Maybe you’ve heard of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Researchers thought torturing kids would be fun, so they sat kids down in front of a marshmallow and told them: “I’m going to leave the room. If you don’t eat the marshmallow, you'll get another one when I come back so you'll get to have two.” And then they left and watched the kids with a hidden camera for about 10 minutes. The kids stared at the marshmallow, held it in their hands, sniffed it, and licked it. Unsurprisingly only 1/3rd of the kids could resist the marshmallow long enough for the person got back and then get the second marshmallow.

Now, a single marshmallow is an easy task for adults, but we still use effort to resist things. An alcoholic, for example, resisting a fully stocked mini-fridge in his hotel room uses a lot of effort. Others use (hopefully far less) effort to resist watching another episode of a good series when it’s time to go to bed or to resist social media during work. The open World Wide Web might be the most distracting thing that ever occurred on this planet. Everything is just a few clicks away and we spend most of our time on devices that have access to this abundance of temptations. So just like the kids in the experiment, we are often tempted to go for instant gratification and the way of the least resistance.

A famous experiment by Roy Baumeister and colleagues had 67 participants who hadn’t eaten for at least 3 hours walk into a room filled with the aroma of just-baked chocolate chip cookies. They sat down to a table with two bowls - one filled with warm chocolate chip cookies and one filled with radishes. Half of the people were told they had to eat radishes and couldn’t eat the cookies. Afterwards they had the poor radish people and the lucky cookie people work on a mentally stressing puzzle. The puzzle was actually impossible. The point was to see how long people would try to do it. The radish people gave up on the puzzle almost twice as fast. On average they quit more than 10 minutes faster than the cookie people.

The idea is that the radish people were tired from using their willpower on resisting cookies, so they had less willpower to use on the puzzle. This is just one of almost 200 experiments that gave credibility to the concept of “ego depletion” - the idea that willpower draws on a limited stock of energy, willpower is like a muscle - we can tire it out. So if we use a lot of willpower on one thing, then we have less willpower to use later on resisting temptations, staying focused, or even making good decisions. This theory was challenged, but the current status quo is that science says:” Yes, ego depletion is a thing.”

In any case, I think we intuitively know that temptations are distracting and that making decisions is an exhausting task. This does make sense. If we need to resist temptations all day long we need to make a lot of decisions on what to do. When we need to make the decision in the evening to either go to the gym or on the couch our brain is exhausted, we will collapse and choose the way of least resistance.

An experiment from a 2012 study had 205 adults wear a beeper that would ask them randomly throughout the day whether they were resisting a desire, how strong that desire was, and whether they were successful in resisting or not.

The interesting point is that the people that were best at self-control according to these reports actually reported experiencing fewer temptations throughout the study. Seems paradox, but the people being better at self-control actually used less willpower to achieve that. What these people did do differently is planning and setting up their lives and days so that less willpower was needed, because there simply was no temptation arising.

Let me give an example. I decide I want to work on a project, may it be for work, for university or something private. I am sitting on my laptop at home. The same laptop I use to browse YouTube. The same laptop I use to watch Netflix. The same laptop where LinkedIn is only one click away and most important for me, the same laptop I use to play chess online. My phone is on my desk. It’s not blinking, but maybe I got messages. It is already 6:30 PM. Maybe I can do the work later at night, or tomorrow, or outsource it?

I start bargaining with myself:” Okay, one game of chess, then I will work on that project”. I even have that discussion right now as I am writing this article. Sure, I am not saying these words in my head when having such a “discussion”, but I am staring at the little Lichess.com icon in my browser for 10 seconds straight. For a short time, I am indecisive. And indecisiveness does not feel good, no wonder - it is positively correlated with measures of anxiety, worry, and depression and has been listed as a symptom of depressive disorder for decades.

The worst part is that being distracted and tempted during specific activities becomes a habit. I love to play chess. In my online chess account, I can see when I played what amount of time and games. Apparently I play quite regularly, but there are peaks in the last two years during the weeks before final exams. Playing “only one game of chess” before going back to studying was my distraction habit for studying.

Whether or not I am resisting to play chess, the temptation depletes my willpower energy. Just being tempted to play is distracting me. Same counts for unopened emails in range of sight, unread messages or notifications, and chocolate cookies standing on the table. Only being tempted by wanting to check a shiny new email impairs our brain’s performance. Glenn Wilson of Gresham College found that when you’re trying to focus on a task, even the simple temptation of an unread email sitting in your inbox reduces your effective IQ by 10 points.

Because the option to do something different is always there, you will always be a little distracted by it.

Let’s get back to the kids from the marshmallow experiment. What did the kids that successfully resisted the tempting sweet marshmallow do differently? They did whatever they could to take their mind off the marshmallow and didn’t rely so much on brute willpower. They covered their eyes, talked to themselves, started counting seconds, and invented games with their hand and feet. By the way, the same researchers also showed in follow-up studies that kids who were able to delay the gratification became more successful later in life.

We always have tons of choices throughout the day - “should I do this or that - or just do this for a little bit and then do that productive thing?” A simple way to reduce that uncertainty and indecision and stop being distracted by these choices is to create an environment where these choices are harder to reach. Or simply delete them. Focus apps for the browser and phone work great. These apps or browser extensions let you block specific sites (temporarily) and sometimes you can also set a timer for a Pomodoro worktime. Apps for your phone may allow you to open certain apps only after a certain time of day (e.g. 18:00 PM). You don’t have one and want to be less distracted? - Install one.

Some recommended:

• Forest App (IOS & Android)
• Brain Focus Productivity (IOS & Android)
• Self control (Mac only)
• Stay focused (Chrome Browser Extension)

In a scenario where eliminating choices and decisions to make makes us focus better and be happier, I clearly see why minimalism is on the rise in the last decade.

I think talking about habits and activities is trying to make decisions for future behavior at this moment. Today we tell ourselves that we will meditate every day the following week, read 20 pages every morning or work out three times a week in the coming month. Whenever we say something it is important how we say it. A simple example: Out of 40 people on a bus 10 died during an accident, 30 survived after the police and firefighters arrived and helped out. Then “30 people saved after bus-accident” sounds more positive than “Terrible accident kills 10 people”.

Besides eliminating choices, framing is important. How we say something to ourselves is important. It can change our attitude and our own self-image. In a study published in 2012 researchers found that people were more likely to stay committed to their statements if they phrased them with “I don’t do X” versus “I can’t do X”. The idea is that someone saying “I don’t miss workouts” misses fewer workouts than someone saying “I can’t miss workouts”.

That has to do with consistency. We all want to act consistent, we want to do what we say and say what we do. Phrasing it in the “I don’t” way makes us think of ourselves as someone who simply does not (or does) do something. Instead, the “I can’t” phrasing feels like receiving an obligation, indicating that we are forcing ourselves to do something that we do not want to do.

From a psychological standpoint, when we say "I don't", we create a feedback loop that reminds us of our control and power over the situation. So simply thinking or even better talking or writing of ourselves as someone who does not get distracted by the temptation to browse Instagram during work or study sessions reduces the temptation felt and the willpower needed to actually stick to our decision.

We tend to do what we believe in. Most people know that fast food is bad for their health and doing sport increases their brain capability, health, and life expectancy. We hear and read about it here and there, maybe in a Ted talk, maybe a self-improvement book, maybe an article. I think simply knowing about the benefits or disadvantages of an activity is not enough. Knowing is not believing. When we believe in something, we have a reason, we think we understand it.

It is much easier to do something because we believe in it. When I was a child, brushing my teeth was not my favorite thing to do. I knew it was right to brush my teeth because my parents told me, not because I believed in it. After a lot of pain at the dentist’s office, I started asking myself why brushing teeth is important, why using dental floss is important and where caries comes from. Once I researched and did understand what’s happening in my mouth I started to believe in mouth hygiene. Ever since I need less willpower to actually spend that 5 minutes in front of the bathroom mirror 2-3 times a day.

The idea here is to question our behavior. We may have been told something is bad or good, but we don’t understand why. Asking questions like:” Why is it good to do sports, what are the benefits?”, “What happens to our bodies in the long run when we do not exercise?” help to find reasons for an internal belief in something - and it is easier to execute on believing than to execute on knowing.