Willpower - what is it, the concept of will in psychology and how to develop it

Will determines the ability to achieve success: it reveals how easily one gets down to work, resists temptations, defeats procrastination and laziness, gets rid of irritants, and puts long-term results above desires for short-term pleasures.

Will in psychology, according to Wikipedia, is a person’s ability to make decisions based on the thought process and direct their thoughts and actions in accordance with the decision made. Simply put, if you made a decision to do something, but no action followed, it means that the decision was not made, and the will was suppressed by fear, stress or laziness.

Modern psychologists suggest that weakness of will may be caused by one or more of the following reasons:

• lack of suitable goals;
• indecision caused by shifting attention from one course of action to another;
• inability to choose between alternative courses of action;
• inability to make a firm decision;
• inability to break bad habits;
• inability to resist desires, impulses and urges.

How it all began

For the first time, as is known for certain from reliable sources, ancient Greek thinkers and philosophers began to think about what will is. Thus, Aristotle’s arguments on this topic have survived to this day. He considered will to be the basis of human morality, and also saw close connections between expressions of will and the ethics inherent in man. Aristotle was the first to express confidence that it is the person who is responsible for his well-being, that is, the individual completely determines his own destiny. He called man an active force, defining will as the beginning of any action. Both bad and good begin with it equally.

Any person voluntarily changes actions. Intentions also change voluntarily. Based on such reasoning, Aristotle believed that it depends only on the person how bad or good he will be. In his reasoning, voluntariness represents the freedom to choose what one wants, focusing on goals, the achievement of which is justified by reasonable arguments.

As psychology developed, thinkers began to think more and more often about what will is. This thinking was the basis for the work of many famous psychologists, thanks to which even a special direction called voluntarism was born. Within its framework, will is considered an autonomous energy that determines mental action. This scientific position does not allow the reduction of a volitional act to a specific mental process. It is believed that it is the will that determines their course and development.

will

Views on will in psychology

Despite the fact that the attempt to define and consider will has a long scientific history, in psychology of the 20th century this category was not considered one of the main ones for study. Moreover, with a sharp decline in the interest of scientists in it (the 40s of the 20th century and beyond), many psychology textbooks lacked a chapter devoted to problems of will. The reason was simple - new structures, such as motive and need, had already been found to explain the function of generating actions [15]. However, now we are seeing a secondary wave of interest in this issue - now not just as one of the topics of human psychology, but as one of the fundamental formations of our psyche, our personality, along with consciousness [16].

1. Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic concept - “It”, “I”, “Super-ego”.

In psychoanalysis, will was understood as the biological energy underlying all human actions. This energy was libido, the energy of sexual desire, the violation of which is fraught with mental disorders [17]. In this concept, a major role in a person’s actions and behavior is played by the life-affirming force of Eros, cultivated through sublimation and allowing a person to splash it out in a different direction. Also, according to the psychologist, the fight against the subconscious desire for death (Thanatos) had a great influence on a person [18].

Freud identified three components of the psyche, which also have a huge impact on the will and volitional effort:

• It (Id) is essentially the hereditary unconscious of a person, in which there are no categories of good and evil, moral principles. This structure is biological desires and unrestrained needs in their purest form.

• Super-I (Super-Ego) – volitional suppression of unconscious drives. A structure that performs the function of self-control, conscience, morality and ethics. Just like It, it belongs to the unconscious - however, it is acquired in the process of life.

• I (Ego) is human consciousness, an intermediary between the structures of “It” and “Super-I”. According to Freud, theoretically he can be strong-willed and agile, but his struggle with “It” is similar to the efforts of a rider who is trying to curb a horse that is significantly superior to him in strength [19].

1. William James (James). Modus operandi.

The American psychologist adhered to a voluntarist view of will - that is, he attributed the main role to will in the development of man and society. James considered the role of volition in decision making. The choice is made from two or more motives on the basis of purposeful concentration of attention on an object, which in this concept is a volitional act [3].

The mechanism of any such act included the element “Let it be!” as consent to perform a certain action [20]. However, this element in the psychologist’s works is described very vaguely, and its role is sometimes not so defined - in the simplest actions consent is not required, since they are performed according to the principle of the ideomotor act described by William Carpenter: the mental image of movement prompts the movement itself, and the inclusion of will is not here required [9].

1. N. N. Lange. Unconscious volitional effort.

The views of the domestic scientist on issues of will were in many ways similar to the views of William James, since Lange was greatly impressed by his work “Principles of Psychology”. Will is understood solely as an impulse to action. In his opinion, action is preceded by a certain “attraction” (need), and volitional effort (“wanting”) “is just an impulse to action” [21, p. 318]. This impulse was understood as a volitional decision and effort, which is expressed in the decision “I will do it” - here, as we see, there is also a certain similarity with James’ theory of the decision “Let it be!”

Having reduced the will to an impulse of innervational nature, the next step is that the psychologist decisively declares that a person has no power over this impulse - at least not consciously. We can only be aware of actions that have already been performed - and they are already accompanied by a conscious volitional effort [21].

1. L. S. Vygotsky. Decision making and will.

According to L. S. Vygotsky, will belongs to the highest mental functions of a person, along with thinking, speech, memory, etc. He also includes in the volitional act the operation of creating an auxiliary motive, which has little to do with a person’s desire, but creates an additional incentive for the planned action [22]. The domestic psychologist identified two processes in the act of will:

• Decision making is the creation of a new brain connection as a functional apparatus.

• Executive – human actions to implement a decision [9].

Lev Semenovich also touched upon the topic of choosing in a difficult situation indifferent (not having much influence in the choice) and “equilibrium” motives in a child. He notes that the solution here is the lot - as, again, a special auxiliary motive when it is difficult to choose. The psychologist's works emphasize the importance of a certain intention for the actualization of the will and the choice associated with it. A person’s behavior, one way or another, is at the mercy of the external situation and the things surrounding him. And only by subjugating this influence that the external world has on behavior does a person gradually develop within himself will in its brightest manifestation.

In his opinion, the next problem in the study of will - namely, how free will is formed - should be addressed by genetic scientists. They need to “...find in the development of the child the lines along which the maturation of free will occurs. We are faced with the task of presenting the gradual growth of this freedom, revealing its mechanism and showing it as a product of development” [22, p. 290].

1. H. Heckhausen and J. Kuhl. Rubicon model

Heckhausen and his colleagues understood will as psychological control over action and developed its general scheme, which received the second name “Rubicon Model” [23, 24]. It finally took shape in the scientist’s works by 1980. The stages of psychological control are as follows:

• The pre-decision (preparatory) stage is the determination of exactly what action will be performed. Making this decision is sometimes not easy (like crossing a Rubicon); you need to think about and weigh a lot. However, a decision still has to be made - this is the action of moving to the second stage.

• Pre-action stage (preactionary) - with a finalized decision, a person begins to take steps and create conditions for its implementation. The transition to the third stage is psychological preparation for the implementation of intentions. Most often, a person experiences difficulties precisely at the stage of transition from the second to the third stage and sometimes cannot decide to take action. Heckhausen compares him to a parachutist, shackled by fear, who must be pushed slightly by the instructor, otherwise he will not make the jump.

• The action stage (actional) is actually the implementation of the plan.

• The post-action stage is the stage of evaluation and self-assessment. Here a person thinks about what was done well, what did not work out and why. It should be noted that in the case of unjustified hopes at the third stage, the transition from it to the after-action may also not go very smoothly [23].

1. Domestic psychophysiology. I. M. Sechenov, I. P. Pavlov about will.

Psychophysiologists, such as I.M. Sechenov, I.P Pavlov, opposed voluntarism and free will, noting the determination of will from unconditioned reflexes. This point of view was first expressed by I.M. Sechenov in his work “Reflexes of the Brain” (his concept is called the natural science theory of mental regulation). He emphasized that the will will not simply arise out of nowhere, without ideas, and “it cannot act on its own, but acts only in the name of reason or feeling” [25, p. 260]. The will needs “wanting,” a motive that always stands next to it, determining its direction (however, the will cannot force a person to do what he does not know how to do [26]).

Here, however, the question arises, which of the many motives can have a stimulating effect on the will, if these motives are sometimes numerous and multidirectional, if not opposite to each other. Sechenov answered this question this way: among the motives there is certainly one that overpowers all other motives. It is this that motivates the will to action; other desires fade into the background. But this point of view also encounters many objections [27]. For example, people suffering from any addiction (tobacco, drugs, alcohol), meeting it halfway and obeying a momentary need (take drugs or alcohol, smoke a cigarette), thereby demonstrating, on the contrary, extremely weak-willed behavior.

I. P. Pavlov considered voluntary actions to be conditioned reflex actions, subject to all the laws of higher nervous activity [9]. He interpreted the will itself as a certain reflex (namely, the “reflex (instinct) of freedom” [28]), which is triggered at the moment a person encounters certain obstacles along the way. The instinct of freedom can stimulate activity in the same way as hunger or danger. In the hierarchy of needs, the will performs the function of suppressing secondary ones and stimulating the most important ones, but its effect on a person’s personality does not end there. Will is capable of stimulating self-affirmation of the individual, showing character (from the ability to stand up for oneself to the other pole - self-sacrifice for the sake of something) [29].

The psychophysiologist believed that if this reflex did not exist, any obstacle in the way would interrupt the movement. However, it should be pointed out that as an example he cited dogs, on which Pavlov studied the functioning of the volitional process. I.P. Ilyin says that, of course, “in humans, the control of one’s behavior is much more complex and concerns not only voluntary movements, but also cognitive processes” [9, P. 70]. Ilyin notes that at present, the view of will and voluntary actions as conditioned reflex is not enough, and it is necessary to look for specific physiological prerequisites for those reactions that we call voluntary.

An attempt to generalize and analyze ideas about will in this article very clearly demonstrated that questions of will still face researchers to this day. Despite the abundance of philosophical, psychological and psychophysiological concepts, the fragmentation of the described views is striking and confirms that there is still something to explore and discover in this area. A. R. Luria spoke quite eloquently (and I would like to end with these words): “We can say with confidence that not a single problem in psychology hides as many errors in its history as this particular problem. Truly, the history of the study of will is a history of delusions, and the inventory of modern psychological ideas about will is a grandiose cemetery of errors, unclearly posed problems and evidence of the frivolity of researchers” [30, p. 476].

Author: Yulia Matychenko, educational psychologist, MBOU Kadetskaya Secondary School 2, Rubtsovsk

Editor: Chekardina Elizaveta Yurievna

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Psychologists and the object of their research

Will is a function of the psyche that affects all aspects of human life. It defines orderliness and the pursuit of a specific goal. The consciousness of the activities of a particular person depends on the will. A volitional action, as Rubinstein defined, is a purposeful act through which an individual achieves some goal defined for himself. Thanks to the will, as you can learn from Rubinstein, impulses are subject to the control of consciousness, and a person has the opportunity to correct the world in which he lives, focusing on his own plan and idea.

Will is also a person’s ability to regulate his behavior. It is believed to be a tool of self-determination. Thanks to this mental feature, the individual is freed from circumstances pressing on him from the outside. Thanks to the will, life receives a subjective aspect.

I want, I can, I create

Will is a mental feature, a phenomenon thanks to which a person overcomes the difficulties encountered on his life path, implementing planned actions. When a person faces problems, he may abandon his line. The alternative is to put in more effort to make the barrier a thing of the past.

Psychologists consider overcoming a barrier the commission of some exceptional action that does not fit into the original framework: the goals that a person initially defined for himself did not include such methods. A special action is accompanied by a change in the motivation for its commission. The person consciously uses additional motivation, the construction of which largely involves the creative essence, the ability to imagine, and predict the development of a situation. The creation of a new motive in many cases is due to the ability to imagine what consequences the action will have.

Will in human life is an involuntary format of activity. It must be initiated, efforts must be made to stabilize it, and certain aspirations must be inhibited. Will is possible only if a person is ready to work with motives and aspirations, motivation. It requires the individual to organize a system of activity so that it allows him to achieve what he wants. With a detailed study of the situation, one can see selective volitional functionality. We are talking about everyday conflicts of motives between which a person must choose.

What is will

This human quality has attracted the attention of philosophers and psychologists for hundreds of years; they have been arguing about it, trying to prove the independence of the human will from higher powers and find ways to help control volitional processes. But so far the volitional sphere has been studied much less than the cognitive and emotional.

Any human activity - both external and internal - has two types: involuntary and voluntary.

1. An involuntary, spontaneous, impulsive type of activity is controlled primarily by reflexes - the mental reactions of our body to external influences or internal changes. This type of activity includes, for example, involuntary attention when a person turns around at the sound of a slamming door or a flash of light. Involuntary or impulsive behavior also includes abruptly withdrawing a hand from a hot frying pan or the crying of an offended child.
2. The second type, or the highest level of activity, which in this case is called activity, is voluntary. This means that performing actions requires volitional efforts, that is, conscious tension to overcome external obstacles or internal resistance: weakness, doubt, indecision, cowardice, laziness, etc. Sometimes these efforts can be insignificant and even invisible to the person himself. For example, in order to lie down on the sofa to rest, serious volitional efforts are not required. What if to do this you need to break away from an interesting activity, interrupt communication on the Internet, because it’s late and time to sleep? Then, apparently, some effort will be required. And in other cases, you have to overcome serious internal resistance, making a difficult decision in a situation of difficult choice.

Voluntary or volitional behavior, like the will itself, is not an innate ability of a person. Until the age of 5-6 years, involuntary activity predominates in a child, but gradually his ability to consciously regulate his behavior develops, and will becomes an important part of life.

Development of the situation

Willpower in a person’s life is not only a mental function that has selective implications. Suppose a person finds himself in a situation where he has several options for the development of events, each of which entails certain consequences. Having determined which option is most preferable in the current circumstances, the person activates the initiating volitional functionality. It consists of applying a series of efforts to implement a certain scenario. Since all the alternative motives that had to be encountered at the stage of implementing the selective volitional function have not yet weakened, efforts have to be made to eliminate all those motives in favor of which a decision was not made.

A person with a strong will implements what is planned, strictly adhering to the plan drawn up initially. He determines for himself specific actions, routes and sequences, strictly observing them in life, not allowing deviation in favor of momentary desires. In psychology, this is called a stabilizing volitional function, thanks to which you can adhere to a certain level of activity, despite the problems and difficulties that arise.

Often, a person, engaged in a certain action, imagines various situations that may follow, forms plans, the implementation of which will be beneficial. This is called voluntary regulation of mental processes and actions occurring within a person’s personality and in the outside world. If it is possible to determine an additional motive, to formulate why the action that was chosen at the selective stage is needed, if it is possible to formulate for oneself a truly important result that a person is ready to strive for, while changing the motivation and supplementing it with new points formed based on the imagination, talk about changing the role of the implemented action in human life due to volitional effort.

Making decisions

In the process of composing a plan for the implementation of a goal that interests an individual, the decision-making process finds expression in different forms. If the impulse that arises in a person at a given moment does not conflict with the internal aspects of mental activity, then in this case the decision is not allocated by consciousness to a special stage. Moreover, there are often no external barriers to achieving the goal towards which this impulse is directed.

There are times when a solution appears as if by itself. This occurs when a person understands that the decision is not optimal, but under such circumstances it is impossible to make a different decision. Such decisions are usually made by people in hopeless situations, for example, in a fire, jumping out of a window, which may be the only chance to save a life.

It happens that opposing motives that overcome a person at the moment of making a decision retain their strength until the very end, while all possibilities for the development of events are preserved.

Then one of the motives is chosen as dominant, not because the others have exhausted their effective force or attractiveness, but because of the awareness of the need to sacrifice the remaining motives to the main one.

Functions and processes

A person with a strong will has a highly developed method of regulating his psyche. Will is important in relation to emotional status, the ability to concentrate attention and motivate oneself to action. The three key functions of will processes are oppressive, stabilizing, and initiating. Initiation is also called inducement. This function has a close connection with motivation factors and is aimed at initiating action. It determines behavioral characteristics and allows a person to be active. Due to the initiating volitional function, barriers (objective, internal) are overcome.

As a stabilizer, will is associated with efforts due to which activity is maintained at a sufficient level, despite interference from outside and within the person.

Inhibitory is the final most important function, which determines the role of will in human life. It is aimed at slowing down other desires, behavioral scenarios and patterns that contradict a specific goal. The oppressive volitional function determines a person’s ability to refuse some action, because of which the most significant value may be in a disadvantageous position. Inhibition is one of the key and most important aspects of regulating human behavioral patterns.

Signs of will

Psychologists, figuring out and defining what human will is, have formulated three characteristics inherent in this mental trait. The first is the awareness of one's own freedom. A person understands that he is free to do any action. He realizes that there is no predetermination in principle, only he himself determines what behavioral reactions will be.

The sign of will is determinacy of action. This must be objective. Its presence is mandatory. The sign must be present in any action, even if from the outside it seems completely free.

At the same time, volitional behavior is a holistic phenomenon that affects all personal aspects. A person expresses himself through such mental characteristics clearly, completely. Regulation of behavior through will is considered the highest level of mental control.

Psychic phenomenon

Experts in the field of philosophy and psychology, trying to determine what human will is, proposed calling it a unique phenomenon of a person regulating his own activities. In many respects, it is precisely due to this aspect that a vector orientation of consciousness and its states towards an indefinite goal is possible. Will allows you to concentrate your efforts in order to achieve what you want. A characteristic feature of will is the impossibility of reducing a phenomenon to a specific objective aspect. It cannot be called pure extra-practical consciousness. Will represents the connection between an action, an object, an object, an impulse, a need.

The study of the will and human activity allows us to say with confidence that this mental function presupposes objectification by the subject and legitimation of desire, its selection into a goal. To some extent, will is the result of reflective reasoning about a person’s needs, and at the same time it is a predictive analysis of what may result from an action.

Will is a combination of desire and a sense of obligation, combined with the concentration of efforts that must be made to implement what is formulated. Will at the same time is the ability of a person to realize the dominant goal, distinguish it from all others and abandon alternatives that impede the achievement of the goal. The core of the act of will is awareness of the value of the goal and the significance of its implementation for the person. Psychologists point out that will is always associated with a person’s ability to assess the correspondence between the formulated goal and the internal scale of values.

Consciously controlled behavior

Nerve impulses in the human brain are ahead of the flow of events from the outside. The basis for this type of functioning of the nervous system is the individual’s past experience, which allows him to anticipate impacts on the nervous system and anticipate their possible consequences. A complex of connections and associations is formed in the brain, developed as a result of repeated repetitions.

In the process of thinking about different situations, different ways to achieve a goal are compared and the most acceptable one is selected. A system of associations formed by experience can restore, from the slightest irritant, the entire chain of thoughts and actions from the first impulse to the realization of the desired goal.

People have the ability to accumulate information and use it as a basis for further actions and are able to generalize information received from outside. All conscious and purposeful behavior of each individual is based on these properties of the human mind.

Versatile and important: will is necessary for man

This phenomenon has long been a source of surprise to researchers of the human psyche. Will is a person’s ability to balance between inhibition and motivation. At the same time, activating a specific action and blocking others, focusing on a goal announced in advance. An act of will is the formulation of a decision, the determination of a method of struggle, the mobilization of forces to achieve what is desired.

The volitional phenomenon is determined by a subjective thesaurus, the articulation of information taking into account the meaning of the action for a particular individual. Will is associated with the attitudes of the individual and his predisposition to certain specific actions. In many ways, the speed of reaction to circumstances and the person’s state of readiness depend on them. As is known from social psychology, will sets a subjective human orientation towards some social value.

Create and develop

In psychology, human will is the quality thanks to which a creative person organizes life, despite the problems of the surrounding world. A person who has this mental characteristic in a pronounced form is able to deal with difficulties and overcome them. Some call will the ability to exist despite the need to fight, while others say that tension itself can already be called will. If he is not in life, it is wrong to call a person strong-willed. To develop this quality, it is necessary to show wisdom and strive for civility.

A strong-willed person is one who can and is ready to cooperate and through this make his life more effective. By organizing a life situation, taking into account prospects and one’s own accumulated wealth, a strong-willed person achieves success. To some extent, it is the mental function in question that provides the possibility of development and is the way in which it occurs. It is formed and improved, and manifests itself most clearly in conditions of negative motivation, that is, a situation when a person clearly understands what kind of person she does not want to be, and is ready to make every effort to avoid becoming such a person.

The character and will of a person are the mental characteristics of an individual, improving and developing over the years. Psychologists specializing in these issues call for developing the will, making efforts to do so within reason. By overloading oneself, a person will not receive any positive outcome. Volitional loads must be combined with positive motives, taking into account that will to some extent is a force, but it reflects not muscle mass and its fitness, but character traits. To properly manage your resources, you need to be wise, be able to correctly analyze what is happening, and make rational efforts. Will allows a person to move towards an elusive goal, but it can also be a tool through which the creative search for an alternative path becomes more effective and simpler.

Is it possible to train the will?

If someone likes to think that someone else controls their life, then such a person is unlikely to be interested in learning that the will can be trained. No matter how paradoxical it may sound, but in fact, man is the creation of God, and he himself has the right to control his life and destiny. But in order to avoid responsibility, some people subconsciously do not want to admit it. They shift responsibilities to other people and live not by their own will, but by chance. In fact, this is a rather convenient position, because then, in case of failure, you can blame anyone, but not yourself.

Will can and should be trained, because in its essence this ability is freedom. When a person manages his life, there are no impossible tasks before him. He is absolutely free to do what he really wants. Such an important ability as willpower can significantly make a person’s life easier, make it richer and more colorful.

Developing: is it necessary?

In a sense, for a person, will is a quality that can be trained, just like muscle strength, except that different exercises are needed for this. If you conduct classes correctly, you can master the control of your antisocial reactions and actions in order to be able to more effectively achieve your goals. The better you can hone your will, the easier it will be to cope with the weaknesses inherent in any individual, as well as habits that negatively affect life. The will becomes stronger if a person gives himself appropriate stress, but only in a limited format.

The reasons why people are interested in willpower training vary from case to case. Some people just want to learn to take control of their lives, others want to improve their self-image as a valuable person. Willpower training helps you become more resistant to stress factors and leave harmful habits in the past. Research has been conducted to explore the importance of the human will and its training. They allow us to speak with confidence about the existence of effective strategies for strengthening this mental personality trait.

The easiest way to start training is to work out your daily routine and clearly regulate periods of sleep and food intake. You need to choose a diet with four or five meals a day and determine the time frame. This will keep your body in good shape. It is important to exclude any harmful foods from your diet. At the same time, they set frames for sleep. The classic option is to sleep from 11 pm to seven in the morning.

Compliance with such a framework allows you to introduce a clear temporary organization into your life. The earlier a person gets up, the easier it is for her to start working on important things, avoiding the temptation to put them off until later. Another aspect of such training is that a person must do what needs to be done, without giving up on a task simply because he does not want to work on it. By doing such things, you can develop strong-willed qualities and make your personality stronger.

Violations

Types of violation of will:

1. Hypobulia - in this state, volitional activity decreases. This disorder is typical for lazy, slow people who find it difficult to decide to do something outside their comfort zone.
2. Abulia - lack of will, weakening of will, indecision. The individual is afraid to make decisions on his own, does not take the initiative in a group of other people, and tries to be in the background.
3. Hyperbulia is an unhealthy activity. It appears in people with manic tendencies. They take on many things at once and never finish anything.

If violations of the will are detected, the person needs to be provided with appropriate psychological assistance.