I want to introduce an excellent book: Willpower - Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney.
As in the title, the two researchers see willpower as the greatest strength. I found the book very instructive. You can use this book for your personal life, for dieting, exercise, alchocol/smoking problems or raising up your children. I advise you to also read "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg after reading "Willpower". Once you transform a decision making task to a habit, you may start using your willpower energy on something else.
Below I present some interesting points from "Willpower". Best regards,
"When psychologists isolate the personal
qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two
traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven’t learned
how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least
discovered how to improve self-control.
The experiments consistently demonstrated
two lessons:
1. You have a finite amount of willpower
that becomes depleted as you use it.
2. You use the same stock of willpower for
all manner of tasks.
You might think you have one reservoir of
self-control for work, another for dieting, another for exercise, and another
for being nice to your family. But experiments showed that two completely unrelated activities – resisting chocolate and working on geometry puzzles -
drew on the same source of energy. Those who try to quit smoking while also
restricting their eating or cutting back on alcohol tend to fail at all three –probably
because they have too many simultaneous demands on their willpower.
The first step in self-control is to set a clear
goal. Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than
aimless change. For most of us, though, the problem is not lack of goals but
rather too many of them.
No glucose, no willpower: Your brain does
not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts
doing others. When people have more demands for self-control in their daily
lives, their hunger for sweet increases. Don’t get into an argument with your
buss four hours after lunch. Don’t trash out serious problems with your partner
just before dinner.
Decision making depletes your willpower,
and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions.
The people who regularly exercised self
control in doing physical workouts, studying, or money management got
progressively better at ignoring Eddie Murphy’s comedy routine and tracking the
moving squares.
Pre-commitment is important: People who
draw up a contract without a financial penalty or a referee succeed only 35
% of the time, whereas the ones with a penalty and a ref succeed nearly
80 % of the time, and the ones who risk more than one hundred dollars do
better than those who risk less than twenty dollars – at least according to
what is reported to stick.com, which doesn’t independently verify the results.
Use your self-control to form a daily
habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
Plenty of research suggests that being
alone in the world is stressful. Loners and lonely people tend to have more of
just about every kind of mental and physical illness than people who live in
rich social networks.
The hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore
temptations when they are not immediately available, but once they’re right in
front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals."
