Where Did My Willpower Go?

Understanding the nature of willpower can help us bolster it.

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• One of the most important psychological processes for goal achievement is self-regulation.
• How effective a person's self-regulation ability is manifests as willpower.
• Willpower is viewed by some theories as a quantity and by others as a skill.
• Willpower can be redefined as the ability to prioritize goals.

Willpower is the fuel that powers the engine of success. It provides the physical, mental, and emotional strength required to get things done. But what exactly is willpower, where does it come from, and how can we have more of it?

To understand the nature of willpower, let’s take a step back and discuss three related concepts: goals, behavior, and self-regulation.

Goals, broadly, refer to some end result that we would like to achieve. Goals range from very short-term (e.g., taking out the garbage) to very long-term (e.g., having enough money saved for retirement), from very specific (e.g., paying the phone bill) to more general (e.g., paying bills on time), and from very concrete (e.g., picking up after your dog) to more abstract (e.g., being a good citizen). Regardless of their size and shape, whether a goal will be accomplished or not depends on one factor: our behavior.

Goals represent a perceived discrepancy between our current state, where we are, and a desired state, where we want to be (e.g., current state: the garbage is in the kitchen; desired state: the garbage is out of the kitchen and in the dumpster). Behavior is what enables us to reduce the discrepancy between current and desired states and to eventually reach our goals.

To accomplish any goal, we need to take certain actions and pause other actions. To answer a client call, we need to pause the conversation we may be having with a coworker. To work on the slides for a presentation, we need to stop pacing in the room and sit in front of the computer. You can imagine how complex a sequence of actions needs to be initiated, modified, or stopped, especially when we are working toward long-term goals like losing weight, getting a promotion, or starting a business.

That brings us to self-regulation.

Self-regulation is a complex psychological process whose role is to monitor and modify our actions to align them with the goals we intend to pursue. Bauer and Baumeister (2011) describe self-regulation as “the capacity to override natural and automatic tendencies, desires, or behaviors.”

According to the authors, being able to reach goals depends on how well we can manage our behavior by switching from automatic to conscious and from habits to purposeful action. Failures in self-regulation can negatively affect the fate of our goals, small and large. Furthermore, weak self-regulation could create a wide range of pervasive problems, from languishing and underachievement to poor health, financial difficulties, and interpersonal conflict.

In summary, goals are related to behavior, and behavior is related to self-regulation. Behavior is the mechanism we use to achieve our goals, and self-regulation is the ability to monitor, adjust, and direct behavior to the service of goals. As you can imagine, monitoring our behavior to ensure it aligns with a goal, initiating actions consistent with that goal, and suppressing actions that distract from the goal takes a lot of energy.

And this brings us back to willpower. Willpower is the strength of the self-regulation process. The stronger our willpower, the more capable we are of producing behaviors that serve our goals and reducing behaviors that detract from our goals.

From this perspective, willpower is not an all-or-nothing privilege, as in you either have it or you don’t. The notion that some people have willpower and others don’t is rather simplistic. A better approach is to assume that everyone is equipped with willpower and that the degree of willpower available at a given time depends on the circumstances.

So, if we all have it, where does our willpower go when we need it?

Based on theories of self-regulation, there are two ways to think about willpower. The first approach is that willpower dwindles with time and effort. Think of it like muscle strength. The more you use, the less you have available until its levels are restored again.

After a strenuous workout, your muscles are weaker and need rest and recovery, which means that you will not be able to prolong the workout or do other things that require muscle strength, like lifting heavy boxes or mowing the lawn, safely and easily. Something similar happens with willpower. When it is used up on earlier tasks, not a lot of it may be available for later tasks.

This may explain why people are more likely to sit in front of the TV and consume the entire bag of potato chips in the evening, at the end of a long day, rather than in the morning, before starting to do any work. When we use a substantial amount of willpower to complete goal-related tasks without losing momentum or getting distracted, we will probably not have enough willpower to keep going. Without enough willpower, we can barely think about goals, let alone initiate goal-relevant actions and suppress intrusive habits. We will opt for the easy alternative.

Easy, in this case, does not mean effortless or comfortable. It means overlearned, automatic, and available. For example, when my willpower is depleted, I prefer to go for a run than to write an article under a deadline. It would be a hard argument to make that writing an article is more tiresome than running! It is common to confuse lack of willpower with being lazy and unproductive.

The second approach is that willpower is in constant supply, independent of time and effort. Think of willpower as a skill. When you have mastered a skill, you can access and use it at any time, and you can improve it further over time. If you know how to ride a bicycle, how to balance, pedal, and steer, you can perform these operations at any time. After a one-mile bike ride or a 20-mile bike ride, your skill of riding a bicycle has not eroded.

You may argue that 20 miles is going to make you more tired than one mile, and you are correct. But it is not a lack of skill that makes you tired. It is fatigue, the depletion of energy.

If my willpower were a skill, it means that I could use it to stay focused during the (boring) company meeting instead of checking Instagram, and later, during the lunch break, I could still rely on my willpower to choose the salad entrée instead of the pizza. And if I applied willpower to order a salad for lunch, I could still apply willpower when I return home from work to make a choice between doing laundry or heading for the sofa, TV, and potato chips. Using willpower throughout the day doesn’t make it run low.

As before, we must make sure not to confuse being too tired to do laundry with being unable to resist the sofa option. When the pros and cons are weighed, not doing laundry could be a wise choice, not a sign of ill willpower. According to this theory, if willpower is a skill that we haven’t developed well, it will affect how we approach most goals, regardless of how much effort those earlier goals require.

What is implied in both theories is that on many occasions during a typical day, we are faced with having to pursue multiple goals. We have to make choices. Do I work on the presentation or start preparing lunch? Do I check the text message I received on my phone or ignore it? Do I grab the ice cream from the freezer or sit still and continue watching the game?

This leads us to a new understanding of willpower: Willpower is the ability to prioritize one goal over another. Willpower is about building resistance to mindlessly choosing a goal that is familiar, easy, and comfortable. Making that choice can take as little as a split second or as long as hours, days, weeks, or years. Theory 1 suggests that we can’t help but make poorer choices as the day goes on, and theory 2 suggests that we can get better at making better choices.

What do you think? Make a few good choices and then give in and indulge, or put more effort into continuing to make good choices? The choice is yours!