Build Your Will Power

Those of us who struggle to resist junk foods or otherwise suffer a lack of will power will be heartened by some good and bad news from neuroscience.

First, the bad news. A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of will power, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others. Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes will power. In a typical experiment on this effect, people who first had to circle every ‘e’ in a long passage gave up sooner when they then had to watch a video of a fixed, boring, scene. The same loss of persistence has been found when people resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, even make the effort to try to impress someone.

Published April 20th, 2008 in Emotional intelligence, Neuroscience by Daniel Goleman

Full Story: http://www.danielgoleman.info/blog/2008/04/20/build-your-will-power/