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Willpower is a muscle. By wanting to do things, but focusing on meditation, you're building up your willpower muscle.
by bennesvig 14y ago
Willpower is a muscle. By wanting to do things, but focusing on meditation, you're building up your willpower muscle.
- dchest 14y agoThis is an analogy, it may be true or false. Download speed is a muscle. By downloading more files you're building up your download speed.
- bennesvig 14y agoThat analogy doesn't work. Meditations influence is covered in depth in The Willpower Instinct, but here's a short summary. ""Meditation requires you to tap all the self-regulation systems in your brain as well as the self-monitoring mechanism," says Kelly McGonigal, PhD, a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of the forthcoming The Willpower Instinct. Every time you meditate, you use two important parts of your brain: the prefrontal cortex, which helps you make smart choices, and the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps you be aware of when you make such choices and when you don't. The more you activate these systems, the more powerful they become, so in the future it will feel easier to do the right thing. "Eventually you will start to notice whenever you are doing something that is inconsistent with your goals," McGonigal says."
- KirinDave 14y agoDoes the Willpower Instinct contain any sort of actual empirical analysis of the subject? Or is it just someone with a PhD saying something? Because medical professionals can believe in magic and bullshit just as easily as anyone else.
- bennesvig 14y agoYes. It mentions actual studies and evidence. http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/01/24/brain-structure-changes-after-meditation/22859.html http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/01/24/brain-structure-chan...
- KirinDave 14y agoBut these studies are on noticing structural changes, not changes in the subject's capability. What makes meditation better at this than, say, sitting down and doing math homework or going out and doing exercise? There's a lot of research to strongly correlate regular physical activity with intelligence (random googled summary with many citations here: http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/brainandex.html http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/brainandex.htm...).
- jcl 14y agoThe analogy is true, insofar as there are experiments that support it. https://www.google.com/search?q=willpower+muscle+research https://www.google.com/search?q=willpower+muscle+research More interestingly, there is research that suggests that believing that willpower is like a muscle impairs willpower. :) http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1686 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1686
- KirinDave 14y agoThat is an amazing study! Thanks for bringing it up!
- disgruntledphd2 14y agoThanks for that, I read that study when it came out (the second one) but could never find it again.