When you get depleted

One day after work, let’s say you are tired. While walking your way to home you have schemed not to cook for today’s dinner, instead have it outside, and you see two restaurants close to you; One is Pizza corner and second one is some Indian restaurant. which one would you choose? By contrast, if you had spent your afternoon relaxing in your home reading a book and plan to go outside for dinner to have refreshment, what choice would you have made?

Still contemplating the situations and decisions you make? When two alternatives are given, you tend to choose the one that salivates (impulsive) you if you are tired. In the latter situation you give enough thoughts before making a decision, you are more likely to choose the healthy food.

Dan Ariely has explained this interesting fact more elaborately with experiments in his book “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty”. He says, when our brain is occupied by cognitive load we tend to make impulsive decisions.

This is one of his experiment to prove it; experiment has two groups, where members of one group are given a two digit number like “23” and members of second group are given seven digit number “7546321” to remember and tell it to the other experimenter waiting on the other side of the room to get rewarded. As the volunteers walked across the hall with numbers in their brain, they unexpectedly meet chocolate cake and salad stalls. The experimenter at the stall says to volunteer to make a choice there itself between those two as a reward. The choice made is written down on a paper and volunteer continues with it to the other side across the hall.

The result of the experiment shows that when volunteers have lengthy number to remember they are more likely choose chocolate cake as a reward impulsively.

This is just not it that makes you succumb to the temptation. There is one more little complicated theory behind this, by Roy Baumeister prof. at Florida State University, it’s called “ego depletion”. To understand this, imagine you have examination in 3 months and you have made resolution to read for 3-4 hours a day for it. For the first two three days you follow the resolution you made. Then you are tempted to adjourn things as you feel you are doing well. As a tantalizing factor, you see your friends enjoying their days doing nothing (atleast that’s what it looks like). After few days of resisting this temptation, things conjure up (you get depleted) and you succumb to it and break your resolution.

Dan in his book talks about a character of the movie “sex and the city”, Samantha jones. She finds herself in a committed relationship. She begins to eat compulsively and as a consequence she gains more weight. The reason behind this baffling behavior is, she found a man moved in next door who she would go after if she was single. To resist her temptation she got this compulsion of eating more. In this case also Samantha is depleted. She knows it is dangerous to succumb to it, so she compromises her depletion with the compulsion to eat more.

Ego depletion says, as you drain your self-control ability using it frequently, there is a possibility one day or a time of a day you will blow it. You succumb to the one tempting you or you find an alternative one to cheat. I find this theory applicable to the well-known bollywood celebrity “Vidya Balan”. Before she was best known for choosing of discipline rolls in the movies. Bafflingly she was found in the movie “Dirty picture”. Most probably things got accumulated and she had an outburst.

Now that we know what depletion is, Dan in his book puts two practices/theory to confront our daily life’s temptation:

1> You try to avoid that temptation all together before it sits lingering in your kitchen.
2> Once in a while as a rational being, you succumb to the temptation.

Agreeing that we can’t escape from the situations that tempt us. Let’s try to walk away from the temptation before it consumes you. It doesn’t sound easy, but instead of trying to overcome it after it consumes you, it’s better to avoid it upfront.

Dan Silverman an economist form University of Michigan and Dan Ariely were colleagues at Princeton University. Both were heading out to a restaurant for lunch every day, the restaurant had variety of desserts. And Dan silverman had very high affinity towards the desserts, being rational and cholesterolically challenged, he thought it is not advisable to eat it everyday. So he found a simple solution to keep himself away from desserts that once in a while he succumbed to it. He also wrote an academic paper justifying his approach.

It is advisable to loosen yourself and succumb to some of the temptations. Put yourself in a situation where you resist all your desires and get depleted. In the last give yourself up for that desire. This way your energy to self-control refills. But, we should be careful that it doesn’t become a practice .