Willpower Is Not a Limited Resource
By: Nir Eyal
Tags: Productivity, Growth Hacking, Psychology, Willpower, Self

Willpower Is Not a Limited Resource

And the belief that it is can be damaging

Photo: ULTRA F/DigitalVision/Getty Images

You come home after a long day of work and immediately curl up on the couch for a few episodes of the latest Netflix craze. As you watch, you’re simultaneously scrolling through Twitter on your phone and digging into a bag of potato chips, even though your resolution was to eat healthier. You look around and see that the garbage needs to be taken out, the laundry needs to be folded, and your child’s toys are strewn across the living room floor. The list of productive things you could be doing seem endless, yet you can’t seem to find the willpower to get started.

Sound familiar? This is called ego depletion, the theory that willpower is connected to a limited reserve of mental energy, and once you run out of that energy, you’re more likely to lose self-control.

Ego depletion would seem to explain your post-work defeat — after focusing all day, you’re just tapped out. But some research suggests that we’ve been thinking about willpower all wrong, and the theory of ego depletion isn’t true. Even worse, holding onto the idea that willpower is a finite resource can actually be bad for you, making you more likely to lose control and act against your better judgment.

The evidence against ego depletion comes from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her team wanted to see how people reacted when they were fatigued. After putting participants through a demanding task, the researchers asked them to drink sugary lemonade for an energy boost, and then evaluated how they reacted. And while the sugar did give a boost to the people who believed their willpower had been exhausted, it had no effect on those who didn’t see willpower as a finite resource.

If Dweck’s conclusions are correct, that means that ego depletion is essentially caused by self-defeating thoughts and not by any biological limitation. It’s an idea that makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we could otherwise persist.

Other research illustrates the power of this effect. A study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their alcohol cravings were much more likely to drink again. Studies of cigarette smokers found that those who believed they were powerless to resist were most likely to fall off the wagon after they quit. And the same theory could be applied to other things as well, such as working out, dieting, or self-control in a relationship.

A new decision-making tool

Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, offers an alternative view to Dweck’s conclusions. Inzlicht believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel.

Seeing willpower through this lens has profound implications on the way we focus our attention. For one, if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a tank, it can be managed and utilized as such. For example, a toddler might throw a temper tantrum when a toy is taken away, but will, over time, gain self-control and learn to ride out bad feelings. Similarly, when we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and healthy to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break.

But sometimes a lack of motivation isn’t temporary. Feelings are our bodies’ way of conveying information our conscious minds might miss. When a lack of mental energy is chronic, we should listen to our willpower just as we should listen to our emotions, using it as a tool that provides us with insight about what we should and shouldn’t be spending our time on. When we treat willpower as a helpful decision-making assistant, working in tandem with our logical capabilities, we can find new paths that may not require us to do things we fundamentally don’t want to do.

What we say to ourselves is vitally important. Believing you have poor self-control is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self-compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.

This article originally appeared on NirAndFar.com.