Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister Read Free Book Online Page A

on the second round. Consciously or unconsciously, they were conserving energy for the final push.
    Then Muraven tried another variation in the second round of the experiment. Before testing people’s perseverance, he informed them that they could win money by doing well. The cash worked wonders. People immediately found reserves to perform well. Watching the experimental subjects persevere, you’d never have known that their willpower had been depleted earlier. They were like marathoners who found a second wind once they caught sight of the prize waiting for them at the finish line.
    But suppose, upon reaching that prize, the marathoners were suddenly informed that the finish line was actually another mile down the road. That’s essentially what Muraven did to the people who won cash for their perseverance in the second round. He waited until after their stellar performance to inform them that they weren’t quite done yet—there’d be another round of perseverance tests. Since they hadn’t been warned ahead of time, they hadn’t conserved any energy, and it showed in their exceptionally bad performances. In fact, the better they had done in the second round, the worse they did in the third round. Now they were like marathoners who had started their closing kick too soon and were passed by everyone else as they limped toward the finish line.

Lessons from the Street and the Lab
    For all her bohemian transgressiveness, Amanda Palmer is thoroughly bourgeois in one respect. Ask her about willpower, and she will tell you that she has never had enough. “I don’t consider myself a disciplined person at all,” she says. But if you press her, she will concede that her six years as a living statue did strengthen her resolve.
    “The street performing gave me balls of steel,” she says. “Those hours on the box trained me to stay focused. Being a performer is about tying yourself to the post of the present moment and staying focused. I’m pretty much the worst when it comes to long-term strategic planning, but I have a really strong brand of work ethic and I’m a very disciplined one-thing person. If it’s just one project at a time, I can focus on it for hours.”
    That’s more or less what researchers discovered after studying thousands of people inside and outside the laboratory. The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons:
    1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
    2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.
    You might think you have one reservoir of self-control for work, another for dieting, another for exercise, and another for being nice to your family. But the radish experiment showed that two completely unrelated activities—resisting chocolate and working on geometry puzzles—drew on the same source of energy, and this phenomenon has been demonstrated over and over. There are hidden connections among the wildly different things you do all day. You use the same supply of willpower to deal with frustrating traffic, tempting food, annoying colleagues, demanding bosses, pouting children. Resisting dessert at lunch leaves you with less willpower to praise your boss’s awful haircut. The old line about the frustrated worker going home and kicking the dog jibes with the ego-depletion experiments, although modern workers generally aren’t so mean to their pets. They’re more likely to say something nasty to the humans in the household.
    Ego depletion affects even your heartbeat. When people in laboratory experiments exercise mental self-control, their pulse becomes more erratic; conversely, people whose normal pulse is relatively variable seem to have more inner energy available for self-control, because they do better on laboratory tests of perseverance than do people with steadier heartbeats. Other experiments have shown that chronic physical pain leaves people with a perpetual shortage of willpower because their minds are so depleted by the