Willpower Won't Save You

Willpower won't save you from poor actions ... because it doesn't exist.

Yesterday I responded poorly to upsetting news. I'm asking myself if I could have acted better. Couldn't I decide to respond better in the moment?

According to this framework I've been developing, I couldn't have. It's just not possible. How I respond to any environment is a deterministic calculation. The inputs go into my brain's present neural arrangement and out comes the resulting response.

I know that I should have said to myself: "I just received upsetting news. I think I need more time to process this information. Let's cancel that important meeting I scheduled and go for a walk, even though it may look bad to do so at the last minute, because I know I'm dealing with a three-alarm fire."

Unfortunately, that's not the way the internal dialogue occurred. Instead, I neglected the alarm bells and went to the meeting and reacted poorly. The fallout isn't tragic, but I certainly wasn't the person I want to be.

The Conscious Permanence framework suggests that willpower simply doesn't exist. Our responses are automatic, so we can't rely on real-time decisions to prevent poor behavior. It turns out our responses are all conditioning. Better training means better responses.

It's a paradox that I'm responsible for my automatic responses. That's because I own the internal processes that regulate my behavior and decisions. It's those internal processes that determine how we respond, and those same internal processes define us as people.

It's my responsibility to make sure my processes are in order so that I respond appropriately to the combinations of inputs life throws at me. Granted, I've never experienced what happened to me yesterday, which likely explains why I was caught off-guard by my reaction. It was a combination of inputs never tested in my neural network. Now that I know I responded poorly, I need to enact constraints into my internal processes to prevent the same bad response.

I greatly respect Carol Dweck's research in her book Mindsets about fixed and growth mindsets. The fixed mindset says if we fail at something, it's because we lack ability. The growth mindset says if we fail, it just means we haven't learned how to succeed yet. The examples in her book are very convincing.

While my response to the situation was deterministic given my internal processing circuitry, I can make changes given this new information. Now I know I can respond poorly when those stress overload alarm bells go off, so it's important to have preventive measures. My poor response shouldn't define me as a person, just how I was at that moment given those combinations of inputs. And I can learn to behave better.

This same idea applies to any bad habits we try to correct. Making poor decisions doesn't mean we are bad people. It's not a problem of needing more willpower or just gritting our teeth harder. We actually need good response mechanisms in place to enable better responses. And those processing changes occur slowly.

That may be why incremental improvement strategies such as those from James Clear (Atomic Habits) or B.J. Fogg (Tiny Habits) are so successful, because they work in a way that aligns with the fact that brains are deterministic and make future changes only through slow neural modification processes.

When you upgrade your operating system to the newest release, the result can be drastic. My OS 11 to OS 12 update looks completely different and takes only a few minutes. However, your behavior changes are related to the neural changes that are infinitesimal in size, such as synaptic and structural changes. Each neural change is like OS 11.00000001 to OS 11.00000002.

Over a long span of time, enough of these neural changes have occurred to affect future patterns that enact constraints to promote better behavior. My effort to change my poor response (OS 11) to a better response (OS 12) involves countless incremental changes in brain structure and function that implement better processing strategies.

We must rely only on small changes each day, learning from our poor responses to challenging inputs. These show us the necessary changes for our brains. Relying on willpower will fail. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we can start enacting the internal processes that will succeed in regulating our behaviors. Then we will become the people we want to be.

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© 2025 Cory Lanker. This work is licensed under Creative Commons
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