Brian Johnson (Heroic +1) describes his morning ritual of sharing OURA/Whoop scores with friends and recounts being pointed to a discussion between Andrew Huberman and David Goggins about willpower. He highlights Huberman’s paraphrase—linking willpower to the anterior midcingulate cortex which grows with challenge and shrinks without continued effort—and urges readers to deliberately practice difficult tasks to ‘exercise’ willpower.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. As you know, if you've been following along, every single morning, I share my aura scores with two of my favorite people on the planet, Brandon Guyer and Sean Casey. For curious souls, this morning I was an 86. Readiness 92. Sleep. Let's go. Now, each of us usually share our scores and then add something a little awesome, whether it's a let's go kick in the butt or a micro celebration of a highlight with our kids or families or whatever. For example, Brandon's boy recently won a championship on the baseball team he coaches and got some sweet bling as a result. While Sean recently celebrated his 50th birthday with his wifey. Now, the other day, after dropping his whoop scores, his OURA ring is being replaced, Brandon shared a clip of Andrew Huberman and David Goggins chatting about willpower. Now, Alexandra had told me about it and I wrote about it in a recent plus one. Check it out. I got it linked and and I pretty much never listened to podcasts or watch YouTube videos, so I didn't immediately watch it. Then Brandon insisted that Sean and I watch it, dropping this wisdom bomb on us. This is Brandon Guyer. He says, I just love how Huberman breaks down exactly what the willpower muscle is that was just found in a new study. Then he quotes Huberman, who says the anterior mid cingulate cortex is smaller and in obese people it gets bigger when they diet. It's larger in athletes. It's especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge. And he continues by saying, all the data points to the fact that we can build this area up, but that as quickly as we build it up, if we don't continue to invest in things that are hard for us and and that we don't want to do, the anterior midcingulate cortex shrinks again. Now I got goosebumps. Copy and pasting that and my head just exploded Again, rereading it. And that's today's PLOS one. If you feel so inspired, and especially if you don't, check out this clip. We've got a link to it. Note. As expected, you'll get some F bombs from David Goggins with some wisdom bombs with him and Huberman. And much more importantly, go do a thing or three that you know you should do that you don't want to do. Give your willpower muscle a workout all day, every day, especially today. Little P.S. after sharing a draft of this plus one with my wifey. She told me she watched a shorter clip. You can check that out in this plus one as well. There's a 13 minute version and then a super short version. Hope you enjoy both.
