Until recently, the prevailing psychological theory proposed that willpower resembled a kind of battery. You might start the day with full strength, but each time you have to control your thoughts, feelings or behaviour, you zap that battery’s energy.
Without the chance to rest and recharge, those resources run dangerously low, making it far harder to maintain your patience and concentration, and to resist temptation. Drawing on the Freudian term for the part of the mind that is responsible for reining in our impulses, the process was known as “ego depletion”.
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At first, the ego-depletion theory was the dominant model on how effort works. It argues that willpower was a resource that could be depleted. Like a muscle, it could also be strengthened.
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