Willpower

role model.

Willpower Workouts
    To social scientists, the idea of strengthening willpower didn’t seem very promising at first glance. After all, the ego-depletion experiments in Baumeister’s lab showed that exertions of willpower left people with less self-control. Choosing radishes over chocolate chip cookies caused an immediate depletion of willpower, and there was no reason to assume the same sort of exercise could eventually lead to more strength in the long term.
    Still, if there was any possibility of strengthening willpower, the payoff could be enormous. Once the first ego-depletion research findings were published, the research group huddled to discuss ways of increasing willpower. Mark Muraven, the graduate student who had designed and carried out the first experiments to show ego depletion, discussed strength-building exercises with his advisers, Baumeister and Dianne Tice. Because no one had any idea what might work, they decided on a scattershot approach. They would assign different participants different exercises, and see if any new strength developed. One obvious problem was that some people would start out with more self-control than others, just as some athletes would start out with bigger muscles and more stamina. To control for that, the researchers would have to do the equivalent of measuring individual changes in muscle power and stamina. They would first bring college students into the lab for an initial baseline test of self-control, followed by a quick depleting task to see how much it declined. Then everyone would be sent home to perform some kind of exercise on their own for a couple of weeks, followed by another round of tests in the lab. Different exercises were chosen to test various notions of what was involved in “character building”—or, more precisely, which mental resources had to be fortified. Did acts of self-control deplete you because of the energy needed to override one response in favor of another? Or was it the energy required to monitor your behavior? Or the energy to alter your state of mind?
    One group of students was sent home with instructions to work on their posture for the next two weeks. Whenever they thought of it, they were to try to stand up straight or sit up straight. Since most of these (or any) college students were used to casually slouching, the exercises would force them to expend energy overriding their habitual response. A second group was used to test the notion that willpower was exhausting because of the energy required for self-monitoring. These students were told to record whatever they ate for the next two weeks. They didn’t have to make any changes to their diet, though it was possible that some of them might have been shamed into a few adjustments. ( Hmm. Monday, pizza and beer. Tuesday, pizza and wine. Wednesday, hot dogs and Coke. Maybe it would look better if I ate a salad or an apple now and then. ) A third group was used to check the effects of altering one’s state of mind. They were instructed to strive for positive moods and emotions during the two weeks. Whenever they found themselves feeling bad, these students should strive to cheer themselves up. Sensing a potential winner, the researchers elected to make this group twice as large as the other groups, so as to get the most statistically reliable results.
    But the researchers’ hunch was dead wrong. Their favorite strategy turned out to do no good at all. The large group that practiced controlling emotions for two weeks showed no improvement when the students returned to the lab and repeated the self-control tests. In retrospect, this failure seems less surprising than it did back then. Emotion regulation does not rely on willpower. People cannot simply will themselves to be in love, or to feel intense joy, or to stop feeling guilty. Emotional control typically relies on various subtle tricks, such as changing how one thinks about the problem at hand, or distracting oneself. Hence, practicing emotional control does not strengthen your willpower.
    But other exercises do help, as demonstrated by the groups in the experiment that worked on their posture and recorded everything they ate. When they returned to the lab after two weeks, their scores on the self-control tests went up, and the improvement was significantly higher by comparison with a control group (which did no exercises of any kind during the two weeks). This was a striking result, and with careful analyses of the