Free Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) by Peg Streep Page B

the students who’d eaten the cookies and those who’d eaten nothing. The students who had to do double duty resisting something yummy and eating something unpleasant also reported being more tired. Baumeister concluded that the energy used to control one impulse leaves less energy to regulate other choices and actions.
    Baumeister and his colleagues ran additional experiments, all of which confirmed a pattern of ego depletion that resulted from not just exercising self-control (not eating cookies or eating radishes) but making choices. Participants in one experiment were divided into three groups, one of which was required to read a speech advocating a rise in tuition at the university. Given that the participantswere students, it’s fair to assume that no one was for a tuition hike. The second group (called the “high choice”) was handed folders that contained speeches either for tuition raises or against; they were told it would be appreciated if they would read the pro-hike speech but that the choice was entirely up to them. The third control group didn’t have to read any speech. The participants were then given the same puzzle—the one that couldn’t be solved—as the one given in the resisting-temptation experiment. Although the participants who’d been given no choice (having to read a speech they most certainly disagreed with) and those with no speech to read persisted in trying to solve the puzzle, those who had to choose between speeches gave up on the puzzle much faster. This led Baumeister and colleagues to conclude that “acts of choice draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.”
    Other experiments showed that suppressing emotion resulted in ego depletion too—something else to keep in mind when you consider the effort artful quitting entails. The following experiment has implications not just for letting go on the cognitive level but also for the management of emotions—an undertaking that is an important part of artful quitting as well. Baumeister and coworkers had half of the participants watch a video and told them to suppress their emotions; the participants were also told that their expressions would be videotaped as they watched. Those in the control group were also told that they would be videotaped but were instructed to “let their emotions flow.” Half in both groups watched a Robin Williams riff, while the remainder watched the tearjerker scene in which the daughter is dying of cancer in Terms of Endearment. After a ten-minute break, all of the participants were asked how hard it had been to comply with the instructions and then were given thirteen anagrams to unscramble. Not only did the group that tried to suppress emotion report that it had been hard to do so, but this group also fared significantly worse on the anagram test.
    Ego depletion isn’t just a theoretical concept, as shown by a recent study of the brains of participants who had engaged in acts of self-control. We’ll turn to this study in greater detail later, butfor now, we note some findings by Dylan D. Wagner and Todd F. Heatherton at Dartmouth. The researchers found that the MRIs of the brains of participants who had tried to self-regulate showed increased activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain—along with the prefrontal cortex—responsible for managing emotion.
    The brain’s wiring for persistence also gets in the way of cognitive disengagement on a completely unconscious level. It’s what’s called the Zeigarnik effect . Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiment, conducted in 1927, was the first to demonstrate how the brain deals with unfinished business—specifically a goal that was consciously selected and then unselected—but its results have been replicated many times since. The experimenters told people to work on jigsaw puzzles and to keep at it until they finished. But some of the participants weren’t