It’s been called many things: incontinence, procrastination, weakness-of-will, and akrasia. Akrasia is a mystery: you know what to do, you know it’s good, but you just can’t seem to get yourself to do it.

Normally you expect your actions to follow your intentions. You intend to raise your arm, and it rises. The experience of akrasia reveals that there’s a gap. You intend to start your work, and you freeze. You argue with yourself. You do anything except the thing you intended to do.

It’s natural to be confused, but you can’t leave it a mystery. If you habitually fail to follow your best intentions, other people will develop contempt for you and you will develop contempt for yourself. How can this gap be crossed?

First off, akrasia is not just a lack of willpower, it’s a process. What decides whether your willpower belongs to your best intentions or your worst? Can you really say your best intentions always win, and if not, why? Let’s dissect the process of akrasia and label its parts.

The anatomy of akrasia is the same whether it’s eating healthy, exercising, starting a project, having a difficult conversation, taking time to relax, or not getting angry. For these failures to matter in life, they happen repeatedly. They are the default. The difficulty of akrasia comes from the power of habit.

Akrasia comes in two broad flavors: active–doing something wrong, passive–not doing something right. Some people, the impulsive kind, who think too little, tend to have a hard time stopping but find it easier to act. Other people, the anxious kind, who think too much, find it easy to stop but hard to act. Which one are you?

We’ll use two example activities: stopping alcohol, and starting working out.

It all begins with a decision to do something differently: “In this situation I will do X instead of Y from now on.” Note: This isn’t an action at all! All this does is prime your memory for when the situation does arise. A decision is nothing but a memory. The real action is what you do in the moment.

So the situation arises: somebody offers you a drink, and you take it without remembering that you’re breaking your resolution. You wake up and start texting in your bed instead of going to the gym. You revert back to habit without noticing. This is the first failure: forgetting.

Let’s say you do remember your decision. Now comes the moment of conflict: you have two contradictory intentions in your mind. You have the habitual intention to drink fighting against your remembered resolution to stop. Your intention to work out is fighting against resistance to getting up. You will experience internal arguing, and if the conflict lasts more than a second, you will feel momentarily frozen as factions within you fight it out.

There are factors, past and present, which help your best intentions win: if you’ve told everyone you know that you’re quitting alcohol (context), if you’re feeling calm and clear (state of mind), if you remember that mountain you want to climb (thoughts).

Knowing how to win mental conflicts is key: you can affect the factors of conflict through preparation, adjusting your mental state, and tactics. If you lack skill or act complacent, your best intentions will lose. Your mind slides towards the habitual intention, until finally you give in. Conflict is replaced by consensus and you revert to habit. As you’re drinking, or sitting in bed, your resolution to change will appear again, and this time you’ll actually regard it as a nuisance. At this point you’ve identified with your old habitual intentions. That’s the second failure: siding with your old intentions.

Let’s say you actually win this conflict. The habitual urge will come up repeatedly. If you get tired or discouraged, you will eventually lose. This is the third failure: persistence.

If you don’t fail in these three ways, then you do the right thing every time, and eventually the winds of habit turn to favor you. If you’re generally in the habit of winning mental conflicts for your best intentions, you develop confidence in yourself. You get to see where your best intentions take you. The skill you develop in doing this applies to every kind of action. If you see akrasia as a process, you’ll see that every instance of akrasia is a problem to be solved, and that there is always a way.