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6A Daily News ��� Thursday, January 3, 2013 Opinion DAILY NEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMA COUNTY Don't think you can stick to your resolutions? Think again T H E V O I C E O F T E H A M A C O U NTY S I N C E 1 8 8 5 Greg Stevens, Publisher gstevens@redbluffdailynews.com Chip Thompson, Editor editor@redbluffdailynews.com Editorial policy The Daily News opinion is expressed in the editorial. The opinions expressed in columns, letters and cartoons are those of the authors and artists. Letter policy The Daily News welcomes letters from its readers on timely topics of public interest. All letters must be signed and provide the writer���s home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and cannot exceed two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section of those submitted will be considered for publication. Letters will be edited. Letters are published at the discretion of the editor. Mission Statement We believe that a strong community newspaper is essential to a strong community, creating citizens who are better informed and more involved. The Daily News will be the indispensible guide to life and living in Tehama County. We will be the premier provider of local news, information and advertising through our daily newspaper, online edition and other print and Internet vehicles. The Daily News will reflect and support the unique identities of Tehama County and its cities; record the history of its communities and their people and make a positive difference in the quality of life for the residents and businesses of Tehama County. How to reach us Main office: 527-2151 Classified: 527-2151 Circulation: 527-2151 News tips: 527-2153 Sports: 527-2153 Obituaries: 527-2151 Photo: 527-2153 On the Web www.redbluffdailynews.com Fax Newsroom: 527-9251 Classified: 527-5774 Retail Adv.: 527-5774 Legal Adv.: 527-5774 Business Office: 527-3719 Address 545 Diamond Ave. Red Bluff, CA 96080, or P.O. Box 220 Red Bluff, CA 96080 Every year about this time, I write a list of New Year's resolutions. It's the usual stuff: Work out three times a week, cut back on coffee and alcohol, floss daily, relearn Spanish, watch less television, etc. I then put the list in the drawer of my bedside table, where it remains until I take it out a year later and laugh at my lack of progress. I'm not alone. The enthusiasm with which Americans make New Year's resolutions is matched only by our chronic inability to see them through. Gyms are packed in January but clear out by March. According to surveys, only about 10 percent of resolutions survive a full year. There's no shortage of good advice on how to bolster willpower, including one piece I'd be smart to take: Don't hide your resolutions in a drawer. Other ideas include keeping goals realistic, planning how they'll be implemented and enlisting the help of friends and family for encouragement and accountability. These are all helpful tips, but there's one important thing missing: belief. Specifically, recent studies suggest that when it comes to willpower, we get what we expect. The new findings fly in the face of previous thinking about willpower, which tended to put the emphasis on power. In this way of looking at things, willpower was seen as a muscle that was easily depleted. Newer research casts doubt on this limited-resource theory and instead suggests that we have as much willpower as we expect to have. In this alternative model, willpower works less like a muscle and more like a placebo. This matters, because willpower's importance goes well beyond keeping New Year's promises. Indeed, researchers find that willpower (or self-regulation) also predicts academic, professional and financial success better than IQ and other aptitude scores. People with lots of willpower work harder, avoid tempting distractions and persist until a task is completed. In a 2010 study led by Swiss psychologist Veronika Job when she was at Stanford University, only people who believed that willpower was limited (according to an initial questionnaire) showed evidence of depleted willpower in tests of self-control given after a mentally challenging lab task. Subjects who believed that willpower was unlimited did just as well on follow-up self-control tasks as control subjects facing the cise self-control. As Kurzban task fresh. When the researchers manip- noted, people actually perform better on self-control ulated people into believing that Guest View tasks after vigorous exercise, which burns willpower was limited far more calories than or unlimited by biasChris self-regulation does. ing the initial quesNone of this means tionnaire, they perthat keeping resoluformed better or tions will be easy. But worse depending on their belief in the durability of willpower is most likely to let willpower. And the same pat- us down if we expect it to. Take tern held outside the lab. The care with your list of resolutions researchers surveyed college for 2013. Narrow it to the goals students about their willpower you really care about. Make a beliefs and then, at various plan. Get the support of your points in the semester, asked loved ones. Seek out accountabout their TV, procrastination ability. For God's sake, don't and junk-food habits. There stuff the list in a drawer. And were no significant behavioral last, but certainly not least, have differences until the stress of faith in your willpower. Give yourself reasons to final exams, when students who believed that willpower was believe, despite the sorry statislimited were much more likely tics and even your own track to put off pressing work and eat record. Think back on the many challenges you have mastered, unhealthy snacks. Another common belief about especially when you stumbled willpower is that it is taxing ��� along the way. If your goal is that exercising self-control or important enough to you, willpower burns a lot of energy. chances are you can achieve it, But does it? Not according to and a little more faith in your Robert Kurzban, a University of willpower could help. Pennsylvania psychologist. In a Chris Berdik is a freelance 2010 paper, he noted that the entire brain uses one-quarter of journalist in Boston and the one calorie per minute, on aver- author of "Mind Over Mind: The Power of age, and brain scan studies show Surprising that only a fraction of the brain is Expectations." This was written more active when people exer- for the Los Angeles Times. Berdik Your officials STATE ASSEMBLYMAN ��� Jim Nielsen (R) State Capitol Bldg., Room 6031 Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) 319-2002; Fax (916) 319-2102 STATE SENATOR ��� Doug LaMalfa (R) State Capitol Bldg., Room 3070 Sacramento, CA 95814 (916) 651-4004; Fax (916) 445-7750 GOVERNOR ��� Jerry Brown, State Capitol Bldg., Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445-2841; Fax (916) 558-3160; E-mail: governor@governor.ca.gov. U.S. REPRESENTATIVE ��� Wally Herger (R), 2595 Ceanothus Ave., Ste. 182, Chico, CA 95973; 893-8363. U.S. SENATORS ��� Dianne Feinstein (D), One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; (415) 393-0707. Fax (415) 393-0710. Barbara Boxer (D), 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111; (510) 286-8537. Fax (202) 2240454. Commentary Will 2013 be the year we slow the moral decline? With dark shadows of uncertainty descending upon the hearts of so many at the conclusion of 2012, one can only hope 2013 will be a year of promise. But even in these dark days, miracles do still happen, especially when people are willing to roll up their sleeves for the cause of freedom. This present darkness has its roots in our nation's moral decline, and the further we get from our moral center, the worse off we are as a people -and a nation. It has taken some time to get where we are today. Over the years, Conservatives have allowed Progressives to hijack the conversation about our founding principles. Liberals have replaced morality with moral relativism in an attempt to justify their own moral ineptitude. For example, a group recently sanitized the King James Bible from any reference to homosexuality, replacing it with their own politically correct version they titled the "New Queen James Bible." Moreover, we've allowed liberals to distort our founders' intentions concerning the separation of church and state. Consequently, prayer and most other references to God have been banned from the public square; yet they see no plausi- ble correlation to those actions and recent mass shootings. Mum's the word when it comes to God, but the roof is raised by right to choose discussions ��� just as long as the conversation stays within the confines of the human life women should be allowed to extract from their bodies. But choice flies out the window when the discussion changes to things the rest of us put in our bodies ��� like soda, fats, salt, and caffeine. They're all about women's rights ��� until you mention Islamic extremism or third-world barbarism in places like Darfur. And to them, capitalism is reprehensible, but taking hard-earned money from a capitalist is okay. Progressives' ideological inconsistencies will be their downfall and their ideology will most certainly crumble beneath the weight of truth just as the Iron Curtain did in 1989. What is wrong in America today is what went terribly wrong in Russia many years ago when the Soviet Union tried the Marxist way to go it on its own without God. While many cast the blame for their problems on poor economic and political choices, Russian writer and Nobel Prize recipient Alex Solzhenitsyn blamed it on the fact "men had forgot- never did. On November 9, the ten God." He was right, and the crowd had doubled to one milworld discovered how wrong lion when the unimaginable happened; a gap in Marx was when men the Berlin Wall (and women) who opened. Without incirefused to forget God dent, candle-carrying played a monumental East Germans peacerole in crushing Comfully filed through munism in Eastern and over the wall, European countries. effectively bringing The story is told in down the East GerPhilip Yancey's book, man government in "Finding God in the process. Unexpected Places," By years' end, in East Germany every multiple Eastern demonstration began Susan Bloc countries joined with worship. (I'm not East Germany's fate, getting all spiritual on and by the end of you here; I'm simply 1991, the Soviet restating history.) Small groups would throw Union dissolved. Hope sprung prayer meetings filled with eternal and the world experipolitical dissidents, concerned enced a long-anticipated fresh citizens, and some of those rep- breath of freedom because peorehensible Christians. After a ple put their faith and longing period of prayer, pastors spoke for freedom into action thus while holding newspapers in allowing the world to witness a one hand and Bibles in the miracle. other. Afterward participants Susan Stamper Brown is an went outside to walk peacefulpage columnist, ly through dark streets holding opinion motivational speaker and banners and candles. In October 1989, as East military advocate who writes Berlin was celebrating the 44th about politics, the military, the year of its communist regime, economy and culture. Email at police were instructed to shoot Susan demonstrators in Leipzig, writestamper@gmail.com or website at where crowds had grown to her nearly 500,000, but thankfully susanstamperbrown.com. Brown