Podcast 059: Book Club 3: The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel
Wendy and Dr. Meaghan discuss the last part of the book. This part of the book discusses how the habit of if.. then can be incorporated into your everyday life. He states that we are not necessarily destined to be either individual of self-control or not, but that we have to work on these habits.
This book has a lot of great nuggets of information that can easily be related to everyday life. How you are the master of your own thinking. It is about the balance of the emotional limbic system and the thought-based prefrontal cortex of the brain.
Also, it is great what he says at the end of Chapter 19: “But I can’t end this discussion without reiterating: a life lived with too much delay of gratification can be as sad as one without enough of it. The biggest challenge for all of us- not just for the child- may be to figure out when to wait for more marshmallows and when to ring the bell and enjoy them. But unless we learn to develop the ability to wait, we don’t have that choice.”
