How To Not Finish The Entire Bowl Of M&Ms

Don’t tell my parents, but until about 4 years ago I was quite the avid party smoker. As soon as the buzz from that first drink kicked in, I would start craving the feeling of warm menthol smoke entering my lungs. 

I would regularly make the conscious decision to quit and would use my will power to say no at parties but the more I was asked if I wanted one, the harder it seemed to be to say no. 

After a couple of weeks of doing this, all it took was one stressful day at work, a couple drinks too many, then I would cave in and start the whole process again.

How many times have you been let down by your own will power? 

Maybe you tried to not finish that entire packet of M&Ms… Maybe you tried to only have one drink… Or maybe you only intended to spend only 5 minutes on Instagram...

I had always believed that will power was something you could train, that it was like a muscle… the more you used it the stronger it got but weirdly this never seemed to be the case.

For example no matter how often I said no to cigarettes, I would eventually always fall back into saying yes. 

But then I realised that just like a muscle, if you overwork it, it gets tired and might need extra time to recover. So regardless of how strong my will power was, if I used it all the time it would eventually run out. 

This is also sometimes referred to as decision fatigue. 

Then one year, I had decided to quit smoking as a NY resolution, followed by 1 month of dry January (with zero exposure to other party smokers), and the cold Amsterdam weather in February and March made me spend less time outside with smokers. 

After 3 months of hardly needing to use my will power, the desire to stay on my good run of no smoking started to outweigh the desire to smoke, it got easier and easier for me to say no and I ended up never doing it again. 

It was like the less I put myself in situations where I had to use my will power, the stronger my ability to say no would get. 

So maybe, one of the easiest ways of improving your will power, is to start by getting better at not putting yourself in situations where you need to use this.

Next time you want to quit something, one of the first things you can do is try to limit your exposure to it. 

If you don’t want to finish the bag of M&Ms, don’t buy it in the first place. If you don’t want to get home drunk, don’t go for that one drink. And if you don’t want to spend 2h scrolling on Instagram, don’t open the app.

Let me know the one thing that uses up most of your will power?

Originally published at https://www.alexlifecoach.com on March 31, 2021.