Most of us have really good intentions. We want to be our best self, not petty and selfish. Make the most of the moment, not get lost in recriminations and ruminations. Do all the good things we know to do to be healthy, not indulge in habits we know don’t serve us.

Maybe your thing is crisps – you can’t stop until you get to the bottom of that big pack. Another drink? “Well everyone else is, so why not?” you think. Or that top you just have to buy – even though your credit card  is already burning hole in your bank balance. For me, it’s digestive biscuits.

Intentions and promises to yourself are one thing. Keeping them is another. Where does your willpower go, just when you need it most?

There’s this thing called “ego depletion” – a term to describe our seemingly fundamental inability to use willpower to stick to our intentions for very long. Two areas of the front bit of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, (dorsolateral and anterior cingulate) are mostly responsible for this self-control.

The repeated need for impulse control causes these parts of the brain to get exhausted, just like a leg muscle would when running.

So, when faced with tempting choices and relying solely on willpower to get you through, it gets harder and harder, as those bits of your brain literally get exhausted. How can you possibly not get depleted when you’re surrounded by temptation all the time?

Research into addiction shows that people who believe they have good self-control fair much better when placed under pressure than people who don’t. Great! But what about those of you who feel that you don’t have great self-control? Isn’t that the whole problem? What can you do about that? Tell yourself you have it and hope for the best?

From my experience of working with people, I don’t find that manipulating your thoughts from one attitude to its opposite works any better than using will power in the long run. If you try to alter your self-talk and persuade yourself that you have good self-control, you just end up in a battle between the opposing forces of monitored and corrected self-talk, the temptation, and the apparent evidence that you actually don’t have self-control.

What does work is going deeper, developing more self-awareness and understanding of the deeper-seating attitudes and beliefs you have about yourself. Through greater self-awareness, you come to see that your thought patterns about yourself are not real. Mindfulness helps you develop this self-knowledge and liberates you from the self-critical self-doubt cycles that drive your need to over-indulge.

Here are three more tips to help you stay true to your intentions:

1. Forgiveness. When you fall off your intention wagon, don’t make it worse by bashing yourself up about that. Don’t enter into a cycle of guilt and further self-sabotage. Forgive yourself. Start again. As I say in MMM, “Mess up, Clean up, Move on”. Each moment arises fresh and new and the past is in the past.
2. In the throes of resisting temptation, play out the scenario of yourself succumbing in your imagination. Go through the whole thing, including how it will feel afterwards and what the consequences will be. This engages your CEO, the left prefrontal cortex, allows you to replace impulse-driven behaviour with more strategic long-term goal orientation.
3. Use your MMM tools to bring yourself back into the present, extend the gap between the stimulus and the response, be it the crisp packet and your mouth, or the must-have top and the credit card machine. In that gap, exercise choice. Therein lies your freedom.