Why do some people have more "Willpower" than others?

"I would love to stop... but I have no willpower!"

How many times have you said this about yourself?... and actually believed it!

Many of us believe that we are genuinely capable of achieving anything that we want to achieve in our lives... if only we had the ever illusive gift that is willpower.

Below is an extract taken from the FAQ section of www.celtichypnosis.com 

that will help you to understand what Willpower is... and how it works.

You will find this interesting!

The first thing you need to understand is that we all have will power! The second thing is that willpower is not designed for permanent change.

We expect too much from our reserves of willpower!
Willpower exists primarily as part of your conscious mind or logical mind and is designed to help you do something that under normal conditions you would not be able to do or would choose not to do. For example sports people or athletes would use willpower when their body or a part of their body is telling them to stop... telling them that they can't go any further. Willpower in such situations acts as an emotional override and this allows them to ignore what they are feeling and continue what they are doing.

You use willpower everyday when you decide to eat one less biscuit, drink one less beer or decide to wait until you have finished the task that you are doing before you have that next cigarette. In each of these examples, your subconscious or emotional mind is telling you that you want the pleasure that that biscuit, that beer or that cigarette will provide... and you want it now! But your emotional override (your willpower) decides to deny or delay these pleasures temporarily for sound logical reasons such as your diet forbids that last biscuit, the fact that you have to get up early for work means that it makes sense not to have that last beer, or that taking a break now will distract you from your current focus and will result in your taking longer to complete that task.

The examples highlighted here are instant and short-term decisions that are motivated by willpower. This is the most effective application of willpower. In situations that last longer or are repeated, willpower is much less effective.

The logic that makes up this aspect of our minds eventually becomes overwhelmed by our emotional desire for pleasure, security or happiness. The more you decide to battle this relentless desire for pleasure, the more stressed and unhappy you become. In the end, it is your capacity to absorb such levels of stress or unhappiness that will determine how long you can hold back this tide of emotion.

So understand this: it is not the variation in willpower that causes some people to have a higher level of resistance than others, it's the variation in people's ability to tolerate the stress associated with that resistance. For this reason you'll find that people who already have high levels of stress in their lives will tend to have the least willpower.

The reality is that those people have the same willpower as everyone else but they are already close to capacity in terms of the stress that they can tolerate. People with little or no stress in their lives can tolerate a lot more of the hardship associated with denying themselves pleasure that their subconscious mind wants them to experience.

Why you smoke - the lesser known facts!

Blog Week 1

Do you remember your first cigarette? Lovely wasn't it?
The vast majority of smokers remember their first cigarette. Their recollection of this moment is that it wasn't a very pleasant experience, in fact many smokers will recall feeling quite unwell after it. So why did they continue to smoke?

There are many myths about smoking out there... In fact much of the information available is simply untrue and one could argue that it is being propagated by large businesses that are motivated by vested interests. More about this later.

The reason why you smoke is very straight forward:

When you inhaled that first cigarette, your motivation was likely due to peer pressure or a desire to stand out among your peers. The fact is that no smoker enjoys that first cigarette! The reason for this is simply that nicotine is a poison... an incredibly strong poison and when your body detects tiny residual amounts of this poison in your system it warns you that something is wrong - I use the phrase "your body's got your back' when I'm explaining this process to my clients. What I mean by this is that your body will always warn you when something is not as it should be... the secret to living a healthy life is to listen to it and heed such warnings.

Although you didn't enjoy the first experience of smoking, you went back for more because of the motivation you have, or the pressure that you're under to smoke! Your experience of your second cigarette wasn't much better than your first... your third - similar... your fourth, fifth etc... the same i.e. not pleasant.

But at some point early in your smoking life your body does something to help you from feeling poisoned... and what it does is quite phenomenal!

To really appreciate what it is that your body does for you, you first need to appreciate that we (humans) are not designed to live in the modern world that we currently enjoy. We have spent 'tens' of years living in a world of electricity, refrigeration, and supermarkets. A life that provides us with what we need, when we need it, so to speak. Our bodies are designed to live in a more challenging, natural environment, where the function of our physical and mental reflexes can mean the difference between life and death. This is the world that our bodies have spent millions of years living, surviving and evolving in. All of our physical and mental reflexes are designed perfectly to survive in this type of environment.

An example of such reflexes might be where a primitive human who is lost in the wilderness without food or water, comes across a mountain stream that is contaminated by some sort of metal element or other. The contamination is not enough to kill them but it is enough to make them ill. The person has a choice: drink the water and live... or don't drink the water and risk dying... not a difficult decision I assume. So they drink the water and they feel a bit unwell - this is their body telling them that something is wrong, that something has entered their body and is causing things to be not as they should be! 

At some point, after the regular consumption of this contaminated substance, their body must come to terms with the fact that this person MUST HAVE TO take in the offending substance and it then switches from warning the person to helping them to avoid feeling pain.

Early on in your smoking life, your body reaches a similar point where it interprets the regular consumption of a residual poison (nicotine) as an act that is necessary... it doesn't understand why, but it does understand that making you feel ill is not helping you, so it switches its focus towards helping you to overcome the necessary evil. At this point, your brain releases endorphins - a natural 'feel good' chemical that causes you to feel calm and relaxed (ring a bell?). 

When this first happens, it is the first time that you've ever felt better after having a cigarette than you did before it... this emotion is quite strong and goes straight into your subconscious mind, where all of your feelings and beliefs reside, and it becomes how you feel about cigarettes - that is a) they help you to belong to groups and b) they help you to feel better when you are feeling uneasy.

This belief stays with you, frequently for life, and you now know that whenever you encounter difficulty or disappointment in your life, there is always something that you can do to ease the stress... have a cigarette. This is why smokers, who have quit for months or even years, can find themselves craving a cigarette 'out of the blue' when something bad happens to them in their life - the belief that was formed early on in their lives is still very much there and wants to help them in their hour of need.

The important thing to understand here is that you are not addicted to nicotine - though there is a multi-billion dollar industry that depends on you believing this!. What you are addicted to is the feeling of your body comforting you by releasing endorphins. Now you could access the same chemical relief by going for a fast 10 minute walk... but you have conditioned yourself to believe that placing poison into your body is the most effective way of achieving this much sought after comfort.

... and this is the lesser known truth as to why you smoke!