A couple days ago I proudly showed my girlfriend
this expensive piece of tupperware I got. You put something in it, set a timer and then
it stays locked until the time runs out. I told her I had been playing this video game
too much and now I can keep myself from playing by putting the game in this 60 dollar piece
of plastic. She was a little concerned, asking me āCanāt
you just resist playing?ā "I'm listening, and it says: I'm a piece of
crap." Whatās funny is I actually saw this thing
on Shark Tank a while back and had the same reaction - "I think Iāll save my money and
not eat the cookies." This video is not an advertisement for this,
but it begs an interesting question. Whatās the difference between successfully
resisting a temptation and just not having a temptation? Maybe youāve heard of the Stanford Marshmallow
experiment. Researchers thought torturing kids would be
fun, so they sat kids down in front of a marshmallow and an told them: āIām going to leave
the room. If you donāt eat the marshmallow, you'll
get another one when I come back so you'll get to have two.ā And then they left and watched the kids with
a hidden camera for about 10 minutes. The kids stared at the marshmallow, held it
in their hands, sniffed it and even snuck a lick or two. Maybe unsurprisingly only 1/3rd of the kids
could resist the marshmallow long enough for the person got back and then get the second
marshmallow. "This little girl was interesting. She ate the inside of the marshmallow. She wanted us to think that she had not eaten
it so she would get two, but she ate it!" Whether the kids did or didnāt eat it, I
think youād agree theyāre clearly exerting effort to resist the marshmallow. A single marshmallow is an easy task for adults,
but we still use effort to resist things. An alcoholic resisting a fully stocked mini
fridge in his hotel room uses a lot of effort, and then others would use far less effort
to resist watching another episode of a good series when itās time to go to bed. So, is there a consequence of resisting temptations
even if you succeed? A famous experiment by Roy Baumeister and
colleagues had 67 participants who hadnāt eaten for at least 3 hours walk into a room
filled with the aroma of just baked chocolate chip cookies. They sit down to a table with two bowls - one
filled with warm gooey chocolate chip cookies and one filled with radishes. Half of the people were told they had to eat
radishes and couldnāt eat the cookies. Afterwards they had the poor radish people
and the lucky cookie people work on a mentally stressing puzzle. The puzzle was actually impossible. The point was to see how long people would
try to do it. The radish people gave up on the puzzle almost
twice as fast. On average they quit more than 10 minutes
faster than the cookie people. The idea is that the radish people were tired
from using their willpower on resisting cookies, so they had less willpower to use on the puzzle. This is just one of almost 200 experiments
that gave credibility to the concept of āego depletionā - the idea that willpower draws
on a limited stock of energy, willpower is like a muscle - you can tire it out. So if you use a bunch of willpower on one
thing, then you have less willpower to use later on resisting temptations, staying focused
or even making good decisions. Now this idea was challenged by a 2015 paper,
but a more recent 2018 paper said Yes Ego depeltion is a thing, some methods are just
effective for testing it and some are not. In any case, I think we intuitively know that
temptations are distracting. Itās going to be at least a little harder
to focus on your work if youāre on a diet and your friend is baking pies and cookies. Or itāll be hard to study if itās Friday
night and your friends keep texting you to come to a party. An experiment from a 2012 study in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology had 205 adults wear a beeper that would ask them randomly
throughout the day whether they were resisting a desire, how strong that desire was, and
whether they were successful in resisting or not. They then took a look at the data of nearly
8000 desire reports and found that the more desires the person had resisted, the more
likely they were to give into future desires. This kinda makes sense. Letās say you have a long day work. Unless you really like your job, for the most
part you are resisting desires. Resisting the desire to skip the 10AM meeting,
or the desire to play games on your phone instead of actually working, or the desire
to take an extra long lunch break or resisting the desire to just go home early. We might say that using all that willpower
throughout the day then makes it harder to resist the desire to watch Netflix on the
couch instead of going to the gym. But hereās whatās interesting. In the study, the people who were best at
self-control and said they were good at resisting temptations, they actually reported experiencing
fewer temptations throughout the study. That is the diligent people with high self
control apparently were just using less self control. In a study titled Whatās so great about
Self Control, Marina Milyavskaya and Michael Inzlicht gathered data from 159 University
students and found that those exerting more self-control were not more successful in achieving
their goals. It was the people who planned their life so
they didnāt have to use self-control were more successful. So the difference between me and successful
actor Tom Cruise is that while Iām figuring out how to resist the temptation to play video
games, he would just throw them away. Since Iāve been working at home most of
the time lately, playing Smash Brothers is always an option. Because that option is always there, Iām
a little distracted by it. Iāll be a bit tired from reading papers
or getting frustrated because I canāt think of what to write next and then Iāll be bargaining
with myself like OK Iāll play for just twenty minutes and then work for an hour ā¦or maybe
play for 10 minutes then 30 imuntes - so regardless of whether or not resisting the temptation
depletes my āwillpower energy,ā just being tempted to play is at least distracting me. This lowers my focus and worsens my productivity
even though Iām not actually playing. Work by Glenn Wilson of Gresham College has
found that when youāre trying to focus on a task, even the simple temptation of an unread
email sitting in your inbox reduces your effective IQ by 10 points. Only being tempted by wanting to check a shiny
new email impairs your brainās performance. In James Clearās book Atomic Habits, he
explains there is a four part habit cycle. The cue, craving, response and reward. First thereās the cue. Letās say youāre at the office, itās
10:30 A.M., youāre a little bored, tired and unfocused. This feeling feeling is a cue for a craving
for coffee. In response to the craving you get up and
get a cup of coffee. You are then rewarded for your behavior with
the energy and the nice taste the coffee provides. James Clear says that a habit will start to
fall apart if one or some of these parts are missing. Letās say you start sleeping properly. 10:30 rolls around, but youāre awake and
alert so thereās no cue for coffee. Or letās say youāre at the office, you
feel tired but you respond to the cue differently - you take a walk instead of coffee. Or letās say you start drinking decaf coffee
- you respond to your craving by grabbing a cup of coffee, but it doesnāt have that
nice caffeine reward. Any of these should help to weaken the habit. Clear says a really effective way for breaking
bad habits is just make the cue weaker or more obscured. If seeing cookies cues a craving to eat cookies,
just put them where you canāt see them or donāt buy them. If youāre trying to focus, just turn your
phone off instead of resisting the temptation to check your phone when you get a notification. Rather than trying to exert more willpower,
you can just strategize or plan better. Going back to the Marshmallow study, they
found that kids who successfully resisted the marshmallow were more successful later
in life. They were more confident, more reliable, less
likely to become obese and even got better SAT scores. But what how did the successful kids do it? Did they just grit their teeth and fearlessly
stare the marshmallow down? Not quite. As reported in one of the original studies
investigating this, the successful kids āā¦ covered their eyes with their handsā¦" so they couldn't
see it, " they talked to themselves, they sang, invented games with their hands and
feetā¦ā They did whatever they could to take their
mind off the marshmallow and didnāt rely so much on brute willpower. Similarly, whatās going to put fattening
foods on your mind more - taking the route home where you walk past the delicious smelling
bakery or taking a different route home? Whatās going to have an alcoholic thinking
about alcohol more? Booking a hotel with a stocked mini fridge
or booking one without? In my last video I talked about how having
so many choices of things to do all the time can cause a persistent feeling of indecision
or uncertainty: Should I do my work or play smash brothers, should I work out or watch
Netflix or do my taxes? Each action provides a reward for a cost. Taxes costs a lot of time and boring decision
making but rewards me no more worries of huge fines. Netflix costs time but rewards me with immediate
enjoyment. From your brainās perspective, the action
that provides the most reward for the cost is not 100% clear. And as I explained last time, this indecisiveness,
this uncertainty can activate the brain in a way generates anxiety and lowers your ability
to focus. So, at least for me, when I remove one of
the choices by locking it in this box- it feels like my brain stops doing all those
calculations and Iām more relaxed and more focused. I would have thought I would still want to
play the game but just be annoyed that itās stuck in the box, but oddly enough I just
forget about it. Another thing Iāve been using is this app
for mac called Self Control. You just add websites you donāt want to
be able to access to a list and then you canāt access them. This too is really effective and helps me
relax and focus with no extra effort spent on resisting watching How to get away with
Murder. We always have tons of choices throughout
the day- should I do this or that or just do this for a little bit and then do that
productive thing? A simple way to reduce that uncertainty and
indecision and stop being distracted by these choices ā¦ is to make the choices you donāt
want to make harder or simply delete them - Use less willpower, not more.
The title is clickbait but the advice is sound. You arrange your life so that you expend your effort on progression and accomplishment. Temptations are a distraction so you minimize them.
At the same time there is something to be said about learning to deal with distractions. Because you may come across situations where you aren't in control of your environment and training to perform under those conditions in "safe" circumstances may also be clutch.
The whole channel is great, found it about 2 years ago when I started my path to self improvement. A lot of what he says is actually useful.
I can only speak for myself, but I've grown quite weary of the video essay videos. What I've found is that YT channels that talk about a variety of topics are just... low substance, exaggerated and they obviously aren't experts on the subject they make the videos about (not that they claim to be).
I found it a lot more enlightening to seek out real experts, like people who lived through or currently perform studies on the subject. In this case of willpower I'd be more inclined to listen to people like Arnold or Goggins. You can tell me ad hominem and that's fair, but it's just my 2 cents.
This channel has pretty good content
Thank you, this was helpful.
Partly true but he left out a key point in multiple of the studies he cited: The people who repeatedly ate the radishes versus the cookies BUILT self control and by the end when faced with another task made to measure self control they significantly out performed their peers who ate cookies and the control. So while there is a lot of truth to this video, you CAN build self control and willpower but starting at lower doses is what works. Trying to bench 225 first try over and over wonāt get you very far but starting at 90 and building muscle up will get you there.
over on the nofap and christian subs, they do talk about this important idea:
willpower should be your last line of defense, not your first.
By installing beneficial habits and avoiding trouble, staying out of degeneracy is mostly automatic. But if you put yourself in the line of fire all the time then your luck or energy will run out eventually.