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 nthree 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 notntangible. Yet like, love, faith and understanding, it can be tested by our behaviors.

Willpower is not self-denial, it is an affirmation of ournhuman 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,nwe 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 nprocessing 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 emotionallynabout the result, and our reasoning based on knowledge andnexperience.

The mental sequence is: nna) thoughts, leading to nb) mental pictures (your mind’s eye), producing nc) emotions/feelings contributing to ournd) behaviors and actions

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

ACC

Specifically, our Anterior Cingular Cortex is the specificnbrain 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 beforenacting, 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 successnin 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 describen‘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,nsuccessful behaviors.

We can choose to activate our ACC (Anterior Cingular Cortex) by raising our Blood Sugar (glucose). Chewing gum,neating an apple or other carbohydrate prior to a test examnproduces 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,nto 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,nncopyright 2008
H. Bernard Wechsle
www.speedlea
ing.orgnhbw@speedlea
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