As a rule, it's important not to confuse serious psychiatric disorders with the normal ups and downs of life. Just because you're feeling low, it doesn't mean you're "depressed"; just because you're easily distracted, it doesn't mean you've got attention deficit disorder. But I'm going to have to make an exception in the case of "utilisation behaviour", a medical phenomenon I happened upon recently with a shock of recognition. It afflicts people who have suffered severe damage to the frontal lobes of their brains ... and me. And probably you, too.
Patients displaying utilisation behaviour can't stop themselves automatically using whatever things enter their visual field: they can't pass a door without opening it, a telephone without picking it up, a light switch without flicking it.
Remind you of anyone? I'm not really suggesting you can't resist opening doors, but it's scary to consider how much our lives are determined not by conscious decisions but by whatever happens to present itself: food that gets eaten because it's there; evenings spent watching TV because there's a TV in the room. Or bigger things: a job you fell into because it came along, or a relationship. (Headline from The Onion: "18-year-old Miraculously Finds Soulmate In Hometown".) Some argue that utilisation behaviour accounts for a lot of what we call absent-mindedness, too: we're accustomed to putting things back in the fridge, say, so when we walk past the fridge, we open it and deposit whatever we're carrying, even if it's the car keys.
Resisting the power of our surroundings takes effort. In one fascinating recent study, psychologists led by Roy Baumeister, a pioneer in research on self-control, asked people to complete tasks that required "effortful persistence" and focus - the equivalent of such real-world challenges as remaining at your desk to work instead of wandering off to make another coffee, or walking past a shop window without making an impulse purchase. The tasks, it turned out, depleted their glucose levels; moreover, subjects who had a glucose drink beforehand showed more persistence. Exerting self-control, in other words, uses up real energy, much as lifting a heavy object does. (For more, see the excellent blog Cognitive Daily, at snipurl.com/21hv9.) Another surprising moral would seem to be: drink a sugary drink before starting work.
Baumeister calls this effect "ego depletion", because we're imposing our sense of self on the world, and on our behaviour, and the effort involved is a limited resource. This is why experimental subjects who are asked to prevent themselves from laughing while watching a funny video perform less well at subsequent tasks that require focus: they have temporarily used up their willpower reserves. It's also why, if you want to change some behaviour, willpower can be only a temporary or partial solution. It's exhaustible, and if you rely on it too much in one area - eating healthily, say - you will find that you don't have enough left over for the rest of life. There'll be lots of healthy food in your fridge, but you'll probably keep leaving your car keys in there, too.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
