How To Really Stick To A New Year's Resolution - Part 2

Interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

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Mike Carruthers:
Willpower or actually lack of it is why we fail at New Year’s resolutions, right? Well not really.

Heidi Grant Halvorson:
Willpower doesn’t work the way you think it does. So most people think of willpower as this sort of fixed thing – right? Some people have it and some people don’t.  Willpower’s actually a lot like a muscle.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals...

Sometimes your willpowers going to be weak and it’s going to weak just like a muscle is weak after a lot of exercise. So at the end of a long day when you’ve been dealing with a lot of stresses and you’ve used up a lot of your self-control that’s when you’re going to have the hardest time resisting temptation.

And it turns out willpower can be built up just like a muscle.

There are great studies that show that even adding something very simple to your daily routine like sitting up straight every time you think of it or starting every day making your bed. Something that requires a little bit of self-control if you do that every day and you keep repeating it – you actually build the muscles.

And there’s another benefit to making and sticking with a resolution.

There was a really interesting study that showed that people who joined a gym and stuck to it, at the end of 2 months they had not only lost weight and felt healthier they did all kinds of other things - like they found that they were spending less money impulsively and they weren’t smoking as much and they weren’t drinking as much. So the building of the willpower muscle in the gym was having all of these wonderful side effects.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here