The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Willpower is a part of the brain that can be trained. In the beginning of the book, he touches on some Strategies from Atomic habits, but does not go into much detail, as the focus of this book is confrontation rather than prevention. Breathing techniques seem to change the blood flow in your brain and therefore boost self-control. He is also very fond of meditation.

Willpower is high in the morning and decreases over the day. Therefore, sleep is very important to refill your willpower reserve. Willpower is like a muscle. This means that you can train it, but also that it can get tired, the more you use it. Similar to muscles, willpower is felt to be depleted before it it. You can push through the feeling of exhaustion.

Moral licensing is the effect that you try to do mental accounting on how much good vs. harmful behaviour you are doing. It’s very unproductive as we tend to cook the books.

Try increasing the consistency instead of changing the behaviour. This frames the decision in a longer-term context.

The halo effect is highly effective, we just try to see reasons for something attractive to be good.

Our willpower works worse when we are under stress. This makes it a good advertising strategy to play an ad right after terrifying news.

The what the hell effect makes small mistakes into larger ones. We have the feeling that we already missed the goal, so now we don’t care anymore.

Real self-forgiveness might be very effective. It makes you take real accountability and makes you able to analyse the mistake and take criticism.

Willpower is contagious. When you observe bad behaviour, you are more prone to it too.

When we try to not to think about something, we will think about it more. The Frankl approach helps.