A Simple Way to Break Your Habit to Overspend

I love Discover Magazine; I find most of the articles to be interesting and sometimes very inspiring too. As an engineer, I occasionally end up leveraging some of the scientific discoveries featured in the magazine in my research and development work. The March 2009 edition of Discovery had a very intriguing discussion piece on how the human brain works.

Within that article a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University named Sam Wang gave out some practical advice to help increase personal willpower. After I read it, I realized that this advice might benefit folks I call financial jellyfishes; that is those who have a hard time exercising self control when it comes to sticking to their budgets.

According to the professor, willpower is controlled in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and it can be exercised like a muscle. He gave an example:

Let’s say you were given a two-step task. Step 1 is to eat an entire plate of something. Once you were finished, you then would have to complete an extremely difficult puzzle. Studies have shown that if you were given a tasty plate of cookies, you would persist in solving that puzzle for some time. However if you were instead given something unpleasant to eat, like a bunch of lima beans, you would spend significantly less time trying to solve the puzzle.

Professor Wang says this experiment shows that our brains have a finite resource of willpower. So those that willed themselves to eat all of the lima beans depleted their willpower to a point that left them with less motivation to work the puzzle. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as ego depletion.

If you ask me, I’d call it a simple disgust for lima beans.

Professor Wang says we can all build up our willpower “muscle” by doing things that require efforts of will. How? Well, the good professor suggests that simply brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand for several weeks will do the trick.

Personally, I think the professor may be on to something good here. Although I don’t have trouble sticking to my budget I do lack willpower in other areas, so I am going to implement this little experiment anyway starting tomorrow.

For those who are having trouble keeping their spending in check, this little exercise is certainly worth a try, don’t you think?

Hey! There is nothing to lose by trying this for a few weeks, right?

If it doesn’t work you’ll at least be able to say you are now a little more ambidextrous. But if it does, your household budget will be all the better for it.

If you liked this article, please be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.