Why making healthy decisions feels hard. (willpower)

Jul. 6

I remember a Tuesday afternoon, I was done with school and work for the day.

It was 5PM I was laying in bed, fully clothed vaping and scrolling on instagram instead of going to the gym.

All I can remember is the heaviness of making the decision to physically move myself to get to the gym to train.

It felt like this very choice was draining the remaining energy out of me. Like I didn't have enough willpower to rely on.

In a sense, I wasn’t wrong. The fact that I was big on procrastination and filling my life with cheap dopamine made all my decisions harder.

I wasn’t aware at the time, but this is called willpower depletion, and that’s the very reason why sustaining a healthy lifestyle when your current one is chaotic truly feels unreachable.

It feels like every tiny healthy decision is mentally 10,000 times more costly than it should be.

In my case, I couldn’t sustain going to the gym consistently because all the distractions—social media, drama, and video games—were depleting me of all my willpower.

So if you’re reading this, you have to know that when the habits you’re trying to integrate aren’t coherent with your current daily life, it’ll be hard and even feel impossible in the moment.

Here’s precisely why sticking to healthy habits seems unsustainable and how to resolve the willpower depletion issue.

Your chaotic lifestyle makes the decision feel impossible

Each decision you make costs you a fair share of your decision-making energy.

The average American makes around 70 conscious decisions per day (Sheena Iyengar - Columbia university)

Some of those choices are mundane, meanwhile others are excruciating to make.

Those intentional choices are the ones that trigger a lot of inner tension: "Do I go to the gym or do I watch another Netflix episode?"

You see, the problem is that in modern life, you have a lot of decisions to make. Probably too many.

You have too many decisions to make and those decisions contain too much options.

This notion has been highlighted in social psychology by Barry Schwartz - called the paradox of choice.

It basically states that the more options you have regarding one choice, the higher the likelihood of dissatisfaction with that decision.

Simply put, if you go to a restaurant and there are 40 items on the menu, it’ll require a lot of mental work for you to choose.

Because your brain is designed to compute opportunity costs, you’ll probably end up choosing something and then, telling yourself it wasn’t the right choice.

This is how hard it is for your brain to decide, now multiply this process by the number of decisions that you make in a day … It’s a lot of mental energy.

The more decisions you have to make, the harder it gets to make them and the lower the quality. This applies especially when the choices aren’t part of your routine (a.k.a - trying to go to the gym or eat healthy when it’s not currently the case).

Here’s why.

Because you have what’s called a willpower reserve, which is limited. This is precisely the source of energy you’ll use to try to make the healthier choice.

From the moment you wake up, all you do is make decisions. Out of sleep, your willpower reserve is at 100, but every little decision is going to take willpower points from you.

If the decision you make is the same as usual, it doesn’t cost your brain that much. On the other hand, if you choose the unusual response, it costs you more …

For example, choose not to hit the snooze button, and you’ll give away 5 points. Choose to make the healthy breakfast choice, and it will take you 10 more points. Do you see how easily this can get to the bottom?

For most people, work will deplete a good portion of their willpower reserve. This is why, after answering emails and dealing with that obnoxious coworker for 8 hours, you find yourself completely drained of willpower.

You have 10 lasting points in the willpower bank, it’s now 5 PM, and going to the gym requires 30 points or so.

Hence, you’re not going.

Your body could theoretically exercise; it’s not a lack of ‘energy’ per se, it’s a lack of ‘mental energy’—of willpower.

You burnt all your stocks during the day, and now you can’t seem to make proper decisions anymore.

That’s exactly why making good choices in the evening or at night is extremely hard: your willpower reserve is so low. This is usually when people tend to indulge in cheap dopamine and ruin their efforts.

Now, the main problem is that in a chaotic lifestyle where unhealthy choices have been repeated and cultivated, making the opposite choice will cost you way more than it should.

This is explained by the fact that your mind, your inner algorithm, has been programmed to repeat the same type of choices that you’ve been making so far.

There’s a compound effect to it, and this is why it’s not fair…

If you’ve been living in chaos for long enough (unbalanced diet, irregular sleep schedule, no exercise), your whole system considers this your baseline level, what is ‘normal.’ If unhealthy is the norm, healthy is the exception.

The solution ? Rebalancing your lifestyle gradually to make healthy the norm and unhealthy the exception.

You only have one battery for everything.

Willpower allows self-control, which is crucial if you want to make healthier choices, especially when it comes to your lifestyle.

Self-control is : ‘’the ability to resist short-term gratification in pursuit of long-term goals’’ - Apa.org

As long as you have enough willpower points, you’re able to control your actions and make better choices.

But when you’re trying to work on your health and fitness, you need to understand something crucial to this process :

Willpower is a general battery, meaning it’s not specific to fitness. The decisions you make in one domain of your life can drain as much of your energy, if not more, than making the right decisions regarding your fitness.

For example, your relationship, work, family, and friends—all these categories use the same battery.

A lot of people add fitness to their lifestyles without realizing that if you need 30 points to go to the gym, and your work is costing you 80 willpower points every day, this is not happening. (Keep in mind that you get 100 points per day)

At least not sustainably, because you’ll still experience bursts of motivation that can last a few hours to a few weeks, but this isn’t what you’re looking for.

If you want to make it sustainable, your goal is to lower the cost of your fitness decisions: meal prepping healthy food, tracking your macros, going to the gym…

At first, these will be extremely demanding because it’s not ‘usual’ for you to make those types of decisions.

That being said, you don’t have less willpower than the people that train daily, eat right, and sleep well.

The problem is that making the healthy alternative is much more costly for you than for people who have been cultivating these choices for a long time.

This distinction is crucial.

And here’s the secret: the more you perpetuate the decision, the easier it gets, and the fewer willpower points you have to consume on making that decision.

If you’ve been sporadically training and have never been consistent, I would bet that it’s because going to the gym costs you too much willpower. Let’s stick with our example: it may take you 30 brain points.

Now, for someone who has been doing this for 10+ years, exercising is part of their routine. Therefore, it may cost them 5, 2, or maybe even 0 points in willpower.

And for someone who truly enjoys going to the gym, it may even add willpower points to their balance. Imagine getting 5 bonus points for going to the gym, cool right ?

But for that to happen, you have to stick to the habit and keep making the hard decision, allowing your brain to reprogram itself by repeating the same ‘healthy choice’ over and over again until it lowers the cost of making that decision.

Harsh truth : Most people quit before reaching that point…

How to make the healthy alternative easy to choose.

Make space

All the domains in your life are connected to the same battery, your willpower reserve. If your work, relationships, habits are already depleting your willpower because they’re too demanding, your fitness will suffer.

More than that, you’ll build up frustration as you try to make ‘better decisions’ without the willpower capacity to back it up.

This may cause you to consciously know that you should be eating the vegetables over the cookies. Not doing it because you’ve used all your willpower on other decisions and dislike your choice for not doing so.

Make more space. You have to know that changing your habits for healthier options is highly demanding and that you need to set up your environment in a way that will allow you to reserve willpower points for your fitness decisions.

Another thing I didn’t cover (maybe because it deserves its own article ? tell me if you’d like it) is distractions.

Cheap dopamine from social media, screens, and video games insidiously drains your brain points too. You don’t have to condemn them, but you need to be aware of their effect.

Make early decisions

Following the tendency of willpower to renew at night, you want to make the hardest and most important decisions first thing in the morning.

Planning also helps a lot so that you don’t have to keep making the decisions, your calendar just tells you what to do.

This approach prevents you from depleting your willpower reserves on the wrong things and end up on the couch, willpower depleted, not able to choose to go to the gym.

Brain Tracy talked about this you want to ‘eat the frog’ first thing in the morning. This means tackling your most important task of the day before anything else.

To achieve this, you have to be aware of your priorities and the decision cost of your habits.

Rank them, if your health is the most important (as it should be…) you should consider working out in the morning before work for example.

Reduce the risk of destroying your efforts.

Know that willpower depletion is inevitable. After a long and hard day at work, you won’t be able to efficiently make the right decisions.

Your brain will be depleted of glucose, and your brain circuits will become inefficient at making the proper decisions. Two things will help you:

First, make sure your environment aligns with your goals and willpower levels.

For example, if you usually watch TV in the evening and snack at the same time but want to get rid of the snacking, change your environment so that snacking is harder to do.

Second, expect that your willpower levels will be low eventually. Therefore, while they’re still high, take advantage of that and redesign your environment to help the future willpower-depleted you.

Repeat the ‘healthy’ choices over and over again.

Choosing the healthy alternative is hard right now; it’s very demanding. Choosing the gym over Netflix, the salad over the pasta, or the run over the scrolling takes a lot of willpower.

But it won’t always be this way. If you keep making the ‘good choice,’ whatever it means for you, it’ll compound, and soon enough it’ll be easier for you to make the right decision as your brain will integrate that as the normal choice to make.

You have to keep making the good decision to allow your brain to reprogram its algorithm. As going to the gym becomes a regular part of your routine, it won’t cost 30 willpower points anymore but only 10 and then just 5 …

This is why building a healthy lifestyle is hard, but it’s also why, if you build it the right way and take the time to do things correctly, it’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.

As always I hope this helps, trust the process.

References :

A simple way to make better decisions - Harvard business Review

https://hbr.org/2023/12/a-simple-way-to-make-better-decisions

The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It) - Harvard business school

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it

The paradox of choice - The decision Lab

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice

Willpower - APA

https://www.apa.org/topics/willpower.pdf

Eat that Frog - Brian Tracy’s blog

https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/the-truth-about-frogs/