Tips For Increasing Your Willpower And Self-Awareness

Strong senses of self-awareness and willpower are usually essential to meeting one’s goals. Learning to become more aware of yourself, your patterns, and your needs and desires can take time and may sometimes involve facing difficult topics. Summoning the willpower you need to stick to personal growth and other goals can also be challenging too—even due to factors as common as sleep deprivation or stress. However, cultivating these two concepts or abilities in yourself can be worthwhile because they can help you live a more fulfilling, balanced life. Read on to learn about techniques for working toward greater self-awareness and increased willpower.

How do self awareness and willpower intersect?

Self-awareness is about being able to see and understand who you are and how you think, make decisions, and affect those around you. Self-aware people can often see how their beliefs, personality, thoughts, and emotions influence their behaviors and how these behaviors impact people in their lives. In addition to potentially creating a better world, healthier relationships, and an improved relationship to self, research also suggests that self-awareness tends to increase individual emotional resilience. 

Willpower is often described as resolve, drive, or determination. It’s about being able to resist short-term temptations and distractions to persist on the path toward long-term goals. It results from the activity of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for self-regulation and planning. People with a strong sense of willpower may be able to override their unwanted feelings, impulses, and thoughts and consciously regulate themselves to stay on track toward their desired futures. 

Tips for gaining self-awareness

Gaining self-awareness is a gradual process that takes time, patience, and persistence. The following strategies may help you along the way.

Identify your values

Reflecting on and naming the values by which you want to live your life can provide a framework for your sense of self. It can guide your decisions and help you identify your goals based on what’s most important to you, serving as an anchor point as you continue to develop awareness. 

Practice self-compassion

Throughout the process of learning about yourself, you may encounter some traits or tendencies that you’re uncomfortable with or that are causing you trouble. Remembering that we all have flaws and maintaining self-esteem in the face of them can help you on your way. After all, research suggests that a self-compassionate approach in life in general is more closely associated with positive mental health than a harsh one.

Journal regularly

Writing about your experiences and interactions and how they made you feel can be a powerful tool for identifying patterns of the self. It can also help with emotional regulation, which can give you a clearer head for making decisions and working toward goals.

Cultivate strong social connections

Seeing yourself through the eyes of others is another way to gain information about who you are and how you interact with the world. Stepping back to observe your relationships with others and even asking them to describe you could help you on your self-awareness journey.

Tips for gaining willpower

We all struggle to exert our own willpower from time to time, and this can be even more true when facing complications like high stress levels or related symptoms of a mental health condition. Trying out the techniques below could be helpful as could speaking with a therapist, which we’ll discuss in greater detail below.

Take a break

If you’re facing a temptation that could derail you from your goal, it can be helpful to take a break and delay the decision of whether to engage with it. For example, if you’re trying to save money and are faced with the temptation to make an impulse buy online, tell yourself that you have to wait 24 hours. In many cases, the strength of the temptation will decrease by the time you circle back—if you remember to at all.

Practice mindfulness

Mindfulness is learning how to focus on the present moment without judgment. Since it takes significant self-control to maintain this attention, practicing mindfulness could help you build willpower abilities in other areas of life, too.

Get enough sleep

Sleep deprivation—even at seemingly minor levels—can significantly impact your cognitive function. Your ability to concentrate declines and your decision-making abilities suffer as well, which can leave you more susceptible to temptation. Getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night can help you avoid these effects, as can taking extra care to limit temptations or distractions when you’re tired.

Manage stress

Stress is another factor that can interfere with one’s ability to make sound decisions in the moment because your energy is being funneled into the stress response. Finding healthy ways to cope with life’s stressors may help improve your willpower.

Words of caution to keep in mind

As with many traits and abilities, finding a balanced amount of self-awareness and willpower is usually the healthiest option. Too little can make it difficult to understand your patterns and desires and reach your goals, but too much can also have pitfalls. For example, after becoming more self-aware, many people identify things they want to change about themselves. While willpower can be a valuable tool in this process, it’s not the answer to everything. 

For example, a person with substance use disorder giving up drugs or alcohol is not a matter of willpower, but a matter of getting professional treatment for this mental illness. Healing from trauma is not a matter of willpower, but a matter of receiving compassionate care and working through it over time. Changing certain personality traits isn’t a matter of willpower, but a matter of acceptance along with work toward managing their effects. 

If you are experiencing trauma, support is available. Please see our Get Help Now page for more resources.

The SAMHSA National Helpline for support with substance misuse is available 24/7 and can be reached by calling (800) 662-4357.

Heightened self-awareness can also lead to excessive introspection. If you discover something about yourself that you don’t like, you might invent explanations for it that are untrue, overwork yourself in an effort to change them, or become overwhelmed when envisioning your personal growth journey going forward. Any of these responses could lead to despondency, depression, anxiety, or other difficult feelings or mental health conditions.

Seeking therapy to help improve self-awareness and willpower

If you are ready to talk to someone about gaining self-awareness and willpower or have uncovered something about yourself that you may want to change or heal, seeking therapy could be helpful. A therapist can guide you on this journey, supporting you in discovering growth practices that work for you and encouraging you to practice self-compassion along the way. If you experience any symptoms of a mental health condition, they can help you address these as well.

Some people might not feel comfortable speaking to a therapist face-to-face, especially when talking about sensitive or personal topics. It’s one reason some people may find online therapy to be a more convenient or approachable option than traditional in-office sessions. With a platform like BetterHelp, you can get matched with a licensed therapist who you can meet with via phone, video call, and/or in-app messaging from the comfort of home so you can control your own environment. Since research suggests that online and in-person therapy can be equally effective in most cases, you can feel confident in choosing whichever works better for you.