Willpower Is A Muscle

When was the last lime you tested your willpower? It seems like some people manage to resist their temptations and make the right decisions without a great deal of effort. Almost like it’s some sort of genetic gift. But then we also see lots of radical transformations and lives completely changed; hence, it must be a learnable skill. The truth is that it’s much more complex than that. We should explore our habits to understand how to develop self-discipline and make it consistent. Let’s have a look at this fascinating experiment.

DON’T Eat The Cookies!!

Everyone who walked into the room where the experiment was being conducted at Case Western Reserve University agreed on one thing: The cookies smelled delicious. They had just come out of the oven and were piled in a bowl, oozing with chocolate chips. On the table next to the cookies was a bowl of radishes. All day long, hungry students walked in, sat in front of the two foods, and submitted, unknowingly, to a test of their willpower that would completely change our understanding of how self-discipline works. Sixty-seven undergraduates were recruited and told to skip a meal. One by one, the undergrads sat in front of the two bowls.

“The point of this experiment is to test taste perceptions,” a researcher told each student, which was untrue. The point was to force students—but only some students—to exert their willpower. To that end, half the undergraduates were instructed to eat the cookies and ignore the radishes; the other half were told to eat the radishes and ignore the cookies. Ignoring cookies is hard—it takes willpower. Ignoring radishes, on the other hand, hardly requires any effort at all. “Remember,” the researcher said, “eat only the food that has been assigned to you.” Then she left the room.

How Your Willpower Gets Depleted

Once the students were alone, they started munching. The cookie eaters were in heaven. The radish eaters were in agony. They were miserable forcing themselves to ignore the warm cookies. Through the two-way mirror, the researchers watched one of the radish eaters pick up a cookie, smell it longingly, and then put it back in the bowl. Another grabbed a few cookies, put them down, and then licked melted chocolate off his fingers.

After five minutes, the researcher reentered the room. The radish eaters’ willpower had been thoroughly taxed by eating the bitter vegetable and ignoring the treats; the cookie eaters had hardly used any of their self-discipline.

“We need to wait about fifteen minutes for the sensory memory of the food you ate to fade,” the researcher told each participant. To pass the time, she asked them to complete a puzzle. It looked fairly simple: trace a geometric pattern without lifting your pencil from the page or going over the same line twice. If you want to quit, the researcher said, ring the bell. She implied the puzzle wouldn’t take long.

In truth, the puzzle was impossible to solve.

This puzzle wasn’t a way to pass time; it was the most important part of the experiment. It took enormous willpower to keep working on the puzzle, particularly when each attempt failed. The scientists wondered, would the students who had already expended their willpower by ignoring the cookies give up on the puzzle faster? In other words, was willpower a finite resource?

From behind their two-way mirror, the researchers watched. The cookie eaters, with their unused reservoirs of self-discipline, started working on the puzzle. In general, they looked relaxed. One of them tried a straightforward approach, hit a roadblock, and then started again. And again. And again. Some worked for over half an hour before the researcher told them to stop. On average, the cookie eaters spent almost nineteen minutes apiece trying to solve the puzzle before they rang the bell.

The radish eaters, with their depleted willpower, acted completely different. They muttered as they worked. They got frustrated. One complained that the whole experiment was a waste of time. Some of them put their heads on the table and closed their eyes. One snapped at the researcher when she came back in. On average, the radish eaters worked for only about eight minutes, 60 percent less time than the cookie eaters, before quitting. When the researcher asked afterward how they felt, one of the radish eaters said he was “sick of this dumb experiment.”

Turn Willpower Into A Habit

By making people use a little bit of their willpower to ignore cookies, they had been put into a state where they were willing to quit much faster. There’s been more than two hundred studies on this idea since then, and they’ve all found the same thing. Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things. If you want to do something that requires willpower—like going to the gym after work—you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day. If you use it up too early on tedious tasks like writing emails or filling out complicated and boring expense forms, all the strength may be gone by the time you get home.

To prevent your willpower from getting depleted you have to organize your day and develop habits with highly desirable rewards that will help you push past the pain and get things done. Self-discipline can be developed just like the muscles in your body. Some great strategies can be found in the amazing book by Charles Duhigg “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change” where this and other experiments are described, as well as case studies explaining how habits work, and how to change them.