Prometheus 6

When life comes at you hard and you persevere, you quite literally use up your potential to do the right thing one more time.

Pumping Emotional Iron
By Wray Herbert

You should be feeling really good about yourself right now. You managed to bite your tongue at the office when your hypercritical boss lit into you. So that was good, disciplined and professional. You kept your head down all day, focusing on a tedious but important deadline project that needed your total concentration. And you did all this while not smoking, day three, even though a long drag on a Marlboro sure seemed like a good idea at times. You should be patting yourself on the back.

So why, if you’ve had such a good day, are you about to collapse on the sofa with a quart of Cherry Garcia and watch reruns of Desperate Housewives? When you showed such self-control all day, why indulge all your mindless weaknesses now?

Psychologists have an idea why. Restraint and self-discipline, they say, are hard work—real effort, not unlike weightlifting. And just as you can overtax your biceps or abs, you can also deplete your reserve of emotional control. When life comes at you hard and you persevere, you quite literally use up your potential to do the right thing one more time.