Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control.

Baumeister himself started out as something of a skeptic. But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose self-control as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fueled by the glucose in the body’s bloodstream. He and his collaborators discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise.

Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison.

Their track record sounds discouraging, and the rate of failure may well be pretty bad by historical standards. We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before beepers and experimental psychologists, but it seems likely that they were under less strain.

A similar notion occurred to someone with better credentials, Sigmund Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. But Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. It wasn’t until recently, in Baumeister’s laboratory, that scientists began systematically looking for this source of energy. Until then, for most of the past century, psychologists and educators and the rest of the chattering classes kept finding one reason or another to believe it didn’t exist.

The prolonged bloodshed of World War I seemed a consequence of too many stubborn gentlemen following their “duty” to senseless deaths. Intellectuals preached a more relaxed view of life in America and much of Western Europe—but not, unfortunately, in Germany, where they developed a “psychology of will” to guide their country during its bleak recovery from the war. That theme would be embraced by the Nazis, whose rally in 1934 was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will.

These gurus’ books would go on selling for the rest of the century, and the feel-good philosophy would be distilled to a rhyming slogan: “Believe it, achieve it.”

The shift in people’s characters was noticed by a psychoanalyst named Allen Wheelis, who in the late 1950s revealed what he considered a dirty little secret of his profession: Freudian therapies no longer worked the way they were supposed to. In his landmark book, The Quest for Identity, Wheelis described a change in character structure since Freud’s day. The Victorian middle-class citizens who formed the bulk of Freud’s patients had intensely strong wills, making it difficult for therapists to break through their ironclad defenses and their sense of what was right and wrong. Freud’s therapies had concentrated on ways to break through and let them see why they were neurotic and miserable, because once those people achieved insight, they could change rather easily. By midcentury, though, people’s character armor was different. Wheelis and his colleagues found that people achieved insight more quickly than in Freud’s day, but then the therapy often stalled and failed. Lacking the sturdy character of the Victorians, people didn’t have the strength to follow up on the insight and change their lives.

In psychology, brilliant theories are cheap. People like to think of the field advancing thanks to some thinker’s startling new insight, but that’s not how it usually works. Coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. Everyone has a pet theory for why we do what we do, which is why psychologists get sick of hearing their discoveries dismissed with “Oh, my grandmother knew that.” Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory, as Walter Mischel did.

it’s quite rare for anything measured in early childhood to predict anything in adulthood at a statistically significant level. Indeed, this disconnect was one of the death blows against the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to psychology, which emphasized early childhood experiences as the foundation of adult personality.

Although raw intelligence was obviously an advantage, the study showed that self-control was more important because it helped the students show up more reliably for classes, start their homework earlier, and spend more time working and less time watching television.

Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems.

The adult human brain makes up 2 percent of the body but consumes more than 20 percent of its energy.

Just 2%?

Dunbar eventually concluded that the large brain did not evolve to deal with the physical environment, but rather with something even more crucial to survival: social life.

Although other primates have the mental power to exhibit some rudimentary etiquette at dinner, their self-control is still quite puny by human standards. Experts surmise that the smartest nonhuman primates can mentally project perhaps twenty minutes into the future—long enough to let the alpha male eat, but not long enough for much planning beyond dinner. (Some animals, like squirrels, instinctively bury food and retrieve it later, but these are programmed behaviors, not conscious savings plans.)

Your unconscious brain continuously helps you avoid social disaster, and it operates in so many subtly powerful ways that some psychologists have come to view it as the real boss. This infatuation with unconscious processes stems from a fundamental mistake made by researchers who keep slicing behavior into thinner and briefer units, identifying reactions that occur too quickly for the conscious mind to be directing.

It took self-control to create her uncontrolled persona, and she credits her success partly to what she calls “the ultimate Zen training ground”: posing as a living statue.

it made immediate sense to clinical psychologists like Don Baucom, a veteran marital therapist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He said the Baumeister research crystallized something that he had sensed in his practice for years but never fully understood. He’d seen many marriages suffer because the two-career couples fought over seemingly trivial issues every evening. He sometimes advised them to go home from work early, which might sound like odd advice—why give them more time to fight with each other? But he suspected that the long hours at work were draining them. When they got home after a long, hard day, they had nothing left to help them overlook their partner’s annoying habits, or to be kind and considerate out of the blue, or to hold their tongue when their partner said something that made them want to respond in a mean, sarcastic manner. Baucom recognized that they needed to leave work while they still had some energy. He saw why marriages were going bad just when stress at work was at its worst: People were using up all their willpower on the job. They gave at the office—and their home suffered the consequences.

But the two other groups quit much sooner, and it didn’t matter whether they’d been suppressing their feelings or venting their grief over the poor turtles. Either way, the effort to control their emotional reactions depleted their willpower. Faking it didn’t come free.

Still, Freud was onto something with his energy model of the self. Energy is an essential element in explaining the liaisons at artists’ colonies. Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido. Freud had been a bit vague about where this energy came from and how it operated, but at least he had assigned it an important place in his theory of self.

Replace artists' colonies with Olympic Village and it makes sense.

In fact, the Stroop task became a tool for American intelligence officials during the cold war. A covert agent could claim not to speak Russian, but he’d take longer to answer correctly when looking at Russian words for colors.

Until recently, researchers couldn’t offer much help. In dozens of studies, they looked unsuccessfully for telltale emotional reactions, turning up either contradictory results or nothing at all. Being depleted didn’t seem to consistently make people feel depressed or angry or discontented. In 2010, when an international team of researchers combed through the results of more than eighty studies, they concluded that ego depletion’s effects on behavior were strong, large, and reliable, but that the effects on subjective feelings were considerably weaker. People in depleted condition reported more fatigue and tiredness and negative emotions, but even those differences weren’t large. The results made ego depletion seem like an illness with no symptoms, a condition that didn’t “feel” like anything.

So if you’d like some advance warning of trouble, look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings.

If you’re trying to resist temptation, you may find yourself feeling the forbidden desires more strongly just when your ability to resist them is down. Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.

During withdrawal, the recovering addict is using so much willpower to break the habit that it’s likely to be a time of intense, prolonged ego depletion, and that very state will make the person feel the desire for the drug all the more strongly.

When asked about other aspects of their lives, it became clear that Bem’s dirty-sock finding hadn’t been a fluke. All sorts of good habits were forsaken as the students’ self-control waned during exam period.

Could all of this merely reflect a practical, if slightly unhealthy, shift in priorities? Were they sensibly saving time so that they could study more? Not quite. During exams, students reported an increase in the tendency to spend time with friends instead of studying—precisely the opposite of what would be sensible and practical. Some students even reported that their study habits got worse during exam time, which couldn’t have been their intention. They must have been devoting much of their willpower to making themselves study harder, and yet they ended up studying less. Likewise, they reported an increase in oversleeping, and in spending money impulsively. Shopping sprees made no practical sense during exam period, but the students had less discipline to restrain their spending. They were also more grumpy, irritable, and prone to anger or despair. They may have blamed their outbursts on the stress of exam period, because there’s a common misperception that stress causes those kinds of emotions. What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.

People often conserve their willpower by seeking not the fullest or best answer but rather a predetermined conclusion. Theologians and believers filter the world to remain consistent with the nonnegotiable principles of their faith. The best salesmen often succeed by first deceiving themselves.

Another broad category is the control of emotions, which psychologists call affect regulation when it’s focused specifically on mood. Most commonly, we’re trying to escape from bad moods and unpleasant thoughts, although we occasionally try to avoid cheeriness (like when we’re getting ready for a funeral, or preparing to deliver bad news), and we occasionally try to hang on to feelings of anger (so that we’re in the right state to lodge a complaint). Emotional control is uniquely difficult because you generally can’t alter your mood by an act of will. You can change what you think about or how you behave, but you can’t force yourself to be happy. You can treat your in-laws politely, but you can’t make yourself rejoice over their month-long visit. To ward off sadness and anger, people use indirect strategies, like trying to distract themselves with other thoughts, or working out at the gym, or meditating. They lose themselves in TV shows and treat themselves to chocolate binges and shopping sprees. Or they get drunk.

A third category is often called impulse control, which is what most people associate with willpower: the ability to resist temptations like alcohol, tobacco, Cinnabons, and cocktail waitresses. Strictly speaking, “impulse control” is a misnomer. You don’t really control the impulses.

But before we get into specific advice, we can offer one general bit of guidance based on the ego-depletion studies, and it’s the same approach taken by Amanda Palmer: Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.

Above all, don’t make a list of New Year’s resolutions.

But to psychologists there was a certain logic to it: By relaxing before Lent, perhaps people could store up the willpower necessary to sustain themselves through weeks of self-denial. The Mardi Gras theory, as it was known, was never as popular with scientists as it was with pancake eaters in peacock headdresses, but it seemed worth an experiment.

The muscles, not surprisingly, use plenty of glucose, as do the heart and liver. The immune system uses large quantities, but only sporadically. When you’re relatively healthy, your immune system may use only a relatively small amount of glucose. But when your body is fighting off a cold, it may consume gobs of it. That’s why sick people sleep so much: The body uses all the energy it can to fight the disease, and it can’t spare much for exercising, making love, or arguing. It can’t even do much thinking, a process that requires plentiful glucose in the bloodstream. The glucose itself doesn’t enter the brain, but it’s converted into neurotransmitters, which are the chemicals that your brain cells use to send signals. If you ran out of neurotransmitters, you’d stop thinking.

The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked. Overall, they tended to be more anxious and less happy than average. Hypoglycemia was also reported to be unusually prevalent among criminals and other violent persons, and some creative defense attorneys brought the low-blood-sugar research into court.

No glucose, no willpower: The pattern showed up time and again as researchers tested more people in more situations. They even tested dogs.

Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower. They helped resolve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion shifts activity from one part of the brain to another. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. That may help explain why depleted people feel things more intensely than normal: Certain parts of the brain go into high gear just as others taper off.

PMS is not a matter of one specific behavior problem cropping up. Instead, self-control seems to fail across the board, letting all sorts of problems increase.

One drug that isn’t used more frequently is marijuana, and that exception is revealing. Unlike cocaine and opiates, marijuana is not a drug of escape or euphoria. Marijuana merely intensifies what you’re already feeling. PMS feels bad, and a drug that intensifies the feeling isn’t going to be attractive. Moreover, marijuana doesn’t produce the same sort of addictive cravings as nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs, so a lessening of overall self-control wouldn’t make a marijuana user more vulnerable to those kinds of temptations.

To repeat, women on the whole have fewer problems with self-control than men: They commit fewer violent crimes and are less likely to become alcoholics or drug addicts. Girls’ superior self-control is probably one reason they get better grades in school than boys do.

For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them. We make daily to-do lists that couldn’t be accomplished even if there were no interruptions during the day, which there always are. By the time the weekend arrives, there are more unfinished tasks than ever, but we keep deferring them and expecting to get through them with miraculous speed. That’s why, as productivity experts have found, an executive’s daily to-do list for Monday often contains more work than could be done the entire week.

Even within a family, the demands of taking care of children may clash with those of maintaining a good relationship with one’s spouse, which may help explain why marital satisfaction declines when a couple gives birth to their first child and goes back up when the last child finally moves out.

The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise.

The most extensive experiments in fuzzy-versus-fussy planning have been the uncontrolled ones run by military leaders on the battlefields of Europe. Napoleon once summarized his idea of strategic military planning: “You engage, and then you wait and see.” By making contact with the enemy and then improvising, he triumphed and made his armies the envy (and the scourge) of Europe. His rivals to the north, the Prussians, groped for some advantage to make sure they didn’t keep losing to the French, and they came up with more planning. The officer class of other countries ridiculed the idea that soldiers should sit at tables with pens and paper, making plans. But the plans turned out to be a genuine advantage, and the next time the two nations fought, the Prussians won a resounding victory.

In accordance with the four Ds of his system, everything that has not been done, delegated, or dropped has been deferred to a half dozen two-drawer file cabinets, which contain his alphabetized plastic folders with labels printed by the little machine next to his computer.

One of the scholars, a young Russian psychology student named Bluma Zeigarnik, and her mentor, the influential thinker Kurt Lewin, pondered this experience and wondered if it pointed to a more general principle. Did the human memory make a strong distinction between finished and unfinished tasks? They began observing people who were interrupted while doing jigsaw puzzles. This research, and many studies in the following decades, confirmed what became known as the Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.

Once again, making a plan made a difference. Those who’d written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel—unless they’d made a specific plan to complete the task, in which case they reported relatively little mind wandering and scored quite well on the reading comprehension test. Even though they hadn’t finished the task or made any palpable progress, the simple act of making a plan had cleared their minds and eliminated the Zeigarnik effect. But the Zeigarnik effect remained for the students without a plan.

So it turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.

“Before, I’d see a pile of papers and wouldn’t know what the hell was in them and just be like, Oh, my God,” Carey says. “The day I got to zero, which is GTD talk for having nothing in your in-box—no phone messages, no e-mails, nothing, not a piece of paper—when I got to that point, I felt like the world got lifted off my shoulders. I felt like I had just come out of meditating in the desert, not a care in the world. I just felt euphoric.”

After watching so many clients agonize over the most trivial decisions and Next Actions, Allen has come to appreciate why decide shares an etymological root with homicide: the Latin word caedere, meaning “to cut down” or “to kill.”