Chocolate Chip Cookies and the Secret to Will-Power


If you run up a long steep incline, it doesn’t take very long before you burn through the energy stored in your muscles and find your legs turning to rubber.  We learn this at a relatively early age, and as a result, some of us make it a habit to avoid running up steep inclines.

What you might not realize is that this exhaustion, this depletion of fuel, happens in the exact same way when you exert yourself mentally.

Your brain, like your muscles, runs on glucose. Give your brain a mental workout and your ability to focus, or demonstrate what we call ‘will power’, is spent as well.

This was proven out in a well-known experiment done by psychology Professor Roy Baumeister and his team at Florida State University. They conducted a test where people where randomly assigned to eat either radishes or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The radish eaters were instructed to resist eating the cookies. In this case, the noble radish eaters were able to exert enough will power to avoid the cookies 100% of the time.

Both groups were then presented with a series of problems that required extreme eye and hand coordination. The radish eaters gave up noticeably sooner — their focus was about 10% shorter.

In this and in other experiments, Baumeister was able to show that the more often and more recently you resist a desire, the less likely you’re able to complete the next tough task that comes along. This might explain why you were able not to eat those cookies your workmate brought in at lunchtime, only to find yourself with no energy to scrub the bathroom that evening.

Interestingly, will power seems to work just like your leg muscles when you tackle a hill. At some point you run out of gas. And you only possess one store of glucose that both your brain and body share in common.

Luckily people can choose to conserve their glucose and hang onto some will power, and so for this reason we are not necessarily reduced to mush after a series of extremely temping situations.

Not only that but one can build their will power by practicing restraint in four key areas: thought, impulse, feeling control and task performance. The muscle analogy holds up, the more you exercise your will power the better you become at resisting whatever temptation might befall you.

It’s therefore not surprising to discover that the ability to demonstrate will power along with intelligence are the only two reliable predictors about a person’s success measured across a variety of areas including, relationship, happiness, and income generation.

 Editors note; don’t try running up a hill with a quart of Hagan Dass in your hand; none of us have enough reserve glucose to pull that one off, not even the most sanctimonious  radish eaters...

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...
Read more

The Top One Quality of True Leaders

Image
“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask. This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader. Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader. If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts. In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of...
Read more