Book Summary: Willpower by Baumeister, Tierney

Here is a skeptical reply to Baumeister on willpower:

This idea has a visceral, compelling feel to it - it does feel like I'm tired and drained after making decisions - and the idea has received a tremendous amount of attention from scientific and lay communities alike, perhaps partially explaining the duo of scientist/journalist on the dust jacket.

There are a number of problems with the model, and in this post, I'll talk about one of them: the model has been falsified a number of times, including by research performed in the lab of the proponents of the model.

Note that one's perception of cognitive resource depletion matters.

The information that willpower is a limited resource which must be managed carefully is very useful, and I think it would change how many people make decisions.

It also has the potential to challenge the popular concept of laziness- if willpower isn't an infinite resource that comes out of thin air than it's not morally wrong to refuse to waste it on something, when you have a more important goal to direct it towards.

However, I think the medical information on blood glucose here is wrong. Metabolically healthy people can eat a reasonable quantity of high glycemic index/load foods, and never experience a low enough glucose crash to inhibit willpower later on even if they decide to transition all the way into a long term fast afterwards. Sure, abnormally low blood glucose inhibits willpower but not within the range of normal healthy glucose fluctuations but only in a person with mild reactive hypoglycemia- usually related to mild insulin resistance.

While a pathological condition, insulin resistance has become almost ubiquitous in the United States in the past few decades (the metabolic syndrome epidemic). Metabolic syndrome/insulin resistance is not actually caused by high glycemic index foods, it's symptoms are simply exasperated by them in the short term. Also, glycemic index of isolated foods is somewhat irrelevant because food combinations have very different combined properties. For example, a baked potato with butter causes glucose levels to rise much slower than a plain baked potato.

I would need to give a lot more information here to fully clarify the evidence behind this position, however it's somewhat tangential to this thread.

Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind – this is called the Zeigarnik effect. Completing the task (or making a plan to do so, the more specific the better) will cause your unconscious to stop nagging you with reminders.

That's the basis of the book Getting Things Done. He recommends doing all things that take two minutes immediately, but otherwise having an organized method off dealing with all issues, where it's all written down and planned, so no nagging is required. Everything is handled, and you know it is handled, so your brain doesn't have to nag you about it.

Excellent summary! I wish all link posters were as thorough.

A couple typos:

Eating foods like white bread, potatoes, white rise

=> "rice"

Conflicting goals cause increased worrying/rumination, decreased rumination

=> probably "motivation"

What are Glucose levels like in someone either a) fasting or b) in a state of Ketosis? I imagine, but haven't seen any data, that they are more stable since you are relying on internal stores which can be converted at a steady rate vs. variable timing of intake and quality of food sources.

I'm also curious if there is more detail that could be shared about attempting to control thoughts depleting willpower. For example, a strategy I have adopted for Meditation is to relax thoughts rather than attempting to use "force" to control them. I imagine the question is too specific, but aside from the one example (trying not to think of a white bear) do they offer any other examples of what is considered attempting to control your thoughts?

I was actually looking for an errata page for the minor mistake on page 119, where it says "three billion" for "three million". The notes are clear, but it still stuck a thumb in my eye.

For what it's worth, I rate the book as good, though a bit drier than The Willpower Instinct. Also, this book seemed less focused on specific things to do.

So after I read Baumeister & Tierney's book, I began wondering whether one could run a little self-experiment to test it. The obvious approach: randomize consumption of some peanut butter crackers (low glycemic index). But then I saw the criticisms of it and failed replications, and I became less enthusiastic: I'm already primed for depletability, so non-blind consumption is predicted by the skeptics to show an effect. So blinding seems necessary.

How do I blind it? I have a few hundred 00 capsules left, but I would blow through them fast filling them up with peanut butter.

Willpower depletion seems to depend (at least to some extent) on whether you believe willpower is a finite resource or not. What that means for people who are aware of that fact, I haven't the slightest idea, but it's probably like what happens to people who have a thorough understanding of the placebo effect and are aware they may be experiencing it.

Good food for thought. I'd like to hypothesize that willpower is not limited in a fixed sense, but also not unlimited. (This might be obvious, but worth thinking through.)

Willpower seems to be increased by practice. People who are disciplined seem to have more willpower to apply to a given problem.

Hmm... alternative hypothesis: is it that they have more willpower, or does their discipline - their daily habits of work and self-improvement - mean that they're wasting much less energy on deciding whether to do something, many times each day? It's probably much more energy-efficient to just do something than to keep procrastinating - i.e. to decide to put it off another 5 min, hour or day, again and again.

[I just noticed I'm conflating energy and willpower... and that I don't have a clear definition of willpower.]

Re John Maxwell IV's point, earlier in this discussion, that willpower being seen unlimited could be a useful reinforcer - I can see that it would be a useful thought to psyche myself up, but I'd bet that it's a false belief. An optimally useful belief might be to have an accurate estimate of my own willpower, and to work on the basis that it might be at the high end of the estimated range - so I push myself, but also recognize my need for recovery, and don't exhaust myself.

Why don't I think willpower is unlimited? I heard of a study* where people who have have been making decisions are less able to resist unhealthy snacks. This fits with my experience and that of others I've talked with. (To try and be thorough, an alternative hypothesis of the study could be that making decisions increases the body's desire or need for glucose - a related but not identical claim. I know which hypothesis makes more sense in my own experience, but I'd like to know if there's more solid evidence.)

Please point out errors & help reduce the fuzziness of this argument.

• "I heard of a study" should trigger your weasel words detector. Take this claim with a grain of salt since I'm being too lazy and/or time-efficient to go and find information about the study or studies.

** I just noticed the formatting here - writing John Maxwell IV with the underscores instead of spaces turns out as John_Maxwell_IV

Glucose acts as willpower fuel. As willpower levels drop, so do glucose levels. Willpower can be restored by raising your blood sugar.

How strong do they claim this effect is? Does it work for higher-than-normal BG (to raise willpower) or only lower-than-normal (to lower it)?

I'm a type-1 diabetic and have been in both situations a lot. More generally, type 2 diabetes is so widespread today that there's a huge amount of (unreliable) data about diabetics. If this claim is true, I'd expect it to show up in metabolism research.