Can you resist the lure of the midmorning trip to the vending machine? What about that jar of candy you know is sitting on that intern’s desk? Or in the middle of putting together that report, can you keep yourself from punching over to that open browser window to check celebrity gossip?
Willpower is your brain’s ability to maintain attention even in the face of temptation, distraction, or discomfort. There are two schools of thought about willpower. One is that if you dig deep, you will always be able to find a bit more. The other is that when you run out of willpower, you are out, and at that point you need to do something to replenish the store.
Research supports both of these beliefs. Or, more precisely, some researchers believe that willpower is an unlimited resource and others think that it is a limited resource. One thing everybody agrees on is that willpower is a good thing. It’s been linked with stuff including “healthier interpersonal relationships, greater popularity, better mental health, more effective coping skills, reduced aggression, superior academic performance, as well as less susceptibility to drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, and eating disorders,” as Roy Baumeister and his Florida State University colleagues write in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Baumeister happens to be in the “finite resource” camp. And while willpower seems like it might be one of those skills, like creativity, that floats around in the human brain blowing raspberries at researchers’ attempts to pin it down, Baumeister believes that willpower is a whole lot more mechanistic than that. To him, willpower is all about sugar.
Do you remember back to this book’s section about sugar and a healthy breakfast? The slow drip of glucose in your brain becomes especially important when you get to school or to work and are faced with the choice to actually get things done or to surreptitiously surf celebrity news on the Huffington Post. Most of the brain continues to function moderately okay as glucose gets a little low or a little high. Not willpower. Baumeister shows that when the going gets tough, the tough require sugar—scores on tests that require sustained attention (i.e., willpower) plummet when brain glucose is low, and scores on difficult (but not mundane) driving simulation tests are lower when glucose is lower. In fact, in a series of experiments Baumeister lays out a pretty persuasive case for glucose as the currency of willpower, summing it up like this: “First, measurements of blood glucose showed significant drops following acts of self-control, primarily among participants who worked hardest. Second, low glucose after an initial self-control task was linked to poor self-control on a subsequent task. Third, experimental manipulations of glucose reduced or eliminated self-control decrements stemming from an initial self-control task.”
In other words, self-control burns glucose; once available stores of glucose are burned, there is less self-control; and giving glucose to someone who has burned his or her store reinvigorates self-control. If you are tempted to check the celebrity news instead of working, drink a Tropicana Twister (4.38 grams of sugar per ounce!).
Then there’s the other camp—the researchers who believe that willpower is an unlimited resource and that even without the influence of syrupy drinks you can dig deep to find more. Finding researchers publicly playing out a difference of opinion through competing journal articles is like science gold. And it’s hard to read the following statement by a Stanford research group headed by Carol Dweck and published in 2010, just after Baumeister’s article, as anything but a gauntlet lobbed in the general direction of the Florida group: “Much recent research suggests that willpower—the capacity to exert self-control—is a limited resource that is depleted after exertion. We propose that whether depletion takes place or not depends on a person’s belief about whether willpower is a limited resource.”
It’s a nifty assertion, but where’s the beef? The “beef” is, like Baumeister’s claims, shown in a series of experiments. In the first, Dweck and her Stanford colleagues showed that for some people, willpower is depleted after a brain-draining task, whereas others can go on to the next challenge with no willpower fatigue. The difference between these two groups is what they believe. For people who believe that willpower is limited, willpower is limited, but for people who believe that willpower is unlimited, it is unlimited.
The second study manipulated what people believed about willpower and then tested them. Again, people taught to believe in the unlimited resource theory could always find more willpower, whereas people taught that the tank could run dry burned out after the first difficult task.
Dweck’s third experiment showed that people in both camps found this task equally exhausting—it’s just that people who considered willpower unlimited didn’t let it exhaust them.
Finally, the fourth study looked out into the world at the lives of people with these two theories of willpower. A Web-based questionnaire assessed students’ opinion of willpower and asked them to list a personal goal. Then later, during exam week, the questionnaire asked how often students had watched TV instead of studying, how often they had consumed high-fat or high-sugar foods, and how they had progressed toward their personal goal. You can probably guess the punch line: students who believed that willpower is finite had eaten more junk food, watched more TV, and worked less toward their goal than people who thought willpower is infinite.
Now that you’ve seen both arguments, which do you believe? Do you believe Dweck at Stanford or Baumeister at Florida State? Is willpower limited and based on glucose, or is willpower limited only by your belief? If you need to buckle down and finish that project while inhibiting the urge to check celebrity gossip, do you think it’s better to dig deep or drink a soda? If you believe you can always find more willpower, you’ll find it. If not, boosting your willpower may require sucking down a Pepsi and dealing with the consequences. Your waistline will thank you for trying the first strategy first.