Intention

CHAPTER 9How to Train the Experience of Willpower

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

Those who believe willpower is nonlimited aren't constrained in the same ways as those who think of willpower as a scarce resource. So the next step, and where the real impact comes in, is training that understanding—training ourselves to view willpower as a nonlimited resource, and in doing so, overcome our limits to achieve more than we thought possible.

How Seeking Novelty Can Replenish Us

To begin this training process, we go back to the example of fatigue. As you might remember, Camparo and her colleagues conducted experiments on the link between mindfulness and fatigue illusion. They wanted to find out whether mindfulness practices could affect participants' perceptions of their own fatigue.¹

To assess mindfulness, the team used Langerian mindfulness, which as is noted in Chapter 6, is understood as being actively present in the now and being aware of new events, as opposed to relying too much on previously learned categories.² A key aspect of Langerian mindfulness is paying attention to novelty by noticing what is different or changing in our environment, keeping us alive to what is happening in the moment. When participating in Langerian mindfulness, participants in Camparo's experiments noticed a change in how they perceived their own fatigue. In fact, the ideas of Langerian mindfulness “offer[ed] individuals control over the timing, amount, and even ...