Willpower and my own personal misunderstandings

    For the book I chose to read during the duration of this course. " The Willpower Instinct" has taught me so much about how to better control my vices if even I should at all, and while I haven't finished the book just, yet I would like to comment on my own personal journey I decided to take alongside this book in order to better hold my vices in check. To keep things simple, most of what I learned about the book is to maintain balance over your temptations as opposed to simply suppressing how you feel towards indulging yourself. As the author seems to put it, willpower is more than just the ability to resist temptations rather it is our ability to know what is right for us and to choose what we want for our future selves more than what we would like in the immediate moment. This ability to choose for ourselves manifests in many ways, but the one I would like to highlight the most for now is the idea that you don't have to always say no to your temptations and if structured properly, you can allow yourself to indulge once in a while in something you want to stop having a hold on you and it can even go as far as to benefit you in the long run. Using myself as an example I have a problem with sweets as I am sure many have as well. Before I would tell myself that after a certain day, I would have no more sweet foods ever but find myself quickly coming back to them after maybe 3-4 days usually in the form of an intense binge. After reading some passages in the book I decided to put ideas the author put forth to the test and carved out a schedule for the month where I promised myself "safe days" to eat as many sweets as I felt necessary but only on the condition that I keep myself properly in check for 5 days. While the time frame of this experiment has been pretty short, I have been noticing that even with the extended period of time between when I can and can't have sweet foods, the calculated promise of unlimited sweets has both helped me keep my temptations in check as well as on the days I do allow myself to go wild I am indulging myself less and less. With any luck I can keep this trend going and possibly even lengthen the amount of time between when I allow myself to have sweets, but this has me rethinking my approach to improving my willpower as a whole. It seems like my body's will works akin to a muscle and the more I try to use it for extended periods of time the easier it is to get tired which results in breaking my own promises. however, if I continue to hone my ability to stave off temptations in small, short rounds I could improve myself more and more until I don't need to hold myself to certain rules and I can just do it naturally and that in and of itself is thanks to the ideas put forth in this book. I still at this moment have a few more chapters to flip through so eventually I will get onto making a more comprehensive book report but for now I truly appreciate the ways this is helping me to recontextualize how I act in my own life in regard to my temptations and how I can properly address them.