Vishen Lakhiani examines whether willpower depletes like a battery. Roy Baumeister's famous sugar experiment suggested it does, but Evan Carter's analysis of 200 studies found publication bias undermining the evidence. Carol Dweck showed depletion effects vanish when people don't believe willpower is limited.
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After a typical hard day at work, I'd sit down on the couch and I'd veg for hours, keeping company with Netflix and a cold pint of ice cream. Now I knew that the ice cream and all that sitting weren't really good for me, but I justified my actions by telling myself that I felt spent. Ego depletion theory, which I had never heard of at the time, would seem to perfectly explain my after work indulgences. In 2011, the psychologist Roy Baumeister published the book Willpower. It soon became an international bestseller. The book cited one of Baumeister's most notable experiments on ego depletion, which showed a seemingly miraculous way to restore willpower by consuming sugar. The study claimed that participants who had sipped sugar sweetened lemonade demonstrated increased self control and stamina on difficult tasks. Now people love this theory. I mean, after all, who wouldn't want to hop on board with the idea that a delicious drink or also had psychological benefits? Recently, however, scholars like Evan Carter at the University of Miami have challenged Baumeister's findings. Carter looked at nearly 200 experiments that concluded eco depletion was real and discovered what's called a publication bias in which studies that produce contradictory evidence were not included. When factoring in the results of those studies, he concluded not only that there was no firm evidence supporting the theory, but that some of the more magical aspects, like the idea that sugar acts as a willpower juicer, have been fully debunked. New studies show how a sip of lemonade can improve performance, but not for the reason Baumeister believed. Rather, the bump in performance had nothing to do with the sugar in the drink and everything to do with the thoughts in our heads. In a study conducted by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues, Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in test subjects who believed their willpower was a limited resource. It wasn't the sugar in the lemonade, but the belief itself that gave participants the extra boost. Now, many people still promote this idea of ego depletion, perhaps unaware of the evidence calling the theory into question. But if Dweck's conclusions are correct, then perpetuating the idea is doing real harm. If ego depletion is essentially caused by self defeating thoughts and not by any biological limitations, then the idea makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we should otherwise persist. Persist. Michael Inslich, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience offers up an alternative view of willpower. He believes willpower is not a finite resource, but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don't run out of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what's happening to us and how we feel. After looking at the evidence, I agree with his conclusion, and I think that changing our mindset about our temperament is a key to becoming indistractable.
