Willpower: The Brain Muscle We Didn’t Know About
For those of you unfortunate enough to have never been taught by Richard Koestner during your stay at McGill, you may not know very much about a little thing called willpower, otherwise known as self-control or self-regulation. Found in varying amounts across all students, willpower is that thing that allows you to reluctantly close the tab on Netflix and open the pages of your textbook (or allows our TA to read through a pile of these blog postings). Lucky for those with plenty of willpower, it is linked to a slew of positive life outcomes and a lack of it is associated with a number of negative ones like arrest, divorce, low income, and loads of anxiety, just to name a few.
According to Baumeister and his work with Tierney “Willpower — Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength” (awesome book), willpower can be measured through a series of tests and experiments which originally deplete a person’s amount of willpower and consequentially, allows for us to observe the negative outcomes (such as fatigue, lack of perseverance as well as cognitive ability). Experiences that deplete our personal stock of willpower can mainly be associated to fighting our natural instincts and doing the opposite of what we really want to. Take for example, resisting the temptation of a freshly baked cookie placed in front of you. You are cruelly instructed to not eat the cookie, BUT you are welcome to eat the radish on the table. You have successfully resisted the urge to eat the cookie after a number of minutes, except NOW you are evaluated as you attempt to solve a number of geometry puzzles. Turns out, those participants in an experimental condition having had to use their self-control with the cookie gave up on solving the puzzles much faster than those who were allowed to eat them (Baumeister, 2011). Their willpower had already been used up, robbing them of the additional self-control required to maintain an effort in solving the math questions.
Similar experiments have been conducted such as having two participants leave their hand in a bucket of ice water; one participant allowed to swear and scream while the other was not. Participants allowed to use profanities were able to keep their hand in the cold water significantly longer than those who had to fight the urge to keep their mouths clean and their voices down (Baumeister, 2011). Stronger levels of willpower are linked to people who are organized and can prepare themselves ahead of time, eat foods high in glucose (which helps replenish the brain’s willpower through it’s breakdown) and with those who exercise their willpower in a number of small ways like simply correcting your own grammar or reminding yourself to sit up straight. Eventually, the repetition of these small tweaks becomes routine, filling your life with well-adopted habits.
That being said, willpower can be improved and amounts of it increased. And really, who wouldn’t want their lives to go a lot more smoothly? By taking control of your life with small things like not procrastinating, keeping your environment free of clutter, making lists, not leaving important decisions until the very last minute, or even putting that brownie off until LATER, you are saving yourself A LOT of mental power and control that should be saved for unpredictable moments of stress where you’ll really need it to be able to push forward and persevere.
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