Willpower

by assigning extra weight to the long-range consequences of the decision. To avoid succumbing to irrational biases and lazy shortcuts, articulate your reasons for your decision and consider whether they make sense.
    Your capacity for fairness and balanced judgment will suffer. You’ll be more inclined to stick with the status quo and less inclined to compromise, particularly if the trade-offs involve much mental work. Like the depleted parole judges we discussed in chapter 4, you’ll be inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else. Being aware of these effects can help you resist some of the dangers of the depleted state.
    And like Jim Turner, the actor we discussed in chapter 2, you may find yourself unable to make the simplest choices even when they help you. In his one-man show about his struggles with diabetes, Turner tells about a day at the beach when he felt his blood sugar falling dangerously low. He realized that he and his son, then four years old, had to leave quickly, and they started to gather up the boy’s toys and put them into the two boxes he’d brought to the beach. It was a routine task, but with his glucose level so low, Turner was flummoxed by his options: which toy in which box? He desperately settled on the first rule that occurred to him—each toy had to go in exactly the same box that it had arrived in—and wasted time obsessively rearranging the toys as his blood sugar kept falling. Then, when they finally left and headed toward the beachside facilities—a snack bar and a public restroom—he was stymied by another decision.
    “I stood there for fifteen minutes with this internal dialogue going on: pee first or eat first?” Turner recalls. “My son was tugging at me, but I couldn’t decide. It was so exhausting I finally just sat down. My son was freaking out. We were there close to half an hour before I finally managed to get up and go eat.”
    You might keep in mind that image of Turner—a guy collapsed on the beach too exhausted to make a decision about going to the bathroom—the next time you find yourself struggling with a routine decision. That’s what a shortage of glucose can do to you. “It feels like a part of your brain has been taken from you,” Turner says. “You can’t concentrate. You sit there staring knowing that something needs to be happening, and you wonder why you can’t do it.” You can’t do it until you make the same choice that finally saved Turner: Eat first. Lab researchers replenish this basic fuel by giving sugar-filled drinks because they work quickly, but it’s better to use protein. Get some healthy food into your body, wait half an hour, and then the decision won’t seem so overwhelming.

Pick Your Battles
    You can’t control or even predict the stresses that come into your life, but you can use the calm periods, or at least the peaceful moments, to plan an offense. Start an exercise program. Learn a new skill. Quit smoking, reduce drinking, make one or two lasting changes toward a healthy diet. These are all best done during times of relatively low demand, when you can allocate much of your willpower to the task. You can then sensibly pick your battles—and sensibly figure out which ones are too much trouble. Even someone with David Blaine’s iron will and astonishing tolerance for pain knows his limits. When we told him about Stanley’s treks through the jungle, he recoiled upon hearing about the constant swarms of mosquitoes and other bugs.
    “ That I can’t do,” Blaine said. “When there are mosquitoes everywhere, I flee. It’s just something I can’t handle.”
    When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better? What can you do about it? You can’t do this every day, of course, and certainly not during busy, stressful times, but you can set aside at least one day a year—maybe your birthday—to do some reflection and write down notes on how well you spent the previous year. If you make this an annual ritual, you can look back over the notes from previous years to see what kinds of progress you’ve made in the past: which goals were met, which goals remain, which ones are hopeless. You should always have at least a vague five-year objective along with more specific intermediate goals, like the monthly plans that we discussed in chapter 3. Have an idea of what you want to accomplish