Why Willpower Is Overrated… And What Leads To Lasting Change

At this time of year, many of us are making renewed efforts to work towards goals, whether the evergreen ones of getting fitter or reading more books, or something grander. It’s often assumed that if only we apply more self-discipline, we can achieve our goal. 

If the desired changes don’t last, we tend to blame and shame ourselves for our “weakness”. However, from a psychological perspective, this explanation is both inaccurate and unnecessarily harsh.

Willpower is not the engine of lasting change. At best, it’s a short-term override. At worst, it becomes another way people blame themselves for their natural human behaviour. 

Why willpower works briefly… and then fails

Willpower relies on conscious effort. It asks the thinking mind to override emotional, habitual, and physiological systems that have often been in place for years.

This can work temporarily. Many people can force themselves into new behaviours for a few weeks, sometimes even a few months, especially when motivation is high or external pressure is strong.

But effort is expensive. It draws on limited emotional and cognitive resources. When stress increases, sleep drops, or life becomes unpredictable (as it inevitably does), willpower is the first thing to collapse. This is not a personal failure: it’s how human nervous systems work.

Behaviour isn’t driven by logic, it’s driven by safety

One of the biggest misunderstandings about change is the assumption that behaviour follows insight. If you know something is bad for you, surely you’ll stop doing it. 

In reality, behaviour is far more closely linked to emotional regulation and perceived safety than to knowledge.

Many habits, such as overworking, emotional eating, scrolling, drinking, vaping, or staying in unsatisfying relationships, serve a regulating function. They soothe anxiety, numb discomfort, or provide predictability.

From this perspective, asking someone to stop a behaviour without addressing what it does for them is like removing a support beam and hoping the structure holds.

Why the try-harder approach often backfires

When people rely on willpower, they tend to enter a familiar cycle:

• Determination and effort

• Temporary success

• Exhaustion or emotional overwhelm

• Reversion to old patterns

• Shame

Shame then becomes the fuel for the next attempt at control, tightening the loop rather than breaking it.

Ironically, this makes the original behaviour more entrenched, because shame itself increases stress, and stress strengthens the urge to regulate through familiar habits.

What actually changes behaviour?

Lasting change rarely starts with effort: it starts with understanding.

In therapeutic work, behavioural change tends to emerge when people:

• Understand what a behaviour is protecting them from

• Learn to tolerate emotional discomfort without immediate escape

• Feel safer experiencing feelings they once avoided

• Develop alternative ways of regulating their nervous system

When the underlying need is met differently, the behaviour often loosens its grip without force. This is why people sometimes stop habits more easily after a certain insight or emotional shift. The behaviour is no longer required in the same way.

The role of the nervous system

Behaviour change is deeply physiological. If your nervous system is chronically activated through stress, pressure, unresolved trauma, or emotional suppression, your capacity for choice is reduced. In this state, habits are not decisions; they’re reflexes.

Therapeutic work, particularly models such as Internal Family Systems therapy, focus on building awareness and emotional wholeness. This can free you up to make positive choices, not effortfully, because your system no longer needs the old response.

Why high-functioning people struggle with this

People who are intelligent, driven, and self-aware often place great faith in willpower because it has worked for them in other areas. They’ve succeeded through effort, discipline, and persistence.

But emotional and behavioural patterns don’t respond to the same rules as career goals. Trying to out-discipline a nervous system response usually leads to frustration, self-criticism, or a sense of something being wrong with you, when in reality, nothing is broken.

A different way to think about change

Instead of asking, “Why can’t I stick to this?”, a more useful question might be:

“What does this behaviour help me manage?”

That question opens curiosity rather than conflict. It invites exploration rather than control. From there, change becomes less about removing behaviours and more about building capacity for feeling, for rest, for boundaries, and for emotional honesty.

A quieter kind of progress

Behaviour change that lasts often looks unimpressive from the outside. There are no dramatic resets or declarations. Instead, there’s a gradual shift in how you respond to yourself.

When behaviour no longer has to carry emotional weight it was never designed to hold, it tends to soften on its own, and that’s something willpower alone can’t achieve.