Willpower and Feelings

Conscious life is the interplay between willpower and feelings. Your willpower is the conscious "you" which is constantly deciding what to do or to think next. Willpower always acts in the context of your feelings. Your feelings provide information, based on experience, about the relative merits of the choices that you have at each moment. The experience that feelings come from includes your own personal experience, the experience of your ancestors (encoded in the genes that specify the design of your brain), and also the "wisdom" of your parents, absorbed in your childhood, by some means not completely understood.

Which is most in charge? Your willpower, or your feelings?

Answer:

• Nothing happens without your willpower, although sometimes only a very small amount of willpower is required to make something happen.
• If the action of your willpower was completely determined by your feelings, you would be like an animal. But you are not an animal, and the proof of this is that at any moment you can "choose" to do something that goes against your feelings at that moment.
• If willpower was always in charge, then your actions could become completely disconnected from your feelings. But your feelings contain all the information about your "success" as a biological organism – whether your stomach is full, whether you are in the company of a person whose children will be your children, whether your place in society is beneficial to your own personal goals. To prevent this disconnection, there must be some way that your feelings constrain your willpower.

Constraint and Accountability

Willpower is more constrained by feelings in the long-term than in the short-term. For example, consider a diet. A diet is an exercise in willpower, and involves ignoring feelings of hunger. A diet of one meal is easy. A diet of one day is not too hard. A diet that lasts a year is almost impossible.

Diets are a favourite subject of New Year's resolutions. But New Year's resolutions don't last very well, and they almost always fail before the next New Year comes.

If we can understand both how and why feelings constrain willpower, we can understand the false assumptions that motivate our persistent attempts to "control" our own behaviour beyond the limits that it wants to be controlled.

Feelings constrain willpower, but they don't do so just to limit willpower, they act to hold willpower accountable. Feelings constitute advice about what is probably the best thing to do next. Willpower always has the freedom to ignore the advice, but, and this is the big "but", it is held accountable for any decision to ignore that advice.

This accountability comes into play if the consequences of a decision go all wrong. If willpower made a decision against feelings, and that decision was a bad decision, then willpower must be held accountable for that failure. If the decision was made with rather than against feelings, then it is the feelings themselves that will be held responsible.

The accountability is why "you" (your willpower) must "listen to your feelings". Not because they are always right (though sometimes they are more right than you might expect), but because "you" will be held accountable for any decision "you" make which ignores those feelings.

On the bright side, if a decision goes right, and the result is better than would have been expected without the decision, then your willpower will be credited with a "reward". The reward causes the strategy that willpower used to make the decision to become (at least partly) incorporated into your feelings, so that next time the same decision can be made more easily. The reward also allows willpower to have less "slack", i.e. a temporarily greater freedom to make more decisions against feelings (to see if there is "more where that came from").

Living in the Moment

What does it mean to "live in the moment"? Your willpower is held accountable for acting with or against your feelings, at the moment the decision is made. This is the critical concept of the "moment".

There is a tendency for the "will" to adopt a life strategy that is independent of the variations that occur in feelings from one time to another. If feelings did not change much, or only changed very slowly, then the "moment" would not matter, and instead of "living in the moment", we could just "live". But, for any number of reasons, feelings do change from moment to moment. For some people they change more than for others, and perhaps it is this group of people who have more reason to take the kind of advice being given here.

A simple example of a feeling that changes is hunger. We feel hungry before we eat. After we have eaten, we might not feel hungry at all. A decision to diet may be based on feelings about the consequences of being too fat, and these feelings may be relatively constant. But the constant feelings in favour of the diet are in conflict with the varying feelings of hunger, which leads to the on-again off-again nature of the diet.

The primary error, of not living in the moment, is to act as if your willpower is held accountable for feelings at some moment other than the moment that a decision is being made. If might seem reasonable to account for future feelings, especially as many of our feelings are themselves feelings about expectations of the future, but this is not how the system works.

How the system does work is that you are expected to make decisions now about the future, in the context of the feelings that you have now about the future, not in the context of the feelings that you might expect to have when that future comes.

Example: The Diet

So how does this apply to a diet?

• At some time you have feelings about the desirability of losing weight, and you make a decision to go on a diet. Unfortunately a diet is something that by definition goes on for an extended period of time – it is not a single decision, but rather a series of decisions. But you cannot make future decisions in the present. So it can make sense to decide to be on a diet in the present moment, and it can make sense to think about the consequences of dieting or not dieting in the future, but a mistake is made when you assume that your present decision is also a future decision (or a series of future decisions). Your future decisions cannot be made now, because they must be made in the context of your future feelings, and your future feelings have not happened yet.
• At some later time, an opportunity to eat arises. Your feeling of being hungry is now stronger than your desire to diet. Your willpower may persist with its plan, but this decision must be remade each time the situation occurs, and each time the decision is made against the feelings of hunger, your willpower is "punished" for making that decision.
• Eventually, in the face of this punishment, your willpower must relent, and the food gets eaten. At this point, you may make a further mistake, which is to try and suppress your feelings about wanting to diet and not wanting to be overweight. Too often we want our life plan to be either one thing or the other. Either you are dieting to lose weight, or, you are eating because you enjoy your food. If you continued to have feelings about the badness of being overweight while you were eating your food, that would "spoil" your enjoyment. But feelings are there for a reason, and they cannot be wished away. If they could be wished away, then willpower would be "in charge", and as we have already seen, this would undermine the crucial role that feelings play in holding willpower accountable for the success of biological goals.
• After you have eaten, (and probably eaten too much) you no longer feel hungry, but now you feel bad about having broken your diet, your "failure" to do what you "wanted" to do. So what should you be feeling? It does make sense at this point to feel bad about the consequences of your over-eating on your weight. But feeling bad about the failure of your willpower serves no useful purpose. Any plan that requires persistent willpower is going to fail, and feeling bad about that is as pointless as feeling bad about the rising and setting of the sun. It is pointless because it is based on an invalid assumption about feelings and willpower: that somehow willpower can be held accountable for decisions made at one moment by feelings that are felt at a different moment. As I have already stated, it just doesn't work this way.

So what is the correct "living in the moment" approach? The correct approach is to have feelings about the desirability of not being overweight, and to have feelings of hunger when you are hungry, and to only ever expect to make decisions in the context of the feelings you have at the times those decisions are being made. So:

• At some point in time, you think about the negative consequences of being overweight, and you have feelings about those consequences. You think about the relationship between your eating behaviour and your weight, but you do not expect to be able to control your future behaviour.
• When food becomes available, the feeling of hunger may exceed your feelings of concern about your weight. If this happens, then eat. But do not suppress your feelings about your weight. If those concerns reduce your enjoyment of the food, then so be it.
• As you eat, you feelings of hunger will naturally reduce. At some point your weight concerns will once again exceed your hunger, and at this point you can stop eating, without any application of willpower.
• Even though your concerns about weight reduced your enjoyment of the food, and perhaps reduced how much you ate, quite possibly you still ate too much. This will make you feel bad about the effect of that over-eating on your weight. Allow yourself to feel this bad feeling. Do not try to suppress it. Also do not try to exaggerate it, in the hope that doing so can "control" your future eating behaviour.
• There is of course more to weight loss that just eating less. Even if your feelings about not wanting to be overweight do not prevent over-eating, they may be sufficient sometimes to help you choose to eat food that is less bad for you, or to choose to do a little exercise (but don't fall into the trap of "deciding" on a long-term exercise plan involving a long-term gym membership or an expensive mail-order exercise machine).

If we could somehow "even out" our feelings, then they would become more constant, and we could avoid the requirement to live in the moment, and our life strategies would become simpler. But our feelings cannot be forcibly evened out, because they are what they are when they are. If you are on an attempted diet, it might seem more "rational" to feel bad about over-eating before you do it, but the cruel torture of the diet is that most of the bad feelings come after the eating, when it is apparently too late.

There is, however, always a next time. You can't decide now to keep to your diet next time, but if your allow yourself to feel badly about over-eating on one occasion, these bad feelings will persist, and they will reduce your enthusiasm for eating too much in the future. It may be that the diet "yo-yo" cannot be completely suppressed, but if you allow yourself to feel your feelings at all times, then those feelings will persist enough that the yo-yo will flatten itself a little. Exactly how much will flatten itself? Probably enough to achieve a somewhat stable equilibrium – knowing that at each moment you are making a decision consistent with the feelings that you have at that moment. You may or may not lose weight, but your weight concerns will probably have some effect on your eating habits, and, what is important, you will not be constantly bouncing back and forth between "beating yourself up" about not being on a diet when you think you should be and "indulging" yourself by breaking a diet that you are supposedly on.

Another Example: Procrastination

Procrastination is another of those problems that can be "cured" by the application of willpower. As in the case of dieting, it involves interactions between feelings at different times – before, during and after performing a task that has to be done by some deadline – and there is an assumption that decisions at one time can or should be made in the context of feelings experienced at a different time:

• Before the task, you wish you didn't have to do it at all, and you suppress the feelings of anxiety you have about not having done it.
• During the task, you wish you weren't doing it, and if you force yourself to complete it in one go, you may develop stronger and stronger feelings of not wanting to do it, as unexpected difficulties arise.
• After the deadline for completing the task has passed, and you still haven't completed it, you wish that you had started it and completed it at some earlier date.

The "living in the moment" solution is to respond to your feelings at all times. Before the task is started, allow yourself to feel anxiety about the possibility of not completing it in time. As this anxiety mounts, at some point the path of least resistance to your feelings is to start doing something about the task. However, do not assume that starting the task means that you will immediately complete it. Let your anxiety drive you to start doing it, but if stress (or plain exhaustion) builds up to the point where you do not wish to continue, then listen to your feelings and stop. Eventually, at some later time, anxiety will build up again, and you will be driven to start again. The very fact of allowing yourself not to complete tasks in one go will take some of the edge off the feelings that you have about not wanting to start in the first place.

And if, after all that, you still don't complete the task on time, allow yourself to feel how badly you feel about the fact that you didn't complete it on time, and how you feel about the consequences of that failure. You will find that those feelings will create a natural motivation to do better next time such a task comes up.

General Application

The principles explained with these two examples can be applied to other problems of the kind where the solution appears to be the application of willpower. Typical symptoms of such problems are:

• The problem involves interactions between feelings that occur at different times.
• There is a presumption that a decision about behaviour at one time can be made in the context of feelings experienced at some other time.

The "solution" to such problems is not to attempt to "control" behaviour at one time based on a decision made at some earlier time, but rather to treat the problem within each moment as a decision as to what behaviour is most compatible with the feelings you are having at that moment. Use of willpower should be limited to those situations where your conscious "self" has strong reason to believe that your feelings are wrong about something, and therefore should be ignored temporarily.

Some Metaphors

• Willpower is like a canoeist in a river, where your feelings are the river. Mostly you have to "go with the flow". If you really have to, you can paddle upstream for a bit, but there is no way you could keep that up indefinitely. The job of the canoeist is not to paddle against the river, but to control the canoe enough that it doesn't crash, capsize or get stuck somewhere.
• Feelings are like a corporate "best practices" office manual. The manual is based on an accumulation of corporate experience, and it gives advice about what you should do in every possible situation. You don't have to follow it, but if you don't, you will be held more accountable for the consequences. If you do follow "best" practice, and it all goes horribly wrong, then you can be sure that the manual will get rewritten accordingly. If you break the rules, and the result is better than what would have been expected from following the rules, then you get to rewrite the manual.
• Exercising willpower is like spending money. Many of the problems that we have can be solved by spending money. But if you tried to solve every problem just by spending enough money on the best solution, you would very quickly end up with a new set of problems, i.e. a severe shortage of money. The trick is to spend money economically, and to spend it where there is a reasonable expectation of a return on your investment (with that return not too far into the future). So it is with willpower.