Do you find that the older you get the less flexible you become? And I’m not referring to your body, that is a conversation for another day. I mean less flexible in your life.
We get ‘set in our ways’ as we get older and as much as we might think it’s just because we think we know what is right and wrong for us and that we ‘deserve’ to spend these years hanging out in our comfort zone, we don’t realize that this comfort zone may be slowly killing us.
There is this area of the brain that is getting some interesting research lately and it’s called the anterior midcingulate cortex. This research is showing that when people do things they don’t want to do, like adding in exercise or resisting eating something they want to eat, this area of the brain grows.
“The [mACC] is smaller in obese people; it gets bigger when they diet. It’s larger in athletes, it’s especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge. And in people that live a very long time, this area keeps its size.” — Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.
But, not unlike other areas of our fitness, the growth of this area of the brain is transient in nature. As quickly as we build it up, if we don’t continue to do things that are hard for us, things we don’t want to do, the anterior midcingulate cortex shrinks again.
So many of us can attest to this. Have you ever tried to lose weight for example and found it really hard at first…and then when you got a rhythm going things seemed to get easier. But then you stop trying so hard, lose some ground, and then all of a sudden you are back from square one with seemingly no willpower left to start again? It’s a tale as old as time. We can’t coast, we need to keep working and challenging our willpower or it shrinks and shrivels away.
The beauty of this is that all of you reading this have not one, but two anterior midcingulate cortex’s, all you have to do is develop them by doing things that you resist doing in order to develop it.
In the end, the message is clear, willpower is like a muscle and it needs to be worked out, especially in ways we may initially resist.
And so I encourage you, the next time something makes you uncomfortable and you don’t want to do it, think twice. Maybe that’s exactly what you should do. And not just for the you that is sitting here reading this today, but for future you that still wants to be dynamic and capable and motivated for years to come.
