The Sugary Secret of Self-Control | Hacker News Reader

The Sugary Secret of Self-Control

nytimes.com

236 pointsgruseom57 comments

A really excellent followup to the study that was linked to around here about 6 months ago that found out "willpower" is an exhaustible resource that needs to be managed throughout your day.

The book[1] this article is reviewing discusses learning to exercise your will power through little mini tasks throughout the day (sit up straight, don't curse, don't eat the whole cake, pickup your desk before going to lunch, etc.) as a means of strengthening that skill.

In their studies they found that employing little tasks like that actually made the willpower muscle (let's call it) stronger, leading to more control over your day.

As to "why do I care?" both studies show that people with more willpower generally end up happier with their lives.

This article does make an interesting point that people with ultimate willpower are not markedly happier than people with nominal amounts of it, so you don't necessarily need to train your willpower muscle to the point of entering the willpower olympics, just slightly stronger than you have now (assuming it is weakened) to enjoy a happier life.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human...

Recent findings by Carol Dweck and others challenge the prevalent notion that willpower is an exhaustible AND finite resource. She found that the subjects who believed that exercising one's willpower strengthens it rather than depletes it actually increased their willpower. One's mindset was the key. http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/In_the_News_files/Job,...

Why can't you believe both? The analogy to muscles and strength training is appropriate here. The day after a workout with very heavy weights, it's hard to lift much at all. So you need to recover.

The thing is that recovery is as important as the actual exercising, because it is during recovery that muscle strength increases. It may be just like that with exercising willpower: it is depleted temporarily, but given time to recover, in the long-term, willpower strengthens.

Of course one needs breaks. One interesting point is that people who view their willpower as limitless can be more productive with fewer breaks. Here is an article with comments from the researchers clarifying their findings: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/10/25/willpower-can-be-an-...

Thanks for the links. I'm always interested to hear about Dweck's latest research.

From the submitted article, this passage is food for thought: "The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will. The authors note that people with the highest levels of self-control are only slightly better than average at controlling their weight, and they describe disturbing experiments that confirm the old saying 'When the penis stands up, the brains get buried' (it sounds better in Yiddish)."

It would be interesting to test, by methodologies proposed by Dweck or by others, just how far willpower can go in controlling the most biologically driven behaviors. There are, of course, some problems with the ethics of human experimentation involved in setting up some of these experiments in rigorous fashion.

"certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will..."

From Kung Fu: When Grasshopper feels the first stirrings of love (and sexual needs), he remembers his teacher's guidance on the subject: "To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance".

I imagine the findings might be statistically significant but the proverb will generally hold. Incidentally, I googled the proverb and it does sound better (funnier) in Yiddish: Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd

I think that the problem is that we are looking at "willpower" as a general skill when we should see it as more specific to the task. I have built up quite a bit of resistance to certain desires like food and television, but I still flounder when it comes to other areas of my life.

I would be very interested in long-term studies that attempt to build willpower in just one area and then examine the individual's ability to apply that self-control to another, separate task.

According to the OP (Pinker's book review) "He enrolled students in regimens that required them to keep track of their eating, exercise regularly, use a mouse with their weaker hand or (one that really gave them a workout) speak in complete sentences and without swearing. After several weeks, the students were more resistant to ego depletion in the lab and showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked, drank and snacked less, watched less television, studied more and washed more dishes."

She found that the subjects who believed that exercising one's willpower strengthens it rather than depletes it actually increased their willpower.

That to me doesn't discredit the notion that willpower is an exhaustible, finite resource. It merely illuminates a neat psychological trick for increasing your willpower.

There is a belief that willpower is finite and exhaustible and nothing will change how much willpower one has, that one cannot increase one's willpower. For example, you only have 25 cents worth of willpower at a certain time and if you spent all of it on not eating a cookie you will not have any left for something else. I suppose if a "trick" increases willpower that proves that willpower is not finite and exhaustible. Clearly there are limits but one's mindset counts for performance.

My point was the fact that a resource is finite does not mean you can't grow it. If I am a child with a second-grade education- I have a finite amount of knowledge, but there are "tricks" (aka education, development) that I can do to increase my knowledge. If I have a pond in my backyard, there is a finite amount of water it can hold, but if I dredge out a few more hectares, it will store even more groundwater and its capacity has increased while still remaining finite (I cannot drink from it forever).

I understand your point about the meaning of 'finite'. My point simply is that those who primarily viewed willpower as a limited resource, finite and exhaustible, did not perform as well as those who believed that exercising willpower increases it. It is not about the nuances of a certain word but how certain attitudes affect performance. Dweck wrote a popular book 'Mindset' where she contrasts 'fixed' mindset with 'growth' mindset. Perhaps 'fixed' makes more sense than 'finite' here. More information at http://mindsetonline.com/

As far as food & overeating/unhealthy foods- I've learned you don't necessarily need self-control. You can stop caring instead. That's how I wound up after going hungry for months, and got used to it.

It's frighteningly effective. Right now, the last meal I remember was about 20 hours ago, and the last meal before that was another 20-24 ago. My stomach is aching, but it doesn't bother me.

Of course, this is not without problems. It basically means I have to consciously remember to feed myself enough to stay healthy. You could say I am now approaching the problem from the opposite direction.

Interesting approach. A lot of people would say "that doesn't fix anything because you replaced one problem with another!" but I would say it does help; it gives you another perspective on the same problem.

Eventually you'll find the middle ground that works for you, but I applaud you providing at least another unconventional alternative to tackling food-control.

"Easier said than done, I know, but the thing I find helps most people is to understand that you can't refrain from doing something you like. You can, however, change the person you are into the kind of person who doesn't even like that stuff. Sugar Smacks still taste the same as they did under Carter, but I don't know anybody who still eats them. Do the same for soda."

For the other readers who are wondering what Sugar Smacks are, Wikipedia tells me they've been called Honey Smacks for a long time now, with a brief period of being just Smacks. I don't think I've ever had them. My parents were not big fans of sugary breakfasts, and Honey Smacks are apparently the sugariest of the sugary, over 50% sugar by weight!

Starving for hours and ignoring your body's warning signals? Whatever happened to "don't eat less, eat better" -- "don't reduce quantity, increase quality"?

If you enjoy eating and don't enjoy the sounds made by a hungry stomach... you can munch down as many of those fresh veggies as you like and will feel all the better for it, while not gaining a pound. Something to consider. Not the same for fruits as they do contain sugars... but veggies, the sky is the limit!

I'm not saying it's the right way to do things. I don't think that starving myself is GOOD. A hungry stomach just doesn't bother me anymore, so I have to proactively think about food. That may seem nonsensical to you if you are still deeply in touch with your sense of hunger, but take me at my word.

I didn't choose for it to be this way, I just didn't have much money for a while.

You didn’t have enough money to eat? That must have been tough. I hope things are better for you now.

At least, not enough to eat properly. It's ok though- that was years ago, and I learned a lot from those times.

Actually it might be the right way to do things. Scientists have found that the most effective way to make monkeys live longer is by starving them their whole lives.

It wasn't scientists who tried that on humans (I hope) but unlike monkeys, famines and malnutrition seems to never have had similarly good results in humans. Snark aside, that's interesting but I wonder what degree of starving produces such good effects -- clearly, no-food kills us so learning just how much or how little to "starve" is healthiest would help.

> A hungry stomach just doesn't bother me anymore, so I have to proactively think about food.

I know what you mean. I drive people crazy when they realize that I can work through lunch and simply not miss it.

This is actually a common eating regime for Buddhist mmonks, who have been doing it by the millions for millenia, because the Buddha is believed to have eaten that way, and recommended it as conducive to health and longevity. I've done it a few times for about a month at a stretch each time. It is quite feasible.

I've gone between 10 and 30 days without eating several times before. It really is good for you if you are relatively healthy to start with.

The first two days are key; You will go crazy if you are unprepared. Remedies for the craziness are drinking lemon water (freshly squeezed lemon in water, possibly with some sweetener but you'll need much less if it is unsweetened), and doing 5-10 minutes of exercise every time you feel the need to eat. Another option is to start when you've lost appetite due to some illness or mild depression - that makes the first two days pass easily.

And then something magical happens - you stop caring about food. For a long time. The smells don't matter, the sight doesn't matter. (Although if you force yourself to eat, it will stat mattering again in a few hours).

A few days or weeks later, you will feel hunger - and realize it is the first time ever you have felt hunger -- everything you felt before you _thought_ was hunger, was just plain appetite. hunger feels different, and it also cannot be suppressed by reading an interesting article or playing a video game.

There are also health benefits, but I highly recommend it just for the psychological experience.

I've only done this for 5 days max, but your experience tracks with mine. It's fascinating from a psychological point of view; I'd agree it's one of those things one ought to try at least once, like skydiving (which comes to mind since I skydived for the first time yesterday).

At this point, the "science" of nutrition is so muddled and tainted by commercial interests as to be essentially without any credibility whatsoever. Pop science articles like the the OP NYT.com link only add to the mess – using absurd metaphors like muscle fatigue for willpower, and talking about self-control as an exhaustible "resource" based on some no-doubt extremely qualitative and subjective study.

Health information in western cultures is very low signal to noise.

That's a super interesting idea, but how do you stop caring in the first place?

I've done a little bit of fasting (I'm actually breaking a fast right now), it really is as simple as that: you simply start seeing whatever it is as not important. Sliverstorm, beagle3 and gwern are exactly right I think.

What you wanted - food - was just a result of you thinking you wanted it. And that was mostly just a result of associating it with the thought of 'need'. But our bodies are apparently made to not bother us needlessly - it's not the body that's bothering us.

When you fast, rather, you go through the whole range of conditioned responses YOU have created to food. But you don't fight them, instead you get to just kind of say 'yeah, that's an interesting thing I've created' and go on with what you're doing. But once you know they are just that, nothing is stopping you. It's a little bit like meditation, where when you notice a thought, you'll simply label it a thought, and its power goes away.

And since you 'know' you will take great care of your body, now and whenever you break the fast (and please do that, follow the instructions, and break it gently, like a part of fasting, rather than straight back to old habits - your pancreas & co will thank you...), there's no crisis thinking or anxiety to it. Rather you get to be alone with your body and your thoughts.

I like it, because it is actually sort of easier to focus when there's just my body doing its things, vs the body with a lot of food it's having to digest, and blood sugar levels going up and down all over the place.

You get to really want something else instead, rather than associating/replacing all sorts of wants with food, if that's what you've done before. It's like realizing those wants are yours and owning them as that, rather than being owned by them when you think it is 'needs'.

Eating regularly is just a routine - probably a good one if it is done right - but there's so much extra luggage, so much extra use, that we put on top.

We really have a lot more power than that. It's not us against the body, it's us thanks to the body. Not thanks to the food - we eat much more than we 'need'.

That sounds scary. How does that affect your energy levels? Are you able to do much work, physical or involving hard thinking? I find that on days I'm working on hard programming problems, I feel hungrier.

While your timespans are perhaps a little long, I adopted a similar approach, which allowed me to lose 70lbs.

Basically, I stopped looking forward to food and began seeing food as fuel. Like having to re-fuel your car, eating sometimes got to be more of a chore than a delight.

Our society looks at food as an indulgence, when perhaps it would be better to look at it as an energy source.

The Western mantra of "eat the things you love and look great doing it!" is probably cognitive dissonance at its best, not helping society at all.

This is very similar to what I tell people asking me about weight loss: "You can't have an emotional attachment to food." I can't remember where I first heard that, but I think it states the idea perfectly.

Willpower is not a resource, and glucose is not willpower fuel. See the following links:

http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/08/willpower-is-not-a-res... http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/08/glucose-is-not-willpow... http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/09/willpower-meets-the-co... http://whatblag.com/2011/08/04/poverty-and-willpower-as-reso...

This is interesting. Offer someone -untrained- $1million to not to connect for 30 days and they'll (most of them) do it. A trained person may fail to do that without the incentive.

Now offer an untrained person to lift 100 Kg with the same incentive. They'll fail whatever the cash is. A trained person with the right physic power will do it. No incentives required.

Conclusion: will power is not a muscle. Will Power is already strong, at its max. It's not about improving it, it's about creating incentives for it to perform. It's putting yourself in the right environment and making a strong plan.

From my experience or learning rather while studying psych I came to believe that as all successful or enjoyable actions are rewarded by dopamine (everything from grasping a spoon so smoking crack). Also, the more closely an action and its reward are pared to one-another in time the greater the strength of the feeling of "that was a good choice or Success!". So it seems to follow that giving in sooner rather than later (for some potentially greater reward - delayed gratification) rewards the brain more and does so faster thus reinforcing that behavior model more and more successfully over and over.

Because delayed gratification is well, delayed, the chemical reinforcements in the brain don't happen (or happen in some other way that is more conscious rather than instantaneous without reflection). So for a child who has not developed the ability to delay gratification it becomes now or never and that mental reward structure can really hurt them later in life. Thanks for posting.

It's always funny and somewhat humbling to remember that children have to develop the ability to delay gratification.

Ooh, that's appealing. One of the authors, Roy Baumeister, gave this very interesting address on how cultures use genders differently: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

> (though not an indistinguishable beverage containing diet sweetener)

Really? Indistinguishable? This presumably doesn't invalidate their results, but a lot of people can distinguish the taste very well. This just seems like sloppiness on their part.

Sloppy perhaps, but the point is still conveyed adequately. A diet beverage might not taste identical (Coca Cola Company acknowledges this, and in fact their diet products have a different flavour profile designed to better match the artificial sweeteners) but they certainly can be an adequate substitute when it comes to satisfying your brain's sugar cravings.

I've been wondering if there's a good way to test this on a personal basis using something like compounding interest, only with candy.

For example, keeping a bag of Reese's Pieces, and every consecutive (time period) you go without breaking goal X, you add (# of time periods) pieces of candy to a jar. Then at the end of the day, you cash out your jar.

So, longer periods of self control would result in a larger reward, and a physical/visual representation of your progress so far would help reinforce your motivation to remain on track.

Maybe if using candy, you get to eat half of what you'd put in immediately, and take advantage of the gradually escalating amount of sugar to help reinforce your willpower reserves?

Mostly just brainstorming here. :P

Nonetheless, the very idea of self-control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. - Rly? How about Eastern cultures who rely on self-control as a foundation for ages and ages? How about Art of War and other classic Chinese texts? How about The Book of Five Rings and other classics about mortal fights? What about Tibetan tradition which emphasizes self-control as a recruitment for self-transformation? Zen and other traditions based on Buddha's teachings? And, at last, what about Greek's 'Conquer yourself' maxim, which is the second most important one after 'Catch The Moment'? ^_^

It seems like modern journalist, same as modern hackers, are completely unaware, that all those self-help books, starting from Dale Carnegie's and Napoleon Hill's ones are mere compilations and oversimplifications of general western and some times eastern philosophy? But why, not everyone has a degree in Philosophy like the founder of this site. ^_^

The level of submissions and discussions on HN is somewhere below zero, after it became a huge mainstream site. Now being hacker is an ability to praise and admire some celebrities to silently down-vote people whom they can't appreciate or even understand.

Is there any new small community, with at least a little bit above mediocre level? ^_^

"[H]as acquired a musty Victorian odor" says nothing about origins; that's the opposite of what "acquired" means. All you have to do is read the next sentence to see that Pinker is obviously talking about the arc of the idea in English-speaking modernity. Is he right about that? Maybe not, but your comment is irrelevant to his claim.

I can't comment on willpower over everything, but if it is about working out / doing chores / getting to work, I have a hack for you:

Well.. it isn't really a hack, but something to remind yourself every fucking time that you're stalling. All you need is enough motivation to do it for 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES!

Thats enough motivation to basically start an activity and forget about everything else in the process, and getting on with it. Just start doing it... FIVE MINUTES!!!

The application of this research on sports performance don't seem to have been explored much as far as I've found.

Which seems surprising to me seeing that Dr. Baumeister is a professor at Florida State. You'd think at least the ability of offensive linemen to stay completely still would have the football program interested in this research.

> “Willpower”is filled with advice about what to do with your willpower. Build up its strength, the authors suggest, with small but regular exercises, like tidiness and good posture. Don’t try to tame every bad habit at once.

This is the key. For example, instead of having a bunch of New Year's resolutions, come up with one resolution every month. Focus your (finite) willpower on making it into a habit, at which point it won't require willpower anymore. Next month, move onto another habit and do the same thing. You can drastically change your lifestyle in just 1 year by repeating this 12 times.

I made a New Years resolution (purely for convenience of logging time) to not eat meat on weekdays. So far, I've been pretty successful at keeping it. I guess the key here is that I'm able to eat meat on weekends as a treat, which refreshes my willpower weekly. Next year, I plan on restricting my diet further, but possibly keep the less-restricted, meat-free diet on weekends.

Also, I have found that "breaking" the willpower mind wall has to do with taking tasks (like good posture, delaying FB status updates, doing dishes) and rewarding yourself mentally along the way by thinking or even saying things like "This is great! or I win!" even so much as smiling while doing these things helps to reinforce the dopamine pathways and can overtime help in "re-coding" your brain to be will-powerful. It's about feeling good while doing things and your brain doesn't know the difference between fake good and real good and before you know it neither will you and that's the point :)

The NYT only found out about this now? O.o

Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/) has some good stuff on training willpower (willpower is like D-Day, a huge violent bloody assault which was used to establish fortifications on the ground so that you didn't need to launch a huge violent bloody assault every time you wanted to get things done). Use willpower to build habits that will stay with you even when you have the mental energy of a marketroid.

It's not an article abouth the subject of willpower (although it seems that way), but rather a book review of the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

So it is. Must remember not to read news at 0500. -_-

Baumeister actually wrote a book about this?! It's definitely a must read. If you haven't picked up anything of his before - he's a very good writer, and one of the most "correct thinkers" I know. Not a shred of idea that's not justified by research.

A short opinion piece that touches on the Baumeister's study: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html

ok, so let's go back to this for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908015 (I am nothing).

As the author says: "I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.".

Does being 'myself' mean I lack willpower and thus just ignore everything and everyone else and focus on myself?

Thing is, in my opinion having good self control wins over being myself (which I think is on the edge of being selfish).

I wonder what you guys think on the question 'being myself' vs 'self-control' ?

Forgive me for my ignorance, but shouldn't "Ulysses had himself tied to the mast" be "Odysseus had himself tied to the mast"?

I haven't read Ulysses but I have read The Odyssey.

"Ulysses" is the Latin rendering of "Odysseus", so is sometimes used interchangeably.

Excellent! Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com