How To Increase Willpower

So, I sleep with my cell phone right next to me, and when I wake up in the morning about a year and a half ago, I used to spend 45 minutes on my phone first thing in the morning. It's the advice that Dr. K absolutely says you should never do this. Drains your dopamine, all this kind of stuff. I used to do it, too. And so, then I thought to myself, "Okay, should I like stop doing this because this is not good for my brain. It's not good for my dopamine." I said, "Actually, no. I What I'm going to do is wake up every morning and I'm going to intentionally not use it for the first hour of the day. I'm actually not going to make things easy for myself. I'm not going to turn things into a habit. I will wake up in the morning and I will struggle with it." So, this does a couple of really important things. The first is that it messes up your performance, right? So, there are many days where I would crack and then my dopamine stores would be messed up for the rest of the day. But, over time, as I set one really specific target, "I'm just not going to use my cell phone in the morning." Fail many days a week, that's okay. About a year, a year and a half later, now I almost never get on my phone in the morning. And here's the really, really interesting thing. As you train yourself to not use your phone, you don't make it easy on yourself, you train yourself to be able to resist. What I found is that my cell phone use has decreased from about 4 and 1/2 hours a day to about 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours of the day. Strengthening your willpower first thing in the morning actually translates through to the rest of the day. The more you make things easy on yourself, the less capable you become.