Dangerous Temptations. (New Year Resolutions)
Posted: Tuesday, January 12, 2010
by Ransy Reynis
http://www.coachransy.com
We defend ourselves against the temptations to exaggerate the threat they pose. It can help us keep New Year resolutions.
When temptation sets in, unconscious factors can give you an extra engine.
How long will your New Year resolutions to lose weight or train last? Can you keep it until Easter?
There are many tricks to keep your resolutions. Some avoid having chocolate in the house and other keep training and food diary or keep an old picture of them self on the frits or bathroom for motivation.
However, it doesn't only depend on the willpower. The way we perceive the temptations, play a major role. A hot topic in research now, is how we can get a solid foundation of unconscious psychological mechanisms.
There are good indications that many of our strategies for self-control is beyond the conscious. This is like an extra engine that helps us up the hill.
Blew up the calories
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, have a series of experiments examined how the world is perceived differently in light of the conflict between temptation and long-term goals.
In an effort a group of students were asked to evaluate the calorie content of a freshly baked cookie. The results showed that those who where most motivated to become slim estimated calorie content to be higher than the others.
In a similar experiment, the students was asked to read an invitation to a party and then consider how long they believed the party will last.
It turned out that the most ambitious students considered that the party would last longer - and thus may be more detrimental to their studies - than the less ambitious students did.
The students were also offered a cookie and asked if they would go to the party. The higher the calorie content students projected, or the longer they thought a party would last, the less likely it was that they succumbed to the temptation.
Formed unconsciously
The results suggest that our long-term goals unconsciously govern the way we perceive the world.
The conflict between short-term temptations and long-term goals is solved by the negative consequences of letting them blowing up.
But this tendency to magnify the negative consequences will only have a purpose when we have choices.
In another attempt was therefore 90 female students asked to evaluate the calorie content of a chocolate.
Some of the students were told that the next phase of the experiment was to do a taste test and had to consume a certain amount of chocolate. The other group was told they could eat as much as they wanted of the chocolate.
Those subjects who were in a choice situation - they could choose to eat chocolate or not - estimated calorie content to be high.
Those who had no choice estimated the calorie content lower. For these there was no conflict between short-term temptation and long-term goals, since they had already agreed to participate in the experiment and eat chocolate.
Other experiments confirmed that the threat temptations constituted only was oversized when there was an actual choice situation.
Wise to recognize the conflicts
Be good at seeing situations where conflict between temptation and long-term goals occurs. Often you fall to the temptation because one has not been able to see that the contestants actually contrary to a goal.
A beer does not make you drunk or alcoholic, and a chocolate does not make you fat, but frequent consumption may result in negative consequences. To see the individual actions in a broader perspective can help one to detect conflicts with their own long-term goals.
Slim desire cover up
Besides confirming the researchers' assumptions about the choices trigger subconscious reviews, experiments also showed that the diet would be manipulated out of clever ways.
In one of the premises where the trials took place, it was hung up posters of slim women in bathing suits, on the beach or jogging in the woods. Female students who were exposed to "random" for these images was more motivated to count calories than the control group who stayed in a room with neutral landscapes.
In a similar manner, slim desire of the female participants in the study was pushed forward by putting out a woman magazine with a focus on the body and health.
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