Everyday Systems

I read an article a month ago about a study on willpower. The researchers concluded that people only have a limited amount of it to "spend". Once your reserves of will have been tapped (for the day??) it becomes veeeeeery hard to keep it up.

It seems to me that this is a very good reason to follow No S rather than another diet. When the habit kicks in, it frees you up to spend your willpower allotment on something else.

Also, an interesting side-note, on Monday I gave up coffee and found it impossible, but impossible to stick to No S. Today the headaches are gone and suddenly three meals seems do-able again.

I read this too, and I think there's a certain amount of obvious truth to the idea that willpower is a limited resource like a paycheck that you can "use up". But I think it's an incomplete picture.

I think a better analogy is that willpower is like a physical muscle. Your muscle power is a limited resource, you can certainly exhaust it short term, but by regularly exercising it you can greatly increase its capacity.

So I think once you've got a few months willpower workout under your belt from successful no-s, not only will no-s get easier because it's more of a habit (a big benefit in itself, and very unusual for a diet), but your general purpose willpower will have gotten a great workout and be better at other tasks. You don't just get your old willpower back, freed up by habit, you get stronger willpower back, it's been improved by the allocation.

Practically speaking, I guess it boils down to the same thing, though: focus on building one new habit at a time. If there must be some overlap, try to at stagger it a bit lest it till habit and exercise can reclaim and improve some previously deployed willpower for your new effort. I've found "monthly resolutions" (no more than one a calendar month) have been a helpful guideline for staggering the introduction of new behaviors that I'm considering habitualizing.

Reinhard