Friday 19th March
Have just started reading a book called Switch by two brothers Chip and Dan Heath (or Chip and Pin as we like to call them) it’s a book all about change, helping people to change etc. First fascinating insight from this is around the issue of self control. They talk about some psychological experiments where they took a bunch of hungry people, some of them were told that they were allowed to eat freshly baked cookies and others were only allowed to eat radishes and were all left in a room alone with both things on offer. The people told to eat radishes did not touch a single cookie – pretty amazing. They were then all put in a situation where they had to use self control again. The people who had not had to use any self control lasted more than twice as long in the second test than those who had eaten radishes. The point being – people have an inexhaustible supply of self control. Once you’ve used some up, you have a lot less to offer.
Personally I think this is one of those insights that whilst you may struggle to see how it’s relevant now, at certain times and in certain situations, that’s going to be invaluable!
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"The point being – people have an inexhaustible supply of self control. Once you’ve used some up, you have a lot less to offer."
ReplyDeleteSo which part of this statement do you think is correct? ;-)
Who knows, you'd think that if you've used self control that maybe you'd actually have more to offer, bit like the whole muscle analogy, the more you use it the stronger it becomes. There's certainly no science to it, but sure is interesting to see that in experiments, people seemed to run out!
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