Brainstates and Willpower
Post on 25-Nov-2015
25 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
Transcript
www.myosynthesis.com
January 6, 2012
Now that weve officially flipped into another new
year, activity at the gym and in the kitchen is
about to boil over into that first-quarter frenzy of
new goals, new resolutions, and the hard
determination that only the buzz of the holiday
season can kindle. For the starry-eyed masses
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
1 of 37
recently-committed to laying down the cigarettes
and twinkies and getting some exercise, the new
year is a time of optimism: they have dreams of
better health and better bodies.
For the old gym hermits, its time to fortify the
defenses, shore up the walls, and hunker down
until late February. Not because we resent the
influx of greenhorns. Ive waffled on this over the
years but in my mellowing-out Ive had to admit
that the January rush makes me happy for what it
is. Sure it can be irritating to see all the
chuckleheaded tomfoolery going on when you just
want to squat, but lets keep it in perspective: at
least theyre trying.
The Serious and Dedicated know that, year after
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
2 of 37
year, the Resolutioner rush inevitably fizzles out
by late February, March at the latest, as that
post-holiday enthusiasm gives way to the hard
truth about reality. Its hard work. Changes arent
immediate and to call gratification, such as it is,
delayed is an understatement. Those of you with
the bug, who enjoy lifting and intense cardio for
what it is, have to realize that, like coffee, its often
an acquired taste.
The average Resolutioner doesnt get that, and
without any guidance or mentoring, the odds are
stacked heavily against them ever figuring it out.
Take a look at all the fresh faces you see on the
second week of January, and compare that to how
many are still there in August.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
3 of 37
Its easy to snicker and shake your head in
judgment. Its even easier, if youre like pretty
much everyone Ive ever met in the fitness or
strength community, to write these people off as
lazy, unmotivated, weak, and other assorted
insults continuing on down the spectrum of
disdain.
A depressingly large number of people abandon
exercise programs, and diets, and plans to quit
smoking, and most anything else you can name.
Why is this? Are people really just lazy and
weak-willed? Are they just stupid and in need of
your brilliant workout and diet plan?
I dont like that answer. One-word responses like
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
4 of 37
lazy and stupid trivialize the complexities of
human nature and, from a pragmatic stance, they
arent Useful. Capital-U Useful is my way of
putting aside all the arguments over science-
correctness and the ego-feeding bluster of being
right and focusing on solutions.
Lazy isnt a Useful concept. Its an easy way to
judge and rank and otherwise look down your
nose, but its certainly not helpful as a fix for the
problem at hand. As for stupid, I know how
tempting it is to throw that word out, but as often
as not your rational problem-solving faculties
otherwise known as intelligence have little to
do with motivation for or adherence to lifestyle
changes.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
5 of 37
As Ive learned more about psychology, and the
biological processes that underpin our decision-
making and problem-solving powers, Ive moved
away from my old determinist views. The idea
that a human being can be summarized by
unchanging biological factors the way a clocks
gears and springs sum into the motion of the
minute and hour hands appeals to many,
especially in the strength and fitness communities
where squat numbers and great abs are so
wrapped up with ego. And of course anyone who
falls short of the physical ideal is simply weak,
lazy, and unmotivated. Cold survival-of-the-fittest
determinism underpins the entire community,
with individual agency your power to make
decisions and act on them being the one and
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
6 of 37
only cause of success or failure.
How many times a day do you read a cheesy
aphorism or repetitive slogan meant to motivate
you and push you into the realm of hardcore?
How often are you reminded that you have to be
tough as a sack of nails and unfazed by even the
most daunting of challenges? How often do you
feel pressured to keep up that facade and put on a
show for the group because any sign of weakness
reflects badly on your character? You cant spend
15 minutes around the average fitness-minded
group without coming across low-budget
posturing.
Youd think willpower were just a matter of
sucking it up and changing yourself. Why dont
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
7 of 37
you just work harder? Why dont you be more like
that guy? Whats your excuse? A fair enough
message, but not when coming from the same
mouth that believes in a predetermined and
unchanging human nature.
Western culture perceives the mind and traits of
character and personality as ineffable things
maybe a soul, or supernatural energy, but
certainly not crude like squishy organs and
tissues. Odds are that, whether you realize it
consciously or not, you think of your mind as
something separate from your body and not
subject to the same rules.
Thats not entirely accurate. Mind is no easy
concept to define, but its certainly not biological
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
8 of 37
or even physical at all you cant touch a thought
or quantify what it is about an emotion that you
experience but at the same time, that internal
life of thought and experience intimately relates to
the activity of nerves in your brain.
Ignoring the thorny issues of cause and effect for
the sake of the point, neurological correlates of
behavior, neural networks that activate or switch
off in rough correspondence with feelings or
behaviors, suggest that our psychology is a
biological function (perhaps not precisely,
because of those thorny causality issues, but for
the purposes of our discussion its close enough to
the mark).
Psychological traits are inherited and biologically
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
9 of 37
determined much like your height and hair color,
emerging from your brain the way hair grows out
of follicles in your skin.
Traits including willpower.
Anyone whos ever suffered from depression or
anxiety disorders knows how powerful those
ailments can be. You just dont feel right on the
inside, and the feelings arent powerless illusions
at their worst they creep out into the world and
distort everything with an ugly tint. Mood
disorders correspond to altered brain chemistry in
several networks related to mood, sense of fear
and anxiety, and motivational drives. Causality
aside, the clear connection between the neurology
and the internal experience has lead
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
10 of 37
neuroscientists and psychiatrists to recognize the
biological origins of these diseases.
Imagine telling the victim of a house fire to suck
up his third-degree burns. Pains all in your head,
after all, just another set of nerves firing in the
right places. The flaw in that reasoning glares at
you: theres an obvious malfunction in the tissue
that needs medical treatment and time to heal.
Mental health issues, subject as they are to
considerable stigma in our society of iron-willed
work ethic, dont get that same benefit of the
doubt. Those afflicted are greeted with disbelief,
often as not told to suck it up and deal with it
by those whove never shared that particular
internal state. The brains dysfunctions arent so
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
11 of 37
obvious or easily ignored as third-degree burns,
and yet theres hardly any difference in the
character of the two scenarios. Tissues and
organs, whether caused by trauma or infection or
plain old genetic inheritance, dont behave how
theyre supposed to behave and the result is a
health problem.
Obvious damage to skin, or liver, or heart
demands medical attention. We treat every organ
system in our body as deserving of medical
treatment except the brain, which, to ask your
average fitness expert, is fixed by being more
hardcore. Thats the extent of Western insight into
problems of the inner self, and thats an obstacle
when dealing with questions of why people arent
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
12 of 37
behaving as youd expect them to behave.
If people arent exercising and sticking to diets, it
might be that theres an internal cause worth
treating the way youd treat a burn or a cut to fix
the health problem. I know that certainly some of
you reading this are from the Im So Hardcore
school of thought and youre rolling your eyes at
me right now. Validating all these lazy people will
only encourage them to be lazy.
Maybe. I dont deny that theres a cultural
dimension to our collective willpower failings, in
that were wired to follow the path of least
resistance and our society brings resistance to a
low unprecedented in human history. But Id
rather understand why the willpower failures
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
13 of 37
happen and look for solutions rather than
bringing out the L-word and the S-word and
transforming this into a moral failing. If there is a
genuine connection between biology and
willpower failure, then its worth investigating.
Roy Baumeister heads the social psychology lab at
Florida State University, a lab with his name on it.
Since graduating from Princeton in 1978,
Baumeister has studied questions of self and
identity. Not only what they are, but how our
notions of self relate to wider society. In whats
become perhaps his most popular thread of
research, Baumeister and his colleagues have
demonstrated in a series of studies that
self-control and willpower act like a limited
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
14 of 37
resource. When we have to make executive
decisions and impose our will putting down the
cookies, skipping that afternoon smoke, or doing
math problems we use up some of that supply.
Use up too much and all those temptations
overwhelm us; we literally dont have the mental
energy to say no.
To understand this in context, you arent an
idealized free-thinking decision-maker reasoning
out logical decisions based on facts. Youre an
emotional thinker on a level you probably dont
realize as your brains built to hide the fact from
conscious awareness, driven by intuitive
emotional biases that color your rational
thoughts. The notion of free will, your capacity to
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
15 of 37
make decisions and follow them through, draws
on the brains rational and emotional circuits in
tandem, and repeated experiments have shown
that its the emotional spearheading the efforts
with the more evolutionarily-recent rational-self
playing lackey.
Self-control isnt so much about drawing up plans
with your shining intellect, rather than
suppressing the urges and emotionally-colored
thoughts spit up by your reptile brain. Willpower
is saying no to the stream of intuitive, knee-jerk
impulses coming out of your mind, clamping
down on them and hopefully giving yourself space
for the slower conscious processes to make
smarter, or at least better-informed, decisions.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
16 of 37
Free will is more like free wont, as the
brain-nerds say.
Baumeisters work implicates the brains store of
glucose (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
/17279852) as willpowers fuel source
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18453466).
Once depleted through intense concentration,
heavy drinking, or forcing yourself to eat yet
another meal of chicken and broccoli, self-control
tanks along with its fuel supply. Youre no longer
able to resist the emotional urges, and any cookies
within striking distance are doomed.
Baumeister compares willpower to a flexed
muscle. You can only hold it so long before you
run out of energy, and once youve worn it out,
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
17 of 37
that muscle wont be good for much else until it
recharges. He calls this phenomenon of exhausted
self-control ego depletion
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9599441).
It doesnt take much imagination to think of the
ways ego depletion might affect, and be affected
by, exercise, being one of the top contributors to
physical and mental fatigue. Even without
research to prove it, you know what goes on
during hard exercise. We tend to sit in a zone of
intense concentration and focus, using up
willpower reserves to push through pain and
fatigue. Working muscles compete for circulating
blood glucose, limiting the brains access and
hampering any possibilities of recharging.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
18 of 37
Kathleen Martin Ginis of McMaster University in
Toronto has examined the depletion of self in the
context of exercise, and her findings bolster the
view that exercise is both cause and effect. A
recent study with Stephen Bray
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20204951)
first exposed the participants to a task meant to
deplete self-control before 10 minutes of cycling.
The ego-depleted subjects produced less work
than fresh counterparts in the control group, as
you might expect. But it didnt stop there. Not
only did these subjects look ahead and plan to do
less work in an upcoming workout, the degree of
reduction in planned effort also predicted their
adherence to a program over the following eight
weeks.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
19 of 37
Depleted ego influences the effort you put into
workouts and your planning for future workouts,
setting off a domino effect of self-sabotage.
Another study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
/pubmed/22020133) from Bray and Martin Ginis
indicates that even thinking really hard depletes
self-control to a degree that impacts maximum
voluntary strength. Thats worth remembering in
light of central fatigue problems that apparently
plague us all now youve only got so much
mental effort to go around, so prioritize it where it
matters (which wont always be exercise if you
have more important things happening in your
life). Hard training and a busy life may not always
cooperate (see also: 21727299
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
20 of 37
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21727299),
17995906 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
/17995906))
A 2010 study by Martin Ginis and Elisa
Murru (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
/20733212) tested a possible selves intervention
on exercise behavior and self-regulatory efficacy,
a way of saying that you believe in your own
performance as a means of reaching a goal.
Participants were divided into two possible self
groups, one a hoped-for group in which they
imagined themselves in the future as healthy
exercisers, the other a feared group imagining
their future as unhealthy and inactive.
It may not sound like much, but evidently it
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
21 of 37
worked. Participants in either of the possible self
groups reported greater exercise adherence at
both four and eight weeks after the intervention,
adherence boosted in part by improved
self-efficacy.
Belief in your own competence matters, and for
reasons extending beyond sticking to a workout
plan. A 2011 study from the University of
Gent in Padova, Italy
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21515737),
suggested that a disbelief in free will that is, the
belief that youre in control and able to act
leads to measurable changes in brain activity, and
those changes affect social behavior and
performance in a given task.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
22 of 37
Participants were asked to read two different
passages, one of which argued against the notion
of individual choice and free will, while the other
affirmed the power of the individual to act. The
passages were expected to briefly affirm or
discourage a belief in free will, and indeed scans
of the subjects brain showed that those in the
disbelief group had less activity in the regions
governing voluntary movement.
Baumeister has also done his share of research
dealing with belief in free will and self-control. A
paper from 2009 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
/pubmed/19141628) suggests that disbelief in free
will leads to selfish, impulsive and thus socially
undesirable behavior. In contrast, believing in
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
23 of 37
freedom to choose and act appears to make
people more thoughtful and reflective, less
aggressive and more willing to be helpful.
Another article co-authored with Kathleen Vohs
of the University of Minnesota suggests that, in
dealing with addictive behaviors, belief in free
will is the socially-useful stance
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19812710):
Self-control is an important form
of what people understand as free
will, and the capacity for
self-control is real but limited
thus neither complete nor
completely lacking. The
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
24 of 37
traditional notion of willpower
may be useful here, especially if
one understands willpower as a
kind of psychological energy that
fluctuates as people use it up and
then re-charge it. Free will is a
partial, sometime thing.
The mere belief that you arent in control causes
changes in neural activity and in the resulting
behavioral outcomes. Free will may or may not
exist as wed want it to be, but believing in it sure
does matter. Feeling out of control and believing
that youre helpless means that, in a real sense,
you are.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
25 of 37
Lets relate that back to the typical exercise and
diet recommendations trickling down to our
Resolutioners. Even coming in with the best of
intentions, how long will a person subsist on
pain-chasing feel the burn and suck it up
training and diets built on deprivation? With
immediate and obvious results, maybe longer
than youd think, but how many get that instant
feedback and stay with it long enough to form a
habit?
When the behaviors are both demanding,
depleting self-control resources, and devoid of
self-validation like results, or at least being
entertaining enough to hold their interest then
of course youre going to have a high washout
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
26 of 37
rate. Thats not a willpower failing, thats a
disconnect between gym and trainer, on the one
hand, and prospective exerciser.
This applies even to those of you with smart and
well-informed training programs and diet plans.
You can have all the information and productive
methods you want. If you cant parse it in a way
that generates appeal and motivates consistency,
then its useless. You can complain about women
who think theyll get bulky and guys curling in the
squat rack and decry all the stupid people that
just wont listen to this awesome advice and
youre not reaching a single one of them.
It would be unfair to make this completely
one-sided, though, and Im not putting blame on
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
27 of 37
anyone (even though I think the fitness
community leaves much to be desired, as were
supposed to be the professionals). The problem,
such as it is, has causes distributed all over society
and it makes no sense to think big. Rather, lets
think of how we can fix it on an individual basis.
Baumeister and Martin Ginis both note that
willpower can be trained with practice
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17083666).
The analogy with a flexed muscle doesnt stop at
tiredness. Like a muscle, continually flexing it
makes it stronger. Regularly challenging your
willpower, by resisting the cookies or making
yourself sit just a little longer, improves
self-control.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
28 of 37
Of personal interest to me have been
mindfulness-based programs and cognitive
therapies. Mindfulness training is interchangeable
with meditation. You sit and breathe and keep
your thoughts on the breath. It may seem boring
at first, but with practice youll notice
improvements in concentration and focus,
improvements that seem to correlate with growth
of the respective brain regions. You arent just
watching your breathing, it turns out. Youre
developing the parts of the brain that handle
attentional focus and self-awareness, two qualities
intimately related to self-control and which,
unsurprisingly, many people are lacking in the
fast-paced information-soaked lives were
expected to live.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
29 of 37
Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR),
developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of
Massachusetts Medical School, combines
elements of Buddhist spirituality and meditation
into a more formalized (as formalized as that sort
of thing gets, anyway) stress-reduction process.
MBSR has its own clinical results showing it
effective as a coping strategy
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15256293)
for a broad spectrum of problems. Kabat-Zinn has
written several books cover his methods in more
detail if youre after a more in-depth treatment.
Cognitive therapy works from the opposite
direction, talking back to those impulsive
thoughts and using your powers of reason to put
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
30 of 37
them away. Cognitive therapy isnt a single
strategy or intervention, but rather a mental
tool-kit that you can draw on according to the
situation at hand. Cognitive therapy has a
clinically-proven track record, not only as a
treatment for mood disorders but in other
life-changing scenarios, so you may well find it
useful as a tool for diet and exercise adherence.
David Burns has written the comprehensive and
easily-accessible Feeling Good: The New
Mood Therapy (http://www.goodreads.com
/book/show/46674.Feeling_Good) which is
recommended for a detailed overview of cognitive
therapy.
The mind goes where you send it and reflects
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
31 of 37
what you put in it. You can let impulses run your
life, or you can realize that you do have control
and find the tools to turn things around.
Mindfulness and cognitive therapy and willpower
practice all put you in a specific frame of mind
meant to counteract that mindless state, and, at
least in the case of mindfulness, this actually leads
to measurable changes in brain structure (see
also: 21071182 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
/pubmed/21071182), 19015095
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19015095),
21334442 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
/21334442)).
This leaves us almost full circle, though not quite.
Willpower and self-control must be part of the
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
32 of 37
solution, and at the same time, these are not
magical qualities separate from biological
influence. The brain generates the self-control
feeling, and a poorly-wired brain with a weaker
impulse-control function whether due to
inherited genes or environmental signals may
be more susceptible to addictive or impulsive
behaviors. Behaviors which include sitting in a rut
on the couch eating junk food.
Just as any two people can stand at different
heights and have different hair color, self-control
and the unconscious impulses it has to fight can
be very different between them.
Id suggest that the slogans, the aphorisms, the
motivational quotes and go-get-em attitude treats
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
33 of 37
the whole problem backwards. Successful athletes
and fitness models who act out those one-liners
didnt get that way by beating themselves into
submission. They learned to do what they do by
practice, training, and conditioning. And I dont
mean in the sense of a Nike commercial. You
didnt grow up in their life, so you cant expect to
adopt their inner drives.
Overcoming adversity, if it can be learned at all as
a life-skill, definitely wont be learned through
self-righteous admonition and brow-beating. To
change, people have to believe that change can
happen at all and that its a process of on-going
refinement. Setting a bar impossibly high and
using the tact of a Parris Island drill sergeant,
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
34 of 37
Biggest Loser style, probably doesnt get it done.
Youd get mad over curls in the squat rack or
women spending three hours a day on the
treadmill to lose fat. Dont treat the mind with
Bro-science.
What you can do, however, is firstly realize that
you have a measure of control, and secondly that
you can fix it by practicing and cultivating that
control through psychological techniques. You
can learn to coach your mind, and believing that
you can is the first step on the way. Thats Useful.
My pragmatic and cynical side knows that you
cant reach everyone this way. Some people, well,
youre just not going to reach them at all, and
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
35 of 37
maybe the L-word and the S-word does apply
sometimes. I just dont think we should give up so
easily when, at least in our own lives, we feel we
arent living up to the Tough As Nails ideal that
encompasses sports and athletic training. You can
succeed without going there, and I really wonder
how many enthusiastic beginners are put off by
that attitude and the elitism that automatically
labels them as stupid and lazy.
For further reading, Baumeister has a new book
out, Willpower: Rediscovering the
Greatest Human Strength
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-
willpower), co-authored with New York Times
science writer John Tierney. I mentioned
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
36 of 37
Like whatyouread?Share it.
Willpower as a book of interest in my year-end
book wrap-up, as, while Baumeisters research is
accessible, I also believe in getting good science
writing from the source whenever possible, so
keep an eye out if you find this a topic of interest.
Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis
37 of 37
top related