> His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. ...they establish habits that eli

> His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. ...they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. This rung a bell for me because I've noticed it's often easier to enforce a rule on myself if it's A) an actual rule and B) pre-decided (by me). It's not that I'm handing over the decision-making to anyone else. It's that I've set myself a rule (like, "no Facebook at work", a personal choice, not imposed by my job), so I'm not deciding right now "do I have time to check FB? Will it suck me in too far?" and so on. Looking back over my various self-improvement "diets" (usually more technological than food-related) I can see that the most successful ones were those for which I could set a hard-and-fast rule and for which I could convince myself that "the rule is set, can't break it now". Which is, of course, still a mental discipline, and a nontrivial one. But it's easier than the ones that involve more deciding on the spot, and a lot easier than the ones where I think, "I will try to mostly avoid...", which usually don't last very long. I'd never really thought of that in terms of number of decisions before, or decision fatigue, but it's an excellent explanation for a phenomenon I was already pretty familiar with.