

Willpower: It’s in Your Head (2011) - Evgeny
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/willpower-its-in-your-head.html

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zeteo
The best practical advice on willpower that I've read is from an old classic,
William James's _Principles of Psychology_. It's a long and dense chapter and
resuming it here doesn't do it any justice. But I will try anyway:

1\. Holding your attention fixed on an action eventually causes you to do that
action. E.g. try relaxing and imagining all the little motions and then the
final state of making a fist. Your hand will, after a few seconds, move of its
own accord and make a fist.

2\. The second part of willpower is to tolerate distractions and difficulties.
James's phrase is "I will have it even so". E.g.:

"Do the dishes"

"But the water is cold"

"I will have it even so"

"But there are so many"

"I will have it even so"

"But there's an interesting article on HN"

"I will have it even so"

Your mileage may vary (I'd certainly be interested in hearing back), but
personally I've been using this technique to do a number of unappealing but
necessary tasks without too much of a feeling of effort.

Regarding the article, I would propose that there are two kinds of willpower.
One is "tyrannical", where you simply force yourself to do something; this
feels like it requires effort, and is depletable. The other is more
"persuasive", using techniques similar to the one described above; it requires
more preliminary thought, but reduces or eliminates the feeling of effort and
is thus not depletable.

~~~
nopassrecover
A little off-topic, but does anyone know why Modafinil is so powerful on
willpower (i.e. capacity to power through things one doesn't care about)?
Anecdotally it's as though it removes all "willpower barriers" - those little
objections one uses to avoid doing things (e.g. "but the water is cold").

I initially put it down to it being used when people are sleep-deprived (as I
find willpower is easier when sleep-deprived) but it's even more effective
when rested.

~~~
nnq
Are you talking from personal experience or is Modafinil really known to be a
powerful willpower booster?

(If it's the first case you might start from it's mechanism of action and
figure out YOUR cause for "willpower barriers" and maybe find a better
solution for them...)

~~~
nopassrecover
I haven't found any medical studies, but it matches the experiences of myself,
others I've talked with, and online anecdotal sources.

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nnq
I seem to believe more and more that there are 2 kinds of willpower:

1\. "make yourself do something" type of willpower - and this type is
depleteable, finite because every time you use it you accumulate some kind of
latent stress, frustration

2\. "make/think yourself you WANT TO DO something", and then obviously do it
because you want to - this type is not depleateable and the more you believe
in it the more you have it (I think religious or mystical people tend to have
more of this - maybe this partly explains the amazing feats of some monks and
things like these...)

I believe more and more that "willpower" is an umbrella term that covers very
distinct concepts that we have not yet separated and that these (the ones
concluding for either "finite" or "infinite" willpower) studies will be later
looked upon as either wrong (some) or "unfalsifiable" (unable to prove they
are false) because they are too ambiguous, same as it happened to freudian
psychology and then it really went out of fashion never to came back in full
strength again...

~~~
cema
An interesting idea. Did you come up with it on your own or have you seen it
discussed somewhere? Any clinical studies, perhaps? Thanks!

~~~
nnq
These are mostly "personal intuitions" and should be take only as inspiration
and with a big grain of salt, as I gravitated towards this subject mainly from
a selfish interest for self improvement, I must admit. If I were a sociologist
I would've probably kept this ideas to myself, formulated a proper theory or
set of theories and designed experiments to prove or select the best theory...
but I'm not in the field so it's probably better to just pass the ball and let
someone with more skill in the field put it in the basket :)

The base of the ideas are Muraven's idea of "willpower as a muscle" and "not
as a skill" (google for his articles starting from '98
[http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=...](http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=mark+muraven+willpower)
), but I think (more like "my intuition says") he only got half of the problem
right: there's a "muscle" type of willpower (the "make yourself do smth"
willpower) and a "skill" type of willpower (the "make yourself want to do
something" type) and maybe his experiments just created the conditions that
favored people exerting the first type (I'll really have to reread his
articles to arrive at a "based" conclusion about this... like in... read more
than the abstracts and conclusions for some, shame on me :| ).

And the other source of the intuition is my recent _very_ unstructured
approach to try and understand some aspects of buddhist philosophy and
meditation...

(But again, I'm not in the field of sociology and the only contact with
academic research I had is a past "involvement" with clinical medical research
(surgery and oncology...) and some aspects of biomedical statistics, so this
really is not my field...)

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Evgeny
This is what I've been thinking since I've first read that willpower is
depletable: "Isn't it just a self-fulfilling prophecy? Don't I feel out of
willpower just because I'm convinced that it should be depleted by now because
of all things I've already done today?"

[http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Publications_files/Job...](http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Publications_files/Job,%20Dweck,%20%26%20Walton,%202010.pdf)

 _Much recent research suggests that willpower—the capacity to exert self-
control—is a limited resource that is depleted after exertion. We propose that
whether depletion takes place or not depends on a person’s belief about
whether willpower is a limited resource._

~~~
nopassrecover
I think (and this could be self-limiting) that powering through a lack of
motivation is a limited process, but if you can line up the motivation (in the
fulfilling sense, not a pep-talk) then there's no real limit.

I think this lines up with Marissa Meyer's thoughts on why burnout isn't
"real", i.e. that burnout, in the pervasive "abandon all hope ye who enter"
form, is not over-exertion but under-motivation. This matches my own
experience where I feel energised by working hard on things I care about, and
worn out by working even trivially on things I don't.

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yskchu
I recommend the book "The power of habit", written by Charles Duhigg, a NYT
bestseller. WIt contains many years of academic research on psychology, and
explains not only habit, but willpower.

Also, watch this video.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIuahuKtim4>

And here's the book:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-
Business/dp/14000...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-
Business/dp/1400069289)

~~~
nnq
Nice series of videos (for those with not enough willpower to read the book
;)... )

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stephengillie
I believe willpower is tied to blood sugar. I have a more difficult time
focusing on difficult problems and getting started on projects when my blood
sugar is low. I think many people incorrectly believe the concept of "blood
sugar levels" is something only diabetics have to worry about.

Our brains are using about 1/5 of the calories we eat, ~400 calories per day
for most of us. Most people are probably unaware of how their sugar-to-blood
ratio naturally varies during the day, in response to eating, exercise, sleep
patterns, etc -- but most of us have experienced feeling cranky and tired,
having a meal, and feeling much more decisive and energized. This is a good
example of how a meal raises one's blood sugar levels.

~~~
ksat
So if I keep drinking glucose every now and then would it benefit in keeping
my willpower up?

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tiredoffps
My willpower skill was built with NES games like Megaman 2 and Battletoads.
The first 2 stages in Battletoads was so fun...I tried so many times to beat
the bike stage so I could see the rest of the game. I was wrong, Battletoads
gets even harder after that. lol

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lists
If you ever encountered modern, continental European philosophy and found it
incomprehensible, one way to approach it would be reading this article a
little differently, shifting its emphasis and thinking about how effective
applications of language are rather than 'willpower' and its determination in
particular. The authors are providing evidence that it is indeed a fiction,
and its this power of fiction that a lot of European philosophy since the
early 20th century has been meditating on.

