Will is... The concept of what it is expressed in, volitional characteristics and manifestation of willpower

• April 4, 2019
• Psychology of Personality
• Natalia Balagurova

Psychologists and philosophers have long been trying to formulate what will is. This concept is considered one of the most difficult to understand among all psychological ones. It is customary to consider a phenomenon as a psychological process; at the same time, the term can denote one of the aspects of the processes occurring in the human psyche. This is also a phenomenon that is formed as a unique personal opportunity to control the actions performed by a person.

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.

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.

Declension of the noun will

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.

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.

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.

What is the will?

Hello! My name is Lampobot, I am a computer program that helps you make Word Maps. I can count perfectly, but I still don’t understand very well how your world works. Help me figure it out!

Thank you!

I began to understand the world of emotions a little better.

Question: bony

- is it something neutral, positive or negative?

Neutral Positive Negative I don’t know

Associations to the word “will”

Synonyms for the word "will"

Synonyms for the word "Will"

Sentences containing "will"

• The fakir, through an effort of will
  , directed the power of his body to the plant, trying to influence its hidden vitality.

Quotes from Russian classics with the word “will”

• Father, mother, all relatives, subordinate to serfdom, accustomed to their position and having experienced, perhaps through their own [bitter] experience, [all] the inconveniences of independent manifestations of their personality - everyone tries, out of a desire for the good of the boy, to instill in him from an early age [ unquestioning obedience to someone else's order,] renunciation of one's own mind and will
  .

The meaning of the word "will"

WILL, -i, f.

1. One of the properties of the human psyche, expressed in the ability to achieve the goals set for oneself, the fulfillment of aspirations.
Strength of will.
Education of will. Overcome smth. by force of will. (Small Academic Dictionary, MAS)

Aphorisms of Russian writers with the word “will”

and human labor creates wondrous wonders!

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Additionally

see also

The meaning of the word "will"

WILL, -i, f.

1. One of the properties of the human psyche, expressed in the ability to achieve the goals set for oneself, the fulfillment of aspirations.
Strength of will. Education of will. Overcome smth. by force of will.

Sentences containing "will"

Fakir by force of will

directed the power of his body to the plant, trying to influence its hidden vitality.

Strength of will

makes it possible not only to implement large-scale projects, radically change lifestyle or achieve the highest goals, but also to respond to the challenges and temptations that we all face every day.

It was good to sit here, listen to the sound of the sea and let loose

own thoughts.

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.

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.

What to remember about willpower?

In this article we looked at what will is in psychology, and such concepts as willpower and free will. In general, I think that with will everything is more or less clear, with its freedom the question is philosophically controversial, but what can be generalized about willpower?

• Willpower is the ability to resist short-term gratification for long-term goals or objectives.
• Willpower is correlated with positive life outcomes, such as good grades, higher self-esteem, lower rates of substance abuse, greater financial security, and improved physical and mental health.
• When willpower fails, exposure to an emotionally charged stimulus overwhelms a person's rational, cognitive system, leading to impulsive actions.
• A person's capacity for self-control appears to be constant. Children with better self-control as preschoolers tend to have better self-control as adults.
• People with low self-control show different brain patterns when presented with tempting stimuli.
• Willpower can be compared to a muscle that gets tired from overuse.
• Research shows that constantly resisting temptation depletes your ability to resist future temptations.
• Depletion of willpower has a physical basis. People whose willpower has been depleted have reduced activity in an area of ​​the brain associated with cognition and have lower blood glucose levels than people whose willpower has not been reduced.
• The effects of willpower depletion can be mitigated by positive moods, beliefs and attitudes.
• Willpower depletion affects a range of behaviors, including food consumption, substance use and abuse, and purchasing behavior.
• Avoiding temptations and planning for the future are effective tactics for maintaining self-control.
• With the right motivation, you can be able to continue even when your willpower is depleted.
• Maintaining stable blood glucose levels, such as by regularly eating healthy meals and snacks, can help prevent the effects of willpower depletion.
• Since exhaustion in one area can weaken willpower in other areas, it is much more effective to focus on one goal at a time rather than “attack” a list of multiple solutions at once.
• Just as muscles are strengthened by regular exercise, regular exercise of self-control can improve willpower over time.

Good luck to you! See you at the sessions!

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.

Willpower - what is it?

If we had more self-control, would we all eat healthier, exercise regularly, avoid drugs and alcohol, save for retirement, stop procrastinating, and achieve all sorts of lofty goals?

According to all surveys, lack of willpower is the No. 1 reason for not following through with such changes.

Many people believe that they could improve their lives if only they had more of this mysterious thing called willpower.

In 2011, 27% of survey respondents reported that lack of willpower was the biggest barrier to change. However, although many people blame a lack of willpower for their poor decisions, they have not given up hope.

Most respondents believe that willpower is something that can be learned. These respondents are up to something. Recent research shows that willpower can actually be improved by training.

On the other hand, many survey participants reported that having more time for themselves would help them overcome their lack of willpower. However, willpower does not automatically increase when you have extra time.

So how can people resist temptation? In recent years, scientists have made some compelling discoveries about how willpower works. In this article we will review our current understanding of self-control.

Lack of willpower is not the only reason why you may not achieve your goals. American willpower researcher Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., a psychologist at Florida State University, describes three necessary components for achieving goals:

• first, he says you need to establish motivation for change and set a clear goal;
• secondly, you must control your behavior in relation to this goal;
• the third component is willpower.

Whether you want to lose weight, quit smoking, study more, or spend less time on the Internet, willpower is an important step towards achieving this result.

At its core, willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to achieve long-term goals. And there are good reasons for this.

Psychologists at one of the universities in the United States studied self-control in eighth-graders during the school year. The researchers first assessed students' self-discipline (their term for self-control) by asking teachers, parents, and the students themselves to complete questionnaires.

They found that students who rated self-discipline highly had better grades, better school attendance and higher standardized test scores, and were more likely to participate in a competitive high school program.

Self-discipline was found to be more important than IQ in predicting academic success. Other studies have found similar patterns.

The benefits of willpower seem to extend well beyond your college years. Terry Moffitt, PhD, of Duke University, and colleagues studied self-control in a group of 1,000 people who were followed from birth to age 32 as part of the Longitudinal Health Study in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Moffitt and her colleagues found that people with high self-control in childhood (as reported by teachers, parents, and children themselves) grew into adults with greater physical and mental health, fewer problems related to substance abuse and criminal convictions, and better behavior in the field of savings and financial security.

These patterns persisted even after the researchers controlled for the children's socioeconomic status, family life and general intelligence. Findings like these highlight the importance of willpower in almost every area of ​​life.

Definition of willpower

We have many common names for willpower: determination, drive, determination, self-discipline, self-control. But psychologists characterize willpower, or self-control, in more specific ways.

According to most psychologists, willpower can be defined as:

• the ability to delay gratification by resisting short-term temptations in order to achieve long-term goals;
• the ability to suppress unwanted thoughts, feelings, or impulses;
• the ability to use a “cold” cognitive behavioral system rather than a “hot” emotional one;
• conscious, effortful regulation of oneself with a limited resource of the “I”, capable of being depleted.

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.

Delay of gratification

More than 40 years ago, Walter Mischel, Ph.D., a psychologist now at Columbia University, studied self-control in children using a simple but effective test.

His experiments using the “marshmallow test” laid the foundation for the modern study of self-control.

Michel and his colleagues gave a preschooler a plate of marshmallows. The child was then told that the researcher should leave the room for a few minutes, and if the child waited until the researcher returned, he could eat two marshmallows.

If the child cannot wait, he can ring the bell and the researcher will return immediately, but then the child will only be allowed to eat one marshmallow.

In both children and adults, willpower can be seen as the fundamental ability to delay gratification. Preschoolers with good self-control sacrifice the immediate pleasure of one marshmallow in order to indulge in two later.

Former smokers give up the pleasure of cigarettes to maintain good health and avoid an increased risk of lung cancer in the future. Shoppers are resisting being 'broken' at the mall to save for future retirement. And so on.

The marshmallow experiments eventually led Michel and his colleagues to develop a framework that explains our ability to delay gratification. He proposed what he calls the “hot and cold” system to explain why willpower succeeds or fails.

The cold system is cognitive in nature. It's essentially a mental system that includes knowledge about sensations, feelings, actions, and goals—reminding yourself, for example, why you shouldn't eat marshmallows.

While the cold system is reflexive, the hot system is impulsive and emotional. The hot system is responsible for quick, reflexive reactions to certain triggers—like putting a marshmallow in your mouth without thinking about the long-term consequences.

If this structure were to be caricatured, the cold system would be the angel on your shoulder, and the hot system the devil.

When willpower fails, exposure to a “hot” stimulus significantly overwhelms the cold system, leading to impulsive action. Some people seem to be more or less susceptible to hot triggers.

And this sensitivity to emotional reactions can influence their behavior throughout their lives, Michel discovered when he returned to his marshmallow-wielding teenage subjects.

He found that teenagers who waited longer for marshmallows in preschool were more likely to score higher on exams, and their parents were more likely to rate them as having greater ability to plan, cope with stress, respond rationally, and exercise self-control in unpleasant situations. situations and concentrate.

But it turned out that the research on marshmallows did not end there. Recently, B.J. Casey, Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College, along with Michel, Yuichi Shoda, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, and other colleagues tracked 59 subjects, now in their 40s, who participated in marshmallow experiments as children.

The researchers tested the subjects' willpower using a test that demonstrates self-control in adults.

Surprisingly, the differences in the subjects' willpower largely persisted over four decades. In general, children who were less successful at resisting marshmallows years ago performed worse on self-control tasks as adults.

A person's sensitivity to so-called hot stimuli can apparently persist throughout his life.

In addition, Casey and her colleagues examined brain activity in some subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects with low self-control showed brain patterns that differed from those with high self-control.

The researchers found that the prefrontal cortex (the area that controls executive functions such as decision making) was more active in subjects with higher self-control.

And the ventral striatum (an area believed to process desires and rewards) showed increased activity in those who had lower self-control.

Research has yet to fully explain why some people are more sensitive to emotional triggers and temptations, and whether these patterns can be corrected.

Will and habits

In many ways, the formation of will is helped by exercise associated with giving up bad habits and developing useful ones. Any person has harmful ones, even if the person does not talk about them; in the depths of consciousness there is a desire to leave them in the past. Some people want to give up tobacco products or alcohol, others want to adjust their diet. By the way, some people believe that you can quit smoking by always keeping a pack of cigarettes with you. This opinion is wrong. Restriction provokes an even stronger desire, but in the absence of restriction, activity is completely determined by volitional efforts.

Forming new habits also involves effort: a habit is an action performed unconsciously. Once you have formed it for yourself, you need to introduce it into everyday life and resort to action so often that it becomes an integral part of your personality. Some time must pass - only then will what is done become an organic part of everyday life, not requiring additional effort. If you can achieve this, you can confidently talk about successful willpower training.