The Real Secret To More Willpower: Be Power Hungry

The word willpower conjures things like laundry day, drunk texting and chocolate cake.  It is what motivates us to resist what we desire, and to tackle tasks we’d rather avoid, in the name of personal betterment. While the motivations behind washing your clothes or avoiding dessert seem rather clear, a new study found that fuzzier unconscious motivations can steer our actions, and that high-achievers and wannabe bosses may have more capacity to dodge cake, or do pesky chores if there’s a reward at the end.

Those who crave power and leadership roles have more  in the willpower department, according to researchers at the Technical University of Munich whose findings were published recently in the online Journal of Personality. Since  willpower is a finite resource, and easily depleted, the professors asked study subjects to perform two willpower-measuring tasks involving popular films, no prior acting experience required.

In the first, subjects reenacted a scene from Dead Poets Society, playing a domineering father character reprimanding his son, while a control group watched and took notes. Then the group was asked to will itself not to laugh or smile during a funny clip from the movie, Ice Age.

Those who acted the part of the bullying father were more likely to control their emotions and not laugh or smile when instructed not to than the control group, who had simply watched the role play.  Findings suggest what might seem obvious, that people who hunger for power or success have greater reserves of resolve to pursue goals than those who don’t. A politician shows greater stamina dialing for campaign funds because she is motivated by the prize of winning office. An actor may tolerate exhaustive grooming, and rigorous diet and exercise hoping to fit a part.

But here’s the catch: wanting a specific, finite accomplishment, like a part,  is not enough, a broader underlying desire to lead or succeed must exist, too.  In other words, think big, think ambitious.

While  the science didn’t reveal how those loftier desires are seeded, the researchers did make recommendations for how employers might optimize employees’ unconscious motivations and direct their willpower stores toward the right projects. They suggested giving leadership positions to those who thrive when they control people, and creative jobs that produce results to approval seekers.

Source: http://healthland.time.com/

Tackling Diet And Exercise Together Produces Best Results: Study

If you're trying to get healthy, tackling both diet and exercise is better than trying to improve one lifestyle habit at a time, new research suggests.

The researchers did add that if you need to start with just one lifestyle change, choose exercise. They found that changing diet first may interfere with attempts to establish a regular exercise routine.

The study included 200 people, aged 45 and older, who were inactive and had poor diets. They were split into four groups: new diet and exercise habits at the same time; diet changes first and starting exercise a few months later; starting exercise first and making diet changes a few months later; and no diet or exercise changes.

The groups received telephone coaching and were tracked for a year. Those who made diet and exercise changes at the same time were most likely to meet U.S. guidelines for exercise (150 minutes per week) and nutrition (5 to 9 servings of fruit and vegetables per day), and to keep calories from saturated fat at less than 10 percent of their total intake of calories.

The people who started with exercise first and diet changes a few months later also did a good job of meeting both the exercise and diet goals, but not quite as good as those who made exercise and diet changes at the same time, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers said in a news release from Stanford.

The participants who made diet changes first and started exercise later did a good job of meeting the dietary goals but didn't meet their exercise targets. This may be because each type of change has unique characteristics, explained study author Abby King, a professor of health research and policy and of medicine.

"With dietary habits, you have no choice; you have to eat. You don't have to find extra time to eat because it's already in your schedule. So the focus is more on substituting the right kinds of food to eat," she said in the news release.

However, people with busy schedules may have difficulty finding time for exercise. King noted that even the people in the most successful group (diet and exercise changes at the same time) initially had trouble meeting their exercise goal, but did achieve it by the end of the study.

Source: Health Day News

Timing Matters To Make Diet and Exercise Changes Last

When it comes to making healthy lifestyle changes, which should come first — changing your diet or becoming more physically active?

Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine report in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine that neither strategy was likely to help individuals meet healthy eating and fitness recommendations and stick with them for a year. For the best results, the scientists found that changing diet and fitness habits simultaneously made the most sense.

Previous studies suggested that providing people with too much information about nutrition and physical activity at once can be overwhelming, and tends to discourage, rather than motivate them to improve their habits. That, say the researchers, has led to the popularity of advising people to make incremental changes, and set smaller, more achievable goals to eat healthier meals and to become less sedentary. But, say some experts, continually making new changes can also drain energy and motivation, and lead to a drop in compliance over time.

So to assess how the two strategies fared in a head-to-head comparison, the scientists recruited 200 inactive participants who were age 45 or older and randomly assigned them to one of four groups that provided nutrition and exercise coaching over the phone. One group was instructed about making diet and fitness changes at the same time, the second group were taught about diet changes first, then fitness changes four months later, the third group changed their exercise habits first and made changes in their eating habits four months later, and the final, control group were not instructed about either diet or fitness changes but about how to manage their stress.

The researchers tracked the groups for a full year to determine which strategy was more successful in helping participants achieve the nationally recommended goals of 150 minutes of exercise per week, eating five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables daily and keeping saturated fat intake at less than 10%.

Compared to the group that did not receive any dietary or exercise advice, the three intervention groups made healthy changes in their diet. Those that changed their fitness regimen first also significantly increased the amount of exercise they received daily compared to the other groups after four months. However, at the end of the year, the group that changed both diet and exercise at the same time was the only one that met the nationally recommended targets for both exercise and nutrition levels, while those who worked on improving their nutrition first were unable to meet the recommended levels of fitness after a year.

The results raise interesting questions about behavior changes and compliance. The researches suspect that modifications to diet are easier to make than changes to physical activity, since meals are already part of a daily schedule, and exercise requires more effort to incorporate into an already busy day.

The findings show, however,  that pairing dietary and exercise changes may help to overcome some of the barriers people face in adding more physical activity into their lives. If folks change diet and exercise sequentially, the scientists say, they may end up placing more importance on the first set of behavior changes and feel less pressured to address the second set. Paying attention to both healthy behaviors at the beginning of a program, on the other hand, could help to give them equal priority, and therefore make it more likely that people will be able to maintain the habits over a longer period of time.

Source: http://healthland.time.com/