Why is it so difficult to achieve challenging objectives?

We intellectually know how to lose weight. We understand that exercise is good for us. Deep down, we have a good sense of the required first steps toward our personal projects.  Why is it so hard to take what are seemingly simple first steps towards our objectives?

When we fall short of our goals there are two things that quickly come to mind: I must lack willpower or I just don’t have enough energy to get things done.

Is Your Body Tired Or Is Your Brain Fried?

The odds are stacked against us in this battle against mental fatigue. There are two main culprits that chip away at our vivacity.

Mental Fatigue And Perceived Effort

Research has shown that mental fatigue has real, measurable effects on the body. As the day goes on and we expend significant mental effort, be it completing the tedious task that’s at the top of the to-do list, dealing with difficult coworkers or having uncomfortable conversations with clients while keeping a poker face, the perception of effort increases as the brain becomes fatigued.

Researchers at Bangor University in Whales tested this concept by measuring a subject’s capacity to sustain physical effort, in this case, a time-to-exhaustion test on a stationary bike after performing a mentally straining task. Groupe A had to slog through 90 minutes of focused attention on a tedious computer task prior to the physical test while group B watched a bland documentary.

Groupe A immediately reported higher levels of perceived effort during the physical test and quit 15% faster on average in comparison to those who watched the documentary.

We all know that we feel tired after doing mentally difficult tasks, but a 15% decrease in endurance is not subtle. This drop-in endurance on the bike is equivalent to performing 100 box jumps on a 14’’ box before taking the test.

The most notable effect of mental fatigue on the body is the ability to not quit while sustaining a prolonged difficult task, or in other words endurance. Endurance however isn’t important only to physical activity. Getting off the couch after dinner on a weeknight to work on a personal project or cheerfully help your kids with their homework also requires endurance. 

Decision Fatigue

The ability to make good choices is often associated with a person’s willpower. If you have strong willpower, you make good choices and vice versa.  However, willpower isn’t a trait that someone inherently has more or less of. Think of it like a muscle that gets a workout each time you have to make a decision. Each time you make a choice or use willpower to stay on task throughout the day the decision muscle gets a bit more tired, making subsequent choices more difficult.

This concept is often referred to in research as decision fatigue. A study from Columbia University observed the impact of decision fatigue on judges ruling on the choice to grant convicted felons parole.

Over 1000 rulings made by parole board judges were observed during a 10-month period. During this study, the factor that had the most impact on a judge’s decision to accept or deny a parole request was not the type of crime committed or how much time had been served off of the original sentence. Time of day was the number one factor to impact a judge’s decision. 

Researcher’s found that a judge was likely to give a favourable ruling about 65% of the time at the beginning of the day while the likelihood of a favourable ruling dwindled down to zero as the day progressed. After a lunch break, the percentage of favourable rulings went back up to 65% and steadily dropped back to zero at the end of the workday.

When your willpower is fading, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight resistance and make good choices. We’ve all experienced this in one way or another. Be it accepting lower quality work on a Friday afternoon, ordering pizza for dinner instead of making a healthy home-cooked meal or watching more TV instead of doing the things we love to do.

Just like our endurance to do hard things, our willpower to make good choices is constantly eroded throughout the day.

Replenish Your Energy Stores

It may seem like the odds are stacked against us when it comes to making healthy choices outside of our work life. Finding the energy and willpower to maintain a healthy lifestyle, be present for our family and progress our personal objectives after a full day’s work is not easy.

There are many obstacles in the way, this is true. Becoming aware of the external mechanisms that act against us allows us to implement systems that counteract some of their negative effects.

5 Ways To Boost Willpower and Endurance.

Establish Priorities

As illustrated in the research discussed above, making decisions on the fly is draining. Taking time to identify the top 3-5 priorities in your life makes choosing what to do next easier.

By setting a clear order of priorities for the things that matter the most to you, you help your future self spend less energy making decisions around what opportunities to say yes or no to. Having clearly defined priorities will help manage your willpower muscle while making things easy when faced with challenging choices.

Say your priorities are as follows:

1. Family
2. Iron Man Training
3. Work
4. Community

Based on this order, it’s easy to decide between working overtime on Saturday or sticking to your training schedule and nailing that big weekend on the bike. At the same time, it’s clear that if there is a family emergency while you’re getting ready to head out for that training block, you’ll change your plans to be there for the ones you love.

There are no good or bad priorities. It’s all relative to each individual. Your priorities may change frequently depending on the season or which stage of life you’re at, this is to be expected. The important thing is to have a clear sense of what they are in the moment.

Pay Yourself First

Even when doing your best to reduce decision fatigue, you still won’t be as motivated, present and effective after hours as you were first thing in the morning. This is why it’s important to tap into your energy reserves and pay yourself first.

Doing the things that require the most endurance and willpower first thing in the morning is the best way that I have found to stick to an exercise routine or make any type of progress on personal projects. 

Getting up early and getting an hour or two of focused effort towards the things that are most important to you before going to work means that you’re doing them while you have the most energy to endure difficult tasks. The first decisions of the day are made while your decision muscle is rested and strong.

This applies to whatever your top priorities are. If you are all in on your job, do the critical things first thing in the morning. If you’re training for that Iron Man race, you’ll have a much better chance of not skipping a workout if you do it before work instead of at the end of the day.

There is an added benefit to paying yourself first that is less measurable: momentum.

There’s a feeling of delicious satisfaction and pride that comes from doing the things that are important to you before doing those that are important to others. When you take care of yourself before work, it eliminates any resentment based on never having time to do the things you love because your job is too demanding. You can focus on the rest of the day knowing that your time reflects your priorities.

Routine And Schedule Are Your Friends

To further remove the reliance on willpower or endurance to make progress towards your goals, establishing a strong routine centred around your priorities is key.

The objective of a functional routine is to remove the need to make good choices while mentally fatigued. You don’t want to wait until you “feel like it” and rely on your willpower muscle to get you to the gym or finish that home improvement project that’s been half done for half a year.

Having pre-defined, dedicated time slots to advance your priorities each week removes the need for choice. The consistency of the routine means that if you just stick with the plan, regular incremental progress will naturally occur.

As mentioned above, the timing of these dedicated time slots is also important. Schedule the known challenges that will need resolution in a time period where you are at your best before the start of the week. If you work in an office, book meetings with yourself in your digital calendar so that you aren’t stuck performing hard tasks in between meetings. 

An exercise in Cal Newport’s fantastic book “Deep Work” that has been a game-changer for me is to map out each day in 30-minute slots and pencil in everything that needs doing tomorrow at the end of today. I work best in the morning so I batch the tasks that require deep focus early and generally only take meetings with other people in the afternoon.

If you don’t define your own schedule and priorities, someone else will.

Stop, Snack & Regroupe

Despite all the careful planning in the world, there will always be hard days. There will inevitably be times when you’re feeling drained and will need to put your head down and get things done or make hard decisions under pressure.

When this happens, don’t forget to take breaks when possible and fuel your brain.

It turns out that there is a physiological reason why the judges from the Columbia University study made better decisions after a lunch break: they replenished their brain’s glucose levels.

Our brains consume a large amount of glucose in periods of sustained mental effort. You are not doing yourself any favours when you power through a busy day and forget to eat.

Next time you are overwhelmed and feel like smashing your head into your computer keyboard, take a break. Go for a short walk and eat a healthy snack. Give your brain a couple of beats to get fueled and ready for the next effort.

If You Are Tired, Sleep

The cornerstone of rest and recovery, be it physical or psychological is sleep.

There are no two ways about it. No matter how effective the routine or how many breaks you take in a day, everybody needs sleep.

It’s common knowledge that adults ideally require roughly 7 to 8 hours of sleep each day. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 1 in 4 adults in Canada isn’t getting enough sleep while half report having poor sleep quality.

There is a revolving door of ill effects brought on by lack of sleep. You feel even more drained at the end of the day so you don’t exercise and spend the evening in front of various screens. However, your body has hardly moved at all and screen time before bed has a proven negative impact on sleep so you burn the midnight oil. The next morning, you get up as late as possible feeling lousy and the cycle continues.

Extend your routine and schedule all the way to a bedtime that works for you. Getting your sleep patterns under control will help you maintain willpower and endurance throughout the day.

Do More

Willpower and endurance aren’t given traits that are out of your control.

Regardless of your own given levels of each, there are things that you can do each day to help make better decisions and persevere through challenging times.

We’re capable of more than we think, by understanding the underlying mechanisms that affect our capacity to stick to our commitments and do hard things we can put the odds of succeeding in our favour.