How to strengthen willpower | Hacker News Reader

How to strengthen willpower

inneridea.com

24 pointsrantfoil13 comments

According to the article, glucose is (pretty much) directly responsible to our level of willpower. This surprised me because the less sugar (in any form) I take, the more willpower I seem to have (and the generally better I feel).

Does anyone have willpower 'mind-hacks' they're willing to share? I find the hardest thing is to just get started, after that everything's easy.

Remember that your body's reaction to sugar is not simple. Eating refined sugar causes a spike and then crash in your blood sugar, while eating complex carbs and "healthy stuff" generally releases energy slower, and doesn't cause your body to freak out. Maybe your lowered willpower occurred during the crash phase?

As far as willpower, try studying a martial art. I studied for 10 years, and taught for 6 of those. Best case, you want a martial art that is both a contact art, and also does the "meditation" side of things.

Aside from regular exercise, a good martial art will teach you a lot of mental conditioning. Meditation for stress relief, breathing regularly while on an adrenaline high, ignoring pain, and thinking your way out of a stressful situation, rather than letting the reptilian part of your brain take over.

I have a blue belt in Judo. What I learned from it is that if you're small and don't weight a lot, people toss you around and you will never get an ippon ;)

That being said, you give solid advice. Studying a martial art definitely gives you more willpower.

The art I taught / studied worked in all the major areas, striking, wrestling / judo, ground, etc. What I found is there is an exchange rate between skill and physical ability, and the rate is different for each major skill.

Imagine one smaller person, and one larger person. How much more skill does the smaller person need to defeat the larger person, in a striking art? How much more skill does the smaller person need in wrestling? In general, wrestling and ground have a more expensive exchange rate, because size and strength are larger factors.

You can defeat larger people, you'll just need to be more skilled.

Yes, the glucose idea is pretty implausible.

Better might be: available reserves of neurotransmitters.

Two words: red grapes.

> Does this mean we should be giving ourselves sugar every time we want to exert some self-control? Clearly, that would be a short-sighted strategy.

Maybe if you're only concerned with use of willpower to limit caloric intake. Otherwise, it sounds like an awesome strategy.

And where's the evidence that willpower is trainable as promised in the intro? I already knew that making choices at all (let alone difficult ones) depletes resources in my body and temporarily dulls my physical and mental capacities. I'd like some science that suggests how, and how much, I can expand my battery or lower the rate at which making decisions depletes it.

"where's the evidence that willpower is trainable as promised in the intro?"

In the second half of the article (linked at the bottom of the first half), they describe having people exert willpower in some small area over the course of a long study, and found that by the end of the study, they also ate better, exercised more, and reduced tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine consumption. This suggests that exercising willpower is effective for building it.

Without knowing more details, I can't tell you how solid that science is. But it does suggest an experiment you can do yourself: consciously exercise willpower in some small area, while tracking various habits that don't directly relate to that area. See if your willpower improves over time.

There has been a lot of this recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661984 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848839

...and some others, one of which sited the same papers (but i cant remember post title.)

I also learned that willpower was a limited resource. The article also states this fact.

However, the article suggests training WP by using it all up. I don't see the point of an article which could have been summed up easily in a paragraph.

Reasons for taking a paragraph and expanding it into an article:

1) SEO 2) Increased mind-share authority for the brand (real-life PageRank) 3) Revenue (Create enough material for two articles so you can make the first one free and get people to sign up for the newsletter/review/magazine/etc)

So if your weakness is not being able to cut on sugar intake you're pretty much screwed...

I am not impressed. The creation of glucose by the liver, gluconeogenesis, is strongly controlled by epinephrine (adrenaline), the same hormone that cranks up the heart rate. Thus it is not surprising to find heart rate variability changes simultaneously with glucose changes.

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