Harness Your Mental Power – Tips For Resisting Temptation

The other day, I ran across an ancient proverb.  It read:

Good habits result from resisting temptation

There’s a great deal of truth in this, I believe.  We’re all human, and each of us faces temptation every day.  It comes at us in the form of food, shopping, credit/debt, envy, jealousy, alcohol – and that’s just to name a few.  We’re motivated to cave to temptation for a variety of reasons.  All of them understandable in their own way.  After all, who wouldn’t want a bigger house?  Haven’t you earned that big slice of chocolate cake?

One of the things we must do is learn to face those temptations and develop means for battling them back.  If you’re a parent, you’re also tasked with teaching your children means to resist their temptations.  After all, they face just as many as you, if not more, and they go into that battle with their minds still in development.

With that thought, I’ve put together the following list, to provide you with some tools for resisting temptation.  Not every one of these tools is applicable to each temptation, i.e. alcohol has its own unique challenges, particularly if you’re an addict.  But this should provide a set of tools to draw from to help with resisting temptation.

17 Tips For Resisting Temptation

1. Acknowledge your weakness.  Most people over-estimate their capacity to resist temptation.
2. Develop constant reminders of your foibles.  Write notes to yourself.  If you’re a techie, you can even schedule direct messages via Hootsuite on Twitter to be twitted to you throughout the day.  How cool is that?
3. Find a replacement vice.  If you’re an ice cream addict, try to find a fruit or vegetable that you love to eat.
4. Develop a reward system.  When you’re successful at resisting temptation, you earn the reward.  Save it for exceptional times.
5. Reduce your access to temptation.  If your work lunch group always heads out at 11:30, plan to be at  your workout by 11:00.
6. Don’t kid yourself.  Know those 100-calorie packs of food?  They just give you license to eat more packages.  After all, each package is small, right?
7. Don’t completely eliminate access to your temptation.  Simply reducing access provides the opportunity for success, which in turn, can build will power.
8. Remember your failures.  They will provide strength to make better choices in the future.
9. Surround yourself with those who you would like to emulate.  We are social creatures and its hard to go against the grain of the group.
10. Provide yourself with an immediate benefit for resisting temptation.  Pick out a smaller vice that’s an indulgence.
11. Don’t try going cold turkey.  Ever heard of the rebound effect?
12. Embrace guilt and fear.  Science tells us those emotions are better motivators than hope.
13. Pace yourself.  Most research agrees that our daily capacity for resisting temptation is finite.  Ever had to bite your tongue with a petulant boss and gone home to eat a whole gallon of ice cream?
14. Watch your heart rate.  It rises when you’re working to resist temptation.
15. Don’t fall for marketing tricks.  Example: Restaurants that serve salads increase their sale of less healthy options.
16. Know yourself.  Are you impulsive or prudent?  Impulsive people tend to feel less guilt when giving in to temptations.
17. Beware of “exclusivity.”  When our temptations are couched in a sense of immediacy, our tendency to indulge rises.

What other tools do you use to battle temptation?  Do you find that one of these works better than another?

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