The Willpower Muscle

I read a good book called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister. It has some fascinating discussion about willpower being a muscle that can fatigue and can be strengthened.

He starts the book with the famous marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel of Stanford.  Children were left in a room with a marshmallow on the table and told they could eat the marshmallow now, if they wanted, or if they waited until the experimenter returned, they would get two marshmallows.  Some children ate the marshmallow right away.  Others tried to hold out by distracting themselves.  The children were followed for many years after the original experiment.  Mischel found that the children, who were able to exercise self-control, had much better life outcomes than the children who were immediate gratifiers.

Baumeister conducted similar experiments and found that willpower is a muscle that can be fatigued.  He left people in a room with a plate of cookies and a plate of radishes.  Afterwards, he asked them to hold their hands in ice water.  The people who were told they could eat the cookies could hold their hands in the water longer than those who were told they could only eat the radishes.

He did a similar experiment to deplete the willpower muscle then gave two groups of people either lemonade with sugar or lemonade with sweetener.  He found that those who were given the sugary lemonade worked longer on difficult puzzles after the willpower depletion.

This led to an interesting finding about dieters.  They need to eat food to have the willpower to avoid eating food.  It is a Catch-22.

Baumeister found that judges made the more difficult decision to grant parole after they had eaten lunch or a snack.  They reverted to the default decision not to grant parole when they were tired and hungry.

He found that decision making is fatiguing.  When car dealers asked their clients to make decisions about the features they wanted in their new car, he found that if the dealers started with difficult decisions with many choices, the clients paid for more expensive features compared to when the decisions the clients started with were simpler with few choices.   Baumeister hypothesized that this is the reason why politicians seem to make such bad choices in the personal lives, after work, because their willpower is fatigued from a long day of making decisions.

Baumeister also found that sleep is important to increase willpower.  Tired people have less willpower than rested people.

The good news is that willpower can be strengthened.  He related how Korean parents can teach their children self-control.  Although, east Asians represent only 4% of the population in North America, 25% of the students in college are east Asian.  After they graduate, they also receive 25% higher salaries.

Baumeister suggests that self-control can be improved by setting “bright lines” in behaviour (i.e. having clear, simple, unambiguous rules).  You should plan ahead to avoid impulsive decisions: “if x happens, then I will do y”.  You should never say “never”; instead say “not now but later”.  You should pre-commit to your resolutions by making your commitments public or signing an agreement ahead of time as to what you will do (e.g. donate to a charity) if you don’t meet your commitments.  To avoid procrastination, reflecting on what you have done will make you happier but reflecting on what you have to do will make you more productive.  Another way to avoid procrastination is to tell yourself you will not do the desired work, instead you will do nothing.  This is because procrastination is not doing nothing but doing lower priority tasks.  You should make only one New Year’s resolution because when you make many resolutions, there is a good chance that some of these resolutions will be conflicting.

Baumiester suggests that your willpower muscle can be strengthened by conscious habits such as concentrating on standing and sitting with good posture at all times or taking time to record everything you eat.  Maintaining good personal hygiene is very useful for improving willpower.  He found that students, who were fatigued from studying, invariably wore dirty socks.  Those who took better care of their hygiene did better on their essays and exams.

Baumeister suggests that we should look for symptoms of willpower muscle depletion.  We should pick our battles to avoid wasting energy on trivial things.  We should pre-commit to a to-do list but beware of the planning fallacy.  We should employ positive procrastination with the “do nothing offense”.