Use your willpower when it’s the strongest to create Safe Zones that will work all the time, even when your willpower runs out.

Like a lot of people, I contribute to my savings account by having money automatically deducted from my paycheck. If the process wasn’t automatic I don’t think I would save nearly as much money.

Think what I would have to do if money wasn’t deducted automatically. I would get my paycheck and then rather than spend it I would have to write another check and deposit it into my savings account. How many times would I think of excellent ways to spend the money rather than saving it? Too many.

Now think back to The Two Brain Threat where we learned how short term emotional thinking can overpower long term logical thinking. Under the influence of dreaming about buying a shiny new toy (short term thinking) I might make the decision to spend the money instead of saving it (long term thinking).

How do I get around this problem? My logical mind knows I need to save for retirement. So at a time when I am at my most logical, that is, when I don’t have a check in my hot little hands ready to spend, I set up an automatic deduction so I have no choice but to save money. It just works.

By setting up the automatic deduction once, the rewards are reaped every month with no effort at all. That’s how the logical mind overcomes the emotional mind. You plan and create your Safe Zones when you are at your most logical, so that you will naturally and easily attain your goals.

Your logical mind knows you need help to stay on your diet. Setting up Safe Zones is that help. Setting up Safe Zones is like setting up an automatic deduction from your paycheck. If you have to rely on constant motivation not to eat, to always exercise, to always do the right thing, then you probably won’t succeed. Few people can make that many right decisions under the continual bullying of their emotional brain.

By setting up Safe Zones when you are using your long term logical thinking, you are giving yourself the best chance to succeed when temptation comes knocking and you want to open the door. By creating Safe Zones, you guarantee success over the long run.

I have fond memories of applying this strategy on what I have come to call my Purge the Urge day. One of the Safe Zone strategies is to toss tempting foods out of your house so you won’t eat them when hunger drives you to forage around your house looking for food to eat. This is “purging the urge.” For me, ice cream is the temptress.

I did the deed from a position of strength. I had just eaten so I wasn’t hungry. I was thinking about creating a Safe Zone so I was committed to throwing away the ice cream even though I had already paid for it and I knew I would really want to eat it later.

Tossing a perfectly good gallon of ice cream into the trash was really hard! But it paid off. Later that night, when I was looking for a snack and I would have normally made a big bowl of ice cream, the ice cream wasn’t there so I didn’t eat it.

You might be asking why I didn't keep the ice cream and use Joyful Eating to joyfully eat just one or two bites? Excellent question. That just doesn’t work for me with ice cream. I know I can’t control my ice cream eating so I know I have to be extreme and keep it out of the house.

From time to time I think I’m over my ice cream problem and I buy some, thinking I’ll control myself. But I don’t. I eat way too much of it. So I go extreme on this strategy and just don’t have ice cream around. I really wish I could handle it differently, but I can’t. It’s not worth the risk.