Most of us have a finite supply of willpower

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006569.html

by cwan • 17 years ago

49 22 17 years ago

charlesju• 17 years ago

I also believe in an amendment to this hypothesis. Some actions that require will-power unlocks more will-power so you might gain will-power after the action.

For instance, going for a run boosts energy and will-power that allows you to work harder in the office.

cwan• 17 years ago

As a sometimes follower of GTD, I also find dumping my to do's from my mind onto paper is remarkably energizing/motivating.

codexon• 17 years ago

Link to the full article bypassing blog spam.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/mu-rda092409....

The blog leaves out the bottom part where it mentions:

"Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself," she says.

req23• 17 years ago

Roy Baumeister has done a lot of the early work on ego depletion. Wikipedia has a good background of reading material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Perceval• 17 years ago

Studies have shown that willpower is linked to blood glucose levels, i.e. that sugar is the fuel for willpower:

http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/11/4/303

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/how-to-boost-your-w...

anamax• 17 years ago

"Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests"

Great. The diet for willpower (grazing) makes me fat.

mcxx• 17 years ago

Not really. Eat honey.

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

The study escapes me at the moment (it might be from a Dan Gilbert TED talk), but people who've just spent time on a difficult puzzle/task are also shown to have less willpower. It's not so much that we have a finite amount of willpower that we have a finite amount of cognitive resources that we can devote to various tasks, willpower being one of them.

edw5192• 17 years ago

After we used this cognitive task to deplete participants' self-regulatory capacity, they didn't exercise as hard as participants who had not performed the task.

This is science?

They used a subjective test of questionable applicability as a measure of a subjective metric of questionable importance to determine that a test group didn't perform as well (whatever that means) as a control group.

The only willpower needed here was to make it to the end of this pseudo-scientific article. Now that I have, I probably won't be able to complete any work for the rest of the day :-)

req23• 17 years ago

The Stroop test is a fairly standard and well-respected test. To claim otherwise takes a post with a lot more substance than the one you have offered.

Care to explain why the test or metric is subjective or questionable, or why you are qualified to declare such?

Until then, refrain with your indignant declamations.

edw5192• 17 years ago

Care to explain why the test or metric is subjective or questionable

OK, let's start with the fact that OP never defines "willpower", whatever that is and for which each of us probably has a different definition. This alone places all further study on a solid foundation of quicksand. Then, OP never explains the applicability or purpose or reciting color words in different colors.

why you are qualified

You mean any more than an "associate professor of kinesiology". I hold my years of experience completing projects in the trenches against her psych lab any day.

refrain with your indignant declamations

Not "indignant declamations" (whatever that means), just my opinion. Are you suggesting that people with opinions should refrain from expressing them in a discussion forum?

Honestly, if this was a wiki, this study would fail horribly in the "citing needed" test. And if it was in physics, biology, or any hard science, it would be laughed off the board. Are you suggesting that since it's psychology related, it deserves a free pass?

It took a lot of willpower to refrain from responding to your reply, but I had none left. Oooh, maybe OP is onto something after all.

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

I often think of my willpower like mana/eve/whatever in a video game. It's dreadful to watch it deplete so quickly at the 9-5.

actionjackson• 17 years ago

Use your gold to buy some potion then.

billswift• 17 years ago

I wrote a blog post http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/08/akrasia-as-reveale... , partially in response to a Less Wrong thread, where I wrote "Complaining about akrasia, the lack of will-power, to get done what you want to do, may show that your real preferences are not those you are claiming." So maybe what the research shows is that the participants have a limited amount of BS they are willing to put up with; they just want it to get over with rather than focusing on the rest of the study.

Estragon• 17 years ago

The will to complete a task is a state of mind. Talking about a "finite supply of willpower" implicitly treats willpower as a substance, rather than a computational state. It's like claiming that a computer has a "finite capacity to run emacs," and you're using this precious capacity up by playing video games.

akeefer• 17 years ago

See Perceval's comment above that links to studies showing that glucose levels influence willpower. In other words, it is basically a physical substance on some level.

joe_the_user2• 17 years ago

The thing about these studies is that while you can discover that one thing that is commonly thought-of as requiring willpower might indeed interfere with another such thing, the question of what that whole class of activities is has not been answered and indeed varies from person to person.

For one man, for example, approaching an attractive woman might require willpower while for another, it might just be a habitual response.

On the other hand, it's likely solving a difficult puzzle would requires resources on anyone's part.

This is a crucial concept and I hope that question of definition is worked on...

joe_the_user2• 17 years ago

And so why does this deserve a downmod?

jack7890• 17 years ago

Don't ALL of us have a finite supply?

keeptrying• 17 years ago

If you've really been working on a startup in your free time from your regular job then you'll be painfully aware that this is true.

Every friday, I try to plan a well balanced weekend so that my willpower to work on my startup is kept topped up after my regular job workweek. I do this by:

1. Planning for one activity during the weekend which I absolutely love to do: kiteboarding or watching football. Its usually good to have this on sunday so that you look forward to it during friday night and saturday. (Yes I've stopped going out on friday night.)

2. Recapping who my most likely paying customers are going to be. And writing out a list of bugs and features that I will work on to be able to acoomodate those users.

3. A list of UI (simple) and fun features which I can do when I start to get tired working.

The system seems to work but is not procrastination-proof. I think I still need to add:

1. A well stocked fridge.

2. A little more face time with my friends. (This is a great willpower rejuvenator.)

3. More time in the gym. Right now this is at 0.

Most of us have a finite supply of willpower

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