The Willpower Instinct

"A great heart will not be denied," by J.R.R. Tolkien

We all undoubtedly wish we had greater willpower as a built-in quality. The good news is that by training our brains, we can improve our ability to control our behaviour, ideation, and mindset.

Willpower instinct helps us in agile strategies that help in self-control and cooperation with others. It provides us agility in the control of our emotions, attention, and actions.

The foundation of willpower instinct is as below:

Pause and make a plan.

The human fight-or-flight response is probably something you're familiar with: Your body reacts to stress in a way that may have been essential when sabre-toothed tigers endangered your prehistoric ancestors.

However, it doesn't help if you're just anxious about your day at work. According to McGonigal, this fight-or-flight response undermines our willpower since it causes impulsive responses to commonplace situations.

It is preferable to select the "pause-and-plan" response to develop more agile self-control. With the help of this technique, we can become aware of our automatic responses and actively select more powerful ones.

"Your brain needs to put the breaks on your cravings and bring the body on board with your goals," says McGonigal.

To accomplish this, your prefrontal cortex will send signals to lower brain regions that control your respiration, blood pressure, pulse, and other automatic bodily activities. You move away from the fight-or-flight response when you pause and make plans. Your heart slows down rather than speeding up, and your blood pressure remains normal. You take a deep breath rather than gasping for air like a lunatic. Your body slightly relaxes instead of tensing muscles to prepare them for action.

Try shifting to the willpower reaction of pausing and making plans the next time you feel the fight-or-flight response about to take over.

Deepen your breath.

One method for entering pause-and-plan mode is to slow down your breathing; this improves your sense of self-control and enables you to respond to challenging situations more confidently with agility.

Slowing your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute which is manageable with some effort and perseverance. This helps in stimulating heart rate variability, which aids in transitioning the brain and body from a state of stress to one of self-control. This approach will calm you down, give you control, and make you feel ready to handle obstacles or desires within only a few minutes.

Your smartphone's stopwatch can be set to count the number of breaths you take each minute. Try to slow your breathing down so that you take four breaths in and six breaths out.

Avoid holding your breath, as this only adds to your stress level, and try to make your exhale last longer than your inhale (you trigger relaxation as you exhale completely). Isn't that a wonderful feeling?

Meditate

Meditation is an excellent method for enhancing willpower instinct and is the best way to do it.

According to a study, practising meditation for just three hours increased attention span and self-control. Researchers could see the changes in the brain after 11 hours. The newly practising meditators had stronger neural connections between brain regions that are essential for sustaining focus, filtering out distractions, and controlling impulses.

According to another study, daily meditation for eight weeks increased grey matter in the relevant parts of the brain and improved self-awareness in daily life. Meditation boosts blood flow to the prefrontal cortex in a similar way to how lifting weights promotes blood flow to your muscles, which may sound amazing given how quickly our brains may change their structural makeup. Like muscles, the brain appears to adapt to exercise by growing bigger and more rapidly to become more adept at whatever task is being asked of it.

Do you currently engage in meditation? If not, begin with: A small amount of motivation to do meditation each day can have a significant impact.

Get Moving Working out is another effective approach to strengthening your willpower instinct. In the brains of new exercisers, neuroscientists have detected increases in both grey matter—brain cells—and white matter, the coating on brain cells that lets them communicate with agility and efficiently with one another.

Although it takes time, exercising will help you feel more energised and in control throughout the day, which will help you save time.

We now have three effective, scientifically supported methods to increase our willpower instinct:

·       Breathing slowly

·       Introspection

·       Workout

By using these methods for strengthening your mind and body, you can ward off willpower destroyers like despair, anxiety, and chronic pain. Additionally, you'll benefit from better health, empathy, and happiness providing you agility in your life as well as an agile work profession.

At last, there is an epic quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "He who is firm in a will mould the world to himself." 

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

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