Weight Training Your Self Discipline Muscles

This article by Douglas T. Kenrick realistically stresses that we can't be trusted. He rattles off some well-known studies showing how ill-disciplined people can be when faced with temptation. Given that other studies, such as Mischel's marshmallows, have shown that having self discipline is one of the major contributors to a person's success, a lack of it must be cause for concern.

I want to dislike the article because the guts of it is that we cannot trust ourselves so rather than try to change ourselves to be more reliable, we need to affect our environment. We need to avoid or prevent the temptations being around us as much as possible in the first place. Kenrick writes mainly about food but it is as true of alcohol, smoking, loser friends and time-wasting as well. So, we shouldn't stock our larders and fridges with sodas, cookies, candy and chips. If we suddenly feel like them and we have to walk to our car to drive to a store, we're less likely to do so. And if these things aren't in our faces, we're less likely to think that we want to. Good luck with that. Avoiding things is always a problem because, ultimately, you can run but you can't hide. You will be confronted with your enemy-items soon enough via TV, billboards, a friend's house, your workplace. What happens then? You go even more overboard.

That stuff just gets you fat and unhealthy which isn't great but what really sucks the success out of your life is the brain-equivalents of soda and candy - time wasters like most TV, most computer games and social networking sites. I'm not trying to get my nag on here. If you're happy vegetating, please do so on your own time and dime but, please, don't whinge about your lack of success.

People who end up happy, healthy, wealthy enough, etc are those who can defer gratification. It's a skill not a natural attribute. You can develop it if you choose to do so and you choose to do so every day as you put in the work, in the same way as a proper weight-training programme can build muscle.

You don't start by throwing around Olympic powerlifting levels of weights. You start small and warm up first to prevent injury and demoralisation. The same goes for building your willpower muscles. One simple but effective technique to is self correcting every time you say, "Yeah" with a, "Yes." It's not that your classier speech will impress people. You're training your mind to notice what it is you're about to do. That's a critical first step in stopping yourself doing it. Give it a go. See how it impacts your thinking and, more importantly, your behaviour. Once you get your 'yeahs' sorted out, then you can work your way up to potato chips and, down the line, big life stuff like your spending, saving and studying habits.

I am so hungry right now. Yeah.

_____