Willpower: A Game Of Strategy : NPR.
I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
- Mae West
There’s a lot of talk about the notions of “willpower” and “discipline” and “focus” and the like when discussing Discipline Priests diet and fitness routines. But what is it? How does it work?
One psychology professor at Columbia University, Walter Mischel, has done some pretty interesting research into the notion of willpower over the last several decades, and has come up with two main strategies for improving our resistance to temptation.
First, just distract yourself from the object of temptation — focus on something, anything else.
Distraction, says Mischel, is actually a perfectly respectable away of exerting willpower. You simply shift your attention away whenever temptation crops up.
Secondly, we can modify the way in which we think about the temptation itself. Rather than focus on how moist and delicious the cake is, we should, instead focus on the fact that it’s a lie, not to mention the whole “guarded by laser-toting robot guardians” thing.
So, for example, to help the children resist the treat, before leaving the room Mischel told the kids to imagine the treat in front of them differently. “I told them to think about those marshmallows as if they were just cotton puffs, or clouds. Those instructions to the 4-year-old had a dramatic effect on her ability to wait for the thing that she couldn’t wait for before.”
And the dynamic is identical in adults, he says. By refocusing thinking on, for example, the long-term consequences of giving in, it becomes easier to resist an impulse.
For some folks, this latter approach comes more easily than others. For instance, thinking about the calories (and the attendant effort to get rid of them) instead of the immediate yum factor of a particular food might work very well for some of us, but not as well for other folks. It’s a bit of trial and error to discover which approach, or combination of them, works best — not unlike learning a new map, or optimizing a spell rotation, or getting one’s desktop icons arrayed just so.
Besides, how can you not love a study called The Marshmallow Test?
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