I've just started a book on willpower and it has some interesting possible ramifications for Mormonism and all its many requirements. This, for example:

"The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons:
1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

You might think you have one reservoir of self-control for work, another for dieting, another for exercise, and another for being nice to your family. But the radish experiment showed that two completely unrelated activities—resisting chocolate and working on geometry puzzles—drew on the same source of energy, and this phenomenon has been demonstrated over and over. There are hidden connections among the wildly different things you do all day. You use the same supply of willpower to deal with frustrating traffic, tempting food, annoying colleagues, demanding bosses, pouting children. Resisting dessert at lunch leaves you with less willpower to praise your boss’s awful haircut. The old line about the frustrated worker going home and kicking the dog jibes with the ego-depletion experiments, although modern workers generally aren’t so mean to their pets. They’re more likely to say something nasty to the humans in the household.

Ego depletion affects even your heartbeat. When people in laboratory experiments exercise mental self-control, their pulse becomes more erratic; conversely, people whose normal pulse is relatively variable seem to have more inner energy available for self-control, because they do better on laboratory tests of perseverance than do people with steadier heartbeats. Other experiments have shown that chronic physical pain leaves people with a perpetual shortage of willpower because their minds are so depleted by the struggle to ignore the pain."

Baumeister, Roy F.; Tierney, John (2011-09-01). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (p. 35-36). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

So, in AngelCowgirl's situation for example, because her husband is using a great deal of his decision-making energy in tending to his "Mormon" concerns, he is little left over for working out his marriage, so he refuses to deal with it. This model also would shed some light on how people resist temptation after temptation but eventually just cave. I've sometimes mentioned how Mormonism had a huge "overhead cost" for me emotionally and this makes some sense out of it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2011 05:11PM by robertb.

And I'm all out of mana potions to restore my will power.

I was just reading something similar somewhere!
Snacking restores willpower, temporarily, to a small amount. Faced with a tough decision? Go take lunch first!

Mormonism takes will power and beats the hell out of you with it. There are little if any allowances given for being human.

If you have any kind of weakness (defined by them)or disability you most likely will never really fit in.

This will be used against you until you either leave or are emotionally destroyed.

It's how the system is set up. They won't ever admit to though.