Saturday morning I woke up with a mother of a hangover. I didn’t even drink that much but clearly this ‘age thing’ is no myth.
I rolled over to my fiancé. “Ugh I shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette. I feel sick. Why did you let me do that?”
“Because you would have just told me, ‘Jay, this is my treat. It’s the weekend and I want one so just leave me alone.”
Yea, I would have said that. “Ok, well I’m getting my life together this week.”
“I’ve heard that before”.
“I mean it.“
“You’ve been really weak lately.”
“Whoa. Weak?”
“Yea. Weak. Your attitude is weak. Your willpower is weak. You say you’re not going to do something – like not drink this Friday, but then you do. You complain about going to work. You complain you’re tired all the time. But we all are. You’re just having the wrong attitude about it.”
“Jeez. I was just saying that if you happen to make it rich, I’ll happily be a housewife and raise alpacas for us. Sorry. Didn’t think that was a sin or anything.”
“You know what I mean, Lauren.”
I rolled back over. He was right, of course. I have been weak. And I know that mindset is everything. But I feel so depleted all the time.
Now I’m going to tell you another story.
In 2014, psychology researcher Roy Baumeister presented a group of participants with an assortment of products including magazine, pens, candles, and t-shirts. This group was asked how often they used each of the products in the recent past.
A second group of participants was given a different task. They were presented with these same products but were asked to choose between two different options for each product.
In the next part of the experiment, participants from both groups were asked to dip their hands in icy water and hold it there for as long as they could bear. What the researchers discovered was that in the first group, the participants who did not have to make any choices held out longer than those in the second group.
In 2007, Roy Baumeister conducted another study which required people to regulate their thoughts. All participants spent several minutes listing whatever thoughts came into their minds. One group of the participants, however, were told that they could think about anything they wanted except a white bear. After the thought-listing exercise, participants were given a set of anagrams to solve. In reality they were unsolvable, yet they measured how long they kept trying before giving up. The people who had tried to suppress the white bear thoughts gave up significantly faster than people in the other conditions.
In 1998, Baumeister found that a mere five minutes of resisting the temptation to eat cookies and making oneself eat radishes instead reduced subsequent persistence on difficult puzzles from 21 minutes to 8 minutes
What do the results of these experiments have in common? Ego depletion. They were all measuring if doing something that required emotional, physical or mental self-control would make it harder to exert self control later.
In 1990 Roy Baumeister and Mark Muraven pioneered the concept that self-control and willpower are finite resources.
According to Baumesiter, ‘We conducted a series of experiments to see what happened to self-control in two consecutive tasks. If self-control operates like an energy or strength, then the
first act of self-control will consume some quantity of this resource, and so the
person will face the second task with a diminished capacity to engage in self-control.”
So after a long day of practicing self-control, i.e.: not telling your boss what you really think, eating an apple for that mid-afternoon snack even though you wanted chips, going to the gym this morning even though you wanted to sleep in, your self-control has run out and you’re left worn out, tired and irritable. By the end, or even the middle of the day, we just don’t’ have the self-control to handle minor inconveniences. And that’s when we blow up. That’s when we overanalyze small moments, feel oppressed by menial tasks, and just hate everyone around us.
So what can we do about it? Today, countless studies have been tested that and found there’s a few things that help reset our pool of willpower.
Replenishment
In these studies, after having the participants partake in an activity that required self-regulation, the researchers had them watch a video of stand-up comedy. In other studies, they surprised them with a participation gift (a gift card or actual cash). After the gifts or the comedy show, they asked them to perform another task that required self-regulation. This time, they didn’t do worse. It seemed their pool of willpower had gone up again.
They even did better than participants who were given a brief rest period between tasks.
Positive emotions also seem to have some value for replenishing the self’s stock of energy and its capacity for self-regulation.
In 2000, Baumeister conducted several studies to assess the effects of positive affect on the depleted self. These followed the usual procedure of having participants engage in two consecutive, seemingly unrelated acts of self-control. In between the two, however, some participants received an induction of positive or negative mood. The people who were put into a positive mood showed less evidence of ego depletion, suggesting that the good emotional state helped counteract the depleting effect of the first task
So How Are We Going To Apply This To Our Life
First, just being conscious that ego depletion is what’s causing you to make poor decisions, not feel like doing daily tasks and just generally causing your apathy will help you a lot.
At 1pm, when you really feel that willpower is depleted, go treat yourself. Take a twenty minute walk around the park. Watch a clip from your favorite movie on YouTube. Read some articles on Words of Women 🙂
Before you send an email that you didn’t really feel like reading through for errors, go take a coffee break. Before you go the next hour-long meeting, chat with your coworker. Give yourself some pleasure!
