Willpower as emotion

A recent study that involved over 2,000 participants attempted to reproduce the experiment that led to the ego-depletion theory but found no evidence of ego depletion.

Scholars looked into a 2010 meta-analysis of nearly 200 experiments and discovered that the meta-analysis showed a "publication bias" in which studies that produced contradictory evidence were not included.

The idea of ego depletion may have caught on because it satisfies a need to justify why we sometimes do things we know we shouldn't.

Instead of looking for an excuse, we should perhaps accept that we are fragile, distractible beings and cut ourselves some slack. Maybe our waning energy and wandering minds are trying to tell us something.

People having a high level of self-control experience better relationships and have higher achievement levels. Lack of self-control is associated with social conflict and low-grade academic performance.

Example: While following a diet regime, a person spends a lot of willpower the whole day trying to avoid junk food, but by the end of the day, all his mental energy has been exhausted, and there is no self-control left, resulting in snacking on unhealthy food.

Many emotional and physical factors contribute to ego depletion, like:

• Emotional distress
• Struggling to learn something new
• Mental fatigue due to anxiety
• Low levels of blood sugar
• Too much choice
• Conflicting beliefs and actions (cognitive dissonance)
• Heart Rate
• Hormonal imbalance
• Being young and immature.

Successful dieters usually declare certain foods to be completely out of bounds, or allowed only during occasional designated cheat meals, rather than expecting themselves to eat everything in moderation.

In practice, adding too many suggestions for living well will create a conflict with each other. 

Suggestions are almost always given on their own, without including a wider context. You can read about why exercise, reading or meditating are good on their own, but rarely find information about how they trade-off against each other.

There are two different types of feeling tired.

1. The feeling you have as you're about to start an activity. Once you actually do it, your mood changes and you find you're glad you did it.
2. The second kind persists throughout the activity itself. You find you struggle with pushing through more than five minutes of it. If you feel like this for weeks at a time, your habits are probably unsustainable.

• A 2011 survey found that 27 % of respondents identified a lack of willpower as the primary factor keeping them from reaching their goals. 
• One study found that students who exhibited greater self-discipline had better grades, higher test scores, and were more likely to be admitted to a competitive academic program. 
• The study also found that when it came to academic success, self-control was a more important factor than IQ scores.
• A health study found that people who were rated as having high levels of self-control during childhood continued to have high levels of physical and mental health in adulthood.
• Research has found that self-control is a limited resource. In the long-term, exercising self-control tends to strengthen it. 
  

A lack of willpower is not the only factor that affects goal attainment.

• There needs to be a clear goal and the motivation to change. Having an unclear or overly general goal and insufficient motivation can lead to failure.
• You need to monitor your actions daily towards the achievement of the goal.
• You need to have willpower.

Working well is not about maximizing every waking moment of the day, in order to get more done. And the focus on maximizing time may actually diminish our creativity.

Instead, try identifying and focusing on the few hours of the day you are most productive.

To achieve sustainable productivity habits, it’s best to build up with easily achievable tasks.

Small chunks of accomplishment will amount to something big eventually.

• Factors such as negative mood, fatigue and alcohol play a large part in self-control failure.
• Previous effort is one especially well studied factor that decreases self-control. All else being equal, a second self-control attempt after an initial one is more likely to fail than one that comes after a relatively restful period when no self-control was exercised.

• Self-control is indeed a resource, but a renewable, psychological one.
• Goals that are motivated from within—for reasons that are personally important to us—are more likely to succeed than those that are motivated from without.
• Succeeding at self-control is more about the desire rather than the ability to do so.

As losing resources is more likely to cause burnout than gaining resources is to mitigate it, dealing with the negative aspects is more beneficial than using positive “band-aid” fixes. You want to drive down uncertainty and inefficiency to ensure that you aren’t doing unnecessary tasks and minimize your emotional exhaustion. To do that:

1. Create a chart and place your major goal at its top, followed by layers of very specific subgoals needed to attain the major goal.
2. Find and fix the inefficiencies in your goal hierarchy.
3. Determine the attainability of each goal.

• Chronic fatigue
• Insomnia
• Impaired concentration/ forgetfulness
• Loss of appetite
• Anxiety
• Increased illness
• Physical symptoms
• Chest pain
• Shortness of breath
• Dizziness
• Gastrointestinal pain
• Depression
• Interpersonal problems.

Long term change is better served by building better habits, than by forcing your willpower. 

You will choose the apple over the cake for a number of times ... and then give up. Building a habit to start the day by going to the gym will work better.

 ...to familiar environmental cues. 

They form when you engage in a behavior repeatedly in the presence of consistent stimuli.

We're usually tempted to spend breaks doing things that are convenient but aren’t truly restful (internet shopping, browsing the latest news, etc.) 

But brief work breaks are only genuinely rejuvenating when they give you the chance to fully switch off. Any kind of activity that involves willpower or concentration, even if it’s not in a work context, is only going to add to your fatigue levels.

The timing of our breaks makes a difference.

Although it may be tempting to wait until we’re flagging later in the day before allowing ourselves a short break, we actually respond better to breaks in the morning - it seems we need to have some fuel in the tank to benefit from a re-fill.