Habits build willpower

- [Narrator] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Man] So tell me, as, as you've done your research associated with procrastination in your book in particular, The End of Procrastination, what's maybe the most surprising or, or fascinating thing that you discovered in digging into some of the research and studies behind this? - [Instructor] Right? There is a huge mental analysis about all the research on procrastination. And the outcome is that the main cause of procrastination is a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation means that you have your emotional part, and then you have your rational part. And if you are unable to resist temptation, your emotional part is going to win. And it means that you go to check your Facebook. You want to, I dunno, overeat, you want to watch Netflix, and so on, but if you have a good willpower and your rational brain is stronger, your willpower is stronger, then you can self-regulate. Even if you have a temptation to do something, you are able to resist. So that's, that's the core of procrastination, to really train your willpower part of the brain. - [Man] All right. Well, well, so that sounds sensible. How do we go about doing that? - [Instructor] Well, there are a lot of techniques for that. My favorite one is of, when you do daily habits, for example, if you do 20 pushups daily, not even your muscles grow, but even your part of the brain that is called the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is for willpower, it grows too, so that's very good news that procrastination, is not something that is burn, but you can really train your willpower as a muscle. So, by doing 20 pushups daily, you really can train your willpower. - [Man] Well that's really cool. And so then, I'm curious, is, is it pushups, is it sort of strength training in particular that, that boosts the willpower or would running do the same thing or-? - [Instructor] Yeah, all exercises do the same, but what is important is to do something daily. You can have your favorite, like five minute routine of, I don't know, it, that doesn't need to be pushups, but five minutes daily can really boost your willpower, and we have one willpower for all domains. So you can train your willpower by exercise, and then you have stronger willpower, even in your work.