Willpower is for Losers

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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.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 83 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/acp_rdit šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 10 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

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.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 19 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/[deleted] šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 10 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

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.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 15 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/SmashPingu šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 10 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

This channel has pretty good content

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 7 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/Garrick17 šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 10 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

Thank you, this was helpful.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 2 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/xXTHEMVGXx1 šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 10 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

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 wonā€™t get you very far but starting at 90 and building muscle up will get you there.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 1 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/[deleted] šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 11 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies

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.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 1 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/JIVEprinting šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Jul 12 2020 šŸ—«︎ replies
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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 ā€œCanā€™t you just resist playing?ā€ "I'm listening, and it says: I'm a piece of crap." Whatā€™s funny is I actually saw this thing on Shark Tank a while back and had the same reaction - "I think Iā€™ll save my money and not eat the cookies." This video is not an advertisement for this, but it begs an interesting question. Whatā€™s the difference between successfully resisting a temptation and just not having a temptation? Maybe youā€™ve 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: ā€œIā€™m going to leave the room. If you donā€™t 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 didnā€™t eat it, I think youā€™d agree theyā€™re 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 itā€™s 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 hadnā€™t 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 couldnā€™t 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 ā€œego 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. Itā€™s going to be at least a little harder to focus on your work if youā€™re on a diet and your friend is baking pies and cookies. Or itā€™ll be hard to study if itā€™s 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. Letā€™s 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 hereā€™s whatā€™s 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 Whatā€™s 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 didnā€™t have to use self-control were more successful. So the difference between me and successful actor Tom Cruise is that while Iā€™m figuring out how to resist the temptation to play video games, he would just throw them away. Since Iā€™ve been working at home most of the time lately, playing Smash Brothers is always an option. Because that option is always there, Iā€™m a little distracted by it. Iā€™ll be a bit tired from reading papers or getting frustrated because I canā€™t think of what to write next and then Iā€™ll be bargaining with myself like OK Iā€™ll 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 ā€œwillpower energy,ā€ just being tempted to play is at least distracting me. This lowers my focus and worsens my productivity even though Iā€™m not actually playing. Work by Glenn Wilson of Gresham College has found that when youā€™re 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 brainā€™s performance. In James Clearā€™s book Atomic Habits, he explains there is a four part habit cycle. The cue, craving, response and reward. First thereā€™s the cue. Letā€™s say youā€™re at the office, itā€™s 10:30 A.M., youā€™re 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. Letā€™s say you start sleeping properly. 10:30 rolls around, but youā€™re awake and alert so thereā€™s no cue for coffee. Or letā€™s say youā€™re at the office, you feel tired but you respond to the cue differently - you take a walk instead of coffee. Or letā€™s say you start drinking decaf coffee - you respond to your craving by grabbing a cup of coffee, but it doesnā€™t 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 canā€™t see them or donā€™t buy them. If youā€™re 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 ā€œā€¦ 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 didnā€™t rely so much on brute willpower. Similarly, whatā€™s 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? Whatā€™s 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 brainā€™s 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 Iā€™m more relaxed and more focused. I would have thought I would still want to play the game but just be annoyed that itā€™s stuck in the box, but oddly enough I just forget about it. Another thing Iā€™ve been using is this app for mac called Self Control. You just add websites you donā€™t want to be able to access to a list and then you canā€™t 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 donā€™t want to make harder or simply delete them - Use less willpower, not more.
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Channel: What I've Learned
Views: 2,081,617
Rating: 4.9324446 out of 5
Keywords: willpower is for losers, what ive learned, willpower doesn't work, willpower is a muscle, ego depletion, how to increase willpower, self improvement, willpower, how to break bad habits, habits, science, psychology, bad habits, how to improve willpower, build willpower, increase willpower, willpower doesnā€™t work, atomic habits, self discipline, how to build good habits, self control, how to focus, distracted, how to build self discipline, personal development, dopamine detox
Id: k2Wcu6aGyz8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)
Published: Mon Jun 15 2020
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