You find it hard to control your eating habits because of all the delicious food around Singapore. You have difficulty saving money because you like to shop every after payday. But are these valid reasons or are you only making excuses for your lack of self-control?

Everybody has a bit to be guilty of but even if you don’t pay much attention to it, self-control is really important in our day to day lives. Before you can learn about the ways you can improve your self-control, it’s important that you understand one of the many factors that govern it.

Gratification

Gratification is the biggest influence when it comes to self-control. Delayed gratification, specifically, is the key to controlling your urges and improving your discipline. It’s the ability to resist the temptation of getting an immediate reward in favor of a more valuable reward later. This is basically the essence of self-control since it teaches you to wait before you can get what you want.

And so, here are some of the many ways you can actually improve your self-control.

Set goals and plan ahead

If you want to start improving your self-control, you should start by setting goals first. For example, if you find that you eat a lot of unhealthy snacks as a result of not eating breakfast, you can simply put “eat breakfast every day for the next 4 weeks”.

This will help you discipline yourself to eat healthier while also getting rid of a bad habit. On the other hand, you should also try to plan ahead. By doing so, you know what to do when there are situations that might tempt you to lose your self-control again.

Try your best to avoid temptation

It’s always possible that you’ll just lose your self-control at one point. And that is magnified by things or situations that actually tempt you to do those unwanted desires. So, as much as possible, stay away from the things that can make you break your resolve.

With the example of unhealthy snacks, you can avoid the temptation by keeping your home or office free from them. By limiting your exposure to those snacks or not seeing them at all, you won’t be tempted to consume those types of food anymore.

Practice, practice, practice

It may sound weird because it’s not some kind of sport, but one of the best ways to improve your self-control is to practice it a lot more. Put yourself in situations that allow you to test your self-control so that you can make it stronger over time.

Of course, only do things that you can successfully exert your discipline at. It won’t make any sense to put yourself in a situation to control yourself if you will only fail in the end.