-
About
Our Story
back- Our Mission
- Our Leadership
- Accessibility
- Careers
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
- Learning Science
- Sustainability
Our Solutions
back
-
Community
Community
back- Newsroom
- Discussions
- Webinars on Demand
- Digital Community
- The Institute at Macmillan Learning
- English Community
- Psychology Community
- History Community
- Communication Community
- College Success Community
- Economics Community
- Institutional Solutions Community
- Nutrition Community
- Lab Solutions Community
- STEM Community
- Newsroom
- Macmillan Community
- :
- Psychology Community
- :
- Psychology Blog
- :
- How to Be Productive: Preserve Your Energy for Wha...
How to Be Productive: Preserve Your Energy for What Matters
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark as New
- Mark as Read
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Printer Friendly Page
- Report Inappropriate Content
Originally September 7, 2014.
My wife loves me, despite smirking that I am “boringly predictable.” Every day, I go to bed at pretty much the same time, rise at the same time, pull on my khaki pants and brown shoes, frequent the same coffee shops, ride the same old bicycle, and exercise every weekday noon hour. As I walk into my Monday-Wednesday-Friday breakfast spot, the staff order up my oatmeal and tea. I’ll admit to boring.
But there is an upside to mindless predictability. As my colleagues-friends Roy Baumeister, Julia Exline, Nathan DeWall and others have documented, self-controlled decision-making is like a muscle. It temporarily weakens after an exertion (a phenomenon called “ego depletion”) and replenishes with rest. Exercising willpower temporarily depletes the mental energy needed for self-control on other tasks. It even depletes the blood sugar and neural activity associated with mental focus. In one experiment, hungry people who had resisted the temptation to eat chocolate chip cookies gave up sooner on a tedious task (compared with those who had not expended mental energy on resisting the cookies).
President Obama, who appreciates social science research, understands this. As he explained to Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” Lewis reports that Obama mentioned “research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions,” noting that Obama added, “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
So, amid today’s applause for “mindfulness,” let’s put in a word for mindlessness. Mindless, habitual living frees our minds to work on more important things than which pants to wear or what breakfast to order. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.
-
Abnormal Psychology
19 -
Achievement
3 -
Affiliation
1 -
Behavior Genetics
2 -
Cognition
40 -
Consciousness
35 -
Current Events
28 -
Development Psychology
17 -
Developmental Psychology
34 -
Drugs
5 -
Emotion
53 -
Evolution
3 -
Evolutionary Psychology
5 -
Gender
19 -
Gender and Sexuality
7 -
Genetics
12 -
History and System of Psychology
6 -
History and Systems of Psychology
7 -
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
51 -
Intelligence
8 -
Learning
70 -
Memory
39 -
Motivation
14 -
Motivation: Hunger
2 -
Nature-Nurture
7 -
Neuroscience
46 -
Personality
29 -
Psychological Disorders and Their Treatment
22 -
Research Methods and Statistics
103 -
Sensation and Perception
46 -
Social Psychology
130 -
Stress and Health
55 -
Teaching and Learning Best Practices
58 -
Thinking and Language
18 -
Virtual Learning
26
- « Previous
- Next »