Cookies and Radishes

I was going to call this chapter “Never hold in a fart” but I feel that title fits in better. Although to be honest, I believe both titles do the job. If you are confused, just bear with me. It will all make sense soon.

The year is 1996, two different groups of people were presented freshly baked cookies on one plate and a bunch of radishes on another plate, and this created one of the evilest experiments ever conducted (sarcastically speaking, of course).

Basically, the research experiment had the purpose of examining the effect of a tempting food challenge designed to deplete participants' willpower through the terrible power of an unfulfilled promise of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

In the first part of the trial, Psychologist Roy Baumeister kept the study participants in a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and then teased them further by showing them the actual treats alongside other chocolate-flavored treats and candies. While some did get to indulge their sweet tooth and enjoy the chocolaty delicacies, the subjects in the experimental condition, whose resolves were being tested, were asked to eat radishes instead. And they weren't happy about it. But, really, who would blame them? I would not be happy too. It reminds me a TED Talk I’ve watched "Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals." Frans de Waal talks about an experiment they have conducted with two monkeys. What was noteworthy about this experiment was that both monkeys were asked to perform a task but they were both paid unequally. One was given a cucumber and the other was given a grape. Of course, the one who received the cucumber was not too thrilled that the other monkey got the grape for the same exact task. After executing the same task again, they got another cucumber while the other got a grape, and how did they react to that? The cucumber monkey threw the cucumber at the researcher and started banging on the cage. Although I do not think that the research participants in the cookies and radishes study threw the radishes at the researchers, I am sure in their minds, they were doing that exact thing.

As the scientists noted in their paper two years later, many of the radish-eaters "exhibit[ed] clear interest in the chocolates, to the point of looking longingly at the chocolate display and in a few cases even picking up the cookies to sniff at them."

After the food bait-and-switch, Baumeister's team gave the participants a second, supposedly unrelated exercise, a puzzle to solve. Little to the participants' knowledge, this puzzle was impossible to solve. The effect of the manipulation was immediate and undeniable. Those who ate radishes made far fewer attempts and devoted less than half the time solving the puzzle compared to the chocolate-eating participants and a control group that only joined this latter phase of the study. The cookie group spent, on average, 19 minutes on the task making 34 attempts. The Radish group, on the other hand, gave up in 8 minutes, after 19 attempts on average. In other words, those who had to resist the sweets and force themselves to eat this vegetable could no longer find the will to fully engage in another torturous task.

I am sure you have heard the expression, “never hold your fart.” But, have you ever stopped yourself and asked, “Why can I not hold my farts in? Why do I have to let it out?” Well, according to science, when you hold your farts in, they accumulate in your bowl system. When It becomes too much for your system to handle, the farts will, therefore, make their way up into the stomach and keep traveling up in your body before they reach your brain. Once, they reach your brain, that is when they affect your frontal lobe. The frontal lobe plays a large role in voluntary movement. It houses the primary motor cortex which regulates activities like walking.

The function of the frontal lobe involves the ability to project future consequences resulting from current actions, the choice between good and bad actions (or better and best) (also known as the conscience), the override and suppression of socially unacceptable responses, and the determination of similarities and differences between things or events.

The frontal lobe also plays an important part in integrating longer non-task based memories stored across the brain. These are often memories associated with emotions derived from input from the brain's limbic system. The frontal lobe modifies those emotions to generally fit socially acceptable norms.

So, what happens when the farts reach your brain and affect your frontal lobe? It has a negative effect on your brain. It affects your decision-making ability, it affects your movement, it affects your emotions. In other words, it messes you up. This is where the expression ‘brain fart’ came from. Brain fart is a temporary mental lapse or failure to reason correctly. It is a momentary mental lapse in attention, memory, understanding, care, or competence.

By this point, you might be asking yourself, “where is he going with the radishes and cookies and farts?” Maybe a combination of eating radishes and cookies might create real farts, the farts I was writing about are metaphorical farts. Bear with me.

In the psychology world, the key finding of the what looks to be a pretty silly study was a breakthrough: self-control is a general strength that's used across different sorts of tasks -- and it could be depleted. This proved that self-regulation is not a skill to be mastered or a rote function that can be performed with little consequence. It's like using a muscle: After exercising it, it loses its strength, gets fatigued, and becomes weak, at least in the short-term. Think about it this way, if you have ever been at the gym and you did 30 pushups (or 50, or 100) and we tried to bench-press two (or 4 or 8) plates right after, we would be having a lot of difficulties lifting weights. Why? Because you just exercised the same part of the body with the pushups.

Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I do not mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision—any time you are paying close attention to your actions, like when you are having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you are writing (like what I am doing at this moment). This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we are more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many—we have depleted our self-control.

Why is self-control or your willpower so important? Well, think about this. When you are trying to change something about yourself, you have to change your habits. In order to change your habits, you have to examine what must go and what you have to do to make the change. Once, you realized what changes need to made, the actions must follow. Now, this is the hardest part – your actions. Although thinking about change and bettering yourself is good and positive, thought alone will not get you anywhere.

It reminds me of a story told by Anthony Robbins in one of his seminars. The story of the priest in the desert. The priest was going everywhere and making sure everyone knew that what they had was thanks to the Lord. He walked from house to house, from village to village and made sure everyone was thankful for everything they received from God. When he was going across the desert, he spotted a house with a garden. He first thought it was a mirage because it cannot be that there is a garden in the desert. When he approached, he saw that it was in fact and real garden in the middle of the desert. Excited, he knocked on the front door. A man opened the door and the priest went on to say to him, “The Lord has done a very fine job with your garden”. The man looked at him and agreed. “Yes, you are right”, he said. “if it was not for the seeds, the soil and the sunshine, there would be no garden here.” He adds, “but let me tell you something my priest, you should have seen how this place looked like when God had it all to himself!”

Have I lost you again? This story has a meaning. So bear with me once more. Mark Twain said, “action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” Actions are more revealing of one's true character since it is easy to say things or make promises, but it takes an effort to do things and follow through. It is meant to emphasize that what you do is more important and shows your intentions and feelings more clearly than what you say. The actions you take (or refuse to take) play a role in determining who you are. And if you want to change the person you are or what you represent, you must follow these thoughts with actions. But, it may not always be easy.

Here’s why this matters for change: In almost all change situations, you’re substituting new, unfamiliar behaviors for old, comfortable ones, and that burns self-control. Let’s say I present a new morning routine to you that specifies how you’ll shower and brush your teeth. You’ll understand it and you might even agree with my process. But to pull it off, you’ll have to supervise yourself very carefully. Every fiber of your being will want to go back to the old way of doing things. Inevitably, you’ll slip. And if I were uncharitable, I’d see you going back to the old way and I’d say, You’re so lazy. Why can’t you just change? Now, this could be anything minor, like a shower routine, to something major, like quitting smoking or going to the gym to lose weight or gain muscle strength.

So, just like the pushup and bench-press analogy I have used before, your willpower and self-control is an exhaustible resource. Although you do want change in your life and often think about it at work, it is a bit hard to work on it once you get back home. I know because I can vouch for that.

When I work, I often have ideas that pop into my head. Great ideas. But I cannot always do something with these ideas and thoughts while I am at work because all f my mental focus has to go on my work tasks. Otherwise, I would be doing a half-ass job with my work and a half-ass job with my ideas. I would rather do a full-ass job with one or the other. I will get better results. But, it happens so often that once I am done work, I get back home and try to work on my idea but,… nothing happens. All of my energy is drained. All of my mental energy that is. So, I would tell myself, “tomorrow, I will have more energy and I will be able to work on my book (or work on my drawings, or some arts and craft project, or whatever my mind was set on that day). Of course, like I previously wrote, “Tomorrow – a mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored.” And so the cycle resumes.

Am I lazy? I do feel like it sometimes. But, that was only before I read up on the research of the cookies and radishes. I first heard about it in the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. What I confused my laziness before, now I see it as me being mentally fatigued. I have exercised all of my willpower, I have used up all of my self-control on the radishes, so when it comes time to work on a puzzle, my brain – filled with farts – cannot function properly and I am therefore unable to either work on my ideas, concentrate on them or complete them. Now, do not get me wrong, there are other reasons why I could not or would not work on my projects. I am not placing the blame onto mental exhaustion. But, come to think of it, that what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel. But, do not be alarmed. There is a cure for that – Sleep. Glorious sleep!

And that, my friend, will be covered in the next post.

Right now, I have to go to sleep.

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PS - the image above is not a real news article. But, it is related to this article. How you may ask? In my opinion, the officer was having a very long and draining day. When He came up to talk to the woman out of jumping down, he was mentally drained and after holding in the farts the whole day, these bad boys crawl up in his head which caused him to make the bad decision of joining this woman's quest of jumping from the top of the building.

I believe that is why people are often making bad judgment calls, specifically late at night.

Although this new article is not real, it does paint a very gruesome picture of how bad mental exhaustion is.

PS part 2 - Sleep more! That is what I should be doing at this very moment, but something has crawled up inside me that makes me want to keep writing. Hm... could be a positive or good brain-fart (like good cholesterol). Right?