He self control is one of those characteristics that we always admire others But it is not always easy to practice ourselves: a sweet that we love, a purchase that we want but do not need, one more beer … The temptation is everywhere and resisting is not fun.
On the other hand, sometimes it is necessary. We are not talking about never giving yourself a slip, but living from slip to slip can end up having consequences for our health, our money or our life in general.
Exercising can be a way to exercise that power of self-control. that we all need sometimes, according to the conclusion of a recent study.
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Can exercise promote self-control?
Physical activity has a powerful psychological effect, altering our mood for the better, helping to control some mental illnesses and facilitating the change of habits and behavior patterns. So a team of scientists from the University of Kansas decided to test their influence on willpower.
They started with a small pilot experiment in which they told four volunteers, all of them sedentary and overweight, that they were going to undergo a training program that would prepare them to complete a 5-kilometer race, and that the effects of that training would be analyzed, including psychological ones.
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Deferred gratification
The experiment included a previous questionnaire to analyze some aspects of the volunteer’s personality, including the ability of deferred gratification, that is, of postpone immediate gratification in favor of greater. An example would be being able to say no to a chocolate ice cream in exchange for being able to eat two later. It is a generally accepted way of measuring something as complex as self-control ability.
The volunteers received three months of training running and running, as well as coaching sessions where they received tips to improve their performance. Every week they repeated the same questionnaires from the beginning. The researchers found that three of the four volunteers they had improved their self-control according to the answers to the questions, while the fourth, which had skipped several training sessions, showed no significant changes.
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Four are too few to draw valid conclusions, so they repeated the experiment increasing the number of volunteers. The results were the same: during the three months of training, and one month after finishing, the volunteers reflected in their responses an improvement in the capacity for self-control through delayed gratification, and the improvement was proportional to the number of training sessions they had attended.
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Feeling good now, or better later
This suggests, according to the authors, that exercise is a simple and effective way to improve self-controlAlthough these results do not indicate how this occurs. However, they do have some hypotheses. On the one hand, exercising affects the parts of the brain that participate in decision making and superior cognitive abilities, which in turn affects self-control.
On the other hand, it may be a psychological effect. Exercising is itself a delayed gratification for many of us.: It costs us and while we do it it does not make us feel especially good, but the feeling of later satisfaction drives us to tie our shoes and go to the gym.
This article was originally published by Rocío Pérez in September 2017 and has been revised for republication.
Images | iStock
In Vitonica | Psychological benefits of sport
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