What's Willpower?

Civilization is based on Homo sapiens ability to make millisecond decisions to act or refrain from reacting.

Can you recall an instance when your wanted to punch out someone’s lights, and stopped in mid-stride?

For dieters, willpower is reacting to your desire to eat
three Hershey bars in front of you. You stop in mid-bite and choose to refrain from an action your cognitive mind sees as self-defeating, or not.

Volition is voluntarily choosing.

Science

Science does not use the word ‘willpower’ because it is not
tangible. Yet like, love, faith and understanding, it can be tested by our behaviors.

Willpower is not self-denial, it is an affirmation of our
human ability to choose to do or refrain from taking an action leading to a particular result.

When we exercise self-control in any given situation,
we are increasing our supply of Willpower.

When you use your prefrontal cortex, the planning, reasoning area of the brain, you exercise self-control.

Amygdala

Our amygdala is a structure in your brain dedicated to
processing and regulating emotions. The name is Greek for almond shape, and connects our feeling with our prefrontal (decision-making) cortex, our visual cortex, and neocortex.

It is not Amygdala (emotions) or our prefrontal (thinking) cortex, but both operating in tandem.

All decisions are a combination of how we feel emotionally
about the result, and our reasoning based on knowledge and
experience.

The mental sequence is:

a) thoughts, leading to
b) mental pictures (your mind’s eye), producing
c) emotions/feelings contributing to our
d) behaviors and actions

Changing your thought or mental imagery produces a different set of feelings, leading to a different
behavior and result. How do you change your thoughts and
feelings?

ACC

Specifically, our Anterior Cingular Cortex is the specific
brain structure dedicated to thinking (cognitive) control.
It receives information from our logic, cause and effect, and reasoning, and combines it with feelings, emotions and personal desires.

Actions (behaviors) are combinations of our present thinking and feelings. It produces the final result, our specific behaviors in any situation.

Success

If you are dedicated to analyzing all you thoughts before
acting, you lose spontaneity and living in the moment.

The opposite pole is when we permit our emotions to decide our behaviors in critical decisions.

Recent studies by professor Sam Wang at Princeton and published by Sandra Aamodt, editor in chief at Nature Neuroscience, indicate people who can resist impulsive behavior (emotions) and who delay gratification (controls acting on our emotional desires), have greater success
in school, career and personal relations.

DWE

Directed Willful Effort is the term used by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., author of The Mind & The Brain to describe
‘willpower’.

He describes how training our DWE can help overcome Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Questioning our assumptions using our thinking brain can lead to different,
successful behaviors.

We can choose to activate our ACC (Anterior Cingular Cortex) by raising our Blood Sugar (glucose). Chewing gum,
eating an apple or other carbohydrate prior to a test exam
produces more glucose in our bloodstream.

More blood sugar increases your supply of willpower and enables you to make better decisions.

Endwords

Any activity we practice to increase self-control, increases our supply of willpower. In speed reading, it takes effort to consistently read using a pen as a pacer to underline the words on the page.

We have been reading for decades without underlining, causing it to operate on auto pilot (habit).

It requires DME (Directed Mental Effort), a/k/a willpower,
to change a habit. Specifically, practicing 15 minutes daily for 21 consecutive days creates a new habit.

Reading using a pen as a pacer to underline sentences increases reading speed by a factor of three. It helps double your long-time memory, and improves comprehension up to 18%.

Would it help your life in school and career to read and remember three books, articles and reports in the time others can hardly finish one? Ask us how.

See ya,

copyright 2008
H. Bernard Wechsler
www.speedlearning.org
hbw@speedlearning.org
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