The Righteous Mind: Why We Are Politically Divided - Season 1, Episode 14 of the Adam Bomb Podcast

Why can't liberals and conservatives get along? Has something changed? Can something be done about it? Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Righteous Mind," provides the best answers I think we'll find. I discuss the book in this podcast.

Listen to The Adam Bomb podcast here:

Also, check this out: 

What Could Stop Our Divisiveness 

It's an interview with Jonathan Haidt on TED.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal GrowthSlotralogyAntivirus For Your Mindand co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English)Follow his podcasts, The Adam Bomb and Talk to Klassy. You can email him here.


Don't Tempt Yourself

Roy Baumeister is a researcher. In one of his experiments, he discovered an important fact: Exerting willpower to resist temptation reduces your ability to persevere on a goal, at least in the short term.

The experiment was simple: Subjects walked into a room that smelled like baking cookies. There was a table in the room with a bowl of radishes and a plate of cookies.

Some subjects were asked to eat radishes, some were asked to eat cookies. Then they were all told to try to do a difficult puzzle. The researchers timed how long it took people to give up trying to solve the puzzle.

Those who resisted eating the cookies gave up after EIGHT minutes. Those who didn't resist (who ate the cookies) persisted for NINETEEN minutes. 

Resisting a temptation depleted some kind of perseverance energy.

So to whatever degree you can, try to make your environment less tempting. Don't keep candy in your house, for example, because if you eat the candy, you lose. But if you resist eating the candy, you also lose.

Look around in your life for sources of temptation and see if you can remove them. This can give you more energy and perseverance to accomplish what you want in your life.

Read more about this: What you need to know about willpower: The psychological science of self-control.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal GrowthSlotralogyAntivirus For Your Mindand co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Subscribe to his blog here. You can email him here.