Intention

CHAPTER 8Physical Ingredients to Willpower

“The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.”

—Arthur C. Clarke

You're at the tail end of a long day at work. It was made particularly heavy by an endless barrage of meetings and a skipped lunch. You started off really strong this morning. You got a good night's sleep, and you were ready for anything. But with each meeting, you can feel your self-control gently slipping. You were going to pass by the gym on the way home, but that's starting to feel increasingly unlikely. After all, you're exhausted and hungry. It's unlikely you'll be able to muster the self-control to get through a workout, so why force it?

It's fairly common knowledge that our basic physiological states, such as hunger or lack of sleep, can limit our willpower. But, as we saw with other willpower myths, common sense isn't always right. While physiological factors do influence our performance, new research tells us that the link between these factors and our willpower might be more in our heads than we thought. In this chapter we look at some physical factors in human performance that are assumed to be fixed so that we can figure out what is actually true. What we believe, as we have just read, has a powerful effect on what we can achieve.

As is noted in previous chapters, conventional ideas about willpower have been challenged in recent years. The scientific community once accepted that willpower was a finite resource, ...