Willpower is Overrated
Use less to get more
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People believe they could immensely improve their lives if only they had more willpower. They would stop eating garbage. Stop binge-watching shows on Netflix. And stop playing video games for 3 hours a day. It would be so easy to eat healthy and read 1 book a week if only they hadn’t been born with such weak self-control and willpower.
The question is not how to resist temptation, but how to not have the temptation in the first place.
You might have heard about the marshmallow-experiment from 1972 where researchers thought torturing kids was fun. So they sat kids in front of a marshmallow and told them “I’m going to leave the room. If you don’t eat the marshmallow, you will get another marshmallow when I come back. Then you can eat the 2 marshmallows.”
After that, they left the room and watched the kids through hidden cameras for ten minutes.
The kids would stare at the marshmallow, hold them in their hands, sniffed at it, and even lick it once or twice.
To no surprise, only one-third of the kids were able to resist the marshmallow until the adult came back and gave them the second one.
Whether or not the kid ate the marshmallow, they clearly exerted effort to resist the marshmallow.
A single marshmallow is easy for an adult, but we still use willpower to resist things. A recovering addict uses a lot of willpower to resist the temptation of another high. A gamer to play another round of Call of Duty. And someone on a diet to get the chocolate from the cupboard.
Is there a consequence of resisting temptation, even if you succeed?
Short answer — yes.
A famous experiment by Roy F. Baumeister and colleagues had 67 participants who hadn’t eaten for at least 3 hours sit at a table with two bowls. One bowl was filled with freshly baked cookies. The other one with radishes.
They told one-half of the participants that they can only eat the radishes. The other half could eat the cookies.
After that, they had the lucky cookie people, and the poor radish people work on a puzzle. The puzzle was actually impossible. The researchers wanted to know how long the participants would try to solve the puzzle.
Their findings were quite interesting.
A control group tried the puzzle for 20.89min. The cookie group for 18.90min. And the radish group for only 8.35min.
The radish group was tired of using their willpower to resist the cookies, so they had less willpower left to solve the puzzle.
This was just 1 out of around 200 experiments that accredited the concept of ego-depletion. The idea that willpower is a limited resource. It’s like a muscle, if you used it on one thing, you have less available the next time a temptation comes around.
This concept was challenged by a 2015 paper but was accredited again by a 2018 paper saying yes, ego-depletion is a thing, some methods are just more effective in testing it than others.
In either case, we all know that temptations are distracting. It’s going to be harder to study when your friends tell you to come to a party or to stay on your diet while your spouse is baking fresh cookies.
Another experiment in 2012 gave 205 adults a beeper that would randomly ask them throughout the day whether they were resisting a desire, how strong that desire was, and if they were successful in resisting the desire.
These desire-reports lead to a linear graph. The more desires a participant had resisted, the more likely that participant was to give in to future desires.
A long and busy day at work will have a lot of temptations in it, even if you’re not fully aware of them. These resisted desires then drain your willpower, and you will be more likely to skip the gym after work and go straight to your couch and turn on the TV.
But here is the interesting part. In the study, the people who are best at self-control, those who said they are good at resisting temptations, reported less tempting desires throughout the study. The participants with the best self-control, actually just used less self-control.
Those who exert more self-control are not more successful in achieving their goals. The people who plan their day in a way that they use less self-control, are the ones most likely to achieve their goals.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, explains that there is a four-part habit cycle. Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward.
First, there is a Cue. You are at the office, it’s 2 pm and you’re feeling a little tired and unfocused. This feeling acts as a cue for a craving for coffee. In response to the craving, you get a cup of coffee. You are then rewarded with the taste and energy from the coffee.
According to James Clear, a habit will start to crumble if one part of the cycle is missing. If you are at the office and you start to feel tired, but you respond to the cue differently. Instead of getting a coffee, you go for a walk.
This disruption will weaken the entire habit.
Clear says an effective way to break bad habits is to make the cue weaker or more obscure. If seeing chocolate on the table cues a craving to eat chocolate, just put them where you can’t see them. Or better yet — don’t buy them.
If you’re trying to study and focus, just turn the phone off instead of resisting the temptation to check it. It’s not a question of weak willpower and self-control. It’s reserving as much willpower as possible for potential later temptations.
Rather than exerting a lot of willpower, plan your day so that you use less.
Work by Dr. Glenn Wilson has found that if you’re trying to work on a task, even a simple temptation of an unread notification on your phone reduces your effective IQ by 10 points. Even a simple temptation like an unread message decreases your ability to think clearly.
Going back to the marshmallow study. The kids who were successful in resisting the marshmallow were also the ones more successful later in life.
They followed each child for more than 40 years. And those who waited patiently succeeded in whatever capacity they were measuring.
But how did the successful kids do it? Did they fearlessly stare down the marshmallow with willpower?
Well, not quite. The successful kids all found a way to distract themselves from the marshmallow. Where the kids who failed had spent their time staring and smelling at the marshmallow, the successful kids would cover their eyes with their hands. Or talked to themselves. Or sing. Or play with their hands.
They did whatever they could to get the marshmallow out of their minds and distract themselves. They did not rely on their willpower.
Similarly, you can apply the rules of ego-depletion to an average day of an adult.
In which scenario would you be more tempted to eat fattening food?
One in which you take the route home where you walk past the delicious smelling bakery?
Or one in which you take an alternative route?
And would an alcoholic be more likely to relapse if he had a bottle of booze at home or none at all?
