> “Willpower”is filled with advice about what to do with your willpower. Build up its strength, the authors suggest, with small but regular exercises, like tidiness and good posture. Don’t try to tame every bad habit at once.
This is the key. For example, instead of having a bunch of New Year's resolutions, come up with one resolution every month. Focus your (finite) willpower on making it into a habit, at which point it won't require willpower anymore. Next month, move onto another habit and do the same thing. You can drastically change your lifestyle in just 1 year by repeating this 12 times.
Also, I have found that "breaking" the willpower mind wall has to do with taking tasks (like good posture, delaying FB status updates, doing dishes) and rewarding yourself mentally along the way by thinking or even saying things like "This is great! or I win!" even so much as smiling while doing these things helps to reinforce the dopamine pathways and can overtime help in "re-coding" your brain to be will-powerful. It's about feeling good while doing things and your brain doesn't know the difference between fake good and real good and before you know it neither will you and that's the point :)
I made a New Years resolution (purely for convenience of logging time) to not eat meat on weekdays. So far, I've been pretty successful at keeping it. I guess the key here is that I'm able to eat meat on weekends as a treat, which refreshes my willpower weekly. Next year, I plan on restricting my diet further, but possibly keep the less-restricted, meat-free diet on weekends.
This is the key. For example, instead of having a bunch of New Year's resolutions, come up with one resolution every month. Focus your (finite) willpower on making it into a habit, at which point it won't require willpower anymore. Next month, move onto another habit and do the same thing. You can drastically change your lifestyle in just 1 year by repeating this 12 times.