Name: 科學驗證的 4個方法 ► 這樣做能提高自控力！暢銷書《自控力》作者 - Dr. Kelly McGonigal 凱莉．麥高尼格（中英字幕）
Uploaded: 2025-04-30T08:54:53.000Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
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So I want us to think together a little bit about why an hour more sleep or 10 minutes of meditation a day,

Modal verbs - B1

might actually give us more willpower for any willpower challenge.

Here is an image from an fMRI study of what happens to the brain,

So when you're getting less than six hours of sleep a night,

your brain is actually unable to recruit the systems of the brain that you need to be that better version of yourself.

I love this image because it's like here's where the balance is weighed, do I want the weight loss or do I want the chocolate bar?

And this area of the brain right here is basically keeping track of your goals.

And when it is unable to do that, when it's under fueled or when it's under active,

your brain thinks all it really wants, all you really want is the chocolate bar, or to procrastinate, or to not bother doing your yoga exercises.

And so in some key way, the ability to remember who you are and what your big goals are,

is dependent on the ability of this area of the brain to use energy well.

And sleep deprivation is one of the main things that can get in the way of that.

And I think that's one of the reasons why this small sleep intervention ended up helping people resist relapse to drug addiction.

Because they now had brains that were better fueled to remember their goals to stay clean and sober.

There are a couple of other things that seem to really strengthen the ability of the brain's frontal regions to help you control impulses and find your motivation.

People who meditate maybe 10 minutes a day, after a couple of months, their brains look different.

These regions are bigger and better connected.

People who work out on a regular basis, who used to be sedentary, again, studies show that in as little as a couple of months of regular workouts, their prefrontal cortices are bigger and denser and better connected.

And so these are two of the things you can do that actually train the physiology of your willpower.

And the the last thing the research suggests is what you eat has a very big influence on whether or not your brain is able to be this better version of yourself.

There's something about having big, big spikes in blood sugar levels and then big drops in blood sugar levels that really screws up how the brain uses energy.

And you need your brain to be like an energy efficient machine if you're going to be walking around the world in that kind of better you mindset.

And so these are all things that we sometimes think of as requiring willpower,

right, we think, okay, I have to sit down and force myself to meditate, I have to work out, I have to say no to the donut and eat something that has fiber in it for breakfast.

But we rarely think about the fact that actually not doing these things may be part of what makes it so difficult to begin.

And there's a kind of a curve where when we first start, it feels like we're using willpower.

But everything on this list ends up giving you back far more willpower than they take.

And not just for these challenges, it's not just that exercising makes it easier to exercise.

Studies show that exercising makes it easier to eat right, to not spend too much money, to stop procrastinating, to pay better attention.

All of these things have a kind of global training effect on what you could think of as your willpower muscle.