Sunday, September 24, 2017

Apparently willpower wears out from even smallest decision-making

And vice-versa: worn out willpower affects thinking and decision making. People who had to exercise willpower by not eating the freshly baked cookies sitting in front of them, performed worse on puzzle-solving as opposed to people who were allowed to eat the cookies.  Therefore don't try to make important decisions or solve problems after lunch, during which you forced yourself to eat a salad, while you were craving a burger and a cheesecake the whole time. Ha, ha. Another study showed that people did poorly on math tests after shopping.

When you go through your daily emails, you have to quickly make a decision whether to open and read or delete. A process of checking emails exhausts you more than you know. It wears out your willpower, which might lead to overeating or drinking or having a cigarette. Try to limit the time you check email and to unsubscribe from as many things as possible. Like, for instance, every time I see the Learn Tango Meetup I keep thinking, that I might want to do that some time, so I just delete the invitation for tomorrow. A week later I get another invitation, and again I spend a second or two thinking that I might want to do that, but not now. So I delete the email. A vicious cycle! What I should do is simply cancel all the notifications like that. If I had an urge to go learn Tango, I'd just go to Meetup site and see when the next lesson is. But the chances are, since I've been deleting the invitation for months, I probably won't. Eliminating constant invitations to do things and reducing my daily emails numbers from 50 to 10 would help to conserve my willpower, which might mean having enough of it not to run out and get a cheesecake and a caramel latte.

It seems that the more you can arrange your day so that everything is done automatically as a routine, so you don't have to make any decisions, the more willpower you'll have, and the better your decisions will be when you do have to make them.


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