Willpower

results in slower brain circuitry is fascinating to neuroscientists, but for the rest of us it would be more useful to detect ego depletion without covering your skull with wires and electrodes. What are the noticeable symptoms—something to warn you that your brain is not primed for control before you get into a fight with your partner or polish off the quart of Häagen-Dazs? Until recently, researchers couldn’t offer much help. In dozens of studies, they looked unsuccessfully for telltale emotional reactions, turning up either contradictory results or nothing at all. Being depleted didn’t seem to consistently make people feel depressed or angry or discontented. In 2010, when an international team of researchers combed through the results of more than eighty studies, they concluded that ego depletion’s effects on behavior were strong, large, and reliable, but that the effects on subjective feelings were considerably weaker. People in depleted condition reported more fatigue and tiredness and negative emotions, but even those differences weren’t large. The results made ego depletion seem like an illness with no symptoms, a condition that didn’t “feel” like anything.
    But now it turns out that there are signals of ego depletion, thanks to some new experiments by Baumeister and a team headed by his longtime collaborator, Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. In these experiments, while depleted persons (once again) didn’t show any single telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier, and disturbing pictures made them more frightened and upset. Ice-cold water felt more painful to them than it did to people who were not ego-depleted. Desires intensified along with feelings. After eating a cookie, the people reported a stronger craving to eat another cookie—and they did in fact eat more cookies when given a chance. When looking at a gift-wrapped package, they felt an especially strong desire to open it.
    So if you’d like some advance warning of trouble, look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings. If you find yourself especially bothered by frustrating events, or saddened by unpleasant thoughts, or even happier about some good news—then maybe it’s because your brain’s circuits aren’t controlling emotions as well as usual. Now, intense feelings can be quite pleasurable and are an essential part of life, and we’re not suggesting that you strive for emotional monotony (unless you aspire to Mr. Spock’s Vulcan calm). But be aware of what these feelings can mean. If you’re trying to resist temptation, you may find yourself feeling the forbidden desires more strongly just when your ability to resist them is down. Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.
    The problem can be particularly acute for people struggling with addiction. Researchers have long noticed that cravings are especially strong during withdrawal. More recently they’ve noticed that lots of other feelings intensify during withdrawal. During withdrawal, the recovering addict is using so much willpower to break the habit that it’s likely to be a time of intense, prolonged ego depletion, and that very state will make the person feel the desire for the drug all the more strongly. Moreover, other events will also have an unusually strong impact, causing extra distress and creating further yearnings for the cigarette or drink or drug. It’s no wonder relapses are so common and addicts feel so weird when they quit. Long before psychologists identified ego depletion, the British humorist Sir A. P. Herbert nicely described the conflicting set of symptoms:
    “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again!” he announced. “God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”

The Mystery of the Dirty Socks
    In the 1970s, the psychologist Daryl Bem set about trying to distinguish conscientious people from others by making up a list of behaviors. He assumed he’d find a positive correlation between “turns in school assignments on time” and “wears clean socks,” because both would stem from the underlying trait of conscientiousness. But when he collected data from students at Stanford, where he taught, he was