Rich Bello explains why willpower depletes like a muscle. Stress shifts your brain from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, favoring quick reactions over control. Poor sleep, shallow breathing, and bad nutrition all weaken self-control, but starting before you feel inspired can flip the script.
Questions this video answers
19 minutes on average.
8 minutes on average.
The prefrontal cortex turns off and the amygdala turns on.
Chapters
Right. Lack of use. Use it or lose it. Right. Stress turns off the prefrontal cortex, and this is a good thing. And when you're in an emergency situation, you turn off all thought. You don't make any conscious decisions. When you're in an emergency situation, the prefrontal cortex turns off and the amygdala turns on and says, we got this. You need to jump out of the way of a train. You don't want to be thinking, you know, should I jump? No, let me think about that for a second. Boom. Run over, right? You don't have to be thinking about that. Your kid's about to be run over. You grab your child, turns off your prefront. Turns off all reasoning ability, and that's a good thing. That's why we need the old brain physical exercise. Now, believe it or not, that's in both of them. And the reason I put that in there is because if you have a major willpower challenge to handle, don't be using your willpower early in the day. If you got some major willpower challenge to handle. And later in the day, you know what? Take it easy. Save your willpower for later in the day. I know one of the New York Giants I saw was, you guys could probably guess who it is, was working out before a giant playoff game, really important playoff game at Green Bay. And he's out there with no shirt on, running around, no shirt on, freezing. Green Bay is really cold. He's freezing to death. And I had just started studying this. I was like, no, what are you doing? Save your willpower for the game. Anyway, of course, they lost the game, and he had a horrible game. Poor nutrition, really bad for your brain, bad for your willpower. High glycemic foods. Brain does not like being bombarded with sugar. Shallow breathing. Everybody take a good breath for their brain. Deep breath. Sleep deprivation, really bad for your brain. So that's how you weaken your discipline, weaken your brain muscle. There's an interesting, interesting study that was done kind of on the topic that I was just talking about. Does your brain, does your discipline get fatigued? And the answer is yes. So they did a study where they put two bowls in front of each of the participants in the study. One was a bowl full of chocolate chip cookies. One was a bowl of radishes, right? For one of the participants, they said, you know what you can eat for this group, you can eat as many chocolate chip cookies as you want. There is no willpower involved in that. For the other ones are saying, you know what? You only get the radishes, leave the chocolate chip cookies. You can't have them, right? There's some willpower involved in that. So they used their willpower up. They were using it. Then they gave them an impossible test, but they didn't know. They thought this test could be handled and they were trying to figure it out. Trying to figure it out. There was no answer. Trying to figure it out. The folks that ate the cookies stuck with the test for 19 minutes on average. The folks that didn't only stuck with it for eight minutes. They gave up after eight minutes. It's proof that willpower is a muscle that does get fatigued. Good news. Discipline is not always necessary. If you're inspired, right? You don't always need to use discipline. If you're inspired, utilize inspiration, right? If you're doing something that you love doing, are you going to do it? Does LeBron James have to be inspired to get out on the basketball court and practice? No, man, he loves what he's doing. He gets out there and just does it. Inspiration. So there's motivation and inspiration. They are different. Inspiration comes from within. It's much more powerful than motivation. Right? Your call to act. Inspiration is always positive. Motivation, it's good. It's not that it's bad, but it comes from outside. It's done to you by these motivational speakers. Talking myself out of a job. It's done to you. It can be positive or negative, right? You can motivate somebody to do something in a negative way. It can put a gun to their head, right? Can motivate them to do things. You can motivate them to do bad things. So the idea is you want to find your passion. What is it that you love doing? You want to go to play every morning and not go to work, Right? Then life is about flow. You guys, I'm sure, have heard about flow. When you're in the flow, life is amazing. Right? Again, that's LeBron James, man. When he's doing what he does, he loves what he's doing. One of the ways, One of the things that I always found interesting is people think they need to be inspired or motivated to start on something. You know, I'll do it, but I just need to be motivated or inspired. No, just start. What happens when you start? What happens when you're like, you really don't want to do something? You just start. Even if you're not inspired by it for some reason, you just start. What happens when you do that? All of a sudden you become inspired and you're motivated. You get on the treadmill. I don't want to do this. Just start running. All of a sudden, you know what I'm feeling inspired. I'm feeling motivated. Right? So you keep going. That creates inspiration, and then that creates momentum. You start running faster. Maybe you listen to some music, you. And that's a great thing to do. So the point is just start. Action precedes motivation and inspiration. Just start.
