It is really interesting to consider whether we have free will or not and to what degree we have control over our actions. People always say that they want to achieve x thing, like losing weight or stop procrastinating, but most of those milestones are inevitably not hit. Why do those failures happen? Most of those goals focus on improving yourself so there isn’t anything stopping you except you. The classic experiment when you leave a child in a room with a marshmallow and tell them that if they don’t eat it within fifteen minutes, they’ll get another one shows that there are limits to our willpower. There are constraints to our ability to control ourselves. If you had to go to the store to get a back of chips versus it sitting in front of you, you would have more self control in the former case rather than the latter. At some point, it seems that biological mechanisms overwhelms mental abilities.

I learned that children start developing a sense of willpower when they are very young. The answers to questions like if your favorite food was in front of you, would you need to eat it changes from of course to not necessarily “needing” to eat it but wanting to. It is fascinating that self control starts developing so early. Even more questions come to mind, like how does self control develop, why does it develop, and why does it sometimes not develop, etc. The little kids developed tactics like distracting themselves by moving around and play with their hands, just as we develop techniques like making sure the junk food isn’t out in the open to help us self-regulate.