Why Your Brain Would Rather Eat a Cookie Than Sign Your Will (And Why That’s Actually Fine)

You Aren't Lazy. You're Just Metabolically Expensive. Here’s the Fix.

If you spend any time on the internet, you have likely been yelled at by a man with unusually white teeth standing in front of a rented Lamborghini.

He probably told you the secret to success is 'The Grind.' He told you to wake up at 4:00 AM, take an ice bath, meditate for an hour, and then crush your goals through the sheer force of your iron will!

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And look, that might work for getting a six-pack or day-trading crypto. But have you ever noticed what happens when that same ‘High Performance Alpha’ tries to sit down and read a life insurance Product Disclosure Statement?

He crumbles. He freezes. And he suddenly decides the garage needs reorganizing, or that now is the perfect time to research the history of the toaster.

Why? Is he lazy? Is he stupid?

No. He’s just out of gas. And I don’t mean petrol - I mean glucose.

Welcome to the weird, messy intersection of your bank account and your biology. Today, we’re going to look at why you, a smart, capable adult, turn into a procrastinating toddler the moment someone mentions ‘Life and Disability Insurance or Estate Planning,’ and why the solution isn't to simply ‘try harder,’ but to hack your own hardware.

The Radish, The Cookie, and The Crash

Let’s start with a cruel little experiment from 1998 that explains almost everything about your financial behavior.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister brought hungry people into a room filled with the smell of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. He sat them down in front of a table with two bowls. One bowl held the warm, gooey cookies. The other bowl held... raw radishes.

Half the group was allowed to eat the cookies. The other half was forced to eat the radishes and ignore the cookies. (I told you it was cruel).

Afterward, both groups were asked to solve an impossible puzzle.

• The Cookie Eaters - happy and fueled - worked on the puzzle for 19 minutes.
• The Radish Eaters - who had just spent all their energy resisting the urge to snack - quit after just 8 minutes.

Here’s the scientific reality: Willpower is not a character trait. It is a fuel tank.

Every time you resist an impulse, make a decision, or suppress a fear, you burn glucose. This is what we call Metabolic Expense.

By the time you get home from work, after fighting traffic, managing your boss, and resisting the urge to strangle a coworker, you are a ‘Radish Eater.’ Your tank is empty. And then, when your financial advisor calls and asks you to make a complex, high-stakes decision about your Will document - yeah right .. that's just not going to happen.

Your brain looks at the fuel gauge, sees it hovering on 'E', and predicts that thinking about a death will cost too much energy. So, it initiates the Shopping Trolley Tango. It drifts toward the easy path. It chooses the cookie. It chooses Netflix. It chooses whatever it can to conserve that scarce decision making energy.

You aren't procrastinating because you are irresponsible. You are procrastinating because you are, so to speak, biologically broke.

The Two Clubs: ‘Get Rich’ vs ‘Stay Rich’

This brings us to the great conflict of your financial life. You see, you're trying to run two opposing pieces of software, on the same hardware.

Software A: The ‘Get Rich’ Club

This runs on Dopamine and Optimism Bias. It’s the part of you that buys stocks, investment properties, starts businesses, perhaps sets up an SMSF and raises the ‘Sails’ of your financial ship. It loves risk because it believes the future is bright. It is fun, fast, and exciting.

Software B: The ‘Stay Rich’ Club

This runs on Cortisol and Productive Paranoia. It’s the part of you that worries about the ‘Hull’ of the ship—the insurance, the legal structures, the 'what ifs.' It hates risk. It is boring, slow, and sometimes, terrifying.

• Here’s the problem: You cannot hold both competing states in your head at the same time.

When the ‘Get Rich’ spruikers tell you to ‘manifest abundance,’ they are training your brain to ignore risk. They are feeding the Optimism Bias. But to sign a Will document and get your life and disability insurances finally sorted… well, you must look at risk. You must confront the reality that you to, are mortal.

If you’ve spent your whole life training for the Optimism Olympics, is it any wonder you pull a muscle when asked to do the heavy lifting of Legacy Planning?

The Judge, The Toddler, and The Parent

"But wait," I hear you say. "I'm a rational person. I can push through this type of thing."

Can you?

Let’s look at a study on Parole Judges. These are highly trained, impartial professionals. Researchers found that if you appeared before a judge early in the morning (when their glucose was high), you had a 65% chance of getting parole. (You can read more about this unsettling study here: Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889-6892).

• If you appeared late in the day, say just before lunch? Your chances dropped to nearly 0%.

When the judges were tired, they didn't stop being judges. They just defaulted to the ‘Safe Option’ (keep them in jail) because it was metabolically cheaper than thinking about the risk of letting them out.

Inside your brain, you have an Internal Toddler (the Amygdala) and a Wise Parent (the Prefrontal Cortex).

The Toddler is fast, emotional, and hates complexity. The Parent part of the brain is smart, rational, and plans for the future. But here’s the kicker: The Parent gets tired easily.

When you try to discuss your estate plan at 6:00 PM on a Friday, your Wise Parent is asleep in the corner. You’re trying to negotiate a legal document with your Internal Toddler. And the Toddler’s response to ‘Let's talk about death’ is exactly what you’d expect: It screams, it throws a tantrum, and it demands a distraction.

The Solution: Stop Grinding, Start Architecting

So, if willpower is a myth and your brain is actively sabotaging you, are you doomed to leave your family ‘Atestate’ - alive but unprotected?

• No. But you have to stop listening and unsubscribe from the ‘Grind Culture’ spruikers and start listening to the scientists.
• We don't need you to "try harder." We need you to design better.

We need to build what engineers call ‘Passive Safety.’ We need to install the financial equivalent of airbags and anti-lock brakes in your environment, so your wealth is protected despite your biology, not because of it.

Here’s your cheat code:

1. Respect the Glucose: Never try to make a legacy decision after 2:00 PM. Schedule the ‘Great Conversation’ for Saturday morning, post-coffee, pre-chaos. Treat it like a surgery, not an admin task.
2. Use the ‘If-Then’ Hack: Motivation is unreliable; automation is forever. Don't say "I’ll try to think about getting a Will." Say: "If it is Saturday at 9 AM, then I will spend 15 minutes finding the contact details for my financial advisor." Research shows this 'implementation intention' triples your success rate.
3. The Responsibility Pivot: Stop trying to use logic on your loved ones. You cannot reason with a tantrum (a brains Amygdala Hijack). If you feel the resistance rising, use the 'Responsibility Pivot'. Name your fear. Say, "I'm scared I'm going to mess this up." Vulnerability calms the brains internal Toddler and wakes up the Parent.

The Final Word

You’re not lazy. You are just a biological machine operating in a digital world that demands more bandwidth than you have.

The ‘Get Rich’ club will tell you to raise the sails and go faster. And you should. But secure people dare to sail further.

Fix the hull. Scrape the fouling and the barnacle we all collect in life. Plug the holes. Upgrade your Operating System. Once you know you can’t sink, you’ll be amazed at how fast you can actually go.

Secure people live bigger lives.

"Ready to install those 'ABS Brakes' for your wealth? We’re finalizing the blueprints now - sign up to the Waitlist for the Cure and we’ll let you know when the manual is ready."

Drew Browne is a specialty Financial Risk Advisor working with Small Business Owners & their Families, Dual Income Professional Couples, and diverse families. He's an award-winning writer, speaker, financial adviser and business strategy mentor. His business Sapience Financial Group is committed to using business solutions for good in the community. In 2015 he was certified as a B Corp., and in 2017 was recognised in the inaugural Australian National Businesses of Tomorrow Awards. Today he advises Small Business Owners and their families, on how to protect themselves, from their businesses.  He writes for successful Small Business Owners and Industry publications. You can read his Modern Small Business Leadership Blog here. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.  Any information provided is general advice only and we have not considered your personal circumstances. Before making any decision on the basis of this advice you should consider if the advice is appropriate for you based on your particular circumstance.