Brainstates and Willpower

www.myosynthesis.com

January 6, 2012

Now that weve officially flipped into another new

year, activity at the gym and in the kitchen is

about to boil over into that first-quarter frenzy of

new goals, new resolutions, and the hard

determination that only the buzz of the holiday

season can kindle. For the starry-eyed masses

Brain States & Willpower Myosynthesis

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recently-committed to laying down the cigarettes

and twinkies and getting some exercise, the new

year is a time of optimism: they have dreams of

better health and better bodies.

For the old gym hermits, its time to fortify the

defenses, shore up the walls, and hunker down

until late February. Not because we resent the

influx of greenhorns. Ive waffled on this over the

years but in my mellowing-out Ive had to admit

that the January rush makes me happy for what it

is. Sure it can be irritating to see all the

chuckleheaded tomfoolery going on when you just

want to squat, but lets keep it in perspective: at

least theyre trying.

The Serious and Dedicated know that, year after


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year, the Resolutioner rush inevitably fizzles out

by late February, March at the latest, as that

post-holiday enthusiasm gives way to the hard

truth about reality. Its hard work. Changes arent

immediate and to call gratification, such as it is,

delayed is an understatement. Those of you with

the bug, who enjoy lifting and intense cardio for

what it is, have to realize that, like coffee, its often

an acquired taste.

The average Resolutioner doesnt get that, and

without any guidance or mentoring, the odds are

stacked heavily against them ever figuring it out.

Take a look at all the fresh faces you see on the

second week of January, and compare that to how

many are still there in August.


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Its easy to snicker and shake your head in

judgment. Its even easier, if youre like pretty

much everyone Ive ever met in the fitness or

strength community, to write these people off as

lazy, unmotivated, weak, and other assorted

insults continuing on down the spectrum of

disdain.

A depressingly large number of people abandon

exercise programs, and diets, and plans to quit

smoking, and most anything else you can name.

Why is this? Are people really just lazy and

weak-willed? Are they just stupid and in need of

your brilliant workout and diet plan?

I dont like that answer. One-word responses like


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lazy and stupid trivialize the complexities of

human nature and, from a pragmatic stance, they

arent Useful. Capital-U Useful is my way of

putting aside all the arguments over science-

correctness and the ego-feeding bluster of being

right and focusing on solutions.

Lazy isnt a Useful concept. Its an easy way to

judge and rank and otherwise look down your

nose, but its certainly not helpful as a fix for the

problem at hand. As for stupid, I know how

tempting it is to throw that word out, but as often

as not your rational problem-solving faculties

otherwise known as intelligence have little to

do with motivation for or adherence to lifestyle

changes.


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As Ive learned more about psychology, and the

biological processes that underpin our decision-

making and problem-solving powers, Ive moved

away from my old determinist views. The idea

that a human being can be summarized by

unchanging biological factors the way a clocks

gears and springs sum into the motion of the

minute and hour hands appeals to many,

especially in the strength and fitness communities

where squat numbers and great abs are so

wrapped up with ego. And of course anyone who

falls short of the physical ideal is simply weak,

lazy, and unmotivated. Cold survival-of-the-fittest

determinism underpins the entire community,

with individual agency your power to make

decisions and act on them being the one and


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only cause of success or failure.

How many times a day do you read a cheesy

aphorism or repetitive slogan meant to motivate

you and push you into the realm of hardcore?

How often are you reminded that you have to be

tough as a sack of nails and unfazed by even the

most daunting of challenges? How often do you

feel pressured to keep up that facade and put on a

show for the group because any sign of weakness

reflects badly on your character? You cant spend

15 minutes around the average fitness-minded

group without coming across low-budget

posturing.

Youd think willpower were just a matter of

sucking it up and changing yourself. Why dont


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you just work harder? Why dont you be more like

that guy? Whats your excuse? A fair enough

message, but not when coming from the same

mouth that believes in a predetermined and

unchanging human nature.

Western culture perceives the mind and traits of

character and personality as ineffable things

maybe a soul, or supernatural energy, but

certainly not crude like squishy organs and

tissues. Odds are that, whether you realize it

consciously or not, you think of your mind as

something separate from your body and not

subject to the same rules.

Thats not entirely accurate. Mind is no easy

concept to define, but its certainly not biological


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or even physical at all you cant touch a thought

or quantify what it is about an emotion that you

experience but at the same time, that internal

life of thought and experience intimately relates to

the activity of nerves in your brain.

Ignoring the thorny issues of cause and effect for

the sake of the point, neurological correlates of

behavior, neural networks that activate or switch

off in rough correspondence with feelings or

behaviors, suggest that our psychology is a

biological function (perhaps not precisely,

because of those thorny causality issues, but for

the purposes of our discussion its close enough to

the mark).

Psychological traits are inherited and biologically


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determined much like your height and hair color,

emerging from your brain the way hair grows out

of follicles in your skin.

Traits including willpower.

Anyone whos ever suffered from depression or

anxiety disorders knows how powerful those

ailments can be. You just dont feel right on the

inside, and the feelings arent powerless illusions

at their worst they creep out into the world and

distort everything with an ugly tint. Mood

disorders correspond to altered brain chemistry in

several networks related to mood, sense of fear

and anxiety, and motivational drives. Causality

aside, the clear connection between the neurology

and the internal experience has lead


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neuroscientists and psychiatrists to recognize the

biological origins of these diseases.

Imagine telling the victim of a house fire to suck

up his third-degree burns. Pains all in your head,

after all, just another set of nerves firing in the

right places. The flaw in that reasoning glares at

you: theres an obvious malfunction in the tissue

that needs medical treatment and time to heal.

Mental health issues, subject as they are to

considerable stigma in our society of iron-willed

work ethic, dont get that same benefit of the

doubt. Those afflicted are greeted with disbelief,

often as not told to suck it up and deal with it

by those whove never shared that particular

internal state. The brains dysfunctions arent so


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obvious or easily ignored as third-degree burns,

and yet theres hardly any difference in the

character of the two scenarios. Tissues and

organs, whether caused by trauma or infection or

plain old genetic inheritance, dont behave how

theyre supposed to behave and the result is a

health problem.

Obvious damage to skin, or liver, or heart

demands medical attention. We treat every organ

system in our body as deserving of medical

treatment except the brain, which, to ask your

average fitness expert, is fixed by being more

hardcore. Thats the extent of Western insight into

problems of the inner self, and thats an obstacle

when dealing with questions of why people arent


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behaving as youd expect them to behave.

If people arent exercising and sticking to diets, it

might be that theres an internal cause worth

treating the way youd treat a burn or a cut to fix

the health problem. I know that certainly some of

you reading this are from the Im So Hardcore

school of thought and youre rolling your eyes at

me right now. Validating all these lazy people will

only encourage them to be lazy.

Maybe. I dont deny that theres a cultural

dimension to our collective willpower failings, in

that were wired to follow the path of least

resistance and our society brings resistance to a

low unprecedented in human history. But Id

rather understand why the willpower failures


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happen and look for solutions rather than

bringing out the L-word and the S-word and

transforming this into a moral failing. If there is a

genuine connection between biology and

willpower failure, then its worth investigating.

Roy Baumeister heads the social psychology lab at

Florida State University, a lab with his name on it.

Since graduating from Princeton in 1978,

Baumeister has studied questions of self and

identity. Not only what they are, but how our

notions of self relate to wider society. In whats

become perhaps his most popular thread of

research, Baumeister and his colleagues have

demonstrated in a series of studies that

self-control and willpower act like a limited


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resource. When we have to make executive

decisions and impose our will putting down the

cookies, skipping that afternoon smoke, or doing

math problems we use up some of that supply.

Use up too much and all those temptations

overwhelm us; we literally dont have the mental

energy to say no.

To understand this in context, you arent an

idealized free-thinking decision-maker reasoning

out logical decisions based on facts. Youre an

emotional thinker on a level you probably dont

realize as your brains built to hide the fact from

conscious awareness, driven by intuitive

emotional biases that color your rational

thoughts. The notion of free will, your capacity to


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make decisions and follow them through, draws

on the brains rational and emotional circuits in

tandem, and repeated experiments have shown

that its the emotional spearheading the efforts

with the more evolutionarily-recent rational-self

playing lackey.

Self-control isnt so much about drawing up plans

with your shining intellect, rather than

suppressing the urges and emotionally-colored

thoughts spit up by your reptile brain. Willpower

is saying no to the stream of intuitive, knee-jerk

impulses coming out of your mind, clamping

down on them and hopefully giving yourself space

for the slower conscious processes to make

smarter, or at least better-informed, decisions.


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Free will is more like free wont, as the

brain-nerds say.

Baumeisters work implicates the brains store of

glucose (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

/17279852) as willpowers fuel source

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18453466).

Once depleted through intense concentration,

heavy drinking, or forcing yourself to eat yet

another meal of chicken and broccoli, self-control

tanks along with its fuel supply. Youre no longer

able to resist the emotional urges, and any cookies

within striking distance are doomed.

Baumeister compares willpower to a flexed

muscle. You can only hold it so long before you

run out of energy, and once youve worn it out,


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that muscle wont be good for much else until it

recharges. He calls this phenomenon of exhausted

self-control ego depletion


It doesnt take much imagination to think of the

ways ego depletion might affect, and be affected

by, exercise, being one of the top contributors to

physical and mental fatigue. Even without

research to prove it, you know what goes on

during hard exercise. We tend to sit in a zone of

intense concentration and focus, using up

willpower reserves to push through pain and

fatigue. Working muscles compete for circulating

blood glucose, limiting the brains access and

hampering any possibilities of recharging.


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Kathleen Martin Ginis of McMaster University in

Toronto has examined the depletion of self in the

context of exercise, and her findings bolster the

view that exercise is both cause and effect. A

recent study with Stephen Bray

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20204951)

first exposed the participants to a task meant to

deplete self-control before 10 minutes of cycling.

The ego-depleted subjects produced less work

than fresh counterparts in the control group, as

you might expect. But it didnt stop there. Not

only did these subjects look ahead and plan to do

less work in an upcoming workout, the degree of

reduction in planned effort also predicted their

adherence to a program over the following eight

weeks.


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Depleted ego influences the effort you put into

workouts and your planning for future workouts,

setting off a domino effect of self-sabotage.

Another study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

/pubmed/22020133) from Bray and Martin Ginis

indicates that even thinking really hard depletes

self-control to a degree that impacts maximum

voluntary strength. Thats worth remembering in

light of central fatigue problems that apparently

plague us all now youve only got so much

mental effort to go around, so prioritize it where it

matters (which wont always be exercise if you

have more important things happening in your

life). Hard training and a busy life may not always

cooperate (see also: 21727299


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(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21727299),

17995906 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

/17995906))

A 2010 study by Martin Ginis and Elisa

Murru (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

/20733212) tested a possible selves intervention

on exercise behavior and self-regulatory efficacy,

a way of saying that you believe in your own

performance as a means of reaching a goal.

Participants were divided into two possible self

groups, one a hoped-for group in which they

imagined themselves in the future as healthy

exercisers, the other a feared group imagining

their future as unhealthy and inactive.

It may not sound like much, but evidently it


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worked. Participants in either of the possible self

groups reported greater exercise adherence at

both four and eight weeks after the intervention,

adherence boosted in part by improved

self-efficacy.

Belief in your own competence matters, and for

reasons extending beyond sticking to a workout

plan. A 2011 study from the University of

Gent in Padova, Italy


suggested that a disbelief in free will that is, the

belief that youre in control and able to act

leads to measurable changes in brain activity, and

those changes affect social behavior and

performance in a given task.


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Participants were asked to read two different

passages, one of which argued against the notion

of individual choice and free will, while the other

affirmed the power of the individual to act. The

passages were expected to briefly affirm or

discourage a belief in free will, and indeed scans

of the subjects brain showed that those in the

disbelief group had less activity in the regions

governing voluntary movement.

Baumeister has also done his share of research

dealing with belief in free will and self-control. A

paper from 2009 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

/pubmed/19141628) suggests that disbelief in free

will leads to selfish, impulsive and thus socially

undesirable behavior. In contrast, believing in


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freedom to choose and act appears to make

people more thoughtful and reflective, less

aggressive and more willing to be helpful.

Another article co-authored with Kathleen Vohs

of the University of Minnesota suggests that, in

dealing with addictive behaviors, belief in free

will is the socially-useful stance

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19812710):

Self-control is an important form

of what people understand as free

will, and the capacity for

self-control is real but limited

thus neither complete nor

completely lacking. The


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traditional notion of willpower

may be useful here, especially if

one understands willpower as a

kind of psychological energy that

fluctuates as people use it up and

then re-charge it. Free will is a

partial, sometime thing.

The mere belief that you arent in control causes

changes in neural activity and in the resulting

behavioral outcomes. Free will may or may not

exist as wed want it to be, but believing in it sure

does matter. Feeling out of control and believing

that youre helpless means that, in a real sense,

you are.


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Lets relate that back to the typical exercise and

diet recommendations trickling down to our

Resolutioners. Even coming in with the best of

intentions, how long will a person subsist on

pain-chasing feel the burn and suck it up

training and diets built on deprivation? With

immediate and obvious results, maybe longer

than youd think, but how many get that instant

feedback and stay with it long enough to form a

habit?

When the behaviors are both demanding,

depleting self-control resources, and devoid of

self-validation like results, or at least being

entertaining enough to hold their interest then

of course youre going to have a high washout


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rate. Thats not a willpower failing, thats a

disconnect between gym and trainer, on the one

hand, and prospective exerciser.

This applies even to those of you with smart and

well-informed training programs and diet plans.

You can have all the information and productive

methods you want. If you cant parse it in a way

that generates appeal and motivates consistency,

then its useless. You can complain about women

who think theyll get bulky and guys curling in the

squat rack and decry all the stupid people that

just wont listen to this awesome advice and

youre not reaching a single one of them.

It would be unfair to make this completely

one-sided, though, and Im not putting blame on


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anyone (even though I think the fitness

community leaves much to be desired, as were

supposed to be the professionals). The problem,

such as it is, has causes distributed all over society

and it makes no sense to think big. Rather, lets

think of how we can fix it on an individual basis.

Baumeister and Martin Ginis both note that

willpower can be trained with practice


The analogy with a flexed muscle doesnt stop at

tiredness. Like a muscle, continually flexing it

makes it stronger. Regularly challenging your

willpower, by resisting the cookies or making

yourself sit just a little longer, improves

self-control.


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Of personal interest to me have been

mindfulness-based programs and cognitive

therapies. Mindfulness training is interchangeable

with meditation. You sit and breathe and keep

your thoughts on the breath. It may seem boring

at first, but with practice youll notice

improvements in concentration and focus,

improvements that seem to correlate with growth

of the respective brain regions. You arent just

watching your breathing, it turns out. Youre

developing the parts of the brain that handle

attentional focus and self-awareness, two qualities

intimately related to self-control and which,

unsurprisingly, many people are lacking in the

fast-paced information-soaked lives were

expected to live.


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Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR),

developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of

Massachusetts Medical School, combines

elements of Buddhist spirituality and meditation

into a more formalized (as formalized as that sort

of thing gets, anyway) stress-reduction process.

MBSR has its own clinical results showing it

effective as a coping strategy

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15256293)

for a broad spectrum of problems. Kabat-Zinn has

written several books cover his methods in more

detail if youre after a more in-depth treatment.

Cognitive therapy works from the opposite

direction, talking back to those impulsive

thoughts and using your powers of reason to put


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them away. Cognitive therapy isnt a single

strategy or intervention, but rather a mental

tool-kit that you can draw on according to the

situation at hand. Cognitive therapy has a

clinically-proven track record, not only as a

treatment for mood disorders but in other

life-changing scenarios, so you may well find it

useful as a tool for diet and exercise adherence.

David Burns has written the comprehensive and

easily-accessible Feeling Good: The New

Mood Therapy (http://www.goodreads.com

/book/show/46674.Feeling_Good) which is

recommended for a detailed overview of cognitive

therapy.

The mind goes where you send it and reflects


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what you put in it. You can let impulses run your

life, or you can realize that you do have control

and find the tools to turn things around.

Mindfulness and cognitive therapy and willpower

practice all put you in a specific frame of mind

meant to counteract that mindless state, and, at

least in the case of mindfulness, this actually leads

to measurable changes in brain structure (see

also: 21071182 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

/pubmed/21071182), 19015095


21334442 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

/21334442)).

This leaves us almost full circle, though not quite.

Willpower and self-control must be part of the


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solution, and at the same time, these are not

magical qualities separate from biological

influence. The brain generates the self-control

feeling, and a poorly-wired brain with a weaker

impulse-control function whether due to

inherited genes or environmental signals may

be more susceptible to addictive or impulsive

behaviors. Behaviors which include sitting in a rut

on the couch eating junk food.

Just as any two people can stand at different

heights and have different hair color, self-control

and the unconscious impulses it has to fight can

be very different between them.

Id suggest that the slogans, the aphorisms, the

motivational quotes and go-get-em attitude treats


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the whole problem backwards. Successful athletes

and fitness models who act out those one-liners

didnt get that way by beating themselves into

submission. They learned to do what they do by

practice, training, and conditioning. And I dont

mean in the sense of a Nike commercial. You

didnt grow up in their life, so you cant expect to

adopt their inner drives.

Overcoming adversity, if it can be learned at all as

a life-skill, definitely wont be learned through

self-righteous admonition and brow-beating. To

change, people have to believe that change can

happen at all and that its a process of on-going

refinement. Setting a bar impossibly high and

using the tact of a Parris Island drill sergeant,


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Biggest Loser style, probably doesnt get it done.

Youd get mad over curls in the squat rack or

women spending three hours a day on the

treadmill to lose fat. Dont treat the mind with

Bro-science.

What you can do, however, is firstly realize that

you have a measure of control, and secondly that

you can fix it by practicing and cultivating that

control through psychological techniques. You

can learn to coach your mind, and believing that

you can is the first step on the way. Thats Useful.

My pragmatic and cynical side knows that you

cant reach everyone this way. Some people, well,

youre just not going to reach them at all, and


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maybe the L-word and the S-word does apply

sometimes. I just dont think we should give up so

easily when, at least in our own lives, we feel we

arent living up to the Tough As Nails ideal that

encompasses sports and athletic training. You can

succeed without going there, and I really wonder

how many enthusiastic beginners are put off by

that attitude and the elitism that automatically

labels them as stupid and lazy.

For further reading, Baumeister has a new book

out, Willpower: Rediscovering the

Greatest Human Strength

(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11104933-

willpower), co-authored with New York Times

science writer John Tierney. I mentioned


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Like whatyouread?Share it.

Willpower as a book of interest in my year-end

book wrap-up, as, while Baumeisters research is

accessible, I also believe in getting good science

writing from the source whenever possible, so

keep an eye out if you find this a topic of interest.


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