Power your will
New studies suggest that our
levels of self-control are not so much a budget we have to eke out, but a
renewable resource that can be powered up as we go along
It has been a long day.
You've been squinting at spreadsheets since 9 am, but your boss keeps
interrupting to ask how you're getting on and colleagues insist on offloading
their own problems. By 6 pm you're exhausted. It's a miracle that you even make
it home before hitting the wine and chocolate.
Psychologists used to have
a convincing explanation for why days like these leave us weak in the face of
temptation. Willpower is a limited resource that, like the cash you work so
hard for, will eventually run out. Use it all up during the day and there'll be
none left by dinner time.
This much has been received
wisdom in psychology circles for nearly 20 years. Recently, though, that
certainty has begun to fade. According to a series of newer findings, our
levels of self-control are not so much a budget we have to eke out, but a
renewable resource that can be powered up as we go along. “Instead of thinking
of willpower as the amount of petrol in a car, think of it as the car's
battery,“ says Krishna Savani at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
“The more you drive, the more the battery gets charged, and the longer it will
last.“ In this view, your powers of concentration are only limited if you think
they are. It raises the intriguing possibility that, if we can get into the
right mindset, superhuman powers of motivation and self-control could be ours
for the taking.
More than 40 years ago, the
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck became fascinated by differences in the way
that children dealt with setbacks at school. While some were quick to quit, others
simply redoubled their efforts. The quitters, blamed a lack of ability and felt
that they would never make the grade. The more determined children, by
contrast, were more motivated by learning itself than by getting good grades,
and they tended to see ability as fuelled by effort, rather than set in stone.
Resistance is fruitful
Dweck refers to these as
fixed and growth mindsets respectively, and believes that our mindset dictates
how we tackle problems throughout our lives. Even with a growth mindset,
though, no one succeeds without self-discipline. This harsh fact of life led
Dweck and others to take a fresh look at what willpower is and why some of us
have more of it than others.
We have known for some time
that the ability to delay gratification in pursuit of longer-term goals has a
big impact on our lives. Back in the late1960s, Walter Mischel first tested the
powers of 4 to 6-year-old children to resist sweets, in what has become a
classic psychology experiment. He placed a marshmallow in front of each child
and left the room for 15 minutes, telling them that if the sweet was still
there when he returned, they would be rewarded with two. Those who managed to
resist temptation long enough to get double helpings went on to be more
successful later in life, education and their careers.
According to the idea that
willpower is limited known as ego-depletion theory the difference in
people's ability to stay strong in the face of temptation can be explained by
the amount of fuel in our mental reserves.Psychologist Roy Baumeister came up
with the idea in1998 after a series of experiments. When people were asked to
concentrate on solving a difficult maze or a series of anagrams, their
performance on a second mentally taxing task dropped compared with control
volunteers whose initial task was easy. Something similar happened when rather
than mental exercise, the exertion takes the form of resisting temptation. In
one early study, people told to ignore freshly baked cookies in favour of
radishes subsequently showed less persistence at a tricky task that involved
drawing geometric shapes.
Baumeister and his
colleagues suggested that the currency of this effect is glucose, which gets
used up faster when our brains have to work hard. In their experiments, giving
participants a high-sugar drink between challenging tasks prevents ego
depletion.
Seeing willpower and
motivation as being more about mindset than blood sugar level might help clear
the confusion. In 2010, Dweck and her colleagues Veronika Job at the University
of Zurich and Gregory Walton, also at Stanford, repeated Baumeister's experiments,
but this time asked volunteers beforehand whether they considered willpower to
be a limited resource depleted by effort. They fo und that those who believed
that willpower is finite showed the usual egodepletion effect, whereas those
who believed that willpower is potentially unlimited showed no signs of running
out of steam in the second task.
Further studies have
discovered that you can improve willpower just by telling people that such a
thing is possible. When people were shown statements such as “it is energising
to be fully absorbed with a demanding mental task“, they continued to improve
through a tough 20-minute memory challenge. Another group that was told
willpower is limited stopped improving halfway through the task.
Meanwhile, other research
has directly challenged the idea that glucose is the source from which
willpower springs. A study by Matthew Sanders at the University of Georgia and
Martin Hagger at Curtin University in Australia have shown that when volunteers
gargled a sugary drink before or during a mental challenge, it prevented ego
depletion, even if they spat the drink out. This suggests that merely the
suggestion of a fuel top-up can keep mental exhaustion at bay.
This is tricky for the
ego-depletion theory to explain because gargling doesn't allow time for glucose
to be metabolised. Baumeister, though, isn't too fazed by this line of
research. “Usually what is in the mouth is soon in the belly, so tasting
glucose signals that it is fine to allocate more resources now, as they will be
replenished,“ he says.
Baumeister recently revised
his theory to take this into account. In a book chapter published last year
with his colleague Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota, he argues that
while there is a limited resource behind self-control, it rarely, if ever, runs
dry. According to the revised theory, whether we are able to maintain
self-control comes down to our judgement about how much willpower juice we have
left and how we choose to allocate these reserves.
No more excuses
A new study by researchers
in India raises the possibility that some cultures may have done just that.
Krishna Savani teamed up with Veronika Job to study volunteers in India because
of the widely held belief here that mental effort isn't draining but energising.
They point to the common practice of teaching children to focus on a candle in
a dark room for 10 to 20 minutes without blinking or looking around. Reflecting
this cultural attitude, the researchers cite figures suggesting that Indian
kids tend to spend more time in class and on homework than in many Western
nations. This is perhaps, at least in part, because mental effort is seen as
purely beneficial.
Savani and Job wanted to
see if this cultural belief would influence the way ego depletion works in India.
If prompting people to think of exerting self-control as energising eliminates
the ego-depletion effect, then perhaps people in India might be immune to ego
depletion. When they repeated Baumeister's experiments with hundreds of Indian
participants, they actually showed a “reverse ego depletion“ effect. When the
first task was harder, they tended to perform better on the second task.
“We no longer have an
excuse for being lazy, saying `Oh, I have worked so hard, I need a break',“ he
says. “No matter how mentally tired you are, you always have mental capacity to
concentrate on and work on a given task.“ For his part, Baumeister told us that
this new “profoundly important“ research from India is “truly fascinating“ and
he acknowledged that “if born out by further work [it] could really bring about
major revisions to our understanding“.
In short, no matter how
much you have to do, you probably have more willpower reserves than you think.
Your chances of future success and happiness may depend on learning to tap into
them. No pressure, then.
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Christian
Jarrett 2017, Tribune Content Agency
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