Ever wonder why we tend to break diets, fly off the handle, and give in to temptation later in the day? Why chocolate cake is so tempting at 8pm but so much easier to resist at 8am? The secret is our brain’s “good little prince.”
In Men in Black, agents J and K head to the morgue to see a dead man named Rosenberg. But during the autopsy, they find that Rosenberg isn’t a man. He’s a robot host for the High Prince of Baltia, a tiny guy working the levers from a cockpit behind Rosenberg’s artificial face.
The good little prince is still alive, but exhausted from working the controls.
Neuroscientists tell us Men in Black isn’t far off the mark. There’s a part of our brain like this good little prince at the controls, right behind our forehead in the frontal lobe. If we could peel back bone and skin just above our eyes, we might just find mahogany trim, because that’s where our little forehead CEO, the executive function, does all its work.
Dr. Piers Steele calls this executive function “willpower’s throne,”1 because all the force of will we muster comes from here. The executive function is active when we plan, solve problems, switch focus, resist temptation, make choices, control our tempers, and more. The executive function is our head honcho, our highest and best self. It’s the good little prince at the controls.
And like Prince Baltia, he’s got tiny arms that wear out with use. When we resist temptation we have less strength to plan or solve problems. When we solve problems we’ve got less strength to plan or resist temptation. Mental muscles, like real muscles, wear down when worked.
This has massive implications for the way we resist temptation, solve problems, and do our work. We’ll explore these implications in upcoming posts.
1Dr. Piers Steel, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 44.
