End Note - January 2010
What New Year's Resolution

January 21, 2010

Author: Catherine M. Callery (Kate) | Louise M. Tarantino

Having trouble sticking to all those New Year’s resolutions you just made?  Maybe it is because you made too many. According to neuroscience research reported in the December 26, 2009 Wall Street Journal, a lot may have to do with asking too much of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for willpower.

The researchers recognize that self-control is not easy: 88% of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey conducted by British psychologist Richard Wiseman.  And it may be even harder to change your behavior if you try to break too many bad habits at once. Apparently asking the prefrontal cortex to help you lose weight and stop smoking at the same time may be just one thing too many for an overtaxed piece of tissue that is also in charge of focus, short-term memory and solving abstract problems.

Studies have shown that giving some subjects slightly more information to remember than other subjects caused them to succumb to temptation more readily. Undergraduates at Stanford University were given either a two-digit number or a seven digit number to remember, and then instructed to walk down the hall, where they were offered two different snacks: chocolate cake or fruit. Those trying to remember the seven digit number were twice as likely to take the cake as those assigned the two digit number. According to researcher Baba Shiv, the extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain, overloading the frontal cortex.

What to do?  In addition to spreading you resolutions out over the year rather than all at once, neuroscientists and psychologists offer a few simple tricks.  One is self-awareness.  Comparing the prefrontal cortex to a muscle:  if asked to hold too much for too long, it just gives out – so give it a rest.  Also, willpower requires real energy, so feed it. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, demonstrated in 2007 that students who had fasted for three hours before being asked to perform a variety of self-control tasks such as focusing on a boring video or suppressing negative stereotypes had much lower glucose levels than students who were not asked to exercise self-control. So, since losing weight is one usually of our top resolutions, depriving the brain of calories can make it even harder to summon up the strength to quit smoking.

Finally, distraction helps. The famous marshmallow experiments done by Professor Walter Mischel at Columbia University demonstrated that those children who were able to resist the marshmallows by concentrating on other things learned to delay their gratification. In other words, practicing mental discipline can help beef up the prefrontal cortex.

So maybe it is better to just put off that diet for awhile….