

How to strengthen willpower - rantfoil
http://www.inneridea.com/library/how-to-strengthen-willpower-part-1

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kilian
According to the article, glucose is (pretty much) directly responsible to our
level of willpower. This surprised me because the less sugar (in any form) I
take, the more willpower I seem to have (and the generally better I feel).

Does anyone have willpower 'mind-hacks' they're willing to share? I find the
hardest thing is to just get started, after that everything's easy.

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arohner
Remember that your body's reaction to sugar is not simple. Eating refined
sugar causes a spike and then crash in your blood sugar, while eating complex
carbs and "healthy stuff" generally releases energy slower, and doesn't cause
your body to freak out. Maybe your lowered willpower occurred during the crash
phase?

As far as willpower, try studying a martial art. I studied for 10 years, and
taught for 6 of those. Best case, you want a martial art that is both a
contact art, and also does the "meditation" side of things.

Aside from regular exercise, a good martial art will teach you a lot of mental
conditioning. Meditation for stress relief, breathing regularly while on an
adrenaline high, ignoring pain, and thinking your way out of a stressful
situation, rather than letting the reptilian part of your brain take over.

~~~
kilian
I have a blue belt in Judo. What I learned from it is that if you're small and
don't weight a lot, people toss you around and you will never get an ippon ;)

That being said, you give solid advice. Studying a martial art definitely
gives you more willpower.

~~~
arohner
The art I taught / studied worked in all the major areas, striking, wrestling
/ judo, ground, etc. What I found is there is an exchange rate between skill
and physical ability, and the rate is different for each major skill.

Imagine one smaller person, and one larger person. How much more skill does
the smaller person need to defeat the larger person, in a striking art? How
much more skill does the smaller person need in wrestling? In general,
wrestling and ground have a more expensive exchange rate, because size and
strength are larger factors.

You can defeat larger people, you'll just need to be more skilled.

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jongraehl
> Does this mean we should be giving ourselves sugar every time we want to
> exert some self-control? Clearly, that would be a short-sighted strategy.

Maybe if you're only concerned with use of willpower to limit caloric intake.
Otherwise, it sounds like an awesome strategy.

And where's the evidence that willpower is trainable as promised in the intro?
I already knew that making choices at all (let alone difficult ones) depletes
resources in my body and temporarily dulls my physical and mental capacities.
I'd like some science that suggests how, and how much, I can expand my battery
or lower the rate at which making decisions depletes it.

~~~
lotharbot
_"where's the evidence that willpower is trainable as promised in the intro?"_

In the second half of the article (linked at the bottom of the first half),
they describe having people exert willpower in some small area over the course
of a long study, and found that by the end of the study, they also ate better,
exercised more, and reduced tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine consumption. This
suggests that exercising willpower is effective for building it.

Without knowing more details, I can't tell you how solid that science is. But
it does suggest an experiment you can do yourself: consciously exercise
willpower in some small area, while tracking various habits that don't
directly relate to that area. See if your willpower improves over time.

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chasingsparks
There has been a lot of this recently:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661984>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848839>

...and some others, one of which sited the same papers (but i cant remember
post title.)

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dbz
I also learned that willpower was a limited resource. The article also states
this _fact_.

However, the article suggests training WP by using it all up. I don't see the
point of an article which could have been summed up _easily_ in a paragraph.

~~~
JoelPM
Reasons for taking a paragraph and expanding it into an article:

1) SEO 2) Increased mind-share authority for the brand (real-life PageRank) 3)
Revenue (Create enough material for two articles so you can make the first one
free and get people to sign up for the newsletter/review/magazine/etc)

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albemuth
So if your weakness is not being able to cut on sugar intake you're pretty
much screwed...

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Daniel_Newby
I am not impressed. The creation of glucose by the liver, gluconeogenesis, is
strongly controlled by epinephrine (adrenaline), the same hormone that cranks
up the heart rate. Thus it is not surprising to find heart rate variability
changes simultaneously with glucose changes.

