If willpower worked the way people say it does, I would have stopped in my thirties. I quit and started again for most of my adult life. I am not short of resolve — I built a career from nothing while raising a child. The resolve was never the missing piece.
Willpower is a budget, and cravings know when it is spent
Nobody’s craving arrives at nine in the morning on a Tuesday when they are rested and things are going well.
It arrives at four in the afternoon after a day of holding it together. It arrives when you are tired, when something went badly, when you have spent the entire day being reasonable at people. The wave is timed, whether or not anything intends it, for the exact moment you have the least left.
So “just use willpower” is advice to pay with an account you have already emptied. And then when it does not work, the conclusion on offer is that you are weak, which is both wrong and expensive — because believing it is what makes the next attempt harder.
The second problem: it gives you nothing to do
Willpower is a negative instruction. Don’t. Resist. Hold out.
Try holding out for fifteen minutes with nothing in your hands and nothing in your mouth and see what your attention does. It goes to the one thing you have told it not to think about, because you have not given it anywhere else to be.
This is why stopping is so much harder than replacing. Stopping is a subtraction, and it leaves a shape behind. Something is going to fill that shape. The only real question is whether you chose what.
What to do instead: pick the replacement before you need it
The decision cannot be made during the craving. During the craving you will lose, because you are negotiating with something that argues in your own voice and knows everything you know.
So decide now, while it is quiet, and make the decision small enough that it survives a bad day:
Have a hard candy. Not chocolate — chocolate is four bites and you are back where you started. A hard candy takes fifteen or twenty minutes if you don’t bite it, which is longer than the wave. Sweet works better than salty. This is not my insight; it is what the women I spent thirteen months with taught me.
Move. A walk to the end of the street. You are not exercising, you are being somewhere else while the five minutes pass.
Have it already on you. A replacement you have to go out and buy is not a replacement. It is a plan.
Why this is not a trick
There is a version of this that sounds like substituting one crutch for another, and I want to meet that directly, because it was my own objection.
The difference is what each one costs. A hard candy at four in the afternoon costs me a few cents and twenty minutes. The alternative cost me a career, thirteen months, and a stretch of my son’s life. I am not trying to reach a state of needing nothing. I am trying to make what I reach for something I can afford.
And it is not the whole thing. AA is part of it. My faith is part of it. The candy is the part that covers the twenty minutes when neither of those is in the room.
It isn’t clever, but it works.
