The surprising thing is that the people who drank more—the ones whose bladders were full—more often chose the delayed award. It’s a surprising finding because, as Tuk explains in the paper’s abstract, psychologists believe that “visceral states are known to have a (detrimental) impact on our ability to exert self-control.” Psychologists call this “ego depletion”: the mind labors to to restrain a bodily function, making it harder to exert self-control in other areas. So how did full bladders lead to better self-control?
Tuk’s study only established a correlation bladder control with other types of self-control, but she does have a working hypothesis about what’s actually happening in her subjects’ brains. The reason is that our feelings of inhibition all originate from the same area in the brain, she explained to me in an email, and so it’s not too hard to imagine that our self-control in one area can affect—or “spill over” (get it?)—into self-control in other areas. “Hence, people who [are experiencing] higher levels of bladder control, should be better able to control unrelated impulses,” she writes.
-More Here (I used to use this trick for night time long distance driving; that was self control on a completely "different" dimension.)
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