Willpower is the wrong tool

Every time I meet with a client I hear something along these lines. I try to stop but I just can’t – I have been fighting through this my whole life – My whole world is burning down because of this addiction. I am keeping it at bay, but I want to be free from this. This is the place most of us go to when we try to stop a habit in our lives. Most of us try to use willpower to change our habits In fact, I get comments like this on my Facebook page all the time. They say things like, “just stop it” Maybe you’ve heard something similar from a friend, spouse, bishop This kind of language is the language of going into battle. It is that keeping it at bay and believing you could lose everything as another client put it that is hindering your progress That is not going to get you all the way there. So many of us have put our fullest attentions and greatest efforts into quitting pornography only to be drawn back into it after a period of sober living. That is because we used willpower to fight what has become our most difficult habit. Willpower is a recipe for short gains, long term struggle because willpower is a trap, great book “change anything” talks about this in depth . It talks about how we may have half a dozen things influencing us to continue a habit while employing just one strategy to negate it. The book also demonstrates that it is not about some innate ability or capacity that makes us stronger than our friends or peers. “…people (often) believe that their ability to make good choices stems from nothing more than their willpower – and that their willpower is a quality they’re born with or they’re not – they eventually stop trying altogether. The willpower trap keeps them in a depressing cycle that begins with heroic commitment to change which is followed by eroding motivation and terminated inevitably by relapse into old habits. Then, when the built-up pain of their habits becomes intolerable, they muster up another heroic but doomed attempt at change.” Willpower is what we think we lack when we tell ourselves that we just didn’t want to quit bad enough Willpower can only take you so far because your brain is not designed to use willpower for lasting change. Willpower is strictly a short term tool The problem with willpower is that it is a power of struggle. When we use willpower we are simply fighting, battling out against the one person we can’t beat, ourselves. There is this new will smith film called Gemini man where I think that is essentially the premise of the film. That resistance, that battle, that warrior mentality, it is costly in terms of energy. In change anything, the premise of the book is that you can change anything you want in your life, if you have the right skills. In my individual coaching sessions I teach people a lot of skills. The webinars I do, are about teaching people skills. Today I’m going to teach you the first of three essential skills that I will be teaching live on June 17. If you are interested in attending that, please go to my website, zachspafford.com and click on free coaching call. That will take you to a zoom registration page where you will get all the info you need to join the call. If you want to stop using pornography, you need to know how to do these three things. I only have time for the first today, but this skill alone will make a huge difference in your life. One of the most important skills you can learn is how to say, “no” to your urges to go down the rabbit hole. Think about how you say no, when you really mean it. Especially with something that might frustrate you. If someone is repeatedly trying to get you to do something that you don’t like, you say, “NO!” There is abruptness, there is a clenching, there is a tightening against the thing...