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I’ve written on other pages that learning to increase my focus has been one of my biggest struggles. In the last half-year I had to do plenty of self-directed studying, which was incredibly difficult for me to learn.
My other page, Feeling Focused and Motivated | Managing ADHD | Dopamine, has almost everything I think is helpful for building focus on it. Many factors that aren’t willpower are incredibly impactful on our focus and ability to work hard. This includes sleep, nutrition, visiting addicting websites, emotional regulation, present-mindedness, and ego. These are all arguably just as important, if not more important, than willpower alone. Willpower is like salt - you need some to make a dish taste good, but too much isn’t good either. It’s easy to get burnt out using too much willpower without proper recovery.
But despite that, I wanted to write this page because I do think willpower is something that’s very useful to build. I consider this page as a sequel to the focusing page linked above.
Here I’ll quote this section of the video:
Imagine you’re choosing lunch, and you have the option between pizza and a grilled chicken salad. I want to eat a slice of pizza. But in response to that, another part of my mind says, “Actually, we should eat a salad. It would be healthier.” In that moment you exert self-control to continue thinking about choosing the salad. Inside you, there is a conflict between one part of you and another part of you. That's why we literally call it self-control. Because you are trying to control yourself - the self wants to do something different than another part of you. We assume (by interpreting our subjective experience) that there's actually a control aspect going on. But that's actually not the case. Researchers discovered is that as long as the conflict is being monitored, we will be in control. The moment we stop monitoring the conflict, we lose all control.|
As you're engaged in the battle of self-control, you feel you're still in charge of your actions. However, that critical moment when you lose control is when you stop paying attention to the struggle. It's common to assume that we stopped monitoring our self-control efforts because we've won or lost the battle – that this outcome determines our attention. We tend to think, "The battle is over, so I can stop paying attention." However, it's the opposite. It's when we disengage from monitoring, and stop being aware of the internal conflict, that we actually lose control.