I was thinking about willpower the other day.  Actually, I was marveling about it. Much as I feel about Sasquatches and Unicorns.  I know they aren’t real… but they might be.  I know willpower is a thing, but I’ve never immersed myself in it.

What creates a will so strong it can shut down everything from basic urges to overwhelming desires.  What allows someone to develop the will to run marathons, meditate for hours, purposefully eat the required fruit and vegetables in a day, every day. In that vein, though, there must be two sorts of willpower.  One for doing (gym, school, chopping firewood) and one for denying (quitting smoking, sticking to a diet, cutting loose a toxic relationship).

And do you suppose the “Doing Willpower” is centred in the Right Brain– where there are  limitless possibilities, and perhaps the “Denying Willpower” lives in old Lefty, where logic and reason rule?

It would explain why a Right Brain person would be more inclined to gravitate to a surplus state, and the Left Brain to a deficit.

I get the Doing More, although you will not see me running in a marathon, like, ever. But I cannot entertain the idea of denial. How can you train your brain to just close the door on things you crave?  And I don’t mean like “Oh, I wouldn’t mind a toffee right now.” I mean the kind of crave you feel in every cell in your body.

I worked with a hypnotherapist once, and she said far and away her toughest (as in almost impossible to treat) patients were smokers. Wherever addiction lives in the brain, it must be able to crowd out Denying Willpower pretty successfully.  We know cigarettes are bad, and heroin, and refined sugar and obsessive love and too much alcohol. Yet, our addictions exert overwhelming control over our brains.

Well- at least, my brain.