I’m starting to understand how the whole concept of willpower is a sham.<\/p>\n
It’s sort of\u00a0funny because I took an entire college course on the psychology of willpower. All sorts of experiments have been conducted\u00a0on people’s ability to do things like “delaying gratification” (such as looking at but not eating a bowl of cookies) and voluntarily withstanding various types of pain (how long will you immerse your hand in ice water?). There are mathematical models describing how willpower is depleted and renewed and how it relates to the immediacy (or lack thereof) of the anticipated reward.<\/p>\n
The first signs of brewing trouble came (for me) in the form of studies showing that diets, exercise programs, and other regimes of “do it because it’s good for you” (including some\u00a0religious doctrines) generally speaking\u00a0do not work. They often work in the short term, but in the long term are more likely to\u00a0leave participants worse off than they were before they started.<\/p>\n
Then I began\u00a0to see that the whole concept of willpower is antithetical to mindfulness, wholeheartedness, integral psychology, Zen, etc. These approaches first and foremost teach us to get out of our heads\u00a0and tune into the sensations and experience of the body in\u00a0the present moment. We work\u00a0to fully experience our feelings, our body’s needs like hunger and movement, and our spiritual needs like\u00a0connection and compassion. We then try to proceed in life honoring those needs without<\/em>\u00a0overriding them with preconceived\u00a0notions\u00a0about what’s “right” or “proper” or “civil” or the way to fulfill some other\u00a0role that we are used to occupying (student, parent, spouse, employee, caretaker, and on and on).<\/p>\n Willpower is forcing oneself to overcome one’s own instincts and needs. Mindfulness is compassionately\u00a0accepting and integrating our whole self, as it is, right now. These are polar opposites.<\/p>\n Ironically, the creators of the diets and workouts \u2014 and the prophets who headline\u00a0our major religions \u2014 most likely\u00a0were<\/em> enlightened. That is, in a compassionate and mindful way they discovered methods by which they achieved health and happiness. Then they wrote those methods down for the benefit of the rest of us. And then,\u00a0the rest of us started trying to force ourselves and each other to do those things<\/em>.<\/p>\n Clearly there is no intrinsic<\/em> problem with eating healthy and getting exercise\u00a0and being honest and treating your neighbor as you would like to be treated. The problem comes when we try to do those things\u00a0by force of will<\/em> rather than\u00a0out of compassion and mindfulness for what our whole self wants and needs.<\/p>\n I say this as someone who has been more or less stuck in my head\u00a0for my entire adult life and who is at the present moment deeply hungry but putting off getting food\u00a0because my mind wants to write\u00a0this article and is afraid of pausing even for a few minutes because the rest of my body might realize that there are other, more pressing needs.<\/p>\n If that’s willpower, I no longer want it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m starting to understand how the whole concept of willpower is a sham. It’s sort of\u00a0funny because I took an entire college course on the psychology of willpower. All sorts of experiments have been conducted\u00a0on people’s ability to do things like “delaying gratification” (such as looking at but not eating a bowl of cookies) and … <\/p>\n