Book SummaryThe Willpower Instinct, by Kelly McGonigal

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Willpower Instinct

The American Psychological Association says that Americans name “lack of willpower” as the main reason they can't achieve what they want in life. Most would jump at the chance to have more willpower, yet few of us realize that willpower isn't a character trait or a virtue but rather an innate instinct that's wired into our brains.

The Willpower Instinct by Stanford University psychology professor Kelly McGonigal explains how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep, not enough exercise, and other external factors. Utilizing scientific research, McGonigal provides a framework for how to increase our willpower and control our behaviors, appetites, and emotions. Each of this book’s sections describes various reasons for willpower failures and proposes methods to circumvent those failures.

You need willpower whether you want to start a business, train for a marathon, overcome procrastination, give up sugar, eat more vegetables, write a novel, break up with your social media accounts, or achieve any other major goal. Even if you're not looking to start a new habit or break an old one, your ability to activate your willpower on an everyday basis has a direct impact on your health, relationships, career, and financial security—and also how you feel about yourself.

How Your Mind Affects Your Willpower

We’d all like to believe that we have control over our own behavior, but the truth is that accessing our willpower is often a struggle. Often we’re at odds with ourselves: We want to achieve our long-term goals, but we also want to do what feels good right now. We might desire the long-term happiness of a healthy, slim physique, but we also want the 30-second happiness of devouring a silky lemon cupcake. We know we can’t have both, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting both.

Prefrontal Cortex: Willpower Control Center

In human brains, the prefrontal cortex is tasked with the important job of self-control. Some people are born with a larger, better developed prefrontal cortex than others, which makes a difference in their behaviors. When people with a larger prefrontal cortex think of saying “yes” to a second helping of dessert, their brains remind them that this is a poor idea, and they say “no” instead.

The rest of us have to contend with having what scientists call “one brain but two minds.” One mind caters to immediate gratification. The other mind delays gratification in the interest of achieving long-term goals. Our prefrontal cortex struggles to keep us focused on the long game, but when we are tired, distracted, stressed, or even mildly intoxicated, we tend to give in to immediate gratification.

We can’t alter the fact that we have conflicting desires, but we can learn strategies to minimize those conflicts. The foundation of gaining more willpower is understanding your own self-control traps and pitfalls. Gaining self-knowledge about how and why you fail at self-control helps you create strategies to succeed.

Distraction Diminishes Willpower

An important key to achieving greater self-control is paying greater attention to the hundreds of tiny choices we make each day. The choices we make while we’re distracted are usually founded on impulse, not deliberate thinking. Instead of operating on autopilot, we need to train our minds to wake up to the small daily decisions that have a direct impact on whether or not we achieve our long-term goals. For example, if you want to get fit, do you start the day by putting on your bedroom slippers or your exercise shoes?

In one study, people were asked how many food-related decisions they make in one day. Most people guessed an average of 14, but when they actually recorded each food-related decision they made in a day, they found it was more like 210. Instead of making small decisions by default, we need to cultivate our ability to pay attention.

Willpower Hack: Train Your Brain Through Meditation

No matter what your age, your brain is trainable, and that means you can improve your willpower. With training, you can learn to keep your big-picture goals at the forefront of your mind, which will motivate you to avoid getting derailed by fleeting desires. (In the moment, you may think you want to blow off some steam by lying on the couch and streaming your favorite show, but since you've decided that your big goal is to write a novel, that should take precedence in your mind.)

One brain-training method that's particularly effective is meditation. Even a five-minute daily practice of focusing on your breathing and quieting your mind can increase your impulse control. The goal is not to eliminate your thoughts; the goal is to keep your thoughts from ruling you. The training comes from the simple act of bringing your wandering thoughts back to focus on your breathing.

Studies show that people who meditate regularly actually have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Meditation increases blood flow to that part of the brain, which makes it grow and get more efficient at processing. As a result, it becomes easier to handle distractions and make good decisions.

How Your Body Affects Your Willpower

Self-control is not just a matter of making up your mind to do something—the body has to partner up with the brain to make it happen. If you're struggling to restrain your impulses or force yourself to work on a certain task, you may need to adjust your physiology.

Any time you're lured into satisfying a craving or impulse—one that's contrary to your long-term goals—you must turn off your brain's innate fight-or-flight response and turn on its pause-and-plan response. In fight-or-flight mode, your brain and body are wired to act instinctively. There's no thinking involved—the brain's message to the body is simply, "Act now!" In pause-and-plan mode, your brain slows down for deliberate, careful analysis. It tells the body to wait, not act,...

The Willpower Instinct Summary Introduction: Why Willpower Matters

Ask people if they'd like to have more willpower, and you'll almost always hear a resounding yes. It’s a critical commodity for anyone with goals to attain. You need willpower whether you want to start a business, train for a marathon, overcome procrastination, reduce your stress, give up sugar, eat more vegetables, write a novel, break up with your social media accounts, or achieve any other major goal.

Even if you're not looking to start a new habit or break an old one, your ability to activate your willpower on an everyday basis has a direct impact on your health, relationships, career, and financial security—and also how you feel about yourself.

The Willpower Instinct by Stanford University psychology professor Kelly McGonigal explains how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep, not enough exercise, and other external factors. Utilizing scientific research, McGonigal provides a framework for how to increase our willpower and access strategies for developing more self-control.

(Shortform note: The author uses the words “willpower” and “self-control” interchangeably, so this summary does the same.)

Choose a Willpower...

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 1: How Your Mind Affects Your Willpower

Most people think of willpower or self-control as the ability to resist temptation. When we say, "I have no willpower" we mean we can't say no to ourselves. We believe we can't eat just one potato chip; we will eat the entire bag. We believe we can't pull ourselves away from the couch and Netflix even when we know it’s time to go to the gym.

Saying "no" to our impulses is just half of the willpower equation. We need to be able to say "no" to some things (perhaps that third glass of wine or second cupcake) and "yes" to others (maybe working out, going to bed earlier, or eating more broccoli). Whether it's a "yes" or a "no," willpower usually involves choosing the more difficult of two options. Accessing your willpower means opting for the harder choice instead of giving in to what seems alluring in the present moment.

How Our Willpower Evolved

You might think the need for willpower is a modern invention, but even our Stone Age ancestors required it. Not only were they tasked with finding food and avoiding large predators, they also had to cultivate the skills to live successfully in tight-knit tribes. Since they weren’t well equipped to survive on their own, they...

Shortform Exercise: Square Off With Your Challenge

Since increasing your willpower requires that you understand your own traps and pitfalls, think about the Personal Willpower Challenge you've decided to tackle. Imagine you're facing your challenge.

What makes this particular challenge hard for you to attain? Name the biggest obstacle that might lure you away from accomplishing your goal.

Shortform Exercise: Account for Small Choices

Part of empowering our willpower instinct is training our minds to recognize when we’re making choices related to our big goals.

Make a list of three choices or actions that you make in a typical day that affect your Personal Willpower Challenge either positively or negatively. (For example, if your goal is to work out more often, ask yourself what choices you make related to working out. Do you wear your sneakers to work so you don't have to change shoes? Do you check your email just before yoga class starts, then wind up missing the class because you're responding to a client?)

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 2: How Your Body Affects Your Willpower

The brain has a lot of control over willpower, but it doesn’t do all the heavy lifting. Your body also “feels” when your willpower is being challenged. The urge that pulls you toward a cigarette, a pizza parlor, a cocktail bar, or an Internet shopping deal is both physiological and psychological.

But there's good news: In the moment of temptation, you can find the power to resist by adjusting your physiology. To do that, you need to turn off your brain's fight-or-flight response, and turn on its pause-and-plan response.

Fight-or-Flight Response

Thanks to our evolution, our bodies respond to external threats with a fight-or-flight response. Back in our cave-dwelling days, if we spotted a giant human-eating predator, we had to act fast. The amygdala—the part of our brain that responds to alarms—would send emergency signals to the rest of the brain and all parts of the body. The adrenal glands would release stress hormones. The liver would flood energy into the bloodstream. The heart and lungs would start pumping faster to supply the body with extra oxygen. And so on.

Meanwhile, the rest of the brain—everything except the amygdala—would basically shut down so the...

Shortform Exercise: Pay Attention to Daily Stress

Science informs us that stress depletes our self-control. Stress also blinds us. When we’re stressed, we become distracted and stop attending closely to the choices we’re making. Pay attention to any stressing situations that come up in the next day or two and see what you can learn.

Make a list of three situations or times when you felt worried, overworked, tired, angry, lonely, hungry, or distracted.

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 3: How Willpower Gets Depleted

Every time you use your willpower, it's a lot like doing a bicep curl with a heavy dumbbell. You can only do so many reps before your arm muscles fatigue completely and you can't lift the weight one more time. Your willpower reserve is just like that. The willpower "muscle" has limited strength, and once that's depleted, your best intentions can backslide.

The research: Studies have shown that if a smoker gives up cigarettes for 24 hours, he or she is more likely to binge on candy. People who are on a restrictive diet are more likely to cheat on their spouses. And people who try to engage in too many self-improvement projects at once—say, giving up sugar and sticking to a budget at the same time—are less successful than those who choose just one project.

Any time you have to make yourself do something difficult—whether it's making a presentation at work or choosing between 50 brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store, you're using up willpower. If your brain is utilizing the pause-and-plan response, it’s going to get weary.

It’s not surprising that for most people, self-control is highest in the morning and diminishes as the day progresses. Our daily...

Shortform Exercise: Track Your Willpower Stamina

Your willpower doesn’t maintain a constant, steady state throughout the day. Gaining knowledge about the highs and lows of your willpower stamina helps you to plan your day around achieving long-term goals. If there are things you’d like to accomplish that you never seem to have time or energy for, work on them during your highest willpower hours.

Pay attention to when you feel like your willpower is strong and when you feel like you want to just give in and give up. Do you notice any certain time of day when you’re more capable of pushing yourself to accomplish tasks that aren’t especially fun? Record the exact hours of the day.

Shortform Exercise: Control One Small Thing

You can train your willpower muscles by cultivating a small new habit. Instead of tackling some huge, difficult willpower goal, decide to control one small thing that you don't ordinarily control. (This exercise teaches your brain to break out of autopilot mode and to do a harder thing when it’s accustomed to doing an easier thing.)

Make a list of two small new habits you could cultivate. It can be something inconsequential like making your bed as soon as you get out of it, using your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, or eliminating the slang interjection “like” from your conversation (as in “I want to stop, but like, I can't.”). Then try injecting those new behaviors into your day.

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 4: Why Morality Doesn’t Apply to Willpower

Too often we frame our willpower struggles in terms of morality. We give ourselves credit for our perceived willpower successes, and we beat ourselves up for our perceived failures. But applying the labels of virtue and vice to our self-control choices sets us up to fall into four common willpower-failure traps:

1. Utilizing moral licensing, we tell ourselves we deserve an indulgent treat because we’ve been good.
2. Under the “I’m Making Progress” trap, we tell ourselves we’ve already taken a few steps toward our goal, so why not take a break?
3. With “Too Much Optimism,” we reward ourselves for our potential good behavior in the future—even if we never follow-through.
4. Under the halo effect, we believe that virtuous choices cancel out bad ones.

The Moral Licensing Trap

Moral licensing is a way of telling ourselves that being "good" gives us moral permission to be "bad." Sometimes if we just convince ourselves that we’re making progress toward our Personal Willpower Challenge, we'll fall off the wagon. We take a few steps in the right direction—for example, we might stop smoking or drinking alcohol for several days—and then we tell ourselves we...

Shortform Exercise: Outwit Your Willpower Traps

Think about the four willpower traps described in this chapter: Utilizing moral licensing, we tell ourselves we deserve an indulgent treat because we’ve been good. With “I’m Making Progress,” we tell ourselves we’ve already taken a few steps toward our goal, so why not take a break? With “Too Much Optimism,” we reward ourselves for our potential good behavior in the future. And under the halo effect, we believe that virtuous choices cancel out bad ones.

Now consider your Personal Willpower Challenge, and ask yourself if you’ve ever fallen into any of those traps while trying to achieve your challenge. Which trap applies to you most often?

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 5: How Desire Steers Us Off Course

We know that the brain’s prefrontal cortex handles the important task of self-control. But that sector of the brain is often at odds with another sector—the part that’s responsible for desire (a.k.a. craving, temptation, and sometimes addiction). If you want to achieve more willpower, you need to understand how these two brain sectors compete with each other, and why satisfying short-term cravings often wins out over working toward long-term goals.

[restricted term] Leads to Desire

At the root of every craving or desire is a brain neurotransmitter called [restricted term]. When the brain senses the opportunity for a reward, it releases [restricted term], which causes a form of arousal. It alerts the rest of the brain to get ready for a reward that will soon arrive. A [restricted term] rush makes us feel alert and excited.

But [restricted term] has major limitations. It sets us up to chase the promise of happiness without ever delivering on that promise. [restricted term] delivers only the excitement of possibility—a hint that something good is coming soon—but not a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction. That’s true not just for humans but also for animals. To a lab...

Shortform Exercise: Recognize Your Dopamine Triggers

Although dopamine serves an evolutionary purpose, it can often derail you from your long-term goals. The promise of reward can leave you repeating the same behaviors without ever achieving deep satisfaction. Once you understand the impact of dopamine on your brain and your actions, you can mitigate this impact.

Keep a list of the little "thrills" that make you feel excitement or anticipation, like some kind of reward is waiting just around the bend. Is it logging on to your Instagram account to see what your friends are up to? Playing the lottery? Smelling the coffee beans roasting at your favorite coffee shop? Shopping online, even if you don't buy anything?

Shortform Exercise: Make Dopamine Your Ally

Dopamine doesn’t have to derail you—it can work in your favor. If you can find a way to add a dopamine rush to your least favorite chore, it will become a lot easier and more fun.

Make a list of two or three tasks you've been putting off (perhaps raking the leaves, cleaning out the garage, or planning out next year’s budget).

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 6: How Feeling Bad Leads to Giving In

When we want to access the willpower to work toward long-term goals, we need a positive state of mind. After all, it takes a certain amount of optimism to be willing to focus on the future. But even for the best of us, it’s impossible to stay upbeat all the time, so it’s key to understand what happens when our moods turn sour or we’ve had a rough day.

Our brains don’t like feeling bad, so they automatically start hunting for something to make us feel good. Unfortunately, the things we turn to when we want to feel good are often the things that make us feel bad. Ask any drug addict, food addict, or any other kind of addict—most will say that indulging in their addiction usually winds up making them feel worse, not better. Clearly we need to find a way to improve our moods that’s more consistent with our long-term goals.

When Stress Makes Us Give In

It’s not surprising that the brain is more susceptible to temptation when we're stressed. In Chapter 2, we saw that stress engages our fight-or-flight response—the opposite of the pause-and-plan response that helps us make solid, carefully thought-out decisions. When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, any temptations that...

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 7: How Instant Gratification Derails Us

Humans have amazingly complex brains, but all too often, we use them for rationalizing, not for making solid long-term decisions. Our brains did not evolve to respond to rewards in the far-off future; they evolved to respond to what's good right now.

We want to sit down and write a business plan for our latest million-dollar idea, but we also want to go on a beach vacation and not open our laptops for a week. After all, we’ve been working so hard lately, and we have all those free airline points, and we are just craving those swaying palm trees and lingering sunsets.

So we tell ourselves that if we go to the beach and ponder that business plan, we’re actually getting something done. Or we tell ourselves that if we go to the beach now, we’ll have more energy to write that business plan later.

In short, we’re experts at inventing mental tricks to convince ourselves we can do tomorrow what we're not doing today. As we learned in Chapter 4, we even give ourselves advance credit for the good behavior we will surely display in the future.

This is what economists call “delay discounting”—we’re hooked on instant gratification and not willing to wait for future...

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapter 8: How Social Connections Influence Willpower

We think our behaviors are under our own self-control, but we're social animals, so we’re also subject to social control. No matter how independent we may think we are, we're influenced by the people around us. Hang out with the right people and your willpower will increase; hang out with the wrong people and you'll give in to temptation more frequently.

The research: A 2010 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that one out-of-shape Air Force Academy cadet in a squadron of brand new cadets could bring down the fitness levels of the entire squadron. In other words, physical fitness is contagious—and so is the lack of it. In a much larger study, two scientists examined 32 years of health data from more than 12,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. Specifically, they looked at weight gain, and what they discovered was an epidemic. Over time, obesity was spreading within families and groups of friends at an alarming rate. If your friend became obese, your risk of becoming obese increased by 171 percent.

Further analysis revealed that not just weight gain but also excessive alcohol consumption spread through social connections. But there...

Shortform Exercise: Examine Your Social Influences

Social influences play a big role in willpower challenges. It’s worth taking some time to think about the habits and behaviors you may have adopted from people in your family or social circle. Sometimes common behaviors are the basis of relationships—and those behaviors may be ones you want to keep or ones you want to discard.

Can you think of any behaviors—virtuous or not—that you’ve mirrored from people close to you? If so, what was the habit, and who were you mirroring?

The Willpower Instinct Summary Chapters 9-10: Why Denial Backfires

Willpower does a good job of controlling our outer actions, but it’s useless when applied to our interior world of thoughts and feelings. Have you ever deliberately tried not to think about elephants? As soon as you set your mind on this task, all you can think about is elephants.

This is a result of what psychologists call “ironic rebound.” It’s the reason why dieters who completely cut out carbohydrates start to think of nothing but loaves of bread.

As soon as we try to eliminate something from our minds, ironic rebound kicks in. When depressed people try to block out sad thoughts, they get more depressed. When parents try to not to worry about their children’s behavior, they wind up worrying more. The harder you try to push away a thought, the more likely it will come back even stronger.

Scientists aren’t exactly sure how this works, but the general idea is that one part of the brain decides it must stay alert at all times for the “forbidden” thing—carbohydrates, elephants, sad thoughts, worries. As a result, it’s constantly focused on their possible existence, and that makes them show up everywhere.

Thought Suppression Leads to Willpower...