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Self Control

Dan Ariely | 17:49

Transcript

Self control, you must be thinking what do you have to do with problems of self control? Let's take a little survey. How many people here in the last week have procrastinated more than you wish you would? How many people have exercised in the last week less than you wish you would have eaten more than you wish you would have had more unprotected sex than you wish you would.


So I want to talk a little bit about self control. And self control is the best thing, the problem that we have all this desire from ourselves for the long term, but then in the short term, we do very different things. And to get us thinking about this, I will tell you about one of my biggest challenges with self control.


So I was in hospital for a long time. And one of the things I got in hospital was a particular version of hepatitis, I got the bed, blood transfusion, and I got a liver disease as a consequence. And from time to time, the liver disease would flare up and I would get even sicker than I was anyway. And this was very unpleasant. And about seven years after it was already out of the hospital after my injury, I had another one of those episodes, I checked myself into hospital. And they told me I had hepatitis C. And the good news was that the FDA was running a clinical trial to figure out whether interferon a medication that was originally approved for hairy cell leukemia is going to be successful for treating hepatitis C. So I said, What would happen if I don't join this trial, you have a good chance of dying from liver cirrhosis. And that's not a good thing. So I, I took the medication.


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