If you’ve ever heard the advice, “Wait 20 minutes before you take a second helping, to see if you’re really still hungry,” now you know why it works. Whenever you make a big deposit or withdrawal from your body budget—eating, exercising, injuring yourself—you might have to wait for your brain to catch up. Marathon runners learn this; they feel fatigue early in the race when their body budget is still solvent, so they keep running until the unpleasant feeling goes away. They ignore the affective realism that insists they’re out of energy.52 Take a moment and consider what this means for your
...more