Radishes & Resolutions
Who doesn’t like chocolate? Imagine what it must have been liked in 1997 when Ray Baumeister and his fellow researchers at Case Western Reserve University must have thought when they were invited to spend time in a room that just smelled of freshly baked chocolate cookies.
And then the same research subjects were shown the cookies and other chocolatey confections right before their very eyes. Half of the lucky souls were invited to eat the warm doughy chocolate cookies. The other half were offered a plate of radishes to much on.
This was a test of will power for the radish bunch and they weren’t exactly thrilled with the bait and switch technique. Researchers noted that they tended to look longingly at the cookies and some even picked them up just to inhale the sense of their gooey goodness.
How many of the radish crew do you think broke ranks and snaffled a cookie whilst they thought no one was looking? Amazingly, and clearly I’d not been invited – no-one took the cookie.
But that really wasn’t the end of the story or the end of the experiment.
Baumeister then asked all the participants to solve a challenging puzzle. In fact the puzzle had been arranged so it was not really possible to solve. In the trial the radish eaters gave in at around the nine minute mark, the chocolate cookie crew gave in at around 18 minutes, around twice as long.
I guess we’re all hoping at this point the revelation was eat more chocolate to get more done but that’s not really the story here or the point of the experiment. This was an experiment in will-power and self-control.
In this experiment Baumeister was seeking to demonstrate when we are forced into actions of self-control, the energy we have is constantly depleting and eventually will run out. Self-regulation as a way of being is somewhat impossible as the will-power required is not infinite.
Further studies have gone on beyond Baumeister in fields of criminology and retail behaviour to reveal that when we use self-control as main method of being, once the reserves are exhausted as they surely will, the consequences for us can be disastrous – for example when we are low or down-hearted we may reach for the chocolate. Baumeister called this process ego-depletion – the notion that will-power and self-control are not just metaphors but connected to glucose levels in our body that deplete over time.
At the year comes to a close and a new one beckons it is traditional for many to make their new year resolutions. 25% of those will be abandoned within the space of just one week. Amazingly the average person makes the same new year resolution ten times without any success. So much for will-power.
So if will power is not going to help us make the change that we want to seek, how can we do it? The answer lies in habit and ritual. If we want something to be different, the best way is to start small, do it often and build up gradually. Why?
Because starting small is only a tiny step from what we do now so it takes less will power to counter what we’d normally have done. Doing it regularly is like building a muscle in our brain so that when we come to do it again, we’re not really demanding so much will-power to just repeat a process. And then repeating it a third time allows us to shift from something we’ve changed, to a more automatic response requiring almost no will-power. And even on the bad days when our reserve of self-control has been severely challenged by something going wrong, having to make a complaint or an upset of some kind, instead of then intuitively reaching for the chocolate as our means of response and reward we can rely on muscle memory to kick in – something Tony Schwartz calls “automacity of being”.
As we approach Christmas and the general holiday period it’s only natural to think to the year ahead and what you’d like to be different. If your festive table has just a hint of chocolate treats available remember the cookie and the radish experiment. If fitness is your wish for 2022 for example then by all means dream big for the marathon you’ll complete but choose your first step as just one up from where you are now. Even if that means a short walk around the block three times in week 1. Build up that mental and muscle memory so that instead of it feeling unusual when you leave the house, your body is kind of expecting “today’s the day when we get to do this”.
Pretty soon instead of this feeling like you’re pushing or willing yourself to do something (this is your self-control reflex at work) you’ll find your body pulling you into action, this is why regular runners often feel they’re missing out on days they can’t run.
