“I Can’t” vs “I Don’t”: The Two Words That Rewire Your Willpower

Somebody holds out a plate. In the half second before you answer, you reach for a sentence, and which sentence you reach for shapes the rest of your evening. The cake barely gets a vote. In 2012 two researchers gave 120 students one instruction about what to say when temptation showed up. One group rehearsed “I can’t eat that.” The other rehearsed “I don’t eat that.” That was the whole intervention. On the way out, each of them was offered a chocolate bar or a granola bar. 64 percent of the “...