PNTV: The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal (#141)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. I'm really excited about this note on the willpower instinct. I don't have a book because I read it on Kindle. I do have a philosopher's note, though, where I pulled out about 10 big ideas. We're gonna look at five of my favorite ones now, but I'm gonna start with a quote from Kelly McGonigal, the author of this great book. She's out of Stanford where she teaches. You may have seen a couple of her TED talks. I'll put links below. She's amazing, next generation, kind of positive psychologist giving us the science behind things like how to cultivate willpower. So book is fantastic. These five big ideas, starting with this quote Kelly McGonagall tells us we may all have been born with the capacity for willpower, but some of us use it more than others. People who have better control of their attention, emotions and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer when pit against other virtues. Willpower comes out on top of self. Control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence. Take that, sats. A stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma. Sorry, Tony Robbins. And more important for marital bliss than empathy. Yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut. If we want to improve our lives, she says willpower is not a bad place to start. So willpower is an amazing skill for us to cultivate. And I'm excited to jump in and look at some of these big ideas. Number one, I wanted to create the why. We've got to have a why if we want to actually master something. That's a good reason why. Willpower out predicts almost anything else for everything that you want in your life. So let's pay attention. First one, pause and plan. It's called the willpower response. That's what Kelly calls it. Pause and plan. What is that? Well, there's fight or flight, right? We're familiar with that. Versus the willpower response, fight or flight. Versus willpower response, fight or flight. We're very familiar with that. Heart rate increases. Our respiration increases. We breathe faster and shallower. Fight, fight or flight. We're all amped up, right? Well, if you want to demonstrate strong willpower, that's not the place to do it. You need to be able to step in between stimulus and response. And you do that by learning how to pause and plan. If you want to demonstrate strong willpower, you need to pause and plan. It's the willpower response. You need to slow down your breathing. You need to slow down your heart rate and the speed with which your mind is going to. And let's look at some ways to do that. Pause and plan. Willpower response is the key to rocking our willpower instinct. Now the number one way to build our willpower. You guessed it. Meditation. Meditation is a panacea for almost anything, huh? And everything. Meditation, the number one way that we can engage in the willpower response and learn how to pause and plan. We basically are building our gray matter. It's like going to the gym for our minds. You go to the gym or the track, wherever you go to train to get your body stronger. Meditation is just like that. It's a gym for your mind where you can go and do reps, bringing your attention back to whatever anchor you've chosen for yourself. We've got other videos on how to get your meditation going. But meditation literally rewires your brain, builds gray matter. In a matter of hours. You can actually measure results on your meditation practice in a lab. 11 hours of training your meditation. You can actually see visibly your physical structure of your brain changing in increasing your ability to focus your attention, to resist impulses and do all that kind of stuff, to pause and plan. Willpower response. Pause and plan versus always being in a frenetic stress mode. Meditation is huge. The number one way to build our willpower. Surprising, huh? Breathing is a good idea. Throughout the day, you want to breathe. Seriously, though, breathing is big. She says if there's one thing to think about in the moment to build your willpower, you're feeling your impulses getting out of control, which, by the way, you can't even notice that your impulses are taking over. Unless you have a reasonably strong mind, you won't even be aware of it. You'll just do it. Then you'll notice the next morning, with a hangover or whatever, you just did what you said you didn't want to do. So the first step of building attention via meditation, we notice we're starting to get a lot of control. Our breath is an extraordinary way for us to build willpower in the moment. It's a very, very good thing. And Kelly suggests that we look at getting our breath down to four to six breaths per minute, which equals about 10 to 15 seconds per breath. Four to six breaths per minute, 10 to 15 seconds per breath takes a little bit of practice. A little slower than you're used to, but you can absolutely do it. Let's practice right now. So if you're going to have 10 to 15 seconds per breath, you basically want to inhale to a count of four. We do this once in a while on these, but I always love taking an opportunity to breathe deep. Let's take a few deep breaths into a count of four and then out to a count of six. Ten seconds or so, which will get us down to this. Six breaths per minute, mark. So it's inhale to four and exhale to six. That's 1. Inhale to 4, Exhale to 6. One more. Exhale into six. Every single time I do that in general, and in one of these videos, I just feel myself just drop in. And you can practice that type of breathing throughout the day. When I'm writing or when I'm doing anything and I think about it, I breathe like that. When you're driving in your car, you're sitting in line at the grocery store, practice your breathing. Get good at breathing deeply, calming your nervous system, getting out of fight or flight and into this. Pause and plan. Build that resource, build that capacity. Breathing is huge. Best way to boost your willpower in the moment is breathing. Over the long run, it's meditation. And then Kelly talks about exercise. She says, if there's such a thing as a wonder drug, exercise is it. We talk about this all the time. John Ratey, a Harvard guy, one of the leading authorities on the science of exercise, says exercising is like. Exercise is like taking a little bit of Ritalin plus a little bit of Prozac. Losing the chalk here, a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac. One of the leading scientists tell us that's what we get out of exercise. None of the side effects, all the good stuff. Maybe a little bit of muscle soreness, but that's a good thing in the big picture. A little bit of Ritalin, focusing your mind, a little bit of Prozac, boosting your mood. That's what exercise does for us. And guess what? It also helps us boost our willpower. It makes us healthier human beings. It's one of the core fundamentals of brain hygiene of optimal living. Exercise, rest, nutrition, those are the primary three. Throw in mental training, meditation, etc. And you have a really, really solid base from which we can optimize exercise. It's a wonder drug. For final big idea. Burn the ships, burn the Ships you've probably heard the story of Cortez. Kelly tells it brilliantly in her book. Basic idea is we need to put our future selves in a position to succeed. So Cortes is sitting there with his guys, his troops, his army, and they're going against a very powerful enemy as they perceive it. And he doesn't want them to be able to retreat. He doesn't want them to be able to hop in their ships and go home. He wants him to fight and he wants him to win. So what does he do? Legend has it he burns his ships, torches them, sets them ablaze. Guess what? They're now committed. They pre committed to the path of fighting and they're not going home. So they have one choice. Win. That's pre commitment. That's burning the ships. So what can you do in your life to pre commit? Things like throwing the food out of your pantry that isn't good for you is a pre commitment. You're making it harder for yourself, your future self, to eat bad food. When you go to the grocery store, don't buy that stuff and bring it back. You have problems overspending. Cut your credit cards in half, get rid of them. What do you need to do such that your future self can benefit from the choices you're making right now? That's one of the keys to willpower. Willpower is finite. You only have so much of it, you need to use it wisely. And if you're having to negotiate with yourself throughout the day on every single little thing, you're going to fatigue and you're going to fall short of who you want to be. So you need to use your willpower wisely by doing things like pre committing and then also creating habits. We talk about this a lot. Use your willpower to create habits that then go on autopilot so you don't need to think about them and then create more habits that you don't need to think about, etc. Etc. Etc. Little by little we can build these habits that allow us to optimize our lives. So there you go. Super quick look and a handful of my favorite big ideas. We got more in the note and of course get the book. If you're feeling it, pause and plan. The willpower response. The opposite of fight or flight. Slowing down our breathing, our heart rate, speed of our mind, etc. We do that number one way. Number one way meditation. Best way in the moment is to take that deep breath that we did. Look at our stats. 4 to 6 minutes per breath. I'm sorry. 4 to 6 breaths per minute. 4 to 6 minutes per breath would be very impressive. 10 to 15 seconds per breath slows us down. Best way to build willpower at the moment, Exercise. It's a wonder drug. It's like taking a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac and then we have our burn the shift Pre commit. Help your future self by creating the structure that that allows you to be your best and to do your best. So there you go. Willpower, instinct. Kelly McGonigal awesome book. Hope you enjoyed this quick overview. What was your favorite big idea? As always, think about how you can take it from theory to practice. How do you embody this stuff? Have fun with that and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. All right, have another awesome day. See you.