Tag Archives: mental-health

Willpower – A muscle not a trait

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Many people talk about willpower as if it’s all or nothing, something you either have or don’t. But that’s not how it works. Willpower isn’t genetic, its better thought of as a skill that you improve and develop over time. While we all have a basic foundation, the strength of your willpower depends heavily on learned habits. The implication being that anyone can improve their willpower through practice, just as they would strengthen a *muscle.

Why not listen to My AI alter ego offer his thoughts….

What is willpower?
While psychologists define willpower as the ability to resist short-term temptations for a longer-term gain, it might more easily be thought of as “doing what you know you should, even when you don’t want to do it.” There are also many terms used in a similar context as willpower that can be confusing. To add some clarity, here are a couple of sentences that puts them all together.

To achieve a long-term goal, Motivation provides the reason to start. Determination is the short-term commitment required to stay on track, Willpower is the moment to moment self-control needed to avoid temptation, and Grit is the perseverance necessary in the long term.

“Research shows that willpower is more important than IQ. That’s why the point isn’t to become smarter, but to become more self-disciplined.” – Adam Kirk Smith (Life coach & public speaker)

The science
Interestingly we know a reasonable amount about willpower and what is happening in the brain. Neuroscience research shows us that there is something called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) which is heavily involved in conflict monitoring, spotting when short term impulses clash with long-term goals and in regulating attention and effort. The implication is that when you resist temptation or push through discomfort, the ACC becomes more active, helping the prefrontal cortex enforce discipline over the brain’s reward systems. In this way, the ACC functions as a kind of “emotional referee,” guiding persistence and aligning behaviour with intention.

“Willpower is the ability to eat one salted peanut.” – Anonymous

Imagine you’re on a diet and someone offers you a slice of chocolate cake. In that moment, your brain experiences a clash between the short‑term impulse to enjoy the cake and the long‑term goal of losing weight. The ACC will spot the conflict and tell your prefrontal cortex, which steps in to enforce discipline over the brain’s reward systems. By saying “no thanks” and resisting the temptation, that’s willpower in action.

What this tells us about willpower is that it is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process rooted in brain activity. The ACC demonstrates that willpower is about managing competing signals balancing the pull of short-term gratification against the push of long-term purpose. Studies suggest that repeated acts of self-control strengthen ACC pathways, making persistence easier over time. In short, the science shows that willpower is a trainable skill, shaped by the brain’s ability to detect conflict and sustain effort, rather than an innate quality we are born with.

“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies, for the hardest victory is victory over self.” – Aristotle

Willpower is closely linked to self-control, providing the mental energy it needs to be effective.  And as identified by University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth, and Martin Seligman this makes a real difference. Their research explored self-control in eighth-graders over the course of the school year. They found students who ranked high on self-discipline had better grades, better school attendance, and higher test scores, and were more likely to be admitted to a competitive high school program. Self-discipline, the researchers found, was more important than IQ in predicting academic success.

How to strengthen your Willpower
The good news is that willpower can be strengthened over time. By practicing small, deliberate strategies, it’s possible to build the mental resilience needed to make better choices, sustain effort, and push through discomfort. The following steps outline practical ways to improve your willpower and make it easier to stay on track when challenges arise.

  • Start small and build gradually – Begin with minor challenges, such as not checking your phone every 10 minutes. Each small success builds confidence and stamina for bigger goals.
  • Practice delayed gratification – Train yourself to pause before giving in to impulses. Even short waits strengthen your ability to resist temptation.
  • Manage stress and energy – Stress drains willpower, so restore your mental reserves with mindfulness, deep breathing, or just plain old regular sleep.
  • Set clear, achievable goals – Define specific actions like “I’ll study for 45 minutes this evening” instead of vague ones like “I will study a lot this week.” Concrete goals reduce decision fatigue.
  • Build routines and habits – Automating good choices such as scheduled study time reduces the need for constant self‑control and frees willpower for bigger challenges.
  • Reward progress. Celebrate achievements along the way to reinforce motivation and keep momentum strong.

For learning, this has important implications. Success is not simply about intelligence or talent, but about the discipline to persist, to resist distraction, and to sustain focus when challenges arise. Each act of willpower, choosing to study instead of scrolling, pausing before giving in to temptation, setting clear goals etc, reinforces the neural pathways that make staying with your task easier next time.

In this way, learning itself becomes an exercise in willpower – a process of training the mind to align effort with purpose.

Worth a listen – How to Build Extreme Willpower, David Goggins & Dr. Andrew Huberman

*Muscle – Its worth saying that the muscle reference is an analogy, it works to a certain extent but is not perfect. Some think a better example might be a battery, it has finite energy, reduces over time and with use, but can be recharged. Also it doesn’t get bigger the circuits become more efficient.

Effective learning = Affective learning

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When we think of learning, we often focus on acquiring knowledge and developing skills. But there’s a third, often overlooked dimension, the affective domain. These are our attitudes, motivation, values, and emotions. It’s easy to view them as somehow less important and yet they are what transform knowledge and skill into true expertise.

Imagine two students sitting in a maths class, both are taught about addition (knowledge). They are then asked to add several numbers together, which they do successfully (skill). But one of them believes they are not very good at maths and that the subject is boring. The other likes the subject and is looking forward to the next class. It’s not hard to figure out who will learn more, not because they were in some way smarter but because of the difference in their attitude, levels of motivation and beliefs.

I’m trying something different this month – a two minute video explainer of the blog, enjoy

How to play the violin
One way to understand how knowledge, skills and the emotional side of learning fit together is to consider how you might learn to play the violin.

“When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story” – Joshua Bell

First you need to be able to read music, this is the knowledge phase. It’s not easy of course, and in some ways may feel a little abstract and lacking in purpose. Next there is the physical skill of being able to play the violin. Reading music is a prerequisite but its practice and repetition that will help you improve. And lastly, you pick up the violin and play a piece of music, this is when the affective domain becomes important. How confident are you there will be no mistakes, do you feel sad when playing, what emotion are you trying to pass onto your audience. To deliver a great performance will require the combination of knowledge, skills, and emotions, interwoven so closely they cannot be separated.

“Music is the language of emotions” – Emmanuel Kant

The research – There is a large body of evidence supporting the impact of emotions, attitudes, and beliefs on learning. In 2014 Reinhard Pekrun published Emotions and Learning, in it he demonstrated that positive emotions like enjoyment and pride enhance learning by increasing motivation, engagement, and cognitive flexibility. In contrast, negative emotions such as boredom and anxiety can suppress learning.  Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset (2006) further reinforces this idea. She showed that learners who believe effort leads to improvement are more likely to persist through challenges. These beliefs rooted in the affective domain shape how students respond to setbacks and how resilient they become in the face of difficulty.

Another Bloom’s taxonomy!
Many will have heard about Blooms taxonomy but what you might not know is that there are three of them. The first is Cognitive, the Bloom most of us have seen before (The pyramid), the second Psychomotor domain, that looks at physical skills, and lastly the Affective domain that defines behaviours that correspond to attitudes and values.

This affective domain has five levels:

  • Receiving – The willingness to attend or listen, giving your attention  
  • Responding – Actively participating, effectively engaging
  • Valuing – Attaching worth to an idea, making it personal, forming the belief
  • Organisation – Integrating the values into your belief system, embedding the belief
  • Characterisation – The learning becomes part of your identity

Why it works – Bloom sets out the hierarchy of development but the reasons our brains respond and change are, firstly emotion directs attention and strengthen memory. Our brains evolved to prioritise emotionally charged information. Secondly, positive feelings boost motivation. When learners feel valued and capable, dopamine release reinforces effort and persistence. And lastly supportive environments reduce cognitive overload, freeing up working memory for reasoning and problem-solving

What does this all mean?
Understanding that there is a third aspect of learning is important, if not educators will spend disproportionate amounts of time on knowledge and skills, which of course is often the case! When in fact they should be thinking about how to use affective techniques to deepen learning. For students it gives an insight into the human side of learning, you are not ChatGPT able to simply scan content and recall it whenever needed, you are a human being who needs to feel, connect, and value the material for it to stick. That emotional and motivational component is the fuel you need for long-term mastery. Simply knowing that can make a big difference.

Want to learn more – Listen to Nick Shackleton-Jones talking with John Helmer about affective learning, and a lot more.

 The 5 best exam techniques ever……

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Father Christmas is so happy because he’s remembered all the names of his reindeer by using the acronym, Reindeer Dance Brightly Visiting Delighted People Cheerfully Carrying Candy. The elves on the other hand just thought they knew the answer!

Although you might think I am using this ‘clickbait grabbing’ headline purely to attract new readers to my blog, which, admittedly, would be nice, you are only partly right.

I thought it would be an interesting and challenging exercise to see if I could pick the “best exam techniques ever.” This is because one of the most valuable skills in teaching and learning is reduction – taking complexity and making it simple.

Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts. Luc de Clapiers (French writer)

From a social media perspective there is of course no downside to a clickbait headline, you might for example find the post helpful, too simple, disagreeable or disappointing. Regardless of what you think, its already too late you have been hooked, which is the whole point. 

Although I can’t promise my list won’t disappoint, it is based on over 30 years of experience in the high-stakes exam world. Additionally, I will provide context and most importantly a justification for each choice.

Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound. Carolina Herrera (Fashion designer)

Short on time or not interested in the detail – Skip straight to the 5 headlines below.

Context – The exam success formula
To add context and inevitably some complexity we should consider what you need to do to be successful in an exam. The diagram below is an outline of the key components, firstly you need knowledge, you can’t pass an exam without it. Secondly you must be proficient in certain skills, think here about time management, reading the question properly, and memory techniques. And lastly, your attitude matters. This is your mental state or disposition and it will influence how you think, feel, and behave. In terms of the exam this includes, having a positive attitude, being confident, resilient, and managing those exam nerves.

Why you need exam techniques

“You can’t pass an exam without knowledge, but you can fail one even though you are knowledgeable.” Stuart Pedley-Smith

This quote encapsulates why exam techniques are so important. Knowledge alone isn’t enough – you need to apply that knowledge under exam conditions which requires other skills. Many good students fail because they don’t use exam techniques, largely because they think knowing the subject is sufficient. An exam room is an artificial environment and you need to be aware of the challenges it will bring.

Exam techniques bridge the gap between knowing and achieving

The best exam techniques……ever
Now for the tricky part – narrowing down all the methods for exam preparation to just five.

1. Question practice: As regular readers of my blog will already know; question practice is essential. But as you get closer to the exam the emphasis shifts from helping you learn to being well prepared for the exam itself.  Question practice supports most of the techniques in the list below, which is why it’s number one. Practicing past papers is even more powerful because it – reinforces understanding, provides feedback, helps develop resilience, enhances time management, identifies knowledge gaps, improves exam writing skills, and clarifies the standard required to succeed. And breath!

2. Preparation – Revision: About two to three weeks before the exam is the best time to start revising. You cannot go into a high stake’s exam without preparation. Revision is the period where you reinforce past knowledge and, in many instances, actually understand some topics for the first time. Although cramming the night before does work to a certain extent, your chances of success are far higher if your revision is well planned and spaced out over time.

3. Recall – Memory techniques: “You can’t know something if you don’t remember it”. Understanding a topic will help with recall, however it’s not enough because you won’t understand everything and the volume of information you are required to learn is often huge.  This is why you need to use memory techniques such as acronyms, acrostics, rhythm and rhyme and mind mapping.

4. Develop a positive mental attitude: There is a lot to unpack in this one. It’s in the top 5 because if stress or test anxiety levels are too high or you lose confidence in your abilities, at best you could freeze in the exam and lose valuable time, at worst you might simply give up. A positive attitude is not believing everything will be fine, that will almost guarantee failure. It’s about developing a series of mental strategies that will help. These include challenging negative thoughts, setting realistic goals, and appreciating that learning from mistakes is a good thing.

5. Effective time management: There were many other techniques that could have occupied the number 5 slot, but I chose time management because, if you don’t manage your time in the exam you will fail. Having sufficient knowledge to pass means very little if you spend too much time on question one, and as a consequence answer the other questions poorly due to the time pressure. Allocating the right amount of time to each question is easy in theory, but doing it in the exam requires practice.

Complexity to simplicity
To be fair I quite enjoyed looking back and thinking about the exam tips and hints that I and others have given over the years. However as I expected it wasn’t easy, there were lots of other very worthy techniques that didn’t make the cut, but overall, I’m happy with the top five. Are they the best exam techniques ever…….well if you got this far in terms of my click rate, it doesn’t matter.

Are attention spans getting shorter – Spoiler, No?

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“Now what was I saying”
A goldfish can remember certain tasks and environments for weeks and even months – a Gnat however doesn’t have an attention span at all. *

There has been a significant amount of space in the press devoted to telling us that attention spans are getting shorter, largely the result of an increased use of digital technologies.

One headline read – “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish“

This story can be traced back to a 2015 Microsoft report which included the claim that the average human attention span had decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013, shorter than the alleged 9 second attention span of a goldfish.

It has however since been debunked and is simply not true. It was based on vague, unsupported opinion and lacked the necessary evidence. Microsoft has since taken the report down from its website.

And yet the myth remains popular possibly because most days you will see people using their smart phones endlessly scrolling, looking for something to grab their attention in order to satisfy their “dopamine bump” addiction. They pause only momentarily to read or look at the image on the screen before continuing the search. Ask them what they are doing, and without looking up to acknowledge the question, they will answer “nothing”!

Many social media platforms are designed around the idea of short attention spans, furthering the belief that we have a new generation of learners who are different in some way to those that went before.

Attention spans
An attention span is typically defined as “the amount of time a person can maintain attention on a specific task or activity, without becoming distracted.” The key point here is that attention has a lot to do with the brains ability to resist interruption.

For this reason, its useful to think about it in two ways:

  • Sustained Attention (maintaining focus over time) is the ability to concentrate on a single task over a long period, such as when you are reading or studying. The average person can focus their attention for around 20 to 30 minutes, which is a lot more that 8 seconds! The Pomodoro technique that was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980’s works on this principle. With the aid of a timer, you are required to take a short break every 25 minutes.  As a result, you can then maintain focus for hours.
  • Selective Attention (choosing what to focus on) is the ability to focus on one thing while filtering out distractions, such as focusing on a single conversation in a noisy room.

These are of course interrelated with sustained attention relying on selective attention to be effective. It’s also important to note that attention is not fixed and is dependent on age, level of interest, fatigue, stress etc.

This study by Rosen, Lim, Carrier, and Cheever (2011) found that students averaged less than 6 minutes on a task before switching to another, most often because of a need to reply to a text or check social media. It concluded that allowing students short “technology breaks” could help reduce these distractions, and that teaching students’ metacognitive strategies would also be beneficial. They stated that the students were prone to distraction due to device notifications, not because they had reduced attention spans.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects attention, impulse control, and activity levels. Symptoms include difficulty in maintaining focus, being impulsive and having high levels of energy. It is a recognised medical condition that results in a lower attention span. It is thought to be highly heritable, with levels in the region of 70 – 80%, but it’s not as common as you might think given its prominence in the press. In the UK, there are only believed to be around 3 – 4% of children and 2% of adults who suffer from it. One caveat, it is possible that there are a lot of people who remain undiagnosed.

The impact on learning
The main point here is that in terms of our cognitive ability attention spans have not really changed. What has, are the levels of distraction and cultural and environmentally accepted norms. Think about the rise of digital devices, instant messaging, and social media, people now have a vast number of ways in which they can distract themselves. In addition, the sheer amount of information available can be overwhelming, making it harder to focus on one task for long. Many of us also lead busy lives, forcing us to juggle multiple tasks and often failing to any of well.

For the learners – Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “it’s not your fault” your genetics have given you a short attention span. Your attention span is fine it’s the environment you find yourself in that is the problem – see last month’s blog on learning environments.

A few tips

  • Take regular breaks – as highlighted above taking short 5 to 15 minute breaks every 20 to 30 minuets, maybe even 45 minutes can improve your ability to focus.
  • Reduce distractions – eliminate or minimise distractions, this means not having your mobile phone in the room or at least turning off your notifications. You need to create a dedicated, distraction free workspace.

And for the educators – While adapting content for individuals to accommodate short attention spans can be useful, especially when trying to engage them. It’s important not to think about it as a new way of learning, it’s more of an environmental challenge. As a consequence it would be wrong to design all lessons with it at the forefront of your mind. Evidence from cognitive science suggests that learning should be challenging (desirably difficult), requiring sustained focus, active engagement, and mental effort. But perhaps worse of all, if we continue to produce content that caters only to short attention spans, there is a danger of inadvertently reinforcing the behaviour.

Fake NBC Goldfish news
Here is a video typical of what you can find on the internet that continues to support the 8 second myth – Is Your Attention Span Shorter Than a Goldfish’s?

And finally, In defence of Gnats
Gnats, like many insects, are primarily focused on tasks like finding food, mating, and avoiding predators. While their attention may shift quickly between these tasks, it’s not really fair to say they have a short attention span in the same way humans or goldfishes do.