#302 Is Willpower Fatigue Real - Menno Henselmans Part 2

Menno Henselmans (0:00)

Most people are only productive when they come to the office in the morning and after lunch, because then they've had breaks. And after that, productivity massively declines.

You see that most workers report only about three hours actual productivity per day.

Siim Land (0:13)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Menno Henselmans. Menno is an online physique coach, researcher, entrepreneur and bodybuilder. This is a two-part podcast, and this is the second part in which we talk about Menno's new book called The Science of Self-Control. This episode is sponsored by Magic Spoon.

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Siim Land (1:32)

So, your new book, The Science of Self-Control.

Given I think most people would expect a more bodybuilding type book about training, per se, so you actually came up with a more mindset or mental side book. So, what made you decide that?

Menno Henselmans (1:49)

Actually, I studied behavioral economics, which is in large part behavioral psychology. So, that's something I'd always been interested in and I have a strong academic background in. And I always found it difficult to implement these things for a few reasons into my writings, especially on Facebook and Instagram. Because for many of these things, you first need to lay a foundation of how the human mind works. And if you don't have that in place, then it's very difficult to discuss anything, especially on social media. And this book basically made me get all of the things that I accumulated for a very long time, put them together, mix them with more new information and publish that. So that's, I think, the main drive of how it's gone. It's just a much better way to tell the whole story without confusing people. And there's also research, by the way, from psychology. Psychology is one of those things, just like nutrition, that everybody has a strong opinion about, even if they have very little knowledge on the topic, no formal training or no actual research on the topic, because it seems so intuitive.

And there's an actual effect that's also been studied in psychology, which says or shows that when people are told the outcome of a psychological study, they almost always go like, oh, yeah, duh, yeah, it makes perfect sense. And when you ask them in advance to predict what people would do in a study, then people really cannot tell well.

So that was also why I've been hesitant to publish much about psychology and stuff, because it's like people always think, oh, yeah, of course. And people always also think that because it's a more soft science psychology compared to a better, harder science, like exercise physiology, people think it's subjective, but it is an empirical science. So there are a lot of things where you say, sure, for example, beauty standards, beauty is subjective, beauty is the eye of the beholder. You know, there's no such thing as objective beauty. Well, you know, there are actually a few indicators that are consistent across cultures, lifespan, decades of research, such as waist to hip ratio.

These things, you know, have an evolutionary basis. And even though, of course, they vary per individual, it's not like it's just up for grabs. You know, everyone has their own opinion and there's no trend to be found. There's actually a very strong trend and we can predict quite well, for example, if we show a picture of a certain person, then science could predict quite well what the average rating of various bodily features of that person would be with reasonable accuracy, at least on a group level.

So, yeah, that's a lot of reasons why I chose to keep the psychology to myself until I got it all out.