Why Willpower Is the Wrong Thing to Blame When the Light Goes

There is one sentence in the MetFix course that I would keep if I had to throw the rest away. It is in module 7, in the section on leptin, and it reads: willpower often fails because the hormonal signals are broken, not because the person is weak. Your brain literally does not know you have enough energy.

I wrote that sentence. Then I kept telling people at the gym that the October slump was a discipline problem. Get up earlier. Want it more. I had the mechanism sitting in my own course notes and I was not applying it to the single most predictable complaint we hear every year.

So this is the long version of that sentence, written for the person who has decided, some time in the last three weeks, that they have gotten lazy.

Earlier this month I wrote about what actually changes when Seattle goes dark: nothing in the chemistry, and almost everything in the schedule wrapped around it. This piece is about what that schedule does to the signals, and why the usual advice is aimed at the wrong organ.

What willpower actually is

Strip the moral language off it and willpower is a brain function. The course names the part: the prefrontal cortex, the area behind your forehead that does planning, restraint and saying no. It is the part that overrides an urge.

Notice what it does not do. It does not generate the urge. The urge arrives from somewhere else, as a report: you are hungry, you are low on fuel, you need something sweet, you need to sit down. The prefrontal cortex receives that report and decides whether to act on it.

That makes discipline an argument. On one side, a report from the body. On the other, a part of the brain deciding whether to believe it. Discipline can win that argument, and it does, many times a day. What it cannot do is check whether the report was true. If the body is sending the wrong report, the prefrontal cortex is arguing with a lie it has no way to see through, and it loses that argument slowly, one evening at a time.

So the useful question is not "how do I argue harder." It is "what is sending the report, and why is it wrong."

The signals the brain is listening to

Four of them do most of the work, and the course spends two modules on them. Here is the short version.

Leptin, the full signal. Fat cells make leptin to tell the brain that energy stores are adequate, and the brain sets your appetite against that report. Leptin resistance follows the same pattern as insulin resistance: when the brain is exposed to a constant high signal, its receptors turn down, the message stops getting through, and the brain concludes that not enough energy is stored. It keeps appetite high. The signal is being sent and the receiver has gone deaf to it. That is where the sentence comes from. The stores are there, and the brain does not know.

Ghrelin, the hungry signal. Ghrelin is the stomach's hunger hormone, and the course's point about it is about timing. It is suppressed while you sleep, and leptin is released while you sleep. Sleep resets the appetite hormones for the next day. The course calls sleep active metabolic reprogramming rather than rest, and this is a good example of why: tomorrow's hunger is set tonight, by a process that only runs while you are out.

Insulin, the storage signal. Insulin is usually described as the hormone that moves glucose into cells, and it is. The course is firm that it is also a storage hormone: when insulin is high, the instruction to the body is store fuel and do not burn it. It has an opposite partner, glucagon, and the two work like a seesaw. Insulin up, storage mode. Glucagon up, burning mode: stored glycogen is released and fat is burned. The seesaw only tips when insulin falls, and insulin only falls when you stop eating for a while. The modern pattern, breakfast through an evening snack, keeps insulin up all day, so glucagon never gets a turn and the fuel stays locked up. When the signal is impaired the course calls it a double trap: glucose uptake is impaired, the storage instruction still works, and burning stays blocked. Whatever is in the tank is not available. So the report that reaches the brain is not "plenty in storage, carry on." It is closer to the opposite.

Cortisol, the emergency signal. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid, which literally means glucose-making steroid. Its job in an emergency is to raise blood glucose: tell the liver to make new glucose, release stored glycogen, and block insulin so the glucose stays in the blood where a running animal could use it. That is sensible if you are being chased. The course's line is that your body cannot tell the difference between a lion and a work deadline, but only one of them involves running. Chronic stress leaves you with high cortisol and high insulin at the same time, two hormones designed to oppose each other, both elevated, pulling in opposite directions. Cortisol also has a daily rhythm: lowest at night, rising before dawn, highest in the morning, falling through the day. That rhythm is one of the things your body clock produces, and your body clock is set by light.

None of these four is a character trait. One comes from fat cells, one from the stomach, one from the pancreas, one from the adrenal glands. The prefrontal cortex gets their reports. It does not write them.

What interferes with them in a Seattle winter

The signals do not have a winter setting. The things that set them do.

The night gets shorter and later. Dark evenings pull everything later: dinner, screens, bed. The night is when the appetite hormones reset, so a short night means an incomplete reset. The course describes what the next day looks like, and it is worth reading slowly, because it is the whole willpower story in three lines. After a short night you are hungrier, because of hormones. You are pulled toward carbohydrate and sugar specifically, because of hormones. And you are less able to resist, because short sleep weakens the prefrontal cortex while making the amygdala, the reactive and emotional part, more active. The research finding the course cites is that sleep-deprived people eat roughly three to five hundred more calories a day, and nobody decides to. Insulin sensitivity is also measurably worse after a single short night; treat that as a direction rather than a precise number. So when you lose the argument with the kitchen at nine o'clock on five hours of sleep, that is not a character result. It is three separate systems voting the same way, and the one system that could have outvoted them is the one the short night turned down.

The light moves. Your clock is set by light, morning light most of all, and the cortisol rhythm rides on that clock. In November you leave home in the dark and come home in the dark, so the morning anchor is weak and arrives late. In the evening the opposite happens. The course notes that melatonin is suppressed by blue light and that metabolism works differently at night than in the day, and a long dark evening is lit almost entirely by screens. The clock gets a weak signal in the morning and a wrong one at night. I am not going to give you a cutoff time. I am pointing at the direction.

Eating spreads across the evening. A dark Seattle evening is long, indoors, and close to the kitchen. Dinner drifts later, the gap between the last bite and bed shrinks, and the snack after dinner becomes a second small dinner. Every one of those keeps insulin up, and insulin up means the seesaw never tips: no glucagon, no burning, storage mode around the clock. I am not going to hand you an eating window either. The course does not need one to make the point. If insulin never falls, the body never gets to the other mode.

The stress is seasonal too. The dark months are year-end months. Reviews, deadlines, travel, family. Cortisol does not read the calendar, but the calendar supplies the lions. The case the course warns about is chronic stress: cortisol high, insulin high, each cancelling the other, blood glucose raised without a bite of food. A short night sits on top of that, because the two tend to arrive together.

Put those four together and look at what happened to the signals. Leptin is being heard less. Ghrelin did not get suppressed. Insulin never fell. Cortisol never fell either. The brain is being told, by four separate reports, that it needs fuel and should keep storing it. Then somebody tells it to be more disciplined.

Why discipline is the wrong organ

Telling someone to be more disciplined aims at the prefrontal cortex. It is a real instruction to a real organ, and it is the one organ in this story that was already working with less, because the short night took it down.

The reports it is being asked to overrule come from everywhere else: fat cells, the stomach, the pancreas, the adrenal glands, and the night's sleep that is supposed to reset them. In a Seattle winter those inputs are exactly what moved. So the advice amounts to this: the one part of your brain that the short night weakened should overrule the three systems the same short night pushed in the same direction, every evening, for four months. That is not a fair fight, and it was never designed to be one. The signals are meant to win. They win in July too. In July they are usually telling the truth.

This is not an excuse. It is a better place to aim. Discipline is real and it still matters. It is the last lever I would reach for now, not the first, because every other lever changes the report the prefrontal cortex is arguing with, and this one only changes how hard it argues.

What to do instead, in the order I would do it

Fix the inputs before judging the output. These are directions, not prescriptions, and there are no numbers in them on purpose.

Protect the night first. The appetite reset happens while you are asleep and nowhere else. Keep the wake time steady even when the evenings are not, and get outside light early, because that is the cheapest way to tell your clock what time it is. Of everything on this list, this is the one that changes tomorrow's hunger before tomorrow starts.

Move, and move after eating when you can. Muscle contraction brings the glucose transporters to the cell surface through a route that does not need insulin at all, which is why the second door works even when the insulin signal is impaired. A walk after a meal sends that glucose into muscle instead of letting it spike in the blood. Put the movement somewhere the weather cannot cancel it. A coached class in a warm, lit room at the same time every week is one version of that. A standing walk with a friend is another.

Give insulin a chance to fall. Eat meals, not an evening. Leave a gap between the last bite and bed. No window, no clock, just a gap, so the seesaw can tip.

Name the stress. You cannot always remove the deadline. You can stop stacking a short night and a long grazing evening on top of it, because those are the two things that turn a deadline into a metabolic event.

Then, and only then, look at discipline. If the night is protected, the movement is on the calendar, the evening has a gap in it and the stress is named, and you are still losing the argument, now it is worth asking about habits and resolve. In my experience it rarely gets that far. The course's two closing principles are the ones I would keep: consistency beats intensity, and every improvement makes the next one easier. Start anywhere.

Check the schedule before you check your character.

What this is not

It is not a claim that eating is never a choice. It is a claim that the choice is made with information, and that the information is the part worth fixing.

It is not a diagnosis of anyone. If you take medication that affects blood sugar, sleep or appetite, or you have a history that makes any of this a medical question, this belongs with your physician, not a gym coach.

And it is not a sales page. The course is free and there is no email gate on it. Modules 7 and 8 are the ones this piece came from, and the ten-question score at edu.metfixseattle.com/score gives you a baseline before you start diagnosing yourself. If you are tired all the time right now and wondering whether that is the season too, that piece covers the engine side of it, and the five levers ranks what moves for what it costs. If you would rather work on your own schedule with a coach next to you, that is what MetFix at the gym is.

The short version

Willpower is a brain function that argues with reports from the body. In a Seattle winter the reports change. A shorter night leaves you hungrier, pulled toward sugar and less able to resist, all at once. Weak morning light and bright evenings drift the clock. A long indoor evening keeps insulin up, so the body never leaves storage mode. Year-end stress adds cortisol on top. The brain is being told, by four separate systems, that it needs fuel. Telling it to be more disciplined aims at the one organ that was already running short.

Fix the night, put movement where the weather cannot reach it, give insulin a gap, name the stress. Then see whether discipline was ever the problem.

• Ravi