How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing how to build tenacity and willpower. Previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast have focused on the topic of motivation. And while motivation and willpower are linked thematically and mechanistically, today, we are going to discuss tenacity, that is, the willingness to persist under pressure and resistance of different kinds and willpower, which has to do with both the motivation to do things and the motivation to resist certain things. Today, you will learn about the psychology and neuroscience of tenacity and willpower. And I must tell you, this is a fascinating literature. In fact, you will learn about a brain structure that at least to my knowledge, most neuroscientists are not even aware of. And yet, in researching this episode, I absolutely fell in love with this brain structure because of its incredible ability to integrate the very sorts of information from within and from outside of you to harness and build tenacity and willpower. And indeed, today you will learn research supported tools for how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower in any circumstance. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui Venison. Maui Nui Venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available. I've spoken before on this podcast in solo episodes and with guests about the need to get approximately one gram of high-quality protein per pound of body weight each day for optimal nutrition. There are many different ways that one can do that, but a key thing is to make sure that you're not doing that by ingesting excessive calories. Maui Nui Venison has the highest density of quality protein per calorie and it achieves that in delicious things like ground meats, venison steaks, jerky, and bone broth. I particularly like the ground venison. I make those into venison burgers probably five times a week or more. I also like the jerky for its convenience, especially when I'm traveling or I'm especially busy with work and know that I'm getting an extremely nutrient dense, high quality source of protein. If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com/huberman and get 20% off your first order. Again, that's mauinuivenison.com/huberman to get 20% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are tailored to your unique sleep needs. Now, sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we are sleeping well and enough, mental health, physical health, and performance all stand to be at their best. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that your mattress is tailored to your unique sleep needs. Helix Sleep has a brief two-minute quiz that if you go to their website, you take that quiz and answer questions such as, do you tend to sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold in the middle of the night? Maybe you don't know the answers to those questions and that's fine. At the end of that two-minute quiz, they will match you to a mattress that's ideal for your sleep needs. I sleep on the Dusk, a D-U-S-K, mattress, and when I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about two years ago, my sleep immediately improved. So if you're interested in upgrading your mattress, go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress for you, and you'll get up to $350 off any mattress order and two free pillows. Again, if interested, go to helixsleep.com/huberman for up to $350 off and two free pillows. Okay, let's talk about tenacity and willpower and how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower. I will also mention certain cases where having too much tenacity and willpower can be problematic for mental health and physical health. But for most people, I believe that enhancing one's level of tenacity and willpower would be advantageous. Now you'll be relieved to know that while there are a near infinite number of different circumstances where one would need to draw on tenacity and willpower in order to succeed, there is one major mechanism within the brain, indeed one major mechanism, by which tenacity and willpower are generated. And it arrives through the activation of a particular brain center that is a hub. That is, it lies at the interface of many other neural circuits and has input from all the critical neural circuits that one would need in order to generate tenacity and willpower. And we are going to return to that particular neural circuit a little bit later after we talk about the psychology of willpower, because in talking about the psychology of willpower, it will frame up as to why understanding this one particular brain center or hub of inputs and outputs from different neural structures in the brain and body will indeed allow you to get the most out of the tools that have been shown in scientific research to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower. In other words, understanding the psychology of tenacity and willpower while valuable, if it's coupled with an understanding of the underlying neural mechanism, and notice I used the singular neural mechanism, not mechanisms for generating tenacity and willpower, will allow you to use and to tailor the specific protocols for enhancing tenacity and willpower to your unique circumstances. So this is yet another case where certainly life circumstances vary from one person to the next. The need for tenacity and willpower varies tremendously. For instance, some people may need more tenacity and willpower in order to engage in certain behaviors. Others of us might need more tenacity and willpower in order to resist certain types of behaviors. Today, you will learn about the brain center that governs all of that. And then you can frame it within the psychological understanding of tenacity and willpower so that you can get the most out of the protocols that we will discuss. Let's start by talking about what tenacity and willpower clearly are. And separating tenacity and willpower from some other psychological constructs that they often get confused with. Because this will be important in understanding exactly what we are trying to build when we say we want to build tenacity and willpower. So tenacity and willpower can be distinguished from habit execution. Habit execution is what you do anytime you wake up in the morning, maybe you lie there for a bit, maybe you get out of bed immediately. Hopefully you get outside and get some sunlight in your eyes, especially on cloudy days. Go brush your teeth, use the restroom, engage with others in your home if you live with others, et cetera. All of those sorts of behaviors, while on some days can be a bit more challenging, especially the get out of bed part, maybe you didn't get a great night's sleep the night before, for instance. But all of those sorts of behaviors are behaviors that you have the neural circuits to generate and that typically you can generate without a lot of willpower required. Now willpower sometimes also referred to as tenacity, grit or persistence is a distinctly different phenomenon than habit execution because willpower and tenacity require that we intervene in our own default neural processes such as habits or particular patterns of thinking and essentially govern ourselves to do or not do some particular thing. And that process requires effort, it requires energy. And I think all of us are familiar with that feeling of effort or energy that's required in order to engage in a behavior that we really don't feel like engaging in or avoiding a behavior or a thought that by default we would naturally just engage in. And when I talk about energy in this context, I'm mainly talking about neural energy. Remember that neurons, nerve cells in your brain and body use chemical and electrical signaling to communicate with one another. That's what allows you and all of us to do all the things that we do, think, feel, move, et cetera. Now, of course, that chemical and electrical communication requires fuel sources that indeed come from things like glucose, ketones, the creatine phosphate system, multiple fuel systems feed the energetics of the brain. But ultimately, when I talk about energy in today's discussion, I'm talking about the energy required to engage in or to resist in a particular behavior. And that level of energy can be quite high depending on how much resistance we are feeling internally or externally, right? Somebody can be telling us, you're not going to be able to do this. You can't do it. And you can say, no, I have a ton of resolve. I have a ton of tenacity, willpower. And I'm going to push past all the barriers that you are setting up for me on the outside. Oftentimes, all too often, I should say, we experience resistance from the inside where we are feeling like we don't want to do something or we really want to do something. And we are having trouble either engaging in the thing that we don't want to do or that we know we should do, but we just don't feel that level of motivation for, or we are having a hard time resisting the thing that's pulling us toward it. So in that context, it's important for us not to just distinguish tenacity and willpower from habit execution, but also draw out a continuum with tenacity and willpower at their most extreme on one end of that continuum and apathy and yes, depression on the other end of that continuum. And we will return to the topic of depression a little bit later, but I can just cue it up right now by saying that one of the hallmark features of major depression is a lack of positive anticipation about the future that leads to, this is important, there's a verb tense here, that leads to a much lower tendency to engage in the specific types of behavior that would allow one to arrive at a particular new, different and positive future. So I'm deliberately putting apathy and depression next to one another at one end of the continuum, and I'm putting grit, persistence, tenacity and willpower at the other end of the continuum. And a little bit later, it will become very clear to you why I put those particular items on the continuum as opposed to other psychological constructs such as motivation, because it turns out that motivation is what allows you to move up and down that continuum, but motivation itself, as a verb, is distinct from what we call tenacity and willpower. And motivation itself is distinct from what we call apathy and depression, but motivation is the engine or the motor, the verb that allows you to move up and down that continuum. And today you will learn multiple tools that will allow you to move toward the tenacity and willpower end of that continuum by engaging a very specific neural circuit. Before we get into the discussion of neural circuits, I'd like to talk about the psychology of willpower. And this is something that really has been considered by psychologists for well over 100 years. William James wrote about this, the ancient Greeks wrote about this. The topic of willpower is certainly not a new one. And yet the formal study of willpower in the laboratory context, that is, bringing human subjects into the laboratory and examining what sorts of conditions allow them to engage their willpower and tenacity, what sorts of conditions really sap or drain their willpower and tenacity. And, of course, parallel experiments done in what we call preclinical models, which are animal studies, have revealed to us a lot about the sorts of conditions that allow us to generate willpower and the sorts of conditions that drain our willpower. Now, if we are to throw our arms around that entire literature, there is a big batch of that literature, not the whole batch, but there's a big batch of that literature that believed and still believes that willpower is a limited resource, much like fuel in the body or fuel in a car. Now, the idea of willpower as a limited resource is certainly not a new idea, but again, the formal study of willpower and willpower as a limited resource really dates back a little over 20, 25 years when Roy Baumeister and colleagues started to explore the idea that of course had been kicked around for years, that with each additional decision that we have to engage across the day and with each additional bout of willpower that we have to draw on as a resource, that we would drain this reservoir of willpower that we all have within us. Now, Baumeister and colleagues referred to that process as ego depletion. Now, when people hear the word ego, some people think Freud, ego, superego, id and so forth. Most people think ego, like somebody having a big personality where they think a lot of themselves. When Baumeister referred to ego depletion, he was defining ego depletion as a concept of oneself and a concept of outside challenges and the degree of effort required to bridge one's concept of self and those challenges. And so ego depletion is really a operational construct within the field of psychology. So we don't want to get too distracted by that word ego. There's a tendency anytime people hear ego, if they hear narcissism or if they hear gaslighting to immediately assume that they know what that means. When in fact, the formal definitions of those quite often differ from the way that they're kicked around on social media, the internet and even in a lot of popular writing about psychology. Okay, so let's just note that ego depletion is the term that Baumeister used to describe the ability for our willpower to be depleted with each successive attempt to engage willpower. And by extension, our ability to replenish our degree of willpower if we take a break from making decisions and engaging our willpower. But ego depletion itself isn't the focus right now. The focus right now is whether or not indeed willpower is a limited resource and whether or not with each decision that we make and each effort to either engage in an activity that we prefer not to, at least in that moment, and with each attempt to resist a behavior, thought, et cetera, that is pulling on us or that we feel that we want to engage in by default, either eating the cookie or thinking the thought or engaging in a particular type of behavior of any kind. And we need to resist that, that it is draining that willpower resource. Now, before I go any further, I know that some of you out there are probably aware that ego depletion and the Baumeister theory of willpower as a limited resource has been very contentious, especially in recent years. And so today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first present the Baumeister and colleagues work about willpower as a limited resource. And then I'm going to present some of the conflicting evidence that Carol Dweck, my colleague at Stanford School of Medicine and researchers elsewhere have carried out meta-analyses and entirely new experiments, which indeed in some cases contradict the findings of Baumeister, but more often than not contradict the conclusions that Baumeister drew about willpower. So if we are to understand the psychology of willpower and tenacity, it's important that we understand the concepts of ego depletion and willpower as a limited resource even if after hearing all the evidence, you decide that willpower is not a limited resource. And in fact, I'm quite confident that once you hear about the Baumeister work and then you hear about the work of Dweck and others, which in some ways counters the conclusions of Baumeister, that you'll have a much firmer and certainly much more complete understanding about what tenacity and willpower are. And perhaps, and here I'm revealing my own leanings when having examined the totality of the data, that tenacity and willpower in some cases is a limited resource that can be replenished by engaging particular processes within the body. That's right, within the body. But that willpower and tenacity and most importantly, how to engage tenacity and willpower, especially when you have a lot of challenges in front of you, not just one challenge, but multiple challenges that need to be carried out throughout the day, over weeks, over months, et cetera, that tenacity and willpower can be drawn upon repeatedly without them being depleted if you are clear on your beliefs about tenacity and willpower. So I realized that what I just brought up was a controversy about something that I haven't even discussed yet. So it might seem like a bit of a swirl of information for which there's really no context. But the reason I bring up the controversy at this stage of our conversation is that the moment that the words ego depletion or willpower as a limited resource falls out of my mouth, I can hear those voices out there saying, wait a second, I thought that was all debunked. And I want to make very clear, willpower as a limited resource and ego depletion have not been debunked. It's simply a controversial area of psychological research. And more importantly for today's discussion, we have to understand the theory of willpower as a limited resource. If we are to understand the controversy, that is the counter argument of what willpower really is, that comes from other groups. So I really want to give you both sides of the story so that when we get to the underlying neural mechanisms for tenacity and willpower and we get to the tools and protocols for increasing your level of tenacity and willpower and your flexibility of willpower in different contexts, that you'll be able to get the most out of those tools and protocols. Okay, so let's take a look at the evidence that willpower is a limited resource. I think most of us are familiar with what willpower feels like, that is what it feels like to be tenacious. And again, there are two sides to this coin. There's willpower and tenacity of the sort of trying to engage in a behavior when we really don't want to, or when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior. And I say when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior, because oftentimes we want to engage in the behavior, we want to study, we want to learn the instrument, we want to perform well, we want to exercise, we want the benefits of all those things. So it's not that we don't want the outcomes or the rewards of those things. And in many cases, it's not that we don't enjoy those activities, but that for whatever reason, we are feeling a lack of motivation. We're drifting down that continuum toward the more apathetic end of things. Hopefully not all the way to deep depression and apathy, but we're drifting that way or we're not far enough up the continuum and we're not engaging enough motivation to feel like the desire to do something, either for its own sake or for the rewards and outcomes of that thing, are sufficient to allow us to just do that thing. And hence the Nike slogan, Just Do It, which is a wonderful slogan, except that in the absence of any understanding about the mechanisms of how we can get ourselves to just do something, oftentimes it falls short. And to be honest, anytime I hear about people saying, well, just eliminate the thinking and just do it, that is valuable advice until it doesn't work. Because when it doesn't work, it simply doesn't work. And then you need to rely on other tools and mechanisms, which are the sort that we will talk about today. So while I have great respect for the just do it mantra, when it doesn't work, it doesn't offer any alternative solutions to engage tenacity and willpower. And I do not know anyone on this planet. I don't care if you're David Goggins or Courtney Dewalter, there will be days when telling yourself just do this or just don't do that is not going to be sufficient for you to engage in the behaviors or resist the behaviors or thoughts that you need to engage in or resist. That's just reality. And we should ask ourselves, why is that reality? And this is a very important point. And in fact, really illustrates the first bucket of tools and protocols for increasing tenacity and willpower. And these are the tools and protocols that I would categorize under the rubric of modulators. I've talked before on this podcast about the important distinction between mediators and modulators. Mediators are things either psychological or biological, et cetera, that are directly in the mechanisms that generate some sort of action or emotion. This could be neurochemicals like dopamine or serotonin and so on. Modulators are things that can modulate, that is, can change our probability of doing something or not doing something, but they do so indirectly. And in the context of tools and protocols to increase our level of tenacity and willpower, I would be completely remiss if one of the sets of tools, that is the protocols, for increasing the probability that we can access high levels of tenacity and willpower, didn't include at least some of these modulators. So I'm just going to spend about three minutes on these modulators, because what we know for certain is that the regions of the brain that generate tenacity, and again, there is literally a brain hub for generating willpower and tenacity, gets strong input from the so-called autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system has two major components. They are referred to as the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Keep in mind, because when most people hear the word sympathetic, they think sympathy, they think emotion, it has nothing to do with that. Sympa means together, and the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, I know that's a mouthful, is responsible for generating states of alertness in our brain and body. Everything from panic to being alert and calm, our tendency to move or our likelihood of moving under pressure. It is also responsible for our ability to resist movement when we need to resist movement, and therefore it's an active process. So the sympathetic nervous system is all the things of action, and when it is involved in generating inaction, those are cases where inaction requires energy, okay? I want to be very clear about this. The sympathetic nervous system isn't just about moving our body, although it has a lot to do with that, it is also responsible for our ability to resist movement or thought or emotion when we need to do that, clamp down on ourselves. The parasympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system is the one that sometimes referred to as the rest and digest neural circuits and chemicals. And that's true, but there's a lot more to the parasympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system. It's also responsible for falling asleep. It's responsible for us feeling relaxed. It is responsible for most of the states of mind and body in which we are quiescent, where we don't feel an impulse to move, or when we have a difficult time getting into action. So the sympathetic and the parasympathetic aspect of the autonomic nervous system are always in a push-pull with one another. Think of them more or less on a teeter-totter. When one end goes up, the other end goes down. They're really in competition with one another and it's their balance that reflects how alert or how sleepy we happen to be. Now, the reason I'm giving you this rather geeky nerd-speak nomenclature-filled discussion about the autonomic nervous system in the context of willpower is that regardless of whether or not you believe willpower is a limited or an unlimited resource, we know one thing for sure. And that's that willpower and tenacity ride on our current autonomic function. We can translate that to everyday language by saying that when we are well rested, for instance, when we've been getting great sleep of sufficient duration, the previous night and the night before that, our level of tenacity and willpower to engage in things that we would not ordinarily engage in by default and our ability to resist behaviors and thought patterns that would otherwise be our default behaviors and thought patterns is much higher. Conversely, when we are not getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis, our ability to call on tenacity and willpower is diminished. Now that series of statements I just made is clearly going to be a duh for most people, but it is very important to understand that when we are sleep deprived, when we are in physical pain, when we are in emotional pain and or when we are distracted, when we are thinking about something else aside from what we are trying to engage tenacity and willpower in order to do or not do, tenacity and willpower will be diminished. Now all of those things together are just a bigger duh. We all know this. If you've got a splinter in your foot, it's really hard to think about not thinking about something else. If you are extremely hungry or if you had an argument with somebody that you really care about and they said something that was particularly vexing to you and it's looping around in your head, it's going to be very hard to engage in something else that you need to do because you're going to be distracted. Likewise, if you're sleep-deprived, likewise, if you are a bit sick or run down or if you're in any kind of physical or emotional pain, your ability to draw on tenacity and willpower will be diminished. So it's an absolute truth that your ability to generate tenacity and willpower rides on a reservoir of autonomic function. And today we don't really have a way of quantifying the level of autonomic function or dysfunction in a very simple way. It's not like resting heart rate, although resting heart rate is involved. For instance, if you haven't slept well for a few nights or if you're particularly stressed, over-trained, you'll wake up in the morning with a significantly elevated heart rate. However, there is no simple metric like heart rate or blood pressure or even cortisol level that can tell you whether or not your autonomic function is in balance, that is the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of your autonomic nervous system are in the best possible balance to generate tenacity and willpower. We don't yet have such a metric, although there are companies that are starting to develop devices that hopefully will give us indices of autonomic function or dysfunction. But it is important that we acknowledge that if you're not taking care of the foundational modulators of tenacity and willpower, none of the subsequent tools and protocols that we will discuss are going to help you that much over time. You might get tenacity and willpower to engage one day when you're very sleep deprived, but it's going to be very difficult to consistently engage tenacity and willpower. For that reason, if you have any struggles with sleep, that is getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis, please see the zero cost toolkit for sleep that we've put at hubermanlab.com. Please also see the Perfect Your Sleep, Master Your Sleep episodes also at hubermanlab.com. And please also see the episode with expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker, Professor of Sleep Neuroscience and Psychology at University of California Berkeley. We just revamped the Huberman Lab website. So if you go to hubermanlab.com and you put something like sleep into the search function, it will take you not just to the toolkit for sleep, but to the exact timestamps that will queue up particular topics and protocols around sleep. So if you were to put sleep and light, it would take you to those particular protocols. If you were to put sleep and magnesium threonate, it would take you to those particular protocols and so on and so forth. Yeah, I don't want to get too far off topic here during today's discussion, but if you're not sleeping well, and if you're not managing your stress levels well, it's going to be much harder for you to engage tenacity and willpower, regardless of the tools you happen to use, and those tools could be everything from behavioral tools to supplements to prescription drugs. You need to get those foundational modulators in check, and there are a lot of zero-cost ways to do that that are all spelled out very clearly at the resources I just described. Likewise, for stress, if you're experiencing challenges with stress, both short-term, medium-term or long-term stress, if you think you have elevated cortisol levels, which by the way may not be the case, there are a lot of tools for modulating stress in real time, increasing your stress threshold, et cetera. Simply go to the hubermanlab.com website and put in stress threshold tools or stress real-time tools, and you'll get a bunch of zero-cost tools that will allow you to do that. It's also worth mentioning that when we get to our discussion about the neuroscience of tenacity and willpower, that you will understand why autonomic health and autonomic function is so important for our ability to engage tenacity and willpower. I'll just tell you right now, it's because the neural circuits of the autonomic nervous system provide direct and robust input to this hub in the brain, this brain location that governs our ability to allocate our mind and body toward particular activities or to resist particular activities. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. AG1 is a vitamin-mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs. 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