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Willpower - a precious resource

Will and discipline are wildly overrated. Consider this: Ninety-five percent of those who lose weight on a diet regain it, and a significant percentage gain back more than they originally lost.  Twenty-five percent of people abandon New Years resolutions within a week, a full sixty percent within six months.  Even after a heart attack only one in every seven patients makes enduring change to their lifestyle. Are we a race of hopeless goof-offs?  Of course not...but how to explain this seeming inability to do what we know to be right? Something must be getting in the way, intervening between what we know to be the right thing to do, and our actions.  It is, and its called LIFE.

Let me explain.

In 1998 psychologist Roy Baumeister  carried out an experiment.  Hungry volunteers, told they were going to do a taste perception test, were put in two separate groups.  The researchers bought in a tray of freshly baked chocolate chips cookies and a plate of radishes to each group.  One group was told to eat at least two cookies but no radishes, the other two radishes but no cookies.  After only FIVE minutes the researchers removed the food and asked the groups to complete a puzzle that had been rigged so it was impossible. What the researchers were really measuring was how long the subject would persist at the challenge before giving up.  The cookie eaters hung in for an average of nineteen minutes. The radish eaters - a paltry eight.                                                                                       NEXT......