will power

people with good self-control achieve virtue in a seemingly easy, undramatic fashion. We may reserve our admiration for the most dramatic cases, in which someone heroically does the right thing despite being strongly tempted to do otherwise. But everyday virtue is best achieved not by such heroic feats of willpower, but rather by avoiding such situations in the first place. By pulling together many small habits, especially for avoiding temptations and problems, one can live a more virtuous life. Yes, after making a lot of decisions, your self control is lower and conversely, after exerting self control, your capacity for making decisions is lower. As you make a bunch of decisions, you gradually deplete the energy you have available and subsequent decisions are more passive and tend to go with the default option. What you have to do is either save big decisions for when you are fresh— one piece of advice is don’t make big decisions on a Friday after a hard week. [Also] realize that you do deplete your energy and this changes your decision making process and realize how it changes. [There is] more avoidance, more taking the easy way out, more sticking with the default and status quo. All of those increase when people’s willpower is down Read more: Q&A: Willpower Expert Roy Baumeister on Staying in Control | TIME.com http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/14/qa-willpower-expert-roy-baumeister-on-staying-in-control/#ixzz2q4TkiZpr