

New Year’s Resolutions and the Science of Willpower - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/new-years-resolutions-and-the-science-of-willpower

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zeidrich
I don't really care for this article. The link that they provided was on how
exercising your willpower increases overall self control is an abstract for a
paper about how people whose "self-regulatory resources were experimentally
bolstered via a 2-week training regimen" are less likely to commit intimate
partner violence.

The problem I have with that is that it doesn't, at least in the abstract,
talk about what the training regimen was. The blog post it implies that it's
caused by constantly depleting your willpower.

I disagree with the conclusions drawn though. I do agree that you can train
your capacity for willpower, but I don't think that a new years resolution is
a good way to do it.

The reason I disagree is that there's a lot of competing factors. When you
exercise a muscle, say you are running, your ability to run is lower to start
with. You run, you get tired, you rest. You're sore for a couple of days, and
then you go back out and run again when you've recovered. You do this a few
times a week and in a few months you're able to run much further. In a few
years running isn't a burden.

On the other hand, when you exercise willpower, you utilize it, you get tired,
and then what? Now your willpower is exhausted. Say you are avoiding alcohol,
and you really enjoy drinking, maybe you're even an alcoholic. You constantly
crave it, and you avoid it, but you eventually exhaust your willpower. Then
what? If this were running, you would rest. But this is a resolution, you
can't give in and drink, otherwise you're breaking your resolution. So you
keep avoiding it, pushing yourself to do that. That builds stress, and stress
is bad in this case. Stress works doubly against you because it starts to push
you to make irrational decisions. But just say you continue to avoid it. You
manage to do so, but at the cost of a lot of stress the whole time its
happening. If you do break the resolution there's all sorts of other things
that happen with your reward valuation and memory that make it hard to want to
try it again. You've now tried and failed to stop, and the next time you want
to try, you'll remember the failure, and feel stress, which will make you more
prone to irrational behavior. There's also self-image issues.

You maybe end up changing your behavior as there's extinction processes when
it comes to habits, and you will have developed coping mechanisms. But a
question is whether your overall willpower has improved. That's hard to say.

When you run, if you continue to run, and then continue to run even more, and
then hook yourself up to a machine that stimulates your muscles when they
eventually give up, you aren't really helping build those muscles. They are
constantly working, they are getting damaged, they are not resting and
rebuilding.

But lets think about something less of an addiction, and more like the cotton
candy example. The problem with a resolution to avoid cotton candy is that
it's trivial and meaningless. You're not exhausting anything. It's like saying
your running regimen is running for 25 seconds whenever you hear Rick Astley
on the radio. Sure, the occasion when you do happen to hear him, you run, but
it's not strenuous or common enough to help at all.

I do train my willpower. I do it not through something like a resolution, but
rather through every day things. For instance, recently I played a video game,
Might and Magic 1. A large part of that game is mapping. It's something quite
enjoyable when I have the willpower, but it is fiddly the way I was doing it,
(I was using mspaint and doing it pixel by pixel.) I can tell when I run out
of willpower because I stop being willing to do it, I start to take shortcuts,
I start to get frustrated. I push myself hard to do that, and then I rest. I
do that in the evening, and I work during the day. I do my normal work during
the day, and that exhausts some willpower, and then if I still have it left
over, I push it hard again at night. That game was just an example, but I do
many different things to the same end. The point is that it's intentional, and
I do it with awareness of how I'm feeling.

The big thing is, I'm aware of how hard I'm pushing it, and I stop without
feeling guilty. The problem with a resolution is it's harder to exercise that
resolution when you want to (I'm going to not eat rice so hard right now!) and
that you can't stop exercising it when you need a rest without breaking your
resolution.

I think the hardest part about training willpower is knowing when to relax it.

