NY Times: Willpower as depletable resource
Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2012 7:47 pm
More validation of some basic everyday systems tenets:
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/sunda ... ref=health
Reinhard
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/sunda ... ref=health
What surprises me is that the word habit doesn't come up once in the article. As we EDSers know, it's the ultimate prop/stretcher for willpower.Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long...
They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.
The result is “ego depletion,†as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.
Reinhard