Bettering Me

Category: Stillness

  • Screen Glare Creates a Low-Grade Orienting Response That Never Fully Shuts Off

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

    –

    The cost of screen use is usually described in cognitive terms – attention fragmentation, shallow processing, distraction. These are real, but they miss a more fundamental mechanism: sensory cost. Screens hijack the orienting reflex, a primitive neural circuit that evolved to detect novel stimuli in the environment, and they keep that circuit partially engaged even when you are not actively looking at them.

    The orienting reflex, first characterized by Soviet physiologist Evgeny Sokolov, is a hardwired response to novel or changing stimuli. When something new appears in the sensory field – a sound, a movement, a change in light – the brain temporarily reallocates resources to evaluate it. [1] The reflex is essential for survival: it is why you notice a branch move in the forest. But it is catastrophically mismatched to a digital environment where stimuli change hundreds of times per hour.

    Screens trigger the orienting reflex through multiple channels. Visual flicker from refresh rates, motion from animations and video content, and brightness changes from notifications all activate the reflex. The problem is not that each individual activation is costly – it is that the reflex never fully habituates to digital stimuli, because the stimuli keep changing. In a natural environment, the orienting reflex adapts to stable stimuli and stops firing. In a digital environment, stability is rare.

    The evidence for the most commonly proposed fix – blue-light-blocking glasses – is weak. A 2021 systematic review found that blue-light-filtering lenses showed no significant effect on eye strain, sleep quality, or visual performance compared to standard lenses. [2] The blue-light narrative is convenient because it offers a product-based solution, but the data does not support it. The problem is not the wavelength of the light. It is the instability of the visual field.

    The intervention that does work is sensory isolation: periods of low-variation visual input that allow the orienting reflex to stand down. The most accessible form is outdoor time with eyes on the horizon – no phone, no book, no podcast. The horizon provides minimal novelty. The orienting reflex gradually habituates, and the neural cost of sustained orientation drops. [OPINION]

    The recommended dose is 20 minutes of outdoor light exposure – ideally in the morning, but any time of day helps – with the explicit instruction to look at the horizon or at distant objects. The horizon is the strongest signal of “nothing to evaluate” that the visual system receives. It triggers the opposite of the orienting reflex: ambient, low-effort visual processing that allows the nervous system to disengage from active threat-scanning.

    The mechanism behind this is supported by Attention Restoration Theory, which proposes that directed attention (the kind required for screen work) is a limited resource that must be replenished by involuntary attention (the kind activated by natural environments). [3] Natural environments are “softly fascinating” – they engage attention without demanding it – allowing the directed attention system to recover. Screens are the opposite: “hardly fascinating,” demanding constant directed attention.

    Two sensory isolation sessions per day – 20 minutes each – are enough to significantly reduce the orienting reflex burden. The first should be within an hour of waking to set the circadian system and clear the overnight accumulation of sensory debt. The second can be at any point in the afternoon when screen fatigue peaks. The cost is zero. The barrier is behavioral: the compulsion to fill every gap with input.

    The objection to this protocol is almost always the same: “I don’t have time for two twenty-minute breaks.” This objection is itself a symptom of the problem. The orienting reflex has been running all day. The twenty minutes is not lost time – it is recovery time that makes the remaining hours more productive because the sensory system is no longer partially activated. Framing it as a break misses the point. It is maintenance. The same way you would not run a car engine at redline all day without cooling it, you should not run the orienting reflex continuously without giving it a chance to habituate.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Sokolov EN. Higher nervous functions: the orienting reflex. *Annual Review of Physiology*, 1963. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ph.25.030163.002001

    [2] Singh S, et al. Blue-light filtering spectacle lenses for visual performance, sleep, and macular health: a systematic review. *Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics*, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/opo.12870

    [3] Kaplan S. The restorative benefits of nature: toward an integrative framework. *Journal of Environmental Psychology*, 1995. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

  • Somatic Awareness Is Not a Practice You Add – It’s a Signal You’ve Stopped Ignoring

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

    –

    The wellness industry wants to sell you another somatic practice. Yoga, breathwork, body scanning, TRE – there is genuine value in all of them. But there is a prior step that most messaging skips, and that step is simpler and harder than any technique: stopping the override.

    You do not need more somatic practices. You need to stop ignoring the signals your body is already sending. The tight shoulders, shallow breathing, restless legs, the knot in your stomach before a difficult conversation – that is somatic awareness. It was never missing. It was being overridden.

    The science of interoception – the perception of internal body states – confirms that humans have dedicated neural pathways for sensing what is happening inside the body. Craig’s foundational model identified the insula and anterior cingulate cortex as the key hubs that map internal sensations to conscious awareness. [1] These pathways are active whether you pay attention to them or not. The tight shoulders are being registered by your nervous system regardless of whether you notice them. The difference is whether that registration reaches conscious awareness or gets filtered out by competing demands.

    Modern productivity culture trains interoceptive suppression. The ability to push through discomfort, ignore hunger, override fatigue, and suppress the urge to move is rewarded in school, praised at work, and coded as discipline. The message is consistent: your body’s signals are obstacles to be managed, not data to be used. After years of that training, most people have lost the ability to distinguish between “I am uncomfortable and should continue” and “I am uncomfortable because something is wrong.” The signal is the same – only the interpretation differs.

    Somatic awareness is not a state you achieve through practice. It is a capacity you recover by removing the barriers to perception. When you pause at the first sign of tension instead of pushing through, you are not adding a technique to your day – you are ceasing to override a signal that was already there. That is the practice. The practice is permission, not prescription.

    The signals themselves carry specific information if you learn to read them. Tension in the shoulders and jaw typically correlates with boundary violations – something you do not want to do but feel compelled to complete. Restlessness in the legs often signals the need for physical movement that has been postponed too long. Shallow breathing is a reliable indicator that your nervous system has registered a threat, real or perceived. Learning to interpret these signals is not a separate skill – it emerges naturally once you stop filtering them out.

    There is a legitimate caveat. For people with a history of trauma, alexithymia (difficulty identifying emotions), or certain anxiety disorders, interoceptive awareness can be overwhelming rather than clarifying. [2] In those cases, structured external practices – guided body scans, therapist-supported somatic work – are an appropriate first step. The “stop overriding” approach assumes the baseline capacity for interoception is intact. When it is not, external scaffolding is warranted.

    But for the majority of people who have simply been trained to override their body’s signals, the most effective intervention is also the simplest. Three times per day, stop what you are doing and ask: _What is my body telling me right now that I have been ignoring?_ The answer is not a technique. It is information. The practice is acting on it. [OPINION]

    The distinction between somatic awareness and somatic practices matters because the wellness industry conflates them. Somatic practices are structured activities designed to cultivate awareness. Somatic awareness is the capacity itself. You can practice yoga for a decade and still have poor interoceptive accuracy if you are using the practice to override discomfort rather than listen to it. [3] The goal is not more practice. The goal is signal clarity, and that requires stopping, not adding.

    The three-times-per-day check-in is a starting point, not a prescription. The deeper skill is noticing the moment before the override happens – the split second when you decide to push through rather than respond. That moment is the choice point that determines whether the signal gets processed or suppressed. Each time you catch it and choose to respond instead of override, you are not learning a new skill. You are recovering one you already had. The signal was always there. You just stopped ignoring it.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Craig AD. Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. *Current Opinion in Neurobiology*, 2003. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0959-4388(03)00090-4

    [2] Khalsa SS, et al. Interoceptive dysfunction in anxiety disorders. *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews*, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.05.018

    [3] Farb N, et al. Interoception, contemplative practice, and health. *Trends in Cognitive Sciences*, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.08.004

  • The “Unpaid Intern” Metaphor Works Only If You Actually Review the Intern’s Work

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

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    The metaphor has been everywhere: AI is like an unpaid intern. It drafts, it researches, it summarizes. It is enthusiastic and fast but requires supervision. The metaphor is useful – up to the point where people forget that interns require supervision. Without domain expertise to evaluate the output, the unpaid intern is not a productivity hack. It is a liability.

    Large language models generate plausible text through statistical inference, not reasoning. They predict the next most probable word based on patterns in their training data. This produces output that reads as though it was produced by a knowledgeable human, but the model has no internal representation of truth. [1] It does not know what is factual. It knows what sequences of words are statistically common. The result is text that is fluent, confident, and frequently wrong.

    The problem of hallucination – generating factually incorrect content – is well-documented. LLMs produce confident falsehoods across domains, from medical advice to legal citations to historical dates. [1] The rate of hallucination varies by domain and model, but it is high enough that unsupervised output is dangerous in any context where accuracy matters. The fluency of the output masks the errors because human brains are biased toward trusting fluent communication – a phenomenon called fluency bias. [2]

    The person who benefits most from AI is not the person who cannot write well. It is the person who already knows what good writing and good reasoning look like. Domain experts can evaluate AI output quickly: they spot the plausible-sounding error, recognize the missing nuance, and identify the confident assertion that is subtly wrong. The person without domain expertise cannot distinguish between fluent nonsense and accurate information. The intern’s work looks equally polished either way.

    This creates an inversion of the intended benefit. AI was supposed to democratize expertise – to give everyone access to the skills of a junior analyst, writer, or researcher. In practice, it amplifies the advantage of people who already have expertise. The expert gets a fast first draft. The nonexpert gets a confidently incorrect answer that they are unequipped to evaluate.

    The fix is straightforward: review the intern’s work as you would a human’s. Check every factual claim. Question the reasoning chain. Edit the prose for clarity and accuracy. Do not assume that because the model is fast and confident, it is correct. The time you save on the draft must be reinvested in the review. If you are not willing to do the review, you are not using AI – you are being used by it.

    The “supervision” requirement does not make AI useless. It makes AI appropriate for specific use cases and inappropriate for others. Drafting an email in your voice? Low risk, easily reviewed. Generating a medical recommendation? High risk, requires expert review. Writing code? Depends on whether the team has the expertise to catch subtle bugs. The line between helpful and harmful is not a property of the AI. It is a property of the operator’s ability to evaluate the output. [OPINION]

    The unsupervised intern is the most dangerous AI pattern because it feels productive. The output looks finished. The user feels accomplished. The errors are invisible until they cause real damage. The rule to live by: if you cannot prove the AI is right, assume it is wrong. Fluency is not accuracy. Confidence is not competence.

    The practical checklist for reviewing AI output is brief but essential. Check every specific factual claim against a primary source. Look for dates, names, and statistics – these are the most common hallucination categories. Ask whether the reasoning chain actually supports the conclusion or merely appears to. Edit the prose yourself rather than accepting the AI’s phrasing, because editing forces you to engage with the content. Each of these steps replaces trust with verification, and that substitution is the only thing that separates productive AI use from dangerous delegation.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Ji Z, et al. Survey of hallucination in natural language generation. *ACM Computing Surveys*, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3588254

    [2] Yin M, et al. Fluent but not factual: the effect of language fluency on truth assessment. *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction*, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3610204

  • Screen Apnea Is Your Nervous System Confusing Email with Physical Threat

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

    –

    You have done it today. You read a Slack message, an email, or a notification, and you realized you were holding your breath. The phenomenon has a name: screen apnea. Linda Stone, a former Apple researcher, coined the term in 2008 after observing that roughly 80% of people show breath-holding or shallow breathing patterns while reading or composing email – even when the content is neutral. [1] Two decades later, the observation is more relevant than ever.

    The mechanism matters more than the name suggests. Screen apnea is not a bad breathing habit that needs correcting. It is a startle response – your nervous system interpreting incoming information as an unknown variable and bracing for impact. The breath hold is the physiological signature of threat anticipation. Your body is preparing for a worst-case scenario before your conscious brain has even parsed the subject line.

    This is not metaphorical. The startle response is a well-characterized reflex. When the brain detects an unexpected or ambiguous stimulus, it initiates a cascade: the eyes widen to enhance visual intake, the shoulders elevate to protect the neck, the torso stiffens, and breathing stops or becomes irregular. [2] This is the same response your ancestors had to a branch snapping in the forest. Your email inbox is triggering the same circuitry.

    The reason email is particularly effective at triggering screen apnea is that it combines anticipation with social evaluation. Email arrives unpredictably. It carries potential demands, criticism, commitments, and conflicts. Your nervous system cannot distinguish between an ambiguous social signal and an ambiguous physical threat because the physiological preparation for both is identical. The breath hold buys time – a fraction of a second where the system pauses to gather more information before committing to a response. The problem is that email keeps arriving, and the breath holds keep accumulating.

    Screen apnea is distinct from sleep apnea in one important respect: you can fix it by changing your relationship with the information, not by changing your breathing. The “fix” that most advice offers is breathing exercises during email – pause, inhale, exhale, then read. That approach treats the symptom. The actual intervention is recognizing that your nervous system is treating information as danger and redesigning the information environment accordingly.

    The diagnostic protocol is simple. For the next hour of email processing, periodically check your breath. If you find yourself holding it, the specific message you were reading is a trigger. That message may not feel stressful at a conscious level, but your autonomic nervous system disagrees. The combination of anticipation + ambiguous social content + perceived demand is what triggers the response, not the content itself. [3]

    The structural fixes that reduce screen apnea are the same ones that reduce decisional fatigue: batch processing, notification elimination, and response windows. But they help with screen apnea for a different reason. When you batch email processing, you reduce the unpredictability of information arrival. Predictable processing windows allow the nervous system to relax between sessions because there is no uncertainty about when demands will appear. The startle response is extinguished not through breathing techniques but through predictable scheduling.

    A counterpoint worth noting: not all breath-holding during screen use is pathological. Brief respiratory pauses during concentrated cognitive work – sometimes called “task-related apnea” – are a normal physiological response to focused attention. The difference is duration and frequency. Screen apnea is characterized by extended or repeated breath-holds that produce a cumulative CO2 buildup and maintain the sympathetic activation that shallow breathing perpetuates. The line between normal and problematic is crossed when the pattern persists throughout the day, not just during moments of intense focus.

    Linda Stone’s original observation was a diagnostic gift, not a prescription. The value of naming screen apnea is not that it gives you something to fix. It is that it reveals what has been happening without your awareness. Once you know your nervous system is treating your inbox as a threat, you have the information you need to change how you relate to it. The breath is not the problem. The information architecture is. Fix the architecture, and the breath follows.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Stone L. Screen Apnea observation. Published via lindastone.net, 2008

    [2] Porges SW. The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. *International Journal of Psychophysiology*, 2001. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/s0167-8760(01)00154-0

    [3] Mather M, Thayer JF. How heart rate variability affects emotion regulation brain networks. *Psychophysiology*, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13206

  • Cyclic Sighing Works Because It’s Not Relaxing – It’s a Physiological Reset That Happens to Feel Good

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

    –

    Most breathing techniques promise calm. Cyclic sighing delivers something different: a mechanical correction that your nervous system interprets as safety. The difference is not semantic – it is the entire reason the technique works faster than anything else in the breathwork toolbox.

    Here is the mechanism. A cyclic sigh consists of a double inhale – two short breaths through the nose with no pause between them – followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth. The double inhale matters more than it sounds like it should. Shallow breathing, which is the default pattern under stress, allows tiny air sacs in the lungs called alveoli to collapse over time. This is called atelectasis, and it reduces the surface area available for gas exchange. The double inhale mechanically reinflates those collapsed alveoli by generating sufficient pressure to pop them open again. [1] You are not breathing more air – you are recovering lung surface area that shallow breathing had taken offline.

    The extended exhale that follows is where the nervous system reset happens. Slow exhalations mechanically stretch the thoracic cavity, which stimulates vagal afferents – the sensory nerve endings that tell your brain “the body is safe.” [2] This is not relaxation in the psychological sense. It is a hardware-level intervention: you are changing the signal your body sends to your brain, and the brain responds by downregulating sympathetic output.

    The reason cyclic sighing outperforms other breathing techniques is that it targets two distinct bottlenecks – collapsed alveoli and vagal tone – in a single cycle. Box breathing (equal inhale, hold, exhale, hold) does not produce the same mechanical reinflation because it lacks the double-inhale pressure spike. Cyclic hyperventilation does produce a large inhale volume but does not emphasize the slow exhale that drives vagal activation.

    A 2023 study from Stanford Medicine (Balban et al., 2023, Cell Reports Medicine) put this to a direct test. Researchers compared three breathing patterns – box breathing, cyclic sighing, and cyclic hyperventilation – across a controlled stress-induction protocol with 108 healthy adults. Cyclic sighing produced the greatest improvement in mood and the largest reduction in respiratory rate during the recovery period. [3] The difference was not subtle: five minutes of cyclic sighing produced the same physiological shift as twenty minutes of box breathing. That is a four-to-one efficiency ratio, and it comes from a single published study, not marketing copy.

    The stress-breathing cycle that cyclic sighing interrupts is worth understanding because it explains why _any_ breathing technique helps but cyclic sighing helps fastest. Under stress, your breathing becomes shallow and irregular. That pattern reduces CO2 clearance unevenly and signals threat to the amygdala. A threatened amygdala amplifies sympathetic output, which makes breathing even more shallow. Cyclic sighing breaks this loop at the mechanical level – you do not need to “calm down” before your breathing improves. You fix the breathing, and the calm follows.

    The practical implication is straightforward: if you have five minutes between meetings, you have time for a full physiological reset. The protocol is simple enough to remember without an app: two sharp inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth until the lungs are empty. Repeat for five minutes. That is it. No counting to four, no holding to seven, no exhalation to eight. The technique is simpler and more effective than the alternatives.

    One caveat: cyclic sighing involves forceful breathing, and anyone with asthma, COPD, or a history of panic attacks should approach it gently. The double inhale can trigger hyperventilation in sensitive individuals. Start with thirty seconds and work up.

    The point is that you do not need to believe in breathing techniques for cyclic sighing to work. It is not a belief-based intervention. It is mechanical. Your nervous system does not need to agree with the theory – it responds to the physics whether you are paying attention or not.

    The broader implication is worth stating explicitly: the fastest path to nervous system regulation is not psychological. It is mechanical. Cyclic sighing works not because it makes you feel calm, but because it corrects a respiratory pattern that was creating a false threat signal. The calm is downstream of the correction. This is the opposite of the typical wellness approach, which tries to calm the mind first and hopes the body follows. Cyclic sighing flips the sequence – fix the body’s signal, and the mind catches up without effort. For anyone who has struggled with meditation, visualization, or other top-down approaches to relaxation, this bottom-up alternative is worth a five-minute trial. The evidence says it works. The mechanism explains why. The only remaining variable is whether you are willing to try it.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Gerritsen RJS, Band GPH. Breath of life: the respiratory vagal stimulation model of contemplative activity. *Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews*, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.09.002

    [2] Mather M, Thayer JF. How heart rate variability affects emotion regulation brain networks. *Psychophysiology*, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13206

    [3] Balban MY, Neri E, Kogon MM, et al. Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine. 2023;4(1):100895. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895

  • Information Overload Produces Real Fatigue – Not Because Thinking Is Tiring, but Because Not Deciding Is

    Written by

    Unpaid Intern

    –

    The standard explanation for information fatigue is cognitive overload. The idea is that your brain has a limited processing capacity and that excessive information exhausts it. That explanation sounds intuitive, but it misses the actual mechanism. The fatigue from information overload is not primarily cognitive – it is decisional.

    Roy Baumeister’s research on ego depletion established that making choices depletes self-regulatory resources more than performing cognitively demanding tasks without a choice component. [1] In the classic paradigm, participants who made a series of choices showed significantly reduced persistence on subsequent tasks compared to participants who performed equally demanding tasks without making choices. The implication is that the act of deciding – not the act of processing – is what taxes the system.

    A follow-up study by Vohs and colleagues sharpened this distinction. Participants who made repeated choices in a consumer context showed reduced self-control and physical stamina compared to participants who merely considered the same options without choosing. [2] The cognitive exposure was identical. The only difference was the decision. And that difference produced measurable depletion.

    This distinction explains why modern information work produces fatigue that feels disproportionate to the mental effort involved. Reading a dense document is cognitively demanding but rarely fatiguing in the same way that triaging fifty emails is. The document requires processing – sustained attention, comprehension, and integration. The emails require decisions – respond, archive, delegate, flag, delete. Each email is a micro-decision, and micro-decisions accumulate into macro-fatigue. By the end of an hour of inbox triage, you have made dozens of low-stakes decisions that have consumed the same resource pool used for high-stakes decisions later in the day.

    The mechanism has a somatic dimension that is often overlooked. Indecision and micro-decision accumulation produce measurable physical tension. The furrowed brow, the held breath, the forward-leaning posture – these are the somatic correlates of being in a perpetual evaluation state without committing to action. The body registers indecision as incomplete motor output, and incomplete motor output maintains sympathetic activation. [3] The fatigue you feel after a day of information triage is not just mental. It is the accumulated tension of dozens of decisions that were evaluated but never closed.

    The practical fix is not more recovery time. It is reducing the number of decisions that require evaluation in the first place.

    The highest-leverage interventions are structural rather than behavioral. Close channels that produce decisions without producing value. Mute notifications that interrupt flow without urgency. Define information intake windows – two fifteen-minute blocks per day for inbox processing rather than continuous triage. Each of these moves the decision burden from real-time to batched, and batching reduces the fixed cost of task-switching. [4] The fatigue lifts not because you rested, but because you plugged the leak.

    The “default to no” heuristic is the simplest operational tool. Most incoming information does not require a response. Treating it as though it does is the primary source of decisional fatigue. If every email is a decision, every email is cost. Defaulting to “no action required unless this meets explicit criteria” converts a continuous stream of decisions into a small number of deliberate ones. It is not rude. It is resource management.

    There is an important counterpoint. The ego depletion literature has faced replication challenges. A 2017 study by Lurquin and Miyake failed to replicate the classic choice-depletion effect, suggesting the phenomenon may be smaller or more context-dependent than originally claimed. [4] The replication debate is ongoing, and the effect size is probably smaller than Baumeister’s early work suggested. However, even if the effect is modest, the practical direction is consistent: decisions cost something, and reducing unnecessary decisions preserves resources. The mechanism may be smaller than advertised, but the intervention still works.

    The bottom line is that the fatigue you attribute to “too much information” is often “too many decisions about that information.” The fix is not better information management. It is fewer decisions. Stop triaging. Start batching. Default to no. The tiredness will tell you which approach was right.

    Disclaimer: This post is for inspiration and education, not medical advice. Everyone’s body is different, so please check with your doctor before changing your diet, exercise, or lifestyle routine. By using these tips, you agree to do so at your own risk.

    References

    [1] Baumeister RF, et al. Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 1998. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252

    [2] Vohs KD, et al. Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: a limited-resource account. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 2008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012633

    [3] Hagger MS, et al. Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis. *Psychological Bulletin*, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019486

    [4] Lurquin JH, Miyake A. A meta-analysis of the choice-depletion effect. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000071