The Science of Will Power

By Michael Lovitch

According to an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, just one act of self-control depletes your ability to have self-control in another unrelated area. For example, when subjects were told not to eat chocolates sitting right in front of them, their persistence in puzzle solving deteriorated. When they were told to suppress an emotional reaction to a movie, they had problems solving a solvable anagram. This is the overwhelming reason why willpower only works in the short term. You only have the conscious resources to exhibit willpower on one (or at the most two) fronts at one time.

This is why it is so hard to stay disciplined with eating, exercise, new goals, studying, and the like. Any self-regulatory strategy has costs with respect to depleting a person's general resources for self regulation. Your conscious mind is only able to process approximately 50 bits of information a second, while your unconscious mind processes approximately 11 million bits per second. That means your unconscious mind processes information about 220 thousand times faster than your conscious mind.

Much of the time, your conscious mind is actually the bottleneck toward effecting true change, as its main role is getting you through the day in the here and now and setting long term goals. (Researchers call this ''Executive Control.'')

The trick, then, is to have the triggers for your desired behaviors reside in your unconscious mind. For example, if your goal is weight control, you would naturally want your unconscious mind to automatically desire healthy green foods, water, healthy portions, exercise, etc. without having to think about it consciously. If your goal is to be more productive, you would want the actions of setting goals, rewarding yourself for success, focusing on your projects to be automatic. If you have to consciously think about it all the time, you will exhaust your resources. These are just a few examples, but I think you get the picture.

This is one of the reasons why tools that help you develop useful behavioral patterns unconsciously are so powerful. The only method for making changes that bypass the conscious mind that is approved and validated by mainstream scientific organizations like the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association is hypnosis.

Get this, at the University of Iowa they are doing MRI studies where you actually see the brain following instructions under hypnosis. People are actually shutting off the feelings of pain, and you can see the pain gateways in the brain being blocked... all under hypnosis. If you can control pain under hypnosis, you can certainly control the way you think about food, stress, and your personal productivity.

Hypnosis can stop stress induced eating, pain, stress and more - but make sure you get the real thing. The Hypnosis Network is a company whose whole philosophy is to bring you the real thing. We choose the best practicing therapist for every important specific issue. We especially like and therefore recommend two programs that cover issues that almost everyone we know has, and those are the issues of being able to control your weight and to consistently be productive - you know - getting things done!