Willpower Depletion & How to Break Negative Habits
I wanted to share a famous experiment, replicated now many times over, on how willpower isn’t something you can just sustain indefinitely. You can’t say, “I’m going to get super fit, and my willpower will get me that way,” because like a muscle, willpower fatigues with use. Here’s an explanation of the experiment, from The Atlantic:
Back in 1996, Roy Baumeister conducted an experiment that was downright evil.
Together with his former Case Western Reserve University colleagues Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice, he examined the effect of a tempting food challenge designed to deplete participants' willpower through the awful power of an unfulfilled promise of chocolate!
In the first part of the trial, Baumeister kept the 67 study participants in a room that smelled of freshly baked chocolate cookies and then teased them further by showing them the actual treats alongside other chocolate-flavored confections. While some did get to indulge their sweet tooth, the subjects in the experimental condition, whose resolves were being tested, were asked to eat radishes instead. And they weren't happy about it. As the scientists noted in their Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper two years later (PDF), many of the radish-eaters “exhibit[ed] clear interest in the chocolates, to the point of looking longingly at the chocolate display and in a few cases even picking up the cookies to sniff at them.”
After the food bait-and-switch, Baumeister’s team gave the participants a second, supposedly unrelated exercise, a persistence-testing puzzle. The effect of the manipulation was immediate and undeniable. Those who ate radishes made far fewer attempts and devoted less than half the time solving the puzzle compared to the chocolate-eating participants and a control group that only joined this latter phase of the study. In other words, those who had to resist the sweets and force themselves to eat pungent vegetables could no longer find the will to fully engage in another torturous task. They were already too tired.
In the psychology world, the key finding of this seemingly silly study was a breakthrough: self-control is a general strength that’s used across different sorts of tasks — and it could be depleted. This proved that self-regulation is not a skill to be mastered or a rote function that can be performed with little consequence. It’s like using a muscle: After exercising it, it loses its strength, gets fatigued, and becomes ineffectual, at least in the short-term.
So how do some people lose weight and keep it off? How do some people quit drinking or drugs for life? Pick your goal, and someone has achieved it for life — and it wasn’t based on willpower, or so say the overwhelming number of scientific voices. Willpower was just the early spark. What was the fuel that sustained for life? Author James Clear posits, in a very compelling manner, it is through sustained habits. Tiny changes over time that yield lifelong results. Dr. Gabor Mate argues, and I think also incredibly convincingly (and I was a skeptic going in because I knew of his theory), that almost anything we do habitually and can’t stop doing that has negative consequences — be it shopping, drugs, work, even obsessive need of others — is an addiction. And addictions are never the primary problem. They are they attempt to remove the problem through escape. Per Mate, address the underlying pain, developed in childhood, and you can get rid of the problem. Check out this video, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,” and the James Clear clip and let me know what you think. And more importantly, stick with what works for you. But don’t rely on going it alone on willpower; it is inevitably going to fade. Find a sustainable solution, be it habituation of healthy patterns, or addressing underlying needs to escape pain, and I believe you’ll find long-term success along the way.