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Gustavo Tolosa: Willpower by Dr Doug Lisle, PhD
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I know that most of you here know him but just in case that you're here for the first time I'll just tell you a little bit about daughter liya who is the psychologist for the mcdougal wellness program and he also teaches and he sees patients at True North health center both in Santa Rosa California and dr. Lyle is also the co-author of the pleasure trap and I think he is working on a new book about we won't talk about that yet and he is also the founder of the esteem dynamics well that is a wonderful website and please visit it is esteem dynamics calm I will type it in a minute and is website where you can get more information about the ideas of the bargain office lectures also for people who might be interested in making a phone consultation with dr. Lyle you can get it from there I know people are some spots every week to do this and I cannot I cannot encourage you enough sometimes a half hour with dr. Lyle is one of the most revealing an amazing moments then you have and a brilliant mind I admire him so much so anyway from any questions that you have about dr. Lyle and you can also email him at dr. Lyle at yahoo.com and it is actually is be are you don't have to spell the whole part dr. Lyle dr. Doug Lyall at yahoo.com I will type all this in the chat box so today we have a very interesting and I know you will all love the presentation that he's going to give us a one to welcome dr. Lyle how are you it's a multi starrer great to see is then very good what we're going to talk to about today is going to be world power and so if there's a strange concept that willpower has only been a word of the English language since the late 1800s so as important as a concept as it is funny that it didn't even quite have its own word until fairly recently in our history the what we're going to be doing is is taking a ride on on learning about both the science and the first-base sort of a theory about trying to understand what willpower is and then the science that really took off in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s which gave us a new look about what willpower is really about so that's what we're going to do so the the main idea that the lay public has about willpower looks kind of like this and that is that if you've got a problem that needs this amount of willpower and you only have this amount of willpower then somehow you're not going to fix it but if you have a problem that needs this much lower power and you have this much then you'll be able to fix it if you apply yourself it's going to turn out that very reasonable assumption has is largely untrue and so even though there are elements of truth in it it's going to be a serious misunderstanding of how the willpower works and so we're going to be unpacking that so that at the end of today we will understand what willpower is and how to summon and keep our willpower its maximum to solve the problems that we need to solve alright so which lie are we ready to launch this nice launch the slides alright here we go just give me a second alright here we are yeah everybody knows what that little thing is of course but we'll get back to that and let's go to the first next slide all right so everybody knows that this is of course the Apollo rocket you can tell by the distinctive markings and if we ever were to meet another receipt out there in outer space the first thing that they would ask us is what's your greatest achievement and we can tell them all kinds of things but probably this is what we would tell them if you had to you had to summon up human spectacular advances in history this is sort of gotta be the big one he actually left your planet and you figured out how to do it so it took millions of people together working together to do this it actually took it no the the National Defense of major countries is usually about 2% of the GNP this took like six percent to the GNP for several years this was a massive undertaking down without email and gotten with no phone calls and letters and very primitive computers to organize such a thing really tells us the story what human beings are capable of if they put their mind to it on the other hand well there's that other thing in the corner we're gonna get back to that all right next slide all right now here's three people that we're going to look at in terms of their individual willpower I've already seen it humans in general seem to have extraordinary ability to do things if they put their mind to them collectively let's look at these individuals turns out that the guy in the middle is Sigma boy now the this extraordinary man had a problem and that is that he he had cancers that we'd grow in his mouth and when they cut the first one out it turned out that it wasn't long before we got another one and they had to cut out another one and it wasn't long before he had a third and this kept going on for years at the end of his life he had had over 30 surgeries on his mouth and had to have a prosthetic job for them now this is at the same time when it's suspected that the smoking has something to do with this and yet he won't put down the smokes now this is a quite a quite a challenging and interesting paradox for somebody who has the will to be a world-class scholar and was sort of self-styled most insightful human to ever walk theoretically and yet he's lost when it comes to this really perplexing sell self-defeating problem the the guy on the right that's Winston Churchill can tell because he's holding up his beeper victory and this is a guy that had no lack of well I basically told Hitler that that his British people were never going to surrender in any circumstances and and just face down this monster and yet you have a problem with alcohol and in fact historians have said it would be fair to call Winston an alcoholic has no alcohol it could possibly drink that much so this is a man you had literally the weight of his civilization on his shoulders and yet this was a habit and a go to coping device that he couldn't get himself out of no matter how much motivation there would have been to do so and on the on the left you're gonna see this is overwintering this is also an extraordinary person that had enormous popularity and influence over television and other media in the United States the and the world and with 20 million people watching her every day hanging on but her words yet the big embarrassing thing in her life is she had problem with her weight and couldn't manage to get her diet act together so when you're looking at these three extraordinary people all of them struggling with a problem that should require willpower if this is if there's a well power deficiency in these two well we've got a problem so we're going to now look at the nature of how the willpower works and a new conceptualization of nature this problem go ahead next right next slide now this is a dung beetle and what this guy does is he rolls up balls of dung and stands on top of them and now of course you can tell by it it's a male the reason you could tell by its males he's standing very proudly at the top of the W and there's a reason why he rolls up balls of dung and stands on top go ahead next slide and that's because this is how he attracts mates it's going to turn out that up in the up in the sky there that's the Milky Way case you didn't know and the dung beetle Orient's its behavior around the Milky Way just as people do interesting way enough I'm not even sure that's true but I read that on Wikipedia I just thought I'd pass that along to you today the but the difference between the dung beetle and the humans is the dung beetle is going to be doing everything by very very short term thinking here in other words and the choice mechanisms that he makes order a stereotyped and narrow so he doesn't have the ability to think through the future and to think through if he takes a drink this is going to happen old if he eats this that it's going to have an impact or if he has lights at the smoke that this is going to happen in other words his behavior is being guided by very short-term simple considerations and so in a fact he doesn't have what we would call willpower in the sense that he doesn't have to override one impulse and map out the future over a couple of courses of action and then essentially override the short-term impulse to do something in order to do what's in his best interest long-term he doesn't have that kind of computational device but humans do and so do other creatures go ahead the next slide so now this is a Thomson's gazelle and what we're going to do is we're going to investigate for a moment as Sigmund Freud's one of his many ideas and the idea that he hypothesized to be the cause of his inability to put down the smokes now his famous idea is what's called the ego and hid and he having the it'd is this sort of wild horse that is pleasure-seeking and it just wants to do what it wants to do and the ego is like the writer of that horse it's not nearly as strong but is reasonable and twice it's best to try to keep the wild horse from doing crazy things and self-destructing now this is what boy is going to be thinking about himself and other people when he sees self-destructive behavior this is a very interesting idea and it has resonated with enough people to make it this one bedrock of psychodynamic psychotherapy and an awful lot of literature as this idea makes a lot of sense to people but we're going to now look at the ego in it and that concept from the vision of biology as opposed to just psychologists speculating on things so now we're going to look at this is a Thomson's gazelle as you can tell by the distinctive markings this one happens to be quite happy this is in this grasslands of Africa and we're going to now see what it does go ahead next slide this guy is going to do is he's going to hang out with his other Thomson's gazelles you can see that they're all quite a bunch of happy group as they eat their grass and they run around and they may have kids and that's what they do but we know that life isn't all rosy but there's usually some negative things in life and of course there are negative things in life for Thomson's gazelles and go ahead and next slide ah there we see it so in the back we see this ferocious cat of Africa some people thought that it was a lion but actually that's just because they don't appreciate the artists you can actually see some spots on that thing even from this distance this is a cheetah and this goddess guys got to worry about this cheetah and so when he's eating his grass which is pleasurable every time he looks up he checks out how far that sheet is and let's suppose he grabs a mouthful of grass comes up and Machida's five hundred yards away not a problem gets another mouthful it's four hundred yards away still not a problem it's another mouthful it's three hundred yards away still not a problem it's another mouthful and like makes its head up the Cheetahs now humidity goes away now what's going to happen is interesting the gazelle will now stop eating and start trotting the other direction away from the cheetah and you might think well big deal of course that doesn't it isn't it's not birth shattering news but it should be earth-shattering news to psychoanalysis because the short term self-indulgent thing to do would be eat another mouthful of grass that you want to eat but that's not what the animal does the animal shifts its gears and brilliantly like a Rolls Royce transmission changes its behavior and does what's in its best long-term interest so it's quickly shocked sacrifices short-term interests and goes for optimal long-term interests and if you watch them they don't have any great cognitive distance about this they're not they don't have an HID lighting their ego in angst and they desperately want another mouthful of grass nothing of the kind in fact the concept of this that there would be such angst and torture and and terrible harsh decision-making processes that we often fail it makes no sense biologically whatsoever it's really bad biology if you have an animal that is capable of computing its long-term best interest as it sees a threat then it should be able to seamlessly shift to defensive reactions without any cognitive dissonance over the problem in other words why have the ability to compute your long-term best interests if you have a hard time executing it makes no sense okay so actually in this very simple demonstration we can crash the notion of psychoanalytic angst in the way that it has been portrayed you know in the last century now suppose now ever we did something suppose that what this guy really likes is the fat that's in the alfalfa grass that it's eating and suppose we get ourselves some alfalfa oil and we pour it all over a section of the grass and so it's really really rich food a naturally rich pitted and so it's hyper activating the dopamine circuits inside this thing's brain that are designed by nature to pick up on those calories and be excited about it now we're going to find that through this thing they have a problem go ahead next slide so now what's going to happen is at 200 yards this thing is going to going to have a fight on its hands that its brain is going to want one more mouthful of the super rich grass that's so exciting but at the same time it may not be alarm bell gets drowned out now when it will the cheetah gets close so this is now the nature of the problem the boy who is having and Winston and Oprah and everybody else the problem is not that the thing has an uncontrollable urge system that is inherently self-destructive the problem is is that if we alter the environment unnaturally then despite completely excellent equipment for making good long-term decision-making in the face of short-term and inducement yeah suddenly the animals in trouble so whether the animal is a brilliant you know will fill human like Winston Churchill or Sigmund Freud or Oprah Winfrey it doesn't make any difference if we tease the system with supernormal stimuli we wind up to the problem okay and there there will is relatively weak at managing it okay next slide please okay so here's a human that would be fine living in its natural habitat except that if we give it a bag of chimps we all know it's gotta happen before it ever picks an apple out of that tree the chips are going to be gone despite whatever the person might want to in theory you'll pursue its quote best healthy interests this is going to be a fight for that nervous system together next slide so what we're really saying here is that willpower is the problem dealing with the short term versus the long term and being able to integrate the best overall interests of the organism which this thing is absolutely designed to do naturally but we see in our modern environment tremendous numbers of challenges that will actually make this difficult so go ahead an X lied place and so here we have some challenges of the modern environment they look a little funny and that is the person who wants to go on a diet which is a totally unnatural thing to do to try to essentially eat a limited range of the opera' of the foods that are available and try to get themselves to eat the foods that are of modest flora density and stay away from the foods that are not and yet we've got other neural impulses that are basically writing circuits that say that the right thing to do is to eat the richest food in the environment those are natural circuits that are screaming at the person to indulge that through dulls themselves as much as possible those things are now in a hefty contradiction and the person is in cognitive distance over this it's difficult it's also true that in the Stone Age you couldn't save any money it's impossible there was no such thing as money and it couldn't be saved and so in the same way in the modern world it's difficult to save as much money as we would like to because it's not part of our nature and yet we can and people do but they also have impulses that they want to use those resources immediately otherwise it feels like they're being wasted so they also want to go on a vacation this is called having money burn hole in your pocket and if you've never had that experience then you're sort of an odd highly conscientious very emotionally stable person almost almost everybody I know with a couple of exceptions we know who they are I have had this feeling and of course such a feeling would be natural to do want to indulge that all right go ahead next slide all right so what we're really seeing here for those of you that that have read or heard you talk about the pleasure trap we're now seeing these three main pillars of meditation as they sort of battle it out and this is how motivation is going to be adjudicated in mind through a balancing act of pleasure-seeking can't avoid standards conservation so what we're going to see that in this case pain is going to be on both sides of the equation where we got the positives over here on the right it's our pleasure and future pain avoidance and on the lap we have the cost of the pursuit of behavior which is going to be energy expended and possible pain so we're going to see that these four variables now battle each other so if we see like a young person the 14 year old doesn't want to go to the dentist and the reason is take some energy to do it which it's really suppose if they had to spend their own allowance to do it now you could really doubt it it's also painful there's no pleasure in it and all the great value of going to the dentist is actually future in avoidance and so it's future pain avoidance against the energy and the pain this is going to be not very enticing to do but if you are have a bigger brain and have more life experience and you can map out the total cost benefit analysis then you'll get yourself to the dentist once in a while even though it costs money and it's painful and there's no pleasure because you're aware that the future pain avoidance is worth the pain and the energy so this is the balancing act that the nervous system goes through in order to execute its best interest all right go ahead next slide please all right so now here are these people and we're gonna call them people in the blue we're gonna call them as schmeiser's and i hope nobody out there his name is Schmeisser because i just made this up and Schmeiser x' have a ski shop in lake tahoe and the people on the left there have a daughter named kendall that wants to work at that ski shop and you see the other people who can get together in the background they don't have daughters that want that job so they don't have to talk to the Schmeiser 'he's there were actually pretty boring people and they wear matching monogrammed sweatshirts which just tells you this is going to be a problem and now you can see that we've got these other little people that are having to to choke it out as the people in the green there are talking to slicers because they've got a dog who wants a job it's a cool ski shop so our gal over here and the red hair is telling ralph listen we've got to go over there and talk to them because we got to face this and you know what this is what human life is human life has a great many of these types of things that go on you say yeah sure boss we'll get to it absolutely not a problem etc even when you'd like to tell somebody you know what it's really not convenient for me no I don't think so now I think your request is unreasonable we don't we override these kinds of things all the time because we have willpower in the sense that our brain can map out our best interests in the long term and often will sacrifice short-term without as much as a little bit of an annoyance and a little bit of a light of energy and determination so what I'm trying to say in all this is that is that actually we have plenty of willpower for the kinds of problems that human beings were naturally designed for our problems only come when we complete unnatural problems at which point then we're in trouble next slide please all right and so we begin the story now about what willpower is by ending the first chapter which is that human beings and other animals have the ability to override short-term lures and desires in order to execute their long-term best interests there is no inherent shortage of willpower however we've seen that there are problems that are that are unnatural which will challenge that limited ability and so we can see that the great people in history and all kinds of other people that we know including ourselves will struggle with this in the face of unnatural temptations so now what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to make sure that the wealth power that we do have is nurtured and protected and defended against challenges that are self-destructive in order to do that we're going to look at the science of wealth power which is actually new it's important the concept is this is it has a surprisingly short history and science and it's for that that we're going to turn now next slide alright this is going to be the story of the research program at Professor Roy Baumeister it's now at Florida State evil is at Case Western for many years and all of the studies that I'm going to talk about here are not we're not just done by Baumeister but they were inspired by my Master's work and we're going to chart our way through the jungle here to an understanding of what willpower is and beginning with the idea that it really wasn't under any scientific investigation until very recently so we're going to begin with the very first and most famous study even that Baumeister's colleagues conducted and and we're gonna see what a mystery was born out of this study my next slide alright so we're going to talk about five studies the most famous one is going to be cookies and it's going to be one Mardi Gras lemonade dog treats and then finally prisoners didn't so we're going to begin the story these all linked together they're all influenced by each other so when beginning to begin with the famous cookie study next slide all right so here's the cookie study just to know that this is called experimental social psychology and for those of you that remember candid camera the guy who invented camera camera was a guy named Allen Funt and he was a at a master's degree in social psychology he was trained by truly the master or the originator of experimental social psychology in the world that this was a the German or a european psychologist Lewin Kurt Lewin that had come over in the 1930s and then essentially this concept was born instead of just observing people naturally and their interactions Lewin had the idea of setting up experiments and interesting events to see what they would do even of course canon camera was the most famous of all these setting up situations to surprise people and put them under unusual circumstances and watch their decision-making which was often hilarious yeah but this is this will look like candid camera and so this is a classic experimental social psychology steady and so this is what they did was they had people fast for three hours and then they had them come into the laboratory for what they thought was a taste study and what they walked into was a was an experiment room that smelled like chocolate chip cookies had just been baked which they had and a little oven right there in the experiment lab and there was a plate full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies along with a bunch of chocolate candies sitting on a plate in a big pile and next to it was a bowl full of radishes and so they had to draw a straw of a hat and they either got the cookie condition or they the radish condition now they got the cookie condition they just sat down and ate as much as they wanted the experimenter would leave the room and then they would come back in and fill out a little form about what they thought of the taste and that would be that for that's going to be part one of your study so very rookie study so the experiment the subjects don't know what it is that they're getting into here they don't know that in fact there's multiple parts of the study they think that this is just all there is to it now the exciting group is the group bed draws the straw that says radish and so they have to sit down in front this bowl of radishes we're right next to them is a plate full of cookies and they're hungry and the experimenter leaves the room and says well eat radishes for 10 minutes and I'll come back in and you can read the taste of the radishes and of course the stress is that they desperately want to eat those cookies but they can't because it's against the rules so there's a lot of close calls there's people that would take the bold plate and put their nose right on top of it sniffing one guy jollof boring the cookies and it broke and you had to put it back together so they can see from a hidden camera that people were stressed even though nobody chomped on any of the cookies or the candy they wanted to this is exactly what Baumeister had in mind when he set this thing up so then what he did was he said okay thank you for your time and thanks for fill out the forms and now we're gonna send you down the hallway because there's another study down the hallway it has something to do with geometric intelligence so just go down there and knock on door number three or whatever it is so what's gonna happen is is that people are going to go to the second study and they think that these two studies are totally unrelated but in fact they're integrated and the what they're going to do at the next study is that they're going to be shown some figure drawings that look like you could draw them and not lift your pencil and there's hold okay your job is to figure out how to reproduce this drawing without lifting your pencil and so it's we're really studying geometric intelligence here and so we're going to leave you alone loan in this room this stack of paper and as soon as you figure it out then ring this bell because I'm going to be timing it to see how fast you can do this and oh by the way there's some people that get stumped it can't figure it out and if you're one of those people just work with work and tell you feel like you can't do it and then when you are sure that you can't do it then ring the bell I'll come in so what this is this is actually going to study how long and tenaciously people work at a problem because the truth is is that the problem cannot be solved so it looks like it can be solved but it cannot be solved and Baumeister has the intuition that if people had to be in the radish condition in part one and wanted the cookies but couldn't get them his intuition was that if they went to the second study and and they were had been in the radish condition then they would not work as long at the problems before they quit as a person who had gotten eat the cookies this was his idea I have no idea why he came up with this idea but he did and so go ahead next slide and we're gonna take a look at it okay so we are step one that's the stress test where the person either gets cookies or they have to face radishes or they get neither they just get handed a magazine and told to read a magazine for ten minutes step two is they go down the hallway and you can see what we call the null hypothesis and science is how long it's going to take these people before they quit trying on this figure drawing and the notion would be that all three conditions would go about the same length that's not what happened what happened is is that in the radish condition people only went for eight minutes before they gave up this is really interesting so if you in condition one you had got the cookies you win 20 minutes before he picked up the little bell in the second part of the study and said hey I can't figure out the figure God but if you were the person in the lattice condition you only went eight minutes this is surprisingly it's about the same length of time that you sat in that room and stared at those cookies and had the eat radishes and one of the cookies so this was a very interesting finding and Baumeister didn't know why it was happening he had suspected that it would happen and he actually had when he wrote this up he said we don't know what to call this and we don't know what it is but in honor of Freud he called it ego depletion remember ego is the wider of the horse of the it'd and he says okay we're going to use Freud Chloe in terms for just a minute for finding the ego or the lighter gets tired and it gets depleted and then it just doesn't have any more juice in it and that's where he came up with that term and when he published that in 1999 and opened up the world of psychology to trying to figure out what on earth is rego depletion and how does it work and why okay next slide alright so they tried to figure this out and many laboratories in the country were trying to figure it out and Baumeister himself finally came up with an idea he thought that maybe maybe when you got pleasured it steel you you up to to face things not to face hard problems so maybe in the first study the magazine group did find that they didn't actually they weren't hungry so it's going to turn out that in the the first group remember the people that got the cookies maybe that pleasure sort of buffered them and got them ready to put up with a bunch of stress and he thought you know maybe that's what Mardi Gras is like so people are going to go into Lent we're going to have to give something up there for a period of time and so what maybe maybe that's why they have this wild party beforehand to pleasure themselves to get ready for being you know abstaining from thanks and so this is called the Mardi Gras study so the Mardi Gras study what they're going to do is they're going to get three conditions it's going to be a milkshake persons going to get a either a pleasurable milkshake a really gunky thing to eat or magazine and then they're gonna have to go do those figure drawings but before we do those bigger runnings what we're going to do is we're going to stress them first then give them either the milkshake of the chunky shake or the magazine and then we're going to test how long they use those figure drawings together so the way they're going to stress people is going to be through what's called a four color test go ahead next slide please so this is they'll flash on a screen and in part one of the study like the word green except it might be in red or might be in green or might be in blue and you have to very quickly decide being whether it's congruent or not congruent turns out it's really harder for people to do this because when you see the word green you're thinking green and then you're you're not sure wait a second does that green or not rain different areas of the brain or having to make those distinctions and it's really hard and give you a headache pretty quick so that's the what they did to stress people and then in a second study down the hallway didn't then they went and they did the other thing they either add a very tasty shake or it's terrible shake or a magazine and then step three let's do the puzzle drawings to see how long they would go before they would quit and so the expected that the people that got pleasured at step two would do really well and then that the people that leave the junky terrible-tasting milkshake would do poorly and the people that got the magazine would you pull this so the expected high low low alright go ahead this next slide place this is what they found so they found that the people that had gotten a milkshake at stage two and did very well and so did the people that ate the junky stuff but the people that he had the magazine handed to them did poorly in in stage three or the fingers or figure drawings this was a total puzzle and Baumeister had no idea what was going on and they were they were frustrated because his theory of pleasure being a buffer against stress just went down the drain nerve and the only thing that they could think of there was the claws would be that they that people ate something so Baumeister thought is it possible that calories is the power in one power and in fact maybe it's blood sugar being replaced in the brain and so he does another study in order to look at this and we're gonna now look at this now go ahead next slide so what he does is the that's the same kind of study that he just did with the junkie milkshake except he replaces it with real lemonade with sugar versus fake lemonade that's just as pleasurable but no sugar you had a magazine so once again what the studies going to be is the subjects are going to be at step one they're going to do that for color test and they're going to be kind of mentally exhausted then the step two they're going to get either a real lemonade with its real sugar in it or fake lemonade or magazine and then the third stage they're going to go down the hallway go into the thing the sister geometric intelligence the handed a sheet and say try to reproduce its drawing and ring a little bell when you're you give up and we're going to find out how long people go before they give up and in this case the hypothesis is the people that give the real lemma need will do well and that the other two people will want one or two groups will do poorly because they didn't get any sugar next slide please and this is exactly what they find so in the Baumeister lab they see that the power and willpower is sugar it's quite frankly shouldn't surprise us people being that the brain is running on a glucose and so when it works hard it burns itself through some glucose and it actually is dipping and the blood sugar in certain areas of the brain it's tired and it takes some time for that to be replenished and if they use something like a simple sugar which can hit the bloodstream very quickly it's not ideal for brain power but it's perfect for experiments so we we use something like an unprotected no fiber sugar like lemonade and boom we immediately get sugar in the system then what happens is is that the person recovers very well when when they eat when they got lemonade that didn't have any calories in it they did not recover and they did not recover obviously with a magazine so this is a fantastic discovery and Baumeister then goes around the country to universities explaining what is the bee did so essentially he recovers the ego power by by replacing calories go ahead next slide please and so he talks like a psychologist like well the ego depletion is you know replaced by nutrition and therefore you know this is how we're going to improve function so sitting in one of his lectures at the University of Kentucky when he's there is a little gal named Holly Miller and she's listened to this kind of talk before our psychologists she's actually a grad student studying dog psychology and she feels like she always hates all these psychological terms because she thinks it's just physiological a great deal of what human beings go through go ahead and next slide please and so what Holly does is decide to replicate the Baumeister study and she's going to do it with her dogs so one of them there his name spot the other one his name spots and she has some other dogs too and they all love Holly and she's going to take them through the Baumeister study in the dog world go ahead next slide and so the stress instead of a four-color task the way she's going to stress her dogs is by having them on a little blanket in the room and they don't get to come over to see her you have to stay for ten minutes that's going to stress a dog out and so that's that's the replication of the part of the study when people are staring at cookies but have to eat radishes okay next slide now in the control condition the dog gets to stay in the cage with Polly in there so the dog is not as stressed because the dog isn't having to constantly override its impulses to run over next slide so then the way after she stresses the dog then she's going to give them a puzzle so obviously they can't do a figure drawing but they can open a puzzle called a tie jug which is a little dog toy that has a treat located in it and all police dogs were trained and had experience in opening cover jugs so she's now going to give them a tug of jug it has a flaw in it and you can't open it we're gonna find out how long the dog worked at the tug of jugg before they quit go ahead next slide place so this is what she finds she finds that the dogs that were sitting in the room with her and had to stay for ten minutes those dogs when she gave him a tug drug that was rigged quit sooner quite a bit sooner than the dogs that have been in the cage so this is a perfect conceptual replication of the Baumeister study and so Holly Miller follows up Baumeister by saying yes what willpower is is it's actually a physiological event that's taking place in the brain we don't have to use the word like ego depletion if you can if you want but this is basic animal nervous system limitations bring him this is how stress is going to work and it's going to cause creatures to quit on difficult problems once they are mentally tired very very important research go ahead next slide please she then gives them stresses them out and then gives them some sugary lemonade in between literally lemonade and they recover beautifully even just as would have been anticipated by looking at the bow Meister steps ahead next slide please now I spent about 10 years of my life working in high-security prisons and it turns out that in prisons men nobody else knew that I was a health psychologist on the outside and it turns out there's they bringing doughnuts into prisons a lot and so I could walk by the break room and it would be doughnuts there and so I could eat doughnuts and nobody would think anything of it so in prison I was a free man and there was a problem with the doughnuts next slide sometimes the doughnuts would jump out of the box I don't know why they would do this but they would sometimes jump out of the box and land in my mouth through no fault of my own so this is now the story of how we're going to solve the problem of jumping doughnuts which is really low power problem all right next slide all right so our last study that we're going to look at is going to be the pole board so the this is this was the final study we're talking about it was inspired by Baumeister's work but was not done by him I was done by people at the University of Illinois ID who even had data that they could mine from a full board in Israel and the SPRO Board in Israel would meet the normal business hours all year long and they would hear cases and they would make decisions about who to let out who not to let out and on average they would call about 35% of people now what what this a group from Illinois did was they went into the record and they collapsed over the course of a year all of the cases and plotted them against a day so all of the cases that will hurt at 8 o'clock in the morning 9 o'clock 10 o'clock and then after lunch etc and if it wasn't the case that justice was being meted out by the board then your odds have been cold if you have a 9 o'clock case should be the same as if you had a 2 o'clock case go ahead next slide please so if justice were the case when we looked at these thousand cases say it should all look completely even if we collapse that years worth of work superimpose them on a day that's provided of course that there's no rule that says we hear the ax murders in the morning and here the parking ticket people in the afternoon it turns out that the cases in terms of their severity were absolutely randomly distributed throughout the day of course and so at the end of the year you have a perfect random assignment condition where essentially if there's anything about this graph that doesn't look like this we're going to smell a rat so people that have been with us this long in this presentation should suspect that there's likely to be a rat here which is going to mean that these judges are going to be getting periodically exhausted and they're gonna get more impulsive and they're not going to make just decisions go ahead and next slide please so one hypothesis but the authors did not say that I said when I first read the study I thought you know what I'll bet the judges when they're when they're not as tired they consider more factors and they think it through and they're more likely probably to let people go but as they get tired during the day they're going to get more impulsive and they're going to get they want a quicker decision and the quick decision will always be oh just keep them in because that's the decision that doesn't take as much effort there's less risk involved with it it turns out that they did steady roles versus non girls and it was true that when they decided to not bowl people the decisions were much shorter they use far less words to describe the decision in other words less mental effort was being put in now the question that wouldn't be important to us if it turned out that the that the decision line was the blue line was if they were meeting out justice beautifully all day long and at the there the time of day didn't make any impact on their decision-making then it would simply be the case that that shorter decisions were indicative of a simpler case that we could simply say no but of course the the outcome line does not look like the blue line and in fact it doesn't even look like the red line that I thought if they did look like the red line notice what a horrible miscarriage of justice would be going on where your odds of going home with 45 percent at 8:00 a.m. the 25% at 4:00 p.m. that means that's a really bad shake if you happen to have the after line slot B now we're going to look at what the actual data showed from the study that was done at the University of Illinois go ahead next slide this is actually what happened so if you have the first case of the day your odds of going home the 70% if you were a little bit later in the morning your odds went out a 10% even if he was right before actually then the judges go out for a break and they get a snack and they come back in and your next odds are 70% if you're heard right before lunch the odds are that you're not going to go home or astronomically against you if you're right after lunch you're fine if you're a mid afternoon you're dead in the water this is an extraordinary study it shows us that human decision-making is enormously subject to the short-term mental state of the brain this is like a travesty of justice here and I want you to realize you are now looking at human willpower so human willpower isn't what we thought which is this characteristic of a person that transcends day and time and sleep deprivation everything else on the side in fact your willpower is bouncing around sitter ibly all day long as an individual and so this is why for example in a a they call a halt hungry angry lonely and tired when you stress the system it becomes much less robust with respect to willpower challenges and that's really a problem when those willpower challenges are involved supernormal stimuli like junky food alcohol cigarettes etc things like that ok so now we're going to go to the next slide so now people say ok well what's the what's the great willpower secret how can I not self-sabotage how can I stay on a healthy track well mm-hmm we already know that your motivational system was not designed to consistently make excellent decisions in the face of supernormal stimuli so it's hard to do any health-promoting program well but there's certain habits that we can use that will make it more likely for us to be successful more often and here they are go ahead next slide first thing you want to do is clean your room you want a clean orderly environment to live in the reason is is that if you have chaos around you your mind is working extra hard just looking at a mess it's trying to think through what priorities it should do first or that missing telephone bill is in other words everything is causing you a great deal more effort mentally when you have a disorderly environment one of the best things that you can do to improve your general world power functioning is to have a neat orderly environment that makes you stronger in the face of temptation go ahead next slide thing you can do you can notice that this is actually the same bedroom as was in the previous slide because it's the same a red plant we're just seeing this now from a different perspective is that is the brilliant artists is now taking you 90 degrees and you're sitting on the bed looking at this now this is that what we lay out as our exercise clothes because our job is going to be to get say 10 or 15 minutes of exercise a day we want to do this for a variety of reasons one of them is we believe it helps support our look out that that we think but we don't know that people that exercise regularly and it doesn't have to be a lot you can put on a couple of dance tunes and just dance around and get yourself a little bit winded but the notion here is to put yourself in a situation where the the body has to kick out some extra glycogen as you start letting yourself down a little bit of blood sugar we think that that may be as as the liver gets better at releasing glycogen that could be a reason why people that exercise regularly have a better world power in general because essentially when they need it they can get to extra energy better okay so next slide please now when the donuts are flying all around you and they're trying to get into you what you want to do is you want to stick something in your mouth first so I would tell myself at the prison you have to go eat something healthy first before you go back around look at those donuts and very often if I would go and eat something fight stick an apple in my mouth be open you know close up the space what would happen is is that this now supports my willpower and now it's like a it's just not as enticing and so it's not always going to work and it's not always going to be a complete solution but we should have a simple rule that if you're about to eat something junky realize you must eat something healthy first and then we'll see whether or not it has such a pill okay and next slide please and finally we want to go to bed on time it's going to turn out that we now know from studies that have been done in the last 20 years that adequate sleep is a extremely important feature in willpower if it turns out that people that will sleep six hours a week instead of eight hours excuse me six hours of night instead of eight hours will have a substantially greater tendency to eat junk food and will typically eat about 300 calories more a day than somebody that's sleeping eight hours and we get more impulsive the brain is essentially dirty it's not functioning very well we don't get a full cleaning job it's kind of like a cheap cleaning job at the car wash you want to get the premium job at the car wash to have the car really clean if you do not sleep participating you are cheating the mind of cleaning itself out that turns out to be a major feature of what is happening during our sleep every animal on the earth literally down to the smallest little tiny creature sleeps every one of them that has ever been steady there's no creature there's no animal that does not sleep we are the only species that willfully shorts our self of sleep and when we do that we pay the price our mental functioning drops we are operating on a handicapped basis and one of the things that will be handicapped will be our workout so that's why we want to make really good quality sleep you know as much as you can in other words people ask how much should they sleep the answer is as much as you want that's what it should be we want to be sleeping satiation as many nights out of seven as you can next slide please and so these are the great willpower secrets from the great Swami here are incredibly simple they're very basic I team clean your room exercise have healthy food and snacks available and get a good night's sleep these things are really basic processes that turn out to help our willpower be as strong as it needs to be so that we don't wind up being compromised and getting it challenged next slide please you know there's always going to be problems there's going to be a project you need to stay up late for and we're not get a good sleep we're going to be around a place where doughnuts are flying and there's no healthy food around we'll always get a wind up in compromised situations and so every now and then a weed is going to start growing in our garden a bad habit is going to start our job is to return to these fundamentals and pull weeds if we return consistently exercise sleep healthy food orderly environment if we keep returning to these fundamentals then what's going to happen is is that we can keep the weeds down to a sane and reasonable level and in that way they don't take over the garden we know what happens when life gets out of balance and any of these things gets crazy our willpower goes out the window and so does our health program next slide and so this is how it is folks that the world power problem can be viewed as a essential mental hygiene exercise that keeps us in a place where we can have the likely deserve all right all right so hopefully that's a good introduction to this for people and some some tips about how what to take away to implement in your life to give yourself the edge that you need radiant presentation dr. Lyle we don't have a lot of time left for questions but we will I would like to ask you one question that came up several times and then maybe for next month we could make a will power of qat but yes Georgia so everybody if you would like to send us questions the questions you can email to webinar at dr. MacDougall calm but dr. Lyle if you could just touch on this topic about sabotage in doctors in and you know when II happen to why or how can people overcome this yes there's many reasons for this and that I've discussed in in other webinars so sometimes we self-sabotage because we're so frustrated meaning that the expectations that we have of ourselves or that other people may quietly have transmitted to us we feel like we can't reach them and we sort of kick over the table and so I I discussed that in detail in in the January 2016 webinar that you and I did called the slow fast way so that's a that's a one very important issue but what we talked about today is also involved people can get overwhelmed because the disorganized we try to learn too much and try to cook too many new things in the kitchen so Massillon it's not organized you know what we want to do is keep things simple we want to we want to do very simple good things over and over again simple exercise program simple dietary program get to bed on time have a have snacks available for us that are healthy so that they are going to move our when we're being challenged or will hungry these are in between meals these are the things that we need to do I believe that a lot of problems come when people overly complicate the Sun and they try to do too much and then they get overwhelmed by them and they can shrug their shoulders and kick over the table and quit keep it simple what we need to do for this program is we need to institute what I call the start stream you better know how you're getting a stream of starches it's your life it's the number one problem that you have and we've got to solve it so if you have an oven that you can cook 10 baked potato potatoes at a time do it if you could make one big crock pot full of the big vegetable stew that you can eat on all week and get several meals out of it that's a good thing if you can eat oatmeal in the morning a lot of mornings if not all then this is a whole slew of the starch spring so we need you just need to solve the problem Start screen and we need to exercise keep an orderly environment get to sleep on time these are this is a group of techniques that will help get us into what I call a good groove and one day that group can get deep and then you're in a deep groove where you just do things right all the time and life is easy the other words this can become an easy program but only after you get good at managing these miniature or smaller problems and get get up the learning curve so they're simple fantastic Gustavo great to see you again all right thank you everyone bye-bye
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