Toronto, Sep 25 (Inditop.com) Have you ever sat down to work on a crossword puzzle only to find that you don’t have the energy to exercise later? Or have you come home from a rough day at office with no zest for a bout of jogging?
A new study reveals that if you use your willpower to do one task, it depletes you of the willpower to do an entirely different task.
“Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise,” says study lead author Kathleen Martin Ginis, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University.
“Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself,” Ginis says.
She says that by constantly challenging yourself to resist a piece of chocolate cake, or to force yourself to study an extra half-hour each night, then you can actually increase your self-regulatory capacity.
Martin Ginis and colleague Steven Bray used a Stroop test to deplete the self-regulatory capacity of volunteers in the study. (A Stroop test consists of words associated with colours but printed in a different colour. For example, “red” is printed in blue ink.)
Subjects were asked to say the colour on the screen, trying to resist the temptation to blurt out the printed word instead of the colour itself, according to a McMaster’s release.
“After we used this cognitive task to deplete participants’ self-regulatory capacity, they didn’t exercise as hard as participants who had not performed the task. The more people ‘dogged it’ after the cognitive task, the more likely they were to skip their exercise sessions over the next eight weeks. You only have so much willpower,” Ginis said.
Still, she doesn’t see that as an excuse to let people loaf on the sofa. “There are strategies to help people rejuvenate after their self-regulation is depleted,” she says.
“Listening to music can help; and we also found that if you make specific plans to exercise-in other words, making a commitment to go for a walk at 7 p.m. every evening-then that had a high rate of success,” she said.
These findings were published in Psychology and Health.
