One of the hardest habits to find the motivation to change is your eating habits. It’s difficult enough to consistently make healthy choices when we’re surrounded by cheap, fast, and hyper-palatable foods, but now with the enacted quarantine, it’s even more challenging not to rely on food as a main source of comfort. So how do we find (and keep) the motivation to make healthy diet choices whenever possible? The answer, according to author Charles Duhigg, may lie in one word: willpower.
In his non-fiction book, The Power of Habit, Duhigg explains that everyone has a limited amount of willpower for each day; some people may have more and some may have less, but no one has an infinite amount. According to Duhigg’s research, when we’re trying to motivate ourselves to do something difficult (like making healthy food choices), we need to limit our expenditure of willpower on arbitrary decisions so we have more leftover to concentrate on the challenging task. For example, if you have a bag of chips in your house when you’re trying to limit the amount of junk food you eat, every time you open your pantry and see the chips you have to use some of your willpower to make the decision not to eat them. If you’ve had to make a lot of other willpower-depleting choices earlier in the day at work or school, it’s likely that by the time you get home you won’t have enough willpower left to avoid the chips. If instead you had used your willpower at the grocery store to make the decision not to buy the chips in the first place, then you wouldn’t be constantly draining your willpower reserve at home.
The more consistent we are in making these healthy decisions using our willpower, the more they will become our default choices, and then our overall lifestyle. So, the next time you’re looking for the motivation to make a challenging lifestyle change, whether it be diet-related or otherwise, think about what choices will keep your willpower at its highest!