Psychology Archipelago

Willpower, Fact or Fiction?

Is willpower a fact or fiction? Although this question may seem obvious to some, there have been some popular news organizations that have recently questioned the credibility of the idea of willpower, such as Vox. There have even been popular youtube videos such as "Willpower is for Losers" which have gotten over 3.5 million views from the channel "What I've Learned." So, is it true?

This has been a question that has been on my mind for a while now. I just finished a half-ironman with barely a month worth of training. I ended the race 10 minutes before the cut off time for getting a DNF, and with a bloody knee from falling off the bike (hurrah for adrenaline!).  It was one of the proudest moments of my life. Of course, this is no David Goggins feat, but the training and finishing the race has me wondering whether the idea that willpower is a myth is true. 

The idea that willpower is a myth is dubbed "resource depletion." It is the idea that willpower is a limited resource, which we run out of. Our brain is like a muscle; it tires out from repeated uses of willpower. So what does the science say about this? It turns out that for the past twenty years, this has been the widely accepted theory on willpower. 

It started with the Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice’s famous cookie experiment on willpower. In the experiment, they placed chocolate cookies and radishes in a room and asked participants to pick only one to eat. They then gave a puzzle designed to be impossible to solve. By measuring the time it took the participants to quit, they were able to measure their willpower. The cookie group, fueled by chocolatey goodness, gave up after 19 minutes, similar to a control group of people not given any food. By contrast, the group that ate the radishes gave up after a measly 8 minutes. People who chose the radishes clear must have used up their limited willpower! At least, that’s what the study concluded. 
However, recent studies have started to question this theory. A recent meta-analysis has shown that the effect of resource is limited or possibly even non-existent. It seems that the cause of resource depletion could be placebo. A study demonstrated this effect by showing that only people who bought into the theory of resource depletion showed significant improvement from glucose. On the other hand, those who did not believe in resource depletion “exhibited high levels of self-control performance with or without sugar boosts.” 

The science might change. But let’s take our analogy to its natural conclusion. If our brain is a muscle, then while it gets tired, it also gets stronger by repeated uses. 
Could you resist this?
In my personal experience, you get motivation from successfully doing the work rather than waiting for some miraculous surge of energy. Continuing the analogy, burnout is similar to overtraining. Burnout can be a sign that we have pushed our brains too far, but we have to be careful. Just because your body is sore doesn’t mean you overtrained, just as if you are a bit tired you haven’t overworked. Of course, if these symptoms persist, we have to take note of it. But while we can overwork our brains, we have to use it to get stronger. I felt this during all of my training for the half-ironman. If I trained the day before, it became easier to train the next day. But I had to drag myself to the gym if I even missed one training session. I'd take the mentality of “I skipped the last one, I’ll do it tomorrow.” Lack of self-control is a direct result of inaction. 

Instead of blaming genetics, limited willpower, or circumstances, sometimes you have to just act, without thinking too much. As David Goggins has said, “you have to train to overtrain.”