Your Willpower Has Problems: Here’s How We Fix Them

Quick pop quiz: which of the following statements about willpower is true?

A. Willpower gives you the ability to “make” yourself do something, no matter what B. You have separate willpower reserves for different areas of your life C. Willpower can be strengthened D. Willpower is never affected by other events in your life

If you guessed C, you guessed correctly!

But…if you can’t always “make” yourself do something through willpower, if we don’t have separate reserves and if it is affected by other events —

Then why do we always say “if I just had more willpower, I could do X.”

A Willpower Fairy Tale

For far too long, people have referred to willpower as a near-mystic force capable of bestowing mental invincibility on those lucky enough to have it. As “proof,” we cite individuals performing superhuman feats, exclaiming, “That person must have so much willpower!”

And, on the flip side, we degrade ourselves when we fail to live up to those incredible standards:

“I’m a wreck at making decisions — I’m weak-willed.”

“I can’t make myself get up in the morning — I’m lazy.”

“I blew my diet at the party — I’m a failure.”

Worse, we may view others through that same lens. An apparent lack of willpower indicates laziness, sloppiness or some other form of character flaw.

Guess what folks? It’s not that simple. It’s not a case of either having willpower or not. It is not some ingrained, unchangeable character trait.

And fortunately for us, the research is finally beginning to uncover the true complexity of willpower — as well as what we can do to improve it.

What Researchers Have Discovered About Willpower

The American Psychological Association defines willpower as:

At its essence, willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.

Basically, willpower is the art of delayed gratification. Which, with what most people know about willpower, is pretty intuitive.

So what do the researchers know now that most people don’t? Three points:

1. Willpower is exhaustible
2. Willpower is affected by stress
3. Willpower can be strengthened

Let’s dive into the impact of each of these new bits of knowledge.

Willpower is exhaustible.

I want you to imagine a pond. Really see it — visualize the water and the grass on the side of the banks.

Now, I want you to imagine that the pond has a number of tiny individual streams coming off of it. The streams lower the water level in the pond a good deal, but for some reason, the pond doesn’t drain completely.

At the bottom of the pond, there’s a spring. The spring is feeding the pond just enough to keep the water level steady.

That pond? It’s your willpower.

We like to think that we have certain amounts of willpower “dedicated” to certain areas of our lives. We get one reserve for our work life, one pool for our personal lives and another regarding our finances.

But, willpower doesn’t work that way. Instead, researchers liken willpower to a muscle. We have one pool of willpower that regulates all of our decision making. So, each of those streams coming off from the pond can be thought of as an area of your life requiring willpower. One stream might be your work life, another might be your finances and another might be the new exercise program you started. Each one is a small drain on your willpower.

And, unfortunately, as pointed out by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Human Strength, our willpower seems to be depleted with every decision we make.

So when you had to pick between grey socks and black socks with your shoes this morning? You used a bit of your willpower. When you had to make a major call on a branding design? You drained your willpower. It doesn’t matter how big or small the decision is.

Fortunately for us, however, willpower is replenished every morning — just like that spring keeps the pond from being completely drained. Which means that we only have to contend with the decisions we make in one day. Simple enough, right?

There is a caveat here, however. “Ego depletion” is the term commonly used to describe the drain on willpower associated with resisting temptations, based on Baumeister’s 1998 “cookie and radish” study. Because ego depletion has become some what of an umbrella term since this paper’s publication, decision fatigue has become a closely associated topic.

The issue lies here: since a replication report in 2016, ego depletion has come under fire for a lack of reproducibility. But, as scientific research is prone to do, there’s been some back and forth debate (along with this 2017 study). Overall, ego depletion is likely affected by multiple factors (candidates so far: our attitudes and beliefs, blood glucose levels, our motivations) and is probably much more complex than we think.

However, the studies typically cited on decision fatigue (here, here and here) specifically seem to be well-supported at this stage. So, it’s likely fairly safe to say that willpower can be exhausted if you’re forced to make enough decisions. Especially if those decisions are made under stress.

Willpower is affected by stress.

In 2015, researchers at Zurich’s Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research conducted a study on whether stress affects an individual’s self-control.

The researchers chose to use healthy eating as a measure of willpower. All participants in the study self-reported that they wanted to eat healthy, but found themselves consuming junk food.

Now, for the experiment: participants in the non-control “stress group” were asked to dunk their hand in ice-water for three minutes. Participants could remove their hands from the water, but if they did, they had to stare at the camera videotaping them until the end of the three minute test.

The study’s subjects were then presented with a series of food choices shown on a computer. Their choices between “healthier but less tasty” and “less healthy but tastier” items were recorded. Finally, they were given real food choices picked from one of the earlier computer trials and reminded that their goal was to choose the healthier option.

Overall. the stressed individuals chose to eat the “less healthy but tastier” items more often (24% more) than the non-stressed participants.

The researchers concluded that the stress had affected the individuals’ willpower because the participants sacrificed their long term goal (eating healthy) for short term enjoyment of the better tasting food.

So taken with the other information we know about willpower now, what does this mean for us? Let’s return to the single pool metaphor:

Think of your pool of willpower, with all the streams flowing off of it. When you’re stressed in one area of your life, one of those streams will suddenly swell, draining off more willpower than usual. Thus, you’re left with less willpower to go to all the other streams. Eventually, with stress in enough different areas of your life, you’ll find your willpower drained completely at a much more rapid rate than usual.

Great, we live in a society where it seems like everyone is stressed. How do we deal with that?

What We Can Do About It: First, stop being so hard on yourself. If you have a failure of willpower, take a step back and think if there’s an unusual amount of stress in your life. If there is, congratulations, you’ve found the cause.

Second, if you’re unusually stressed, it’s not a good time to start some new behavioral change requiring a lot of willpower, like beginning smoking cessation, altering your sleep schedule dramatically or starting an extreme exercise or diet program. Focus on getting your stress under control first, then work on the behavioral change after that. Trying to “power through” will likely set you up for failure as the behavior change will become yet another stressor.

And finally, realize that we can do things to improve. Because as research shows…

Willpower can be strengthened.

Earlier in the article, I mentioned that researchers think of willpower like a muscle. Muscles get exhausted, yes. But, they can also be strengthened with training. So could willpower work the same way?

That’s exactly what Cheng and Oaten set out to discover in their 2006 study.

In the study, participants were enrolled in a regular exercise program that gradually increased in intensity of the course of two months. The exercise program participants showed a significant increase in their acute willpower (measured by a visual test).

But, on top of that, the participants also showed decreased levels of alcohol, tobacco and junk food consumption and healthier eating habits along with improved emotional control. Their willpower had increased in all areas of their lives.

Because the majority of the “other improvement” measurements were health related, Cheng and Oaten thought the correlation might be due only to the effect of exercise. A natural assumption considering who wouldn’t try to eat healthier if you’re also expending all that effort on exercise as well?

So, as Charles Duhigg details in the Power of Habit, Cheng and Oaten conducted two more studies in the same way with different “willpower habits” — a financial management program and a study skills program for university students.

The results correlated with their findings on the exercise study on all fronts.

Consider this our ray of hope: it seems that willpower can be strengthened with habitual “training.” Therefore, picking one willpower-testing task that you want to implement on a daily basis may be the answer to increasing your willpower in the long term. Starting small, with easier tests, then gradually building up the intensity is a great way to get started.

Remember, we only have one pool of willpower a day. Make sure yours isn’t being drained by pointless decisions or unneeded stress. And when it comes to willpower failures, chalk it up to fatigue and resolve to do better next time.

Next week, we’ll be talking about ways to gauge exactly how stressed you are and how to know when to take proactive measures against that stress. See you then!