How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity | Huberman Lab Podcast

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Tenacity and willpower are not habits

  Huberman separates them from habit execution, which is reflexive. Tenacity and willpower are what it takes either to do something you don't want to do by default, or to resist something you do. He puts tenacity and willpower at one end of a continuum and apathy and depression at the other. Motivation is the engine that moves you along it. 'Just do it' or 'just don't' fails sometimes for everyone, he says, even David Goggins or Courtney Dauwalter.

• 02

  Everything rides on autonomic function

  Whatever the theory, willpower drops when you're sleep-deprived, in physical or emotional pain, hungry, sick, overtrained or ruminating, such as replaying an argument or ignoring a splinter in your foot. No simple metric yet tracks sympathetic–parasympathetic balance; resting heart rate gives only a hint. Without sleep and stress management, he says, the later tools won't help much.

• 03

  The ego-depletion experiments

  Roy Baumeister's group placed participants in a room with radishes and the smell of freshly baked cookies. Those who had to resist the cookies then gave up sooner on a puzzle that, unknown to them, couldn't be solved. Those who only resisted radishes persisted much longer. This produced the idea that willpower is a limited resource that gets depleted.

• 04

  Glucose as the limiting fuel, and why it's controversial

  Because the brain is among the body's most metabolically active organs and runs mainly on glucose (or ketones on a ketogenic diet), Baumeister's group proposed blood glucose as the depleted resource. Replications and meta-analyses split. Some confirm the effect and others refute it, partly over statistical power.

• 05

  Beliefs change the effect of glucose

  In a PNAS paper titled 'Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control' from Carol Dweck's group, participants did back-to-back Stroop-style tasks with a sugar drink or a taste-matched artificially sweetened drink. Glucose improved performance only in people who believed willpower is a limited resource. Those who saw it as non-limited performed well without the glucose.

• 06

  Baumeister's rebuttal

  With three or more demanding challenges in a row, rather than two, sipping glucose did help sustain performance, even though his group conceded that beliefs matter. Huberman says the tools work whichever camp you're in.

• 07

  The anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) is the hub

  Over two dozen studies point to this paired frontal-lobe structure, about a third of the way back from the forehead. It is more active in successful dieters and smaller or less active in obesity and clinical depression. Super-agers, people over 60 with the cognition of people decades younger, have a larger aMCC than their peers. In anorexia nervosa it is hyperactive at rest and when presented with food. Lisa Feldman Barrett's lab framed it in a review titled 'The tenacious brain'.

• 08

  Allostasis: allocating resources toward goals

  The aMCC receives inputs from autonomic, motor and dopamine and serotonin reward systems. Huberman frames it through allostasis: beyond keeping balance (homeostasis), the brain allocates bodily resources toward goals. It can trigger and respond to dopamine release.

• 09

  Hard things, not easy ones, build it

  In Colcombe and colleagues' 2006 study, 60- to 79-year-olds did three one-hour sessions a week of aerobic training for six months, working up to about 60–75% of maximum heart rate (roughly zone 3). Their aMCC and anterior white matter held steady or grew. A stretching and calisthenics group of equal time showed no such change and no VO2 max gain. The new exercisers had to summon effort; Huberman's point is that if you already train, you need to add something harder.

• 10

  Reward yourself after the hard thing

  A recent animal study in Neuron described stress relief as a natural resilience mechanism. The relief after a stressor ends is itself rewarding, and adding a reward afterwards increased the ability to get through future stress. Huberman suggests occasionally rewarding yourself, in healthy ways, after doing the hard thing.