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“If you want to lose five kilos as a common example, until the scales are telling you that you’ve dropped five kilos, you are failing,” she says. “Psychologically that is pretty hard.”
And while a sense of direction can be useful, we do not always need a specific goal to succeed.
Joe Rogan, who hosts the world’s number one podcast has repeatedly said that he didn’t have a plan for the show beyond speaking with people he found interesting.
“I’m stunned by it all still, to this day, but I enjoy doing it, so I keep on doing it,” Rogan said in 2023.
Enjoyment of an activity makes it easier to exercise discipline, which can result in success with or without a goal.
But even if we don’t love an activity or pursuit, if we see a greater purpose – we see our personal growth or we can see how doing it will enable us to help others, for instance – that can also motivate us to keep at it.
It’s what American psychologist and author of the best-selling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth calls “boring but important”.
And while discipline involves training ourselves to improve in an area, it is not to be confused with self-control, which involves restraint from an activity or behaviour.
The problem with willpower and self-control
While we tend to think that people who resist temptation simply have greater self-control than we do, various studies suggest this is not the case.
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Rather, research has found that people who report having good self-control are typically not experiencing as many temptations in the first place. When they have the same number of temptations placed in their environment as those who report low self-control, they struggle just as much.
It is removing the temptation that makes certain behaviours easier. And given we don’t find the same things equally tempting, using cognitive strategies to make a temptation less desirable (telling ourselves that we can have the chocolate some other time or that we “don’t eat X”) can be powerful too.
“This idea that we need to aspire to have more discipline and exercise our willpower in order to thrive in this world and be a successful human being? No, that is not the only way,” Imber says. “Sure, some people do that, but it is exhausting trying to exercise self-control throughout the day every day.”
Towards a better way
The way to better habits and behaviours is designing our day to make healthier behaviours easier and more enjoyable.
The keys, Imber argues, are understanding our individual barriers (they might be environmental, motivational, social, or cognitive) and appreciating those barriers may be different depending on the activity or task. Once we understand them, we can start to design systems to remove the barrier, and support change.
“Ideally, what you want to do is set up systems in your life that actually remove the need for willpower,” says Imber, whose new book The Health Habit explores a range of evidence-based ways we can do this.
So if you are trying to quit alcohol or sugar, like Imber, removing all the alcohol or sugar from the house means you’re not as reliant on willpower or self-control to avoid them.
And though environmental hijackers, as she calls them, were Imber’s main issue with sugar (by having chocolate lying around her house she had no environmental barrier to eating it), her barrier to exercise was motivational – it was something she felt she had to do rather than something she wanted to do.
So she used a system, based on a technique called temptation bundling, where she only got to watch her favourite TV show – the US version of The Bachelor – when she was working out on her exercise bike.
And designing the day, instead of focusing on the far-off goal, makes an activity less overwhelming as well as giving us a regular win. So instead of focusing on an end goal, like a half-marathon, focus just on how many kilometres you need to run that day or how to fuel your body to support that run.
Behaviour change is really hard because we are a human. But, reminds Imber:
“If you’ve got a daily system in place, if you stick to that system, you are winning, you are succeeding.”
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