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February 22 - March 8, 2020
Dvorak and Wang argue that the modern human brain may still be using blood sugar levels as a sign of scarcity or abundance in the environment.
when your blood sugar drops, your brain will still favor short-term thinking and impulsive behavior.
Most psychologists and nutritionists recommend a low-glycemic diet—that is, one that helps you keep your blood sugar steady.
Low-glycemic foods include lean proteins, nuts and beans, high-fiber grains and cereals, and most fruits and vegetables—basically, food that looks like its natural state and doesn’t have a ton of added sugar, fat, and chemicals.
Hill had proposed that exercise fatigue might be caused not by muscle failure, but by an overprotective monitor in the brain that wanted to prevent exhaustion.
Physical exhaustion was a trick played on the body by the mind.
Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body—we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are.
The widely observed scientific finding that self-control is limited may reflect people’s beliefs about willpower, not their true physical and mental limits.
we often have more willpower than we believe we do.
All too often, we use the first feeling of fatigue as a reason to skip exercise, snap at our spouses, procrastinate a little longer, or order a pizza instead of cooking a healthy meal.
When your willpower is running low, find renewed strength by tapping into your want power.
If you’re trying to change a behavior to please someone else or be the right kind of person, see if there is another “want” that holds more power for you.
Behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein have argued persuasively for “choice architecture,” systems that make it easier for people to make good decisions consistent with their values and goals.
If we want to strengthen self-control, we may need to think about how we can best support the most exhausted version of ourselves—and not count on an ideal version of ourselves to show up and save the day.
Self-control is like a muscle. It gets tired from use, but regular exercise makes it stronger.
It’s just human nature—we resist rules imposed by others for our own good.
Progress can be motivating, and even inspire future self-control, but only if you view your actions as evidence that you are committed to your goal.
you need to look at what you have done and conclude that you must really care about your goal, so much so that you want to do even more to reach it.
Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good.
We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.
Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behavior tomorrow? What effect does this have on your self-control today?
Our optimism about the future extends not just to our own choices, but to how easy it will be to do what we say we will do. Psychologists have shown that we wrongly predict we will have much more free time in the future than we do today.
We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today.
When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself.
So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?”
Oreo cookies labeled “organic” are judged to have fewer calories than regular Oreos, and are perceived as more appropriate to eat every day.
We need to feel like the kind of person who wants to do the right thing.
Our whole world is full of stimuli—from restaurant menus and catalogs to lottery tickets and television ads—that can turn us into the human version of Olds and Milner’s rat chasing the promise of happiness.
In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire.
Evolution doesn’t give a damn about happiness itself, but will use the promise of happiness to keep us struggling to stay alive.
This is a great instinct if you live in an environment where food is scarce. But when you live in a world where food is not only widely available but also specifically engineered to maximize your dopamine response, following every burst of dopamine is a recipe for obesity, not longevity.
now we have Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and text messaging—the modern equivalent of psychiatrist Robert Heath’s self-stimulating devices.
It’s as if our cell phones, BlackBerrys, and laptops have a direct line into our brains, giving us constant jolts of dopamine. There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology.
We are driven to chase pleasure, but often at the cost of our well-being. When dopamine puts our brains on a reward-seeking mission, we become the most risk-taking, impulsive, and out-of-control version of ourselves.
Do you know who has figured this out? People who want your money.
Although we live in a world engineered to make us want, we can—just by paying attention—start to see through some of it.
We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks.
If there’s something you’ve been putting off because it’s so unpleasant, can you motivate yourself by linking it to something that gets your dopamine neurons firing?
WE MISTAKE THE PROMISE OF REWARD FOR HAPPINESS
The promise of reward is so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy, and consume things that bring us more misery than satisfaction.
when people pay close attention to the experience of their false rewards, the magical spell wears off.
you force your brain to reconcile what it expects from a reward—happiness, bliss, satisfaction, an end to sadness or stress—with what it actually experiences, your brain will eventually adjust its expectations.
While we get into trouble when we mistake wanting for happiness, the solution is not to eliminate wanting. A life without wants may not require as much self-control—but it’s also not a life worth living.
When our reward system is quiet, the result isn’t so much total contentment as it is apathy.
If we are to have any self-control, we need to separate the real rewards that give our lives meaning from the false rewards that keep us distracted and addicted.
In the end, desire is neither good nor bad—what matters is where we let it point us, and whether we have the wisdom to know when to follow.
If we want to avoid such stress-induced willpower failures, we’ll need to find a way to feel better that doesn’t require turning to temptation. We’ll also need to give up the self-control strategies—like guilt and self-criticism—that only make us feel worse.
The brain, it turns out, is especially susceptible to temptation when we’re feeling bad.
whenever you are under stress, your brain is going to point you toward whatever it thinks will make you happy.
Binge-eaters who feel ashamed of their weight and lack of control around food turn to—what else?—more food to fix their feelings.
