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There’s no shortage of good advice on how to bolster willpower, including one piece I’d be smart to take: Don’t hide your resolutions in a drawer.

Other ideas include keeping goals realistic, planning how they’ll be implemented and enlisting the help of friends and family for encouragement and accountability. These are all helpful tips, but there’s one important thing missing: belief. Specifically, recent studies suggest that when it comes to willpower, we get what we expect.

The new findings fly in the face of previous thinking about willpower, which tended to put the emphasis on power. In this way of looking at things, willpower was seen as a muscle that was easily depleted. Newer research casts doubt on this limited-resource theory and instead suggests that we have as much willpower as we expect to have. In this alternative model, willpower works less like a muscle and more like a placebo.

This matters, because willpower’s importance goes well beyond keeping New Year’s promises. Indeed, researchers find that willpower (or self-regulation) also predicts academic, professional and financial success better than IQ and other aptitude scores. People with lots of willpower work harder, avoid tempting distractions and persist until a task is completed.

Another common belief about willpower is that it is taxing — that exercising self-control or willpower burns a lot of energy. But does it? Not according to Robert Kurzban, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. […] As Kurzban noted, people actually perform better on self-control tasks after vigorous exercise, which burns far more calories than self-regulation does.

None of this means that keeping resolutions will be easy. But willpower is most likely to let us down if we expect it to. Take care with your list of resolutions for 2013. Narrow it to the goals you really care about. Make a plan. Get the support of your loved ones. Seek out accountability. For God’s sake, don’t stuff the list in a drawer. And last, but certainly not least, have faith in your willpower.

Give yourself reasons to believe, despite the sorry statistics and even your own track record. Think back on the many challenges you have mastered, especially when you stumbled along the way. If your goal is important enough to you, chances are you can achieve it, and a little more faith in your willpower could help.

In his book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science ofSleep__, author David K. Randall calls sleep “one of the dirty little secrets of science.” That’s because despite spending almost a third of our lives sleeping, we don’t really know much about the process of sleep.

[T]he discovery of the stages of sleep shattered this perspective. For instance, our brains are just as active in REM sleep — aptly named rapid eye movement because our eyes shift rapidly against our lids — as they are when we’re awake.

In Dreamland, Randall shares a slew of these fascinating, surprising and eye-opening facts, anecdotes and research studies. These are a few curious tidbits from his book.

Continuous vs segmented sleep:

Today, we think that sleeping through the night is a sign of normal and healthy slumber. In fact, people who wake up around the same time every night think their sleep is fractured — and that something is wrong, Randall writes. And when they complain about this concern to their doctors, they probably walk away with a sleeping pill, he says.

But segmented sleep has actually been the norm for thousands of years — that is, until the advent of artificial lighting. In the 1980s and ‘90s, history professor Roger Ekirch began seeing interesting patterns in his book collection, which included tales and medical texts: references to “first sleep” and “second sleep.”

Randall notes that other studies have confirmed that people naturally experience segmented sleep. And in areas with no artificial light, people still experience first and second sleep.

On naps:

In our society, naps are viewed as luxurious activities only reserved for the privileged or the lazy. That’s a shame, because research continues to show the benefits of naps and discredit these beliefs.

One study found that astronauts who slept for just 15 minutes had better cognitive performance, even when there was no boost in their alertness or ability to pay attention.

Another study found that participants who napped and experienced the deeper stages of sleep had more flexible thinking. They were able to apply information they memorized to a new task much better than participants who watched a movie instead of napping.

Randall also notes that participants who take naps outperform their counterparts who aren’t allowed to doze off on other various tasks.

Wrapping up, the importance of sleep research:

While sleep research is in its infancy, one fact is undeniable: Sleep is vital for everything from our survival to our success.

When functioning optimally, sleep can sharpen our thinking and help us problem solve (like golfer Jack Nicklaus did when he figured out how to tweak his swing in his sleep). When gone wrong – as in cases of sleepwalking and sleep deprivation – it can distort our cognitive skills, sink our mood and even make us dangerous.

As Randall notes, “Sleep isn’t a break from our lives. It’s the missing third of the puzzle of what it means to be living.”