Your #Goals Are manifold: eat better, drink less, learn French, run a half marathon, save money. If only you had superhuman willpower, right?

You’re not giving yourself enough credit, says Katharina Bernecker, Phd, a university of Zurich postdoctoral student who studies willpower. Most of us show a decent amount of self control daily: getting out of bed on time, not snapping at petty colleagues, taking care of annoying tasks. Those things might not seem like accomplishments, but “any conscious act in favor of a long-term goal, like earning money, over satisfying immediate needs, like staying in bed, is willpower,” she explains.

That said, no one has as much self-control as they want which is why researchers are working to figure out exactly what willpower is and how to get more of it. What happens in our head that stops us from hitting snooze again or reaching for that doughnut is unclear. Willpower is a concept invented by psychologists; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tend to study executive function, which includes some of the brain processes involved in willpower, such as impulse control. When you attempt to steer behavior, patterns of electrical activity in the brain duke it out. If doughnuts are on offer, one primal part of you wants to eat them because they’re a rich energy source. Another part doesn’t because you’ve set a goal to lose weight. A third negotiates, I’ll eat them, but I swear, I’m working out later.