Three emotions that help achieve goals

Psychologist David Destino explains why willpower does not help to achieve long -term goals. The real secret of success in emotions.

I would like to have a stronger willpower, more self -control and perseverance. Everyone dreams about it. It seems that this will definitely help us be more stubborn in achieving goals.

But it just seems so. Willpower does not guarantee that you will resist the temptations in order to achieve long -term goals. Most likely, at the moment when it will be needed most, it will let you down. Perhaps you have repeatedly convinced of this from experience. Remember the started and abandoned diets, work postponed for meeting with friends, about excess glass.

Faced with a choice: pleasure now or reward in the future – we often choose the first. The reason is that a difficult choice depleted our cognitive resources. The more we resist the temptations, the higher the probability of surrender. Moreover, if we are not sure that current efforts will bear fruit in the future, we have little chance of making a wise decision. We are ready to sacrifice in the present only if the future reward is guaranteed, but this is rare.

These emotions help us open from the best side and see everyday actions in the long run

Willpower really often fails. But there are other ways to achieve results. For example, cultivate positive emotions: gratitude, sympathy and pride.

They

help to open from the best side and see everyday actions in the long run. In addition, they have three important advantages over willpower. Firstly, their strength is not exhausted. Secondly, an immediate reward cannot “deceive them”. And thirdly, they simultaneously increase the quality of decisions in different areas of life.

Gratitude

I set out to find out how stimulating gratitude affects behavior. To do this, we organized an adult version of the famous “Test with a marshmallow”. At first we asked the participants to recall the cases when they felt grateful, happy and indifferent. Then we offered them a few questions of this kind: “What do you prefer: get X dollars now or y dollars through z days?»The amount Y has always been more than X, and the number of days (Z) changed.

We found out that a sense of gratitude almost doubled self -control. The subjects who recalled the state of gratitude were more likely to wait for the upcoming reward than those who recalled happiness or indifference. The feeling of gratitude is also related to the willingness to make a sacrifice to help others. When they help us and we are grateful for this, we are more willing to help others.