Exercise Your Willpower?

I heard a short interview with social psychologist Roy Baumeister on NPR today discussing willpower.

And, since this is the season of resolutions, I thought I'd relay a few of the interesting pieces as I understood them in hopes that it might be beneficial as you build your "to do" list for 2012.

Baumeister concludes that willpower is a "muscle" that can be exercised and built up. And it can also be depleted.

In other words, he claims that you only have so much willpower. And if you try to use it all at once on many different things, you simply don't have enough to go around and you won't succeed.

But if you start small, making small changes, getting small victories, you can build up your willpower for the bigger challenges.

So, instead of deciding to only eat 1200 calories of healthy food and exercise for one hour every day on January 1 ... a goal that's too big and too hard and uses all your willpower up on day one ... you might want to start smaller. Say, limit yourself to only eating candy once a week for a couple of weeks. Then once you have that conquered, you could move to two days a week of completely clean eating for a few weeks. Then once you have that conquered, you could add two days of 30 minutes of exercise a week. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Make small changes that you can sustain, build on successes, form new habits and retrain your brain.

Sounds sort of familiar, right?

He also said that willpower is a literal "thing" (don't you love my scientific explanations?) and that it has to be fed. Literally fed. Like by eating good food ... protein. And by getting good sleep. When you do those good things for your body, your brain benefits.

I've never seen this Mr. Baumeister, but I like him already.

See for yourself here: http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/1594203075