How to Build Willpower (and Change Your Brain)

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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you've ever gotten any value from this podcast, do me a favor. Share it with one person today so that we can impact another person's life and hopefully make the world a better place. Today we're going to be talking about how to build your willpower and neurologically change your brain in the process. And today I'm going to blow your brain with a piece of neuroscience. That is a discovery that came up in the past few years that there has been a ton of research on. And basically long story short is every time you do something that is hard that you do not want to do, you grow a specific part of your brain that helps you do it again in the future. It helps you resist impulses and stay on track towards your long term goals in your life. And for me, what we're going to talk about is so cool because I've always felt like willpower was a muscle that I could grow. Like when I think about when I was younger, I was a surfer and stoner and partier and I was lazy as hell. And then one day I started Forcing myself to do things that I didn't want to do. At 19 years old, I found myself in a sales company. And there was a room that was inside of this, this office. And they called it the dungeon. It's where the AC was. And it was cold and it was like humid. And there was all of these old receipts of people who had bought in the past. And I was like, I can just cold call all of them and see if they want to buy some more. And I didn't want to do it. I remember specifically I got a moment in my brain where I remember sitting there looking at the phone and being like, if I want my life to be different, I've got to do this. And I didn't want to do it, but I forced myself to make hundreds of phone calls a day. And over time, doing this over and over again in many different ways in my life, developed a lot of willpower. And so let's talk in detail about this part of your brain, what science actually shows us and then how you can build your willpower as well. So there's a part of your brain that is called the anterior cingulate cortex, I'm going to call it the ACC for the rest of this, just to make things shorter. Okay. The ACC sits in the frontal part of your brain and it plays a really key role in a few different things. Number one is what's called conflict monitoring, which is like, I really want this cookie, but I'm trying to lose weight. It also plays a really big part in emotional regulation. So it's, that's, that's staying calm when you want to feel reactive towards something. And it's also a really big part of cognitive control, which is overriding short term urges so that you can stay aligned with long term goals. Basically, inside of your brain, it is your willpower muscle. It is the, the voice that you can grow inside of your head that says get up and go to the gym. And even though you don't feel like it, because it's time for you to change your life and you know, it shows you that willpower is not something that you're born with, it's something that you actually build within yourself. You know, the. They found that when humans repeatedly do stuff in this research that all of this comes from when they repeatedly do things that they don't want to do, those things that require an internal resistance. The ACC gets larger in those humans. So people who do things that they don't want to do and choose long term gratification over short term gratification and take the hard road in life, the ACC in their brain actually grows and gets larger. The way you want to think about is this, like when I think about going to the gym, the gym is just gravitational resistance. When you have a 10 pound weight and you have a 25 pound weight, the 25 pound weight has more gravitational resistance. That's pulling it back towards the earth. And the acc, when you find this moment in your life where you're like, I want to do this thing, or I know I should do this thing, but I just really don't want to because it's hard. Instead of it being a gravitational resistance, it's an internal resistance that you come up against in your brain. I know I should do this, I don't want to do it. And it shows you. Like the most important part of this that I really want everyone listening to understand is that it shows you that willpower is not something that, that you're born with by the grace of God and some people are not. It shows you that willpower is something that can be grown in any breathing human. People who exercise regularly, they found, especially if they exercise when it's really hard and they don't like doing it and they don't feel like doing it, they show more ACC activation and structural growth, which means that the actual ACC in their brain is stronger and bigger in their brain because they grew it through neuroplasticity than those who don't exercise regularly. They've actually found that people who are obese, obese individuals on average have smaller ACCs than somebody who is not obese simply because they might have trouble saying no to food or saying no when, you know, they want to stay on the couch and they feel like they should get up and go for a run. But you know what's really interesting though, is when someone who's obese, who has a small ACC, begins to work on themselves and lose weight and go to the gym and eat healthier and say no to the cravings that they have, their ACC region actually grows. So someone who is obese, who has a small ACC, who decides that they want to start working on themselves and growing and losing weight and saying no to the sweets and saying no to sitting on the couch and getting up and doing the hard things, their ACC grows inside of their brain like this is like, it's fucking mind blowing if you really think about it, right? They have found that athletes, monks, long distance runners and people who train for endurance, they all tend to have a larger ACC than the average person. Why? Well, because they've obviously grown it. And then last, they found that people who challenge themselves consistently. So it obviously can be running, it can be saying no to certain things that you eat, but it can also just be like growing your business and following through. It might just be that the reason why you're having such a hard time growing your business is because you haven't pushed yourself enough in your life. And so people who challenge themselves through business, through emotional or psychological effort, like therapy or sobriety or meditation, also show growth in their ACC as well. This is mind blowing. It's like, it's. It shows you that you can grow your willpower, which is amazing. And this is the most important insight. You don't build discipline by doing more. You build discipline when you do what you're emotionally resisting. So if you're resisting something in some way and you decide to do it, those are the moments when you build up your discipline. It's not the act of just working hard. It's the act of overriding resistance that actually grows your willpower inside of your brain. So I want you to think of it this way. Doing a task that you don't like or you have fear over will actually cause growth inside of this region in your brain. So whether it's, you know, skipping dessert and saying no to dessert, or deciding that you're going to wake up early, or saying no to scrolling on your phone, or deciding that you're gonna hold your tongue during some sort of conflict, every act of self overcoming. I don't know if that's a word or not that I just made up, but overcoming yourself is a rep to strengthen your acc. This is one of the reasons why, for years, I've loved and hated cold showers. And I learned about cold showers back in 2015. I think it was when I first learned about and saw all of the amazing things that Wim Hof was doing. And I was like, I'm gonna try this out. And so I started doing them. And I realized that every time I was about to go do a cold shower or do a cold plunge, I'd have this internal resistance. I was like, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And I was like, I've got to fight this part of me. I've got to fight what I ended up coining as the internal. The little bitch inside of my head. I have to fight that version of me. What I realized is that it became a little bit easier to do it the next day because I learned the benefits of how when I did a cold plunge in the morning, it was just easier to do the hard things the rest of the day. And so let's talk about how to actually train your discipline daily and actually reshape your brain. You know, if you were to look at it, it's like, okay, if I want to grow a muscle, if I want to grow my biceps, I need to work my biceps every single day. Well, if we want to grow the acc in your brain, let's figure out exactly how to do it. So let me give you the step by step process. Okay? Step number one is to pick one thing that you resist and force yourself to do it. You have to remind yourself that this is your neural gym session. You know, the resistance is the weight that's on the barbell. We all have every single day one thing that we don't want to do. We have one thing that we're skipping, like making the bed or, you know, answering emails or meditating or flossing or having a tough conversation with a spouse or an employee, or opening your budgeting app and actually putting your budget together. The point is not the task though. The point is training yourself to do it. When you don't want to do it, especially when your mind says no is when it's important. It's not just doing the task, it's the mental resistance that you come up against and going, I'm going to do it because I'm going to strengthen my willpower through doing it. And so, you know, you identify these points in your life of micro resistance. That's the moment where you normally check out or decide to do something different. You know, that drawer that you need to organize and you're like, well, you know what, I should go do something else instead. And we will be right back. Teachers are deep into new units. This time of year. 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Find these types of things and you go, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set a two minute timer and that's it. You just tell your brain we're going to do this Just for two minutes, no drama. And then you just go, okay, I'm going to clean this thing up. For the next two minutes, you set your timer, and then when your timer goes off, you celebrate completion. When you finish, say out loud. Yes, say it out loud. Something like, I show up even when I don't want to, or I'm building my own willpower, or I follow through on what I say I'm going to do. This is actually how you start to build self trust. Not by listening to a motivational podcast and being motivated for a moment. It's by consistently following through. That's how you build your own confidence and self trust. Just the first thing. The second thing is to create short daily discipline windows. So, like, discipline doesn't require three hours. It just needs effort more than anything else. And so it's about protecting a pocket of time in your day where you're going to fully commit to something. No checking your phone, no multitasking, no, you know, giving yourself a way to mentally opt out of it. And I would recommend to start with start, make it simple. Make it 10 to 15 minutes. Don't make it an hour, don't make it two hours. For 15 minutes, I'm going to do this one thing, and here's the secret sauce of it. Make it like a mental sprint. And so it could be like, I really need to learn this complex solo on guitar. I'm gonna give myself 15 minutes and 15 minutes only, and I'm only gonna focus on just this thing. Or it might be something really complex that you need to read for work and you need to start to understand and get into your brain. Or it might be sitting there and meditating completely in silence for 15 minutes and just noticing the anxiety come up in your body and breathing through it. It could be, you know, cleaning that neglected space that's inside of your house. It could be learning something that really challenges you, like a new language, or deciding that you want to start coding, or a concept that really confuses you. It's like this 15 minute sprint where you're just like, I'm going to focus on this thing and this thing only. Let me explain to you why this works neurologically. You're exercising a party branch called the prefrontal cortex, which is where your decision making and impulse override comes from. You're also lighting up the. The acc, which we talked about, the anterior cingulate cortex. Every time you override your distractions. When you go, I need to check my phone. Nope, not doing it. Oh, I need to go do this. Nope, I'm not going to do it. You're. You're lighting that part of your brain up every single time. Once again, you're not training the task. You're training the skill of willpower. And so you've got to take it really seriously. This is your mental gym. This is your mental version of flossing. It's not glamorous, it's not sexy, but it rewires your capacity for bigger things in your life. So that's the second thing. The third thing is to lean into discomfort as regularly as you possibly can. Discomfort, most people associate as a bad thing. They associate it as the enemy. Discomfort is not the enemy. And so I want you to reframe and rewire your thoughts around discomfort. Like, this one isn't about just, like, suffering through something. It's about stretching yourself through something. And most importantly, it's about breaking your brain's addiction to comfort, because comfort is the killer. And so, like, leaning in, what could leaning in look like? You know, you're in the shower, you get this crazy idea, maybe I should take a cold shower. And your brain's like, nope, don't do it. Definitely don't do it. No way. And you're like, oh, there it is. That's the internal resistance that I needed. I'm going to do it for 30 seconds. It could be something like that. It could be, as I said, deciding to sit still and meditate or just breathe without looking at your own for five minutes. It could be, you know, doing something that's boring because you don't want to do it, but you know that you should and then finishing it on purpose. It could be something happens to you and you want to blow up on somebody. You want to, you know, do whatever it is that you normally would have done in the past. You're like, you know what? I'm not going to react. And you hold back from venting or yelling or arguing. Just one time today. And you know, that feeling of internal resistance, like, that's your moment. You have to remind yourself, this is my moment to choose differently. Every time that you lean in instead of checking out, your brain gets this new message. And it's like, hey, I can handle hard things without running. I can do hard things in my life. I follow through. I'm a strong person. And this is what's really important for your acc, is that you're literally increasing distress tolerance in your brain, which is one of the highest predictors of emotional resilience. And so discomfort for us, it's Not a stop sign. It's your time for strength training. So that's number three. Number four is try to start delaying gratification. This is probably the most underestimated habit, but it's directly tied to your willpower, to your longevity, to your emotional regulation, to your executive functioning. And so it's like when you wake up in the morning and you want to check your phone, wait 15 minutes, just delay that gratification for a few more minutes. You know when you have that snack in your hand and you want to eat that snack, that bag of chips or that piece of candy, you're looking at that snack. Delay the gratification, put it away and hide it in the back of your pantry and walk away from it. Or even better, throw it in the trash. Because your body doesn't need it in the first place. You know, at the end of the night, even if it's just one time a week, like end your night without TV or Netflix or your phone, just delay this gratification. You know, you want to buy something, which so many people just get instant gratification from. They feel awkward in the world, so they go shopping, they buy something, and they get a little hit of dopamine. Like, leave something in your cart for 24 hours before you purchase it. Just delay this gratification. And what these are doing, these tiny little pauses are resensitizing your impulse circuit. And each delay is saying, like, hey, I'm in charge of this, not the craving. And guess what? The more that you do it, your acc grows stronger with every act of deferral. And so it learns, hey, I delay. I don't immediately go for things. So that's number four. And number five is to do what I was saying a minute ago, which is reframe resistance as growth. Resistance isn't a problem. It's the proof that you're in the right place. You've just got to take a different action. And so the inner trick that I have found of like really high performing people, the high performing brain, is that when things get hard, they don't panic. They expect things to get hard. And they go, okay, things are getting hard. And they reframe it as, this is progress. This is my time to grow. This is where I'm in my mental workout. And this is how you build the mental reps out of discomfort. You know, when you hear the brain, you get that feeling that says, I don't want to do it, answer, perfect, we're gonna do it anyways. You know when your brain says, let's just skip today. You're like, no, I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm showing up. When your body says, oh, I'm tired, well, then your brain needs to say, hey, this is how we get stronger. And it's about reframing your relationship to difficulty. You know, you stop seeing a challenge as something to avoid or something that you have to just try to force yourself to get through. And you start seeing it as something that you actually grow from. You know, if it's uncomfortable, it's working. This is the sign that my growth is happening. And the best part is that your brain rebuilds and grows with every single rep. Every time you resist this urge, every time that you act from your higher self instead of your comfort, your brain reshapes itself. Not metaphorically, actually structurally, this is actual neuroplasticity in action, which is your brain's ability to reorganize itself to through effort and repetition. When you back away from a challenge, you're strengthening that part of your brain that backs away. When you go face first into a challenge, you are strengthening that part of your brain as well. So you're not just being disciplined, you're building a new brain, which is the amazing part about it. And you've got to remind yourself when you're doing something that's hard. And so studies have actually shown. What's even cooler is that people who have larger ACCs live longer lives. They have larger or better maintained ACCs inside of their brain. Why? Because these people tend to stay mentally sharp, they tend to keep moving, they are more emotionally regulated. They stay engaged with their goals and personal growth and in all of their old age. And so willpower doesn't just build character, it preserves cognition and keeps you alive longer. And so if you're lazy or you feel like you're not ready to take action and you feel like you back away too much, you're not lazy, you don't back away too much. You're just under trained, your willpower muscle is weak. And so you've got to ask yourself, like, where am I avoiding discomfort in my life? And what is one thing that I can lean into today that I don't want to do? And then let this be your mental push up. And that is how you grow yourself and you grow your brain. And when you grow your brain and especially the acc in your brain and you create a better life for yourself, remind yourself, this is my mental pushup. Every rep of resistance is making me stronger and making my brain better and going to help me create a better life. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. Once again, if you love this episode, please share this Put it on your Instagram stories. Tag me obdial jr r o b D I A L J R I love when I see that you guys put all the time I see you guys tag me in different stories and videos of you going for a walk or going for a run. You're at the gym and you're listening to the podcast. I see every single one of them. So if you would share it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. And with that I'm leaving the same way leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. 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