How do you grow willpower?

Then applying will-power to a challenge is like "Fibercon" - not the most pleasant to subject yourself, something you have to intend yourself to do regularly/everyday..and better for you in the long-run.

I'd like to share with you one of my favorite essays that I've read - it's about Salsa dancing but it's really on 'willpower' and the importance of effort over time: http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...

The trick is balance.

Force yourself to take breaks and give yourself rewards. I finished a big piece of code on Tuesday and went for a bike ride to the Persidio. Exercise is also a great way to deal with stress.

Eat well, splurge a little and make sure you are eating foods high in Omega-3. Your brain will thank you.

Talk to your friends about your ideas. It is energizing evangelizing your ideas and getting people passionate. Doing so over a pint at the Toronado is a bonus.

And finally have fun! We have one life to live, do something that you deeply care about.

Willpower is an equilibrium between two distinct drives, one of which is a drive to act, and one of which is an inhibitory drive. The first step to growing willpower is to make sure your lack of willpower isn't caused by a biological problem or a mental health problem. Before struggling too long to grow willpower, have a physical, have your thyroid level checked, and get a mental health evaluation.

The reason you can build willpower is that it is an equilibrium between the parts of your brain that produce fear and anxiety and the parts of your brain that produce good feelings. Your right prefrontal cortex produces negative emotions, and your left prefrontal cortex produces positive emotions. This circuitry is linked up to the circuitry that primes your body to move. Assuming no mental or physical illness, willpower is simply a measure of the relation between these systems.

We know that monks who meditate for 10,000 hours have much greater gamma ray function. Gamma rays underlie large scale brain synchronization. These monks also had a different relationship between the left and right prefrontal cortexs (corti?). In monks, the positive emotion producing left prefrontal cortex was much more active than the right. Also, they were much more primed to move.

Meditation, particularly certain kinds from Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, are scientifically proven to work on this, to such a degree that neuroscientists haven't seen some of those neurological states in normal people. From studying these monks, we know what to do.

It's scientifically proven that you can grow willpower by getting a physical, and a mental health eval, and then meditating. It's the best, most efficient way. Everything the nyt article lists as a way of increasing willpower is an example of an activity where you must be continually bringing your attention into the present. I don't want to sound like some stupid hippy, but meditation can be the most concentrated way to practice this focusing of attention, and directing your focus in certain Tibetan buddhist ways hits all the main parts of increasing motivation.

I consulted http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma8/monkstudy.html to refresh my memory on the monk neurology study.

Red Herring. There are widely-known tools to look up research articles, and it's not conventional to cite such articles in newspapers because the journals are not easily accessible to the general public.

I wonder how many other things he refuses to believe in because he's never read the papers?

"anyone with above average willpower has a busy enough life not to have time to participate in psychological surveys"

and an appeal to personal belief (which also happens to be biased, and begs the original question):

"I think I possess above average powers of will, but I would never test them against things I thought were pointless."

Finally, he closes by quoting a section of the original article out of context, and misinterpreting the meaning:

"there are tons of higher level masters of teaching willpower, but since they don’t have neuroscience degrees, this article neglects to give them a voice....Why use 10% of the article on a guess, when a phone call could bring an expert with data."

(the original Times article explains that the theory of glucose-induced willpower was tested in specific experiments, and found to have some merit.)

For a guy who wants to take a science reporter to task for sloppy reporting, he sure does play fast-and-loose with the logical fallacies....