Do You Have Willpower? Then Maybe You Should Read This

I have never been able to stick to any dieting schedule. I try though—every Friday while buying the weekly groceries, I will myself not to pick up cookies and shortbread. Come Wednesday, I am back at the local mom-and-pop, sheepish and defeated.

I thought my willpower – or at least what little of it there ever was – had withered away. Much to my chagrin, this article tells me, science is discovering that the very idea of willpower is withering.

For the longest time, the thinking was that people with a lot of self-control—the ones who can resist temptation majestically—are good at “inhibiting their impulses”. It was believed that they have a lot of willpower and know how to use it. 

This article explores how this idea that self-control is dependent on willpower is now looking like a myth. For years, psychologists used the same tests to measure willpower and self-control but today tests that create internal, cognitive conflicts are used to measure self-control.

Curiously, many recent studies have stumbled upon a paradox. One study discovered that people who claimed to be best at self-control were hardly using it at all; another found out that students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. In fact, students who experienced fewer temptations overall were more successful. Moreover, the students who had exercised more self-control reported feeling drained.

The article continues to explore several other facets of willpower and has a nice list of what works and what does not when it comes to self-control.

In effect, new studies are suggesting that the concept of willpower as a finite resource needs to be re-examined. By treating willpower as something absolute and unshakable, we are easily blaming our lack of willpower for our failings. This, as we all have experienced sometime or the other, leads to feelings of inhibition, low self-esteem and shame, and holds us back from actually finding solutions to our weaknesses.