Why Willpower Matters. People who have better control of
their attention, emotions and actions, are better off in almost any way you
look at it. They are happier in their friendships, their marriage lasts longer,
and they make more money and go further in their careers. With willpower we can
accomplish the list of goals we often struggle to get done. That might be
something like quitting smoking, starting a business or something as simple as
cleaning your room. Willpower is a general strength that improves everything
along with it. In fact, willpower is a better predictor of how well you do in
school or how successful you are at work, than intelligence.
If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad
place to start. It has to be noted that willpower is like a battery. When used,
it slowly gets depleted. You can see that on college campuses, during the final
exam period. Students fill their heads with facts and formulas, pull all fighters,
and push themselves to study hard. However studies show that these efforts come
at a cost. During the final exams, many students seem to lose the capacity to
control anything other than their study habits. They seem to smoke more
cigarettes and have more emotional outbursts. They skip showering and rarely
make an effort to change clothes. Dear god, they even stop flossing. People who
use their willpower seem to run out of it. And that's not all. Trying to
control your temper, stick to a budget, or refusing that slice of cake, all draw
from the same source of strength. This means that if you turn down the dessert,
you'll be more likely to get angry. And if you manage to control your anger,
you're more likely to overspend and not stick to your budget. Scary!!! But if
willpower is limited, are we doomed to fail at our goals? Luckily there are
things you can do to overcome your willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control.
Willpower is the highest in the morning and slowly degrades over the course of
the day, almost like your phone battery.
However, if you want your willpower to be full in the
morning, you need to get some quality sleep first. If you are surviving on less
than six hours of sleep a night, there's a good chance you don't even remember
what it's like to have your full willpower. Being sleep deprived makes you more
susceptible to stress, cravings and giving in to temptation. So 7 to 9 hours of
sleep per night, is what you should be getting to get your willpower fully
recharged. One of the reasons sleep is critical for self-control, is because
your brain requires blood glucose as a fuel. Especially the front part of the
brain, the prefrontal cortex. This brain region has been associated in
controlling behavior and decision making. When we don't get enough sleep, our
prefrontal cortex get sluggish and less responsive. It's almost the same as
being drunk. And if you ever had too much to drink you know you don't make the
wisest decisions. However, the brain scans showed that when the sleep deprived
participants catch a better night’s sleep, they no longer show signs of
prefrontal cortex impairment. So while lack of sleep can impair the prefrontal
cortex, there's a way to actually increase its size and efficiency. The answer
is slow breathing meditation.
People, who meditate just 10 minutes a day, build gray
matter in their prefrontal cortex and after a couple of months their brains
look different. But why slow breathing? The reason is it increases our heart
rate variability. Heart rate variability is a variation in the time interval
between heartbeats. To exert self-control, the heart rate has to go down, but
the variability needs to go up. Studies have shown, heart rate variability
starts increasing as the breathing rate drops below 12 breaths per minute. For
best results, you have to slow down breathing to 4 to 6 breaths. It's slower
than you normally breathe, but it's not too difficult with a little bit of
practice. Slowing the breath down helps shift the brain and body from a state
of stress to relaxed self-control mode.
A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in
control, and capable of handling your challenges. If you're on a diet it's a
good idea to practice slowing down your breath, before you start looking at
that slice of cake. In one study, where they were experimenting with a new
treatment for enhancing self-control, two researchers were stunned by their
findings. While they had hoped for positive results, nobody predicted how
effective the treatment's effects would be. After just two months of treatment,
the participants in the study showed improvements in attention and ability to
ignore distractions. They also reduced their smoking, drinking and caffeine
intake - despite the fact that nobody had asked them to. They were eating less
junk food and more healthy food. They were spending less time watching
television and more time studying. They were saving money and spending less on
impulsive purchases. What is this miracle drug and where can I get a
prescription? The intervention wasn't a drug at all.
The willpower miracle was physical exercise. The participants,
who never exercised regularly before the intervention, were given free
membership to a gym and encouraged to make good use of it. They exercised an
average of just one time per week for the first month, but were up to three
times per week by the end of the two month study. The researchers didn't ask
them to make any changes in their lives, and yet the exercise program improved self-control
in ALL aspects of their lives. Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a
wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. It also increases
heart rate variability, which we talked about earlier. If you tell yourself
that you are too tired to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something
that restores your energy and willpower, not drains it. Now let's say you
decide to quit smoking. Everything is going great for a week or so, but then
you suddenly find yourself with a cigarette in your hand. Maybe you felt
stressed, maybe you just weren't thinking, who knows. It's best to be self-critical
about it, right?
Feeling guilty that you lit that cigarette, will surely
remind you not to do it next time. Well the problem is that guilt is driving
people back to doing the very thing they want to avoid. After all, what do you
do when you feel bad? You do something that reduces the bad feeling. Usually
that's the very thing that you want to quit, so it's no wonder alcoholics want another
drink, smokers want to light a cigarette and dieters want to eat another slice
of cake. Remember, everyone is bound to fail sooner or later, so it's important
how we respond to this slight setback. Rather than telling yourself things
like, "Why did I do that again? I'm so stupid. I'm never going to
change." Start talking to yourself in a second person, as if you were
talking and giving advice to a good friend. Basically say to yourself,
"You know what? This is the process of change. Sometimes we fall off the
wagon. Everyone is imperfect." So after a willpower failure, it's better
to encourage yourself, rather than criticize. After all you're only human.
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