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A couple days ago I proudly showed my girlfriend this expensive piece of tupperware I got.
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You put something in it, set a timer and then it stays locked until the time runs out.
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I told her I had been playing this video game too much and now I can keep myself from playing
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by putting the game in this 60 dollar piece of plastic.
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She was a little concerned, asking me “Can't you just resist playing?”
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"I'm listening, and it says: I'm a piece of crap."
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What's funny is I actually saw this thing on Shark Tank a while back and had the same
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reaction - "I think I'll save my money and not eat the cookies."
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This video is not an advertisement for this, but it begs an interesting question.
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What's the difference between successfully resisting a temptation and just not having
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a temptation?
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Maybe you've heard of the Stanford Marshmallow experiment.
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Researchers thought torturing kids would be fun, so they sat kids down in front of a marshmallow
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and an told them: “I'm going to leave the room.
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If you don't eat the marshmallow, you'll get another one when I come back so you'll
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get to have two.”
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And then they left and watched the kids with a hidden camera for about 10 minutes.
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The kids stared at the marshmallow, held it in their hands, sniffed it and even snuck
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a lick or two.
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Maybe unsurprisingly only 1/3rd of the kids could resist the marshmallow long enough for
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the person got back and then get the second marshmallow.
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"This little girl was interesting.
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She ate the inside of the marshmallow.
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She wanted us to think that she had not eaten it so she would get two, but she ate it!"
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Whether the kids did or didn't eat it, I think you'd agree they're clearly exerting
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effort to resist the marshmallow.
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A single marshmallow is an easy task for adults, but we still use effort to resist things.
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An alcoholic resisting a fully stocked mini fridge in his hotel room uses a lot of effort,
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and then others would use far less effort to resist watching another episode of a good
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series when it's time to go to bed.
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So, is there a consequence of resisting temptations even if you succeed?
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A famous experiment by Roy Baumeister and colleagues had 67 participants who hadn't
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eaten for at least 3 hours walk into a room filled with the aroma of just baked chocolate
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chip cookies.
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They sit down to a table with two bowls - one filled with warm gooey chocolate chip cookies
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and one filled with radishes.
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Half of the people were told they had to eat radishes and couldn't eat the cookies.
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Afterwards they had the poor radish people and the lucky cookie people work on a mentally
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stressing puzzle.
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The puzzle was actually impossible.
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The point was to see how long people would try to do it.
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The radish people gave up on the puzzle almost twice as fast.
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On average they quit more than 10 minutes faster than the cookie people.
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The idea is that the radish people were tired from using their willpower on resisting cookies,
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so they had less willpower to use on the puzzle.
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This is just one of almost 200 experiments that gave credibility to the concept of “ego
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depletion” - the idea that willpower draws on a limited stock of energy, willpower is
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like a muscle - you can tire it out.
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So if you use a bunch of willpower on one thing, then you have less willpower to use
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later on resisting temptations, staying focused or even making good decisions.
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Now this idea was challenged by a 2015 paper, but a more recent 2018 paper said Yes Ego
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depeltion is a thing, some methods are just effective for testing it and some are not.
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In any case, I think we intuitively know that temptations are distracting.
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It's going to be at least a little harder to focus on your work if you're on a diet
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and your friend is baking pies and cookies.
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Or it'll be hard to study if it's Friday night and your friends keep texting you to
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come to a party.
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An experiment from a 2012 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology had 205
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adults wear a beeper that would ask them randomly throughout the day whether they were resisting
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a desire, how strong that desire was, and whether they were successful in resisting
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or not.
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They then took a look at the data of nearly 8000 desire reports and found that the more
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desires the person had resisted, the more likely they were to give into future desires.
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This kinda makes sense.
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Let's say you have a long day work.
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Unless you really like your job, for the most part you are resisting desires.
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Resisting the desire to skip the 10AM meeting, or the desire to play games on your phone
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instead of actually working, or the desire to take an extra long lunch break or resisting
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the desire to just go home early.
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We might say that using all that willpower throughout the day then makes it harder to
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resist the desire to watch Netflix on the couch instead of going to the gym.
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But here's what's interesting.
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In the study, the people who were best at self-control and said they were good at resisting
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temptations, they actually reported experiencing fewer temptations throughout the study.
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That is the diligent people with high self control apparently were just using less self
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control.
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In a study titled What's so great about Self Control, Marina Milyavskaya and Michael
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Inzlicht gathered data from 159 University students and found that those exerting more
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self-control were not more successful in achieving their goals.
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It was the people who planned their life so they didn't have to use self-control were
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more successful.
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So the difference between me and successful actor Tom Cruise is that while I'm figuring
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out how to resist the temptation to play video games, he would just throw them away.
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Since I've been working at home most of the time lately, playing Smash Brothers is
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always an option.
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Because that option is always there, I'm a little distracted by it.
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I'll be a bit tired from reading papers or getting frustrated because I can't think
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of what to write next and then I'll be bargaining with myself like OK I'll play for just twenty
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minutes and then work for an hour …or maybe play for 10 minutes then 30 imuntes - so regardless
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of whether or not resisting the temptation depletes my “willpower energy,” just being
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tempted to play is at least distracting me.
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This lowers my focus and worsens my productivity even though I'm not actually playing.
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Work by Glenn Wilson of Gresham College has found that when you're trying to focus on
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a task, even the simple temptation of an unread email sitting in your inbox reduces your effective
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IQ by 10 points.
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Only being tempted by wanting to check a shiny new email impairs your brain's performance.
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In James Clear's book Atomic Habits, he explains there is a four part habit cycle.
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The cue, craving, response and reward.
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First there's the cue.
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Let's say you're at the office, it's 10:30 A.M., you're a little bored, tired
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and unfocused.
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This feeling feeling is a cue for a craving for coffee.
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In response to the craving you get up and get a cup of coffee.
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You are then rewarded for your behavior with the energy and the nice taste the coffee provides.
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James Clear says that a habit will start to fall apart if one or some of these parts are
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missing.
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Let's say you start sleeping properly.
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10:30 rolls around, but you're awake and alert so there's no cue for coffee.
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Or let's say you're at the office, you feel tired but you respond to the cue differently
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- you take a walk instead of coffee.
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Or let's say you start drinking decaf coffee - you respond to your craving by grabbing
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a cup of coffee, but it doesn't have that nice caffeine reward.
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Any of these should help to weaken the habit.
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Clear says a really effective way for breaking bad habits is just make the cue weaker or
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more obscured.
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If seeing cookies cues a craving to eat cookies, just put them where you can't see them or
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don't buy them.
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If you're trying to focus, just turn your phone off instead of resisting the temptation
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to check your phone when you get a notification.
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Rather than trying to exert more willpower, you can just strategize or plan better.
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Going back to the Marshmallow study, they found that kids who successfully resisted
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the marshmallow were more successful later in life.
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They were more confident, more reliable, less likely to become obese and even got better
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SAT scores.
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But what how did the successful kids do it?
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Did they just grit their teeth and fearlessly stare the marshmallow down?
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Not quite.
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As reported in one of the original studies investigating this, the successful kids “… covered
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their eyes with their hands…" so they couldn't see it, " they talked to themselves, they
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sang, invented games with their hands and feet…”
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They did whatever they could to take their mind off the marshmallow and didn't rely
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so much on brute willpower.
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Similarly, what's going to put fattening foods on your mind more - taking the route
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home where you walk past the delicious smelling bakery or taking a different route home?
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What's going to have an alcoholic thinking about alcohol more?
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Booking a hotel with a stocked mini fridge or booking one without?
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In my last video I talked about how having so many choices of things to do all the time
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can cause a persistent feeling of indecision or uncertainty: Should I do my work or play
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smash brothers, should I work out or watch Netflix or do my taxes?
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Each action provides a reward for a cost.
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Taxes costs a lot of time and boring decision making but rewards me no more worries of huge
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fines.
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Netflix costs time but rewards me with immediate enjoyment.
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From your brain's perspective, the action that provides the most reward for the cost
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is not 100% clear.
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And as I explained last time, this indecisiveness, this uncertainty can activate the brain in
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a way generates anxiety and lowers your ability to focus.
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So, at least for me, when I remove one of the choices by locking it in this box- it
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feels like my brain stops doing all those calculations and I'm more relaxed and more
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focused.
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I would have thought I would still want to play the game but just be annoyed that it's
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stuck in the box, but oddly enough I just forget about it.
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Another thing I've been using is this app for mac called Self Control.
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You just add websites you don't want to be able to access to a list and then you can't
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access them.
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This too is really effective and helps me relax and focus with no extra effort spent
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on resisting watching How to get away with Murder.
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We always have tons of choices throughout the day- should I do this or that or just
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do this for a little bit and then do that productive thing?
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A simple way to reduce that uncertainty and indecision and stop being distracted by these
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choices … is to make the choices you don't want to make harder or simply delete them
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- Use
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less willpower, not more.