| The problem I have is that 'willpower' is completely subjective and arbitrary. Exerting your willpower is not the same as me exerting mine. Also, your definition of a willpower choice might not be the same to me. Like I said, in my 20s, food was meaningless. Calories/fat/cholesterol weren't even something I considered. I wasn't overweight due to my high metabolism, so the choice between fruit or cake would be arbitrary. It wouldn't depend on using my brain, it would depend on any number of other factors. To put it simply: if I felt like the fruit, I'd eat the fruit, otherwise cake. You felt that playing a specific game was a waste of your time and you felt you'd have difficulty in quitting so you made it significantly hard to start again. Someone else might be able to just shut it down, leave it all installed, never go back to it, and, maybe, never even think about it again. So, unless you know that a person has some reservations about eating cake, it's hard to say whether choosing cake over fruit is a willpower decision. There's an even worse example in the article: Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Once again, it makes the assumption that stopping off at Burger King is somehow taboo to the person and because they blew a ton of cognitive cycles their willpower is blown. And all this completely inferred by a flawed premise (or at least flawed in how it is presented to us in this blog post). Let me give a reverse example. I chew my nails, sometimes very badly, and this can get to the point of the skin around the nail as well. It can be pretty painful. I've tried just about everything to quit, yet I've been doing this for at least early middle school. I find that if I can keep myself busy enough, either through work or non-stressful activities, I do not chew my nails (or at least it's minimized. My willpower is low when my cognitive functions are in excess - the exact opposite of what this research and accompanying blog assumes. That is one reason I find it to be somewhat questionable. |