July 30
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’” (Galatians 5:22-23)
I read a book recently entitled What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam. In it, she discusses willpower and some fascinating research that was done in this area. The following is from her chapter entitled “A Matter of Willpower”:
“New research into that old-fashioned concept of willpower is showing that tasks that require self-discipline are simply easier to do while the day is young. Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has spent his career studying this topic of self-discipline. In one famous experiment, he asked students to fast before coming into the lab. Then they were put in a room, alone, with radishes, chocolate chip cookies, and candy. As Baumeister and science journalist John Tierney write in their 2011 book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, some students could eat what they wanted, and some were assigned to eat only the radishes. Afterward, the participants had to work on unsolvable geometry puzzles. ‘The students who’d been allowed to eat chocolate chip cookies and candy typically worked on the puzzles for about twenty minutes, as did a control group of students who were also hungry but hadn’t been offered food of any kind. The sorely tempted radish eaters, though, gave up in just eight minutes – a huge difference by the standards of laboratory experiments. They’d successfully resisted the temptation of the cookies and the chocolates, but the effort left them with less energy to tackle the puzzles.’
“What Baumeister and his colleagues took from this experiment is that ‘willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse.’ This is a problem because, while we think of our lives in categories like ‘work’ and ‘home,’ the reality is that, as Baumeister told me, ‘You have one energy resource that is used for all kinds of acts for self-control. That includes not just resisting food temptations, but also controlling your thought processes, controlling your emotions, all forms of impulse control, and trying to perform well at your job or other tasks. Even more surprisingly, it is used for decision making, so when you make choices you are (temporarily) using up some of what you need for self-control. Hard thinking, like logical reasoning, also uses it.’ Over the course of a day, dealing with traffic, frustrating bosses, and bickering children, plus – more insidiously – electronic temptations that are as alluring as fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, a person’s supply of willpower is simply used up.
“’There seems to be a general pattern that major self-control failures and other bad decisions occur late in the day,’ says Baumeister. ‘Diets are broken in the evening, not the morning. The majority of implusive crimes are committed after 11:00 p.m. Lapses in drug use, alcohol abuse, sexual misbehavior, gambling excesses, and the like tend to come about late in the day.’”
More about these important findings tomorrow.