Is not doing something the most important thing to do today?
ercising self-control in one area of life tends to improve all areas of life. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Those in the fitness program got fitter; those working on study discipline got more schoolwork done; the people in the money-management program saved more money. But—and here was a truly pleasant surprise—they also got better at other things. The students who did the study-discipline program reported doing physical workouts a bit more often and cutting down on impulsive spending.…
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This Is Why First Impressions Can Be Dangerous
can become a slave to our first impressions. Once we've set them, they can be hard to change. Via David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart: A study in 1997 by Wilkielman, Zajonc, and Shwartz created first impressions in subjects with images of smiles and frowns. The people in the study saw a photo of either a happy or a sad face flash briefly on a screen and then were shown an unfamiliar Chinese character and asked to say…
1 min read
How can you figure out what your real long term goals are?
sualize your funeral and consider what you would want friends to describe as your legacy. Via Richard Wiseman's excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: Asking people to spend just a minute imagining a close friend standing up at their funeral and reflecting on their personal and professional legacy helps them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality. Join over 200,000 readers. Get a free…
1 min read
What should you think about to immediately increase self-control?
ink about money: Self-control draws upon a resource that is limited, such that acts of self-control deplete the resource, causing performance on subsequent acts of self-control to suffer. In this research, we demonstrate that activating the concept of money can buffer this ego depletion effect. Across two experiments using varied operationalizations of self-control, participants completed an initial task that depleted self-control resources or not, were then reminded of money or neutral concepts, and finally, completed a second task requiring self-control.…
1 min read
Is postponement the key to resisting temptation?
lling yourself "Not now, but later" is far more powerful than "No, you can't have that." From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: ...people who had told themselves Not now, but later were less troubled with visions of chocolate cake than the other two groups... And: Those in the postponement condition actually ate significantly less than those in the self-denial condition...The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it…
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What’s an easy way to increase self-control?
rk on improving your posture. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Unexpectedly, the best results came from the group working on posture. That tiresome old advice—“Sit up straight!”—was more useful than anyone had imagined. By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. The improvement was most pronounced among the students who had followed the advice most diligently (as measured by the daily logs the…
1 min read
Why is it so hard finding a spouse in NYC?
o many choices makes people ridiculously picky. From Willpower: Resdiscovering the Greatest Human Strength: For a column in 1995, Tierney did a semiscientific survey to investigate a New York phenomenon: the huge number of intelligent and attractive people who complained that it was impossible to find a romantic partner. Manhattan had the highest percentage of single people of any county in America except for an island in Hawaii originally settled as a leper colony. What was keeping New Yorkers apart?…
2 minutes
Is envy our default setting?
s. It requires mental effort to not be envious. Via Peer Reviewed By My Neurons: Envy is a shitty thing. In addition to feeling bad that there’s something you don’t have, you often feel bad about how stupid it is that you’re envious. The good news is that a new study by Jan Crusius and Thomas Mussweiler should alleviate the negative feelings that stem from the latter situation. Through a series of experiments they found that envy appears to be our…
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