it. And it happens that you want very much, and the subconscious still resists. This, as I see it, is the most difficult problem, which is mainly fought with incredible efforts.

The subconscious mind can also have good reasons for wanting or not wanting something, and it should not be forgotten. If transfer conscious thought into the subconscious allows very simple techniques, then to bring the desire from the subconscious into consciousness is much more problematic. And it's very useful to do this to find out the nature of resistance. There is a high probability of agreeing with your subconscious mind, including detecting an imposed desire. Extracting information from the subconscious, in particular, and are engaged in psychologists, using various methods and techniques. There are very different approaches, from simple dialogues to immersion in a hypnotic state in order to pull your stumbling block out of the subconscious. If you are very much tormented by some indecision, I advise you to turn to such practices, and very preferably with the help of a psychologist. However, psychologists say that you need to be very careful, and in general, digging into the subconscious is a very dangerous thing, since it is not known what we will get out of there and what it will turn out in the future. My opinion is that a person who seeks self-knowledge should not be stopped. The main thing is that there is no risk of harm to health. As for simpler cases, generally speaking, it is worth training the habit of analyzing oneself, of studying oneself as a kind of outside organism. Trying to look at yourself from the outside as a subject of research helps to look at yourself impartially, and objectively assess the motives of your unconscious behavior. Mistakes, unpleasant patterns of behavior are easily recognized, and recognition is the first and most important step toward change. The vast majority of our actions are controlled directly by the subconscious mind, and only a few actions are carefully considered. Therefore, the ability to analyze the result of your subconscious mind is an important thing in general, and not only for resolving conflicts in your desires.

7. I have never been helped by willpower except in physical exertion. It was only through careful awareness that I was able to:
- quit smoking,
- stop drinking,
- to refuse harmful food,
- play sports,
Change the work to one that you like and bring the desired result,
To make many other, large and small pleasant changes in life.

The bonus is that such changes do not bother. No conflict, no problem. There's only satisfaction. Of course, not everything is perfect, and there is always room for improvement.

I do not know anyone who has done any of the things enumerated by an effort of will. But there are many examples of failure on all counts. At best, people will last for a few months.

8. What should I do? Increase self-awareness, analyze yourself more often and admit your mistakes.
- Never stop learning.
- Those who have problems with procrastination – take the opportunity not to work, and read “Cure for laziness” by Vladimir Levy. Imho is a bit tedious to read, but the thoughts are useful, and I have never seen anything like it again.
- For those who seek to understand themselves, their surroundings, and their relationships, read Introduction to Neurolinguistic Programming (Joseph O’Connor, John Seymour) – this is not what people usually think when they hear NLP.

Thank you all for reading. I would be grateful for the feedback in the form of voting. I want to know if it made sense to write this. : Interesting attitude of the audience to this topic I read fluently or not read, but I agree with the idea as a whole. Read fluently or did not read, I disagree with the idea Read carefully, but still disagree Read, but did not understand anything Read and changed their views Only registered users can participate in the survey. Come in, please. 67 people voted. 28 people abstained.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/229611/