Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/preference-over-null-preference/

For some parts of life it is better to exist with a prepared preference, for other parts of life it is better to exist without a prepared preference.  This is going to be about looking at the sets of preferences and what might be better in each scenario.

On the object level some examples:

• I like blue hair
• I don't like the colour red
• I like to eat Chinese food
• My favourite animal is a frog
• I don't like sport
• I would rather spend time in a library than a nightclub
• I love bacon icecream
• This is my favourite hat

The specific examples are irrelevant but hopefully you get the idea.  Having a preference is about having full set and reducing it to a smaller set.  Example: one colour is my favourite out of the full set of colours.

In contrast, a null preference might look like this:

• I don't care what kind of pizza we eat
• I eat anything
• I just like being with friends, it doesn't matter what we do
• I love reading
• I've never really had a favourite animal
• Use your best judgement for me
• I can't decide what to wear

While null preferences are technically just another form of preference, I want to separate them out for a moment so that we can talk about them.

Deciding whether you should hold a preference, even if you didn't previously have one - can be an effective strategy for making decisions where there were previously difficulties.  The benefit of having a preference is that it stands as a pre-commitment to yourself to maintain existing choices on certain choice-nodes.

The disadvantage of using this strategy is that if your preference fails to be fulfilled then you are at risk of disappointment.

If you get to the supermarket and can't decide which type of jam (or jelly for american;) to buy, you can consult an existing preference for blueberry jam and skip the whole idea of considering other types of jam.

For preference failure, if you prefer blueberry but the store doesn't have any, you risk leaving without jam, or being left with a choice less desirable like strawberry.

Nothing about your preference on the world effects the world until you interact with it.  For the jam example: deciding you like blueberry will not cause blueberry jam to be available to you.  Modifying the map will not immediately impact the territory.  If you go on an endless tirade everywhere you travel - of demanding blueberry jam, chances are that at some point people will be more motivated to be prepared for the mad blueberry jammer.  However the instant that you decide to have a preference, you have not yet caused any impact on the world.  So the instantaneous effect of having a preference is nothing.

There will be times where you are not in control of the choice nodes available to you.  There are times when you will be.  That doesn't seem relevant to which is better.

There will be times when there will be more choices and times when there will be less.  That doesn't seem relevant.

There will be times when your preference will be easily fulfilled and times when it will be hard or impossible.  That doesn't seem relevant.

There are big expensive important choices, and small irrelevant insignificant choices.  Apart from desiring to spending more time on big expensive important choices, that doesn't seem relevant either.

There will be days with more willpower and days with less willpower, (and days exist on which willpower does not deplete).

Should I change what I do right now?

I don't know.  What do you do now?  Can we derive knowledge from the pre-existing system to make progress on what should change towards the future.

Try this:

• Think of 10 decisions you have made today (or recently). This might be the hard part.
• Were they all good decisions?  Do you already know what would have been better decisions in those places?  Can you identify the ones that need improvement already?
• For each one, think of what metric would allow you to know you have made them better.
  Examples:
  • Better outcomes as a result of your decision
  • Faster decisions
  • Decisions that take something into account
  • Decisions that are more inline with high level or distant goals
  • Decisions that make you look good to your peers
  • Decisions that leave you feeling more of a certain feeling - free, safe, thrifty, skilled, powerful...
• For each decision and for each metric, is a better outcome likely to come from having a preference, or having a null preference.

As I get to this point I don't have a defining thesis for this concept.  I don't have an answer as to whether preference can be ruled better than a null.  Or that you might want to reduce your identity down until you have all null preferences, leading you to flexibility and freedom (of course such a reduction leads to a burden of maintaining the system of nulls as well).  

I do want to open up this concept to you to decide and influence the use of the idea.  If you hold a preference too strongly you risk the possibility of making the wrong choice over and over.  If you hold it too loosely you risk indifference towards the world (maybe part of the answer is to look at where you are now in terms of decision problems and consider which direction you want to travel towards).  I don't know.

• How can this concept be used?
• What comes to mind as a powerful example of preference over null preference, or nulls over active preference?
• Where do you stand now?  And if you were to move in any direction which would it be?
• Does the application of preference/null solve or reshape any existing problems in your life?

Meta: 2 hours writing, then I got stuck when I realised I didn't have a concluding thesis (didn't actually have the answers) but I wanted to release the incomplete concept anyway to see if anyone else could come up with ideas around it.

Content warning: a couple LWers apparently think that the concept of ego depletion—also known as willpower depletion—is a memetic hazard, though I find it helpful. Also, the material presented here won't fit everyone's experiences.

What happens if we assume that the idea of ego depletion is basically correct, and try to draw an analogy between thermodynamics and willpower?

Figure 1. Thermodynamics Picture

You probably remember seeing something like the above diagram in a chemistry class. The diagram shows how unstable, or how high in energy, the states that a material can pass through in a chemical reaction are. Here's what the abbreviations mean:

• SM is the starting material.
• TS1 and TS2 are the two transition states, which must be passed through to go from SM to EM1 or EM2.
• EM1 and EM2 are the two possible end materials.

The valleys of both curves represent configurations a material may occupy at the start or end of a chemical reaction. Lower energy valleys are more stable. However, higher peaks can only be reliably crossed if energy is available from e.g. the temperature being sufficiently high.

The main takeaway from Figure 1 is that reactions which produce the most stable end materials, like ending material 2, from a given set of starting materials aren't always the reactions which are easiest to make happen.

Figure 2. Willpower Picture

We can draw a similar diagram to illustrate how much stress we lose while completing a relaxing activity. Here's what the abbreviations used in Figure 2 mean:

• SM is your starting mood.
• TS is your state of topmost stress, which depends on which activity you choose.
• EM1 and EM2 are your two possible ending moods.

Above, the valley on the left represents how stressed you are before starting one of two possible relaxing activities. The peak in the middle represents how stressed you'll be when attempting to get the activity underway, and the valley on the right represents how stressed you'll be once you're done.

For the sake of simplification, let's say that stress is the opposite of willpower, such that losing stress means you gain willpower, and vice versa. For many people, there's a point at which it's very hard to take on additional stress or use more willpower, such that getting started on an activity that would normally get you to ending mood 2 from an already stressed starting mood is very hard. 

In chemistry, if you want to make end material 2 instead of end material 1, you have to make sure that you have some way of getting over the big peak at transition state 2—such as by making sure the temperature is high enough. In real life, it's also good to have a plan for getting over the big peak at the point of topmost stress. Spending time or attention figuring what your ending mood 2-producing activities are may also be worthwhile.

Some leisure activities, like browsing the front page of reddit, are ending mood 1-producing activities; they're easy to start, but not very rewarding. Examples of what qualifies as an ending mood 2-producing activity vary between people—but reading books, writing, hiking, meditating, or making games or art qualify as ending mood 2-producing activities for some.

At a minimum, making sure that you end up in a high willpower, low stress ending mood requires paying attention to your ability to handle stress and conserve willpower. Sometimes this implies that taking a break before you really need to means that you'll get more out of your break. Sometimes it means that you should monitor how many spoons and forks you have. In general, though, preferring ending mood 2-producing activities over ending mood 1-producing activities will give you the best results in the long run.

The best-case scenario is that you find a way to automatically turn impulses to do ending mood 1-producing activities into impulses to do ending mood 2-producing activities, such as with the trigger action plan [open Reddit -> move hands into position to do a 5-minute meditation].

Last week Professor Neil Levy, a neuroethicist,  gave three lectures on Self-Control at the Oxford Martin School. Roughly, the first lecture targeted philosophical issues, the second empirical issues and the third bridged the two. Neil's summaries and audio are at the bottom. In the next two paragraphs I will briefly summarize the take-home message of the lectures.

Over the three lectures, he offered a new approach to self-control. He argues that will-power is of little relevance to self-control, that the self-control character-trait which correlates with success is not will-power and that relying on will-power alone leads to low levels of self-control. He defends that self-control is mainly the ability of self-management, of managing the environment so that temptations become more costly, less salient or inaccessible - he mentions Facebook nanny, Beeminder, commitment devices and so on. Self-management is the ability of not having to use will-power. Will-power is only relevant insofar as it enables these techniques to be deployed, but once in place the techniques themselves consist in avoiding to use will-power altogether. Will-power is an extremely scarce resource, and we should use the little we have so we don't have to depend on it anymore. He cites numerous evidence in support for his view. To mention a few, people with high self-control character-trait are less able to resist temptations, exert less effortful self-control, but are nonetheless more likely to pick environments with few temptations/distractions and better at developing techniques to ignore temptations (e.g. little children sung, slept, etc.). He contends that glucose role in increasing self-control is exerted by signalling high short-term resource availability, a stable environment, and thus low opportunity costs - but he doesn't expect this effect to hold in the long-term. He predicts that unconscious signals of a stable environment will increase self-control, which helps explains why high social-economic status correlates strongly with self-control. Neil has a blog post discussing how the myth that willpower equals Self-Control prevents the prescription of policies that would use these managerial techniques to increase people's Self-Control. By the end, he hinted his view could perhaps be seen as the extended will view, mirroring the extended mind view.

I believe the first lecture is not especially helpful for LessWrongers as it mainly focuses on contrasting his view with the rationalist view within philosophy, which is not pretty rational and likely false. Those interested in the empirical side will find the second lecture more attractive and should check this blog post summarizing it. I think the take-home message is more extensively spelled out in the third lecture. On the first lecture, there is this post by Professor Julian Savulescu, which particularly addresses the objective stance towards oneself present on Neil's view and opposed by the (philosophical) rationalists. There's some disagreement about to what extend these rationalists would really disagree with this view.

Lecture One: Self-Control: A problem of self-management

In this lecture I argue that self-control problems typical arise from conflicts between smaller sooner and larger later rewards. I suggest that we often fail successfully to navigate these problems because of our commitment to a conception of ourselves as rational agents who answer questions about ourselves by looking to the world. Despite the attractions of this conception, I argue that it undermines efforts at self-control and thereby our capacity to pursue the ends we value. I suggest we think of self-control as a problem of self-management, whereby we manipulate ourselves.

Lecture One Audio.

Blog post by Professor Julian Savulescu on the objectifying view defended in the first Lecture.

Lecture Two: The Science of Self-Control

In this lecture I outline some of the main perspectives on self-control and its loss stemming from recent work in psychology. I focus in particular on the puzzle arising from the role of glucose in successful self-control. Glucose ingestion seems to boost self-control but there is good evidence that it doesn't do this by providing fuel for the relevant mechanisms. I suggest that glucose functions as a cue of resource availability rather than fuel.

Lecture Two Audio.

Blog post by Dr. Joshua Shepherd summarizing the second Lecture.

Lecture Three: Marshmallows and Moderation

There is evidence that self-control is a character trait. This evidence seems inconsistent with the management approach I advocate, since that approach urges that we look to external props for self-control, not to states of the agent. In this lecture I argue, that contrary to appearances, we should hesitate to think that people high in what is known as trait self-control have any such character trait. In fact, properly understood the evidence concerning trait self-control supports the management. 

Lecture Three Audio.

EDIT: Changed the title from willpower's relative irrelevancy to the myth of Willpower. Added a link to another blog post.

I was recently reading a blog here, that referenced a paper done in 1999 by Baba Shiv and Alex Fedorikhin (Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making). In it, volunteers are asked to memorise short or long numbers and then asked to chose a snack as a reward. The snack is either fruit or cake. The actual paper seems to go into a lot of details that are irrelevent to the blog post, but doesn't actually seem to contradict anything the blog post says. The result seems to be that those with a higher cognitive load were far more likely to chose the cake than those who weren't.

I was wondering if anyone has read any further on this line of research? The actual experiment seems to imply that the connection between cognitive load and willpower may be an acute effect - possibly not lasting very long. The choice of snack is made seconds after memorising a number and while actively trying to keep the number in memory for short term recall a few minutes later. There doesn't seem to be anything about the effect on willpower minutes or hours later.

Does anyone know if the effect lasts longer than a few seconds? If so, I would be interested in whether this affect has been incorporated into any dieting strategies.

Another attack on the resource-based model of willpower, Michael Inzlicht, Brandon J. Schmeichel and C. Neil Macrae have a paper called "Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited" in press in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Ungated version here.

Some of the most interesting points:

• Over 100 studies appear to be consistent with self-control being a limited resource, but generally these studies do not observe resource depletion directly, but infer it from whether or not people's performance declines in a second self-control task.
• The only attempts to directly measure the loss or gain of a resource have been studies measuring blood glucose, but these studies have serious limitations, the most important being an inability to replicate evidence of mental effort actually affecting the level of glucose in the blood.
• Self-control also seems to replenish by things such as "watching a favorite television program, affirming some core value, or even praying", which would seem to conflict with the hypothesis inherent resource limitations. The resource-based model also seems evolutionarily implausible.

The authors offer their own theory of self-control. One-sentence summary (my formulation, not from the paper): "Our brains don't want to only work, because by doing some play on the side, we may come to discover things that will allow us to do even more valuable work."

• Ultimately, self-control limitations are proposed to be an exploration-exploitation tradeoff, "regulating the extent to which the control system favors task engagement (exploitation) versus task disengagement and sampling of other opportunities (exploration)".
• Research suggests that cognitive effort is inherently aversive, and that after humans have worked on some task for a while, "ever more resources are needed to counteract the aversiveness of work, or else people will gravitate toward inherently rewarding leisure instead". According to the model proposed by the authors, this allows the organism to both focus on activities that will provide it with rewards (exploitation), but also to disengage from them and seek activities which may be even more rewarding (exploration). Feelings such as boredom function to stop the organism from getting too fixated on individual tasks, and allow us to spend some time on tasks which might turn out to be even more valuable.

The explanation of the actual proposed psychological mechanism is good enough that it deserves to be quoted in full:

Based on the tradeoffs identified above, we propose that initial acts of control lead to shifts in motivation away from “have-to” or “ought-to” goals and toward “want-to” goals (see Figure 2). “Have-to” tasks are carried out through a sense of duty or contractual obligation, while “want-to” tasks are carried out because they are personally enjoyable and meaningful [41]; as such, “want-to” tasks feel easy to perform and to maintain in focal attention [41]. The distinction between “have-to” and “want-to,” however, is not always clear cut, with some “want-to” goals (e.g., wanting to lose weight) being more introjected and feeling more like “have-to” goals because they are adopted out of a sense of duty, societal conformity, or guilt instead of anticipated pleasure [53].

According to decades of research on self-determination theory [54], the quality of motivation that people apply to a situation ranges from extrinsic motivation, whereby behavior is performed because of external demand or reward, to intrinsic motivation, whereby behavior is performed because it is inherently enjoyable and rewarding. Thus, when we suggest that depletion leads to a shift from “have-to” to “want-to” goals, we are suggesting that prior acts of cognitive effort lead people to prefer activities that they deem enjoyable or gratifying over activities that they feel they ought to do because it corresponds to some external pressure or introjected goal. For example, after initial cognitive exertion, restrained eaters prefer to indulge their sweet tooth rather than adhere to their strict views of what is appropriate to eat [55]. Crucially, this shift from “have-to” to “want-to” can be offset when people become (internally or externally) motivated to perform a “have-to” task [49]. Thus, it is not that people cannot control themselves on some externally mandated task (e.g., name colors, do not read words); it is that they do not feel like controlling themselves, preferring to indulge instead in more inherently enjoyable and easier pursuits (e.g., read words). Like fatigue, the effect is driven by reluctance and not incapability [41] (see Box 2).

Research is consistent with this motivational viewpoint. Although working hard at Time 1 tends to lead to less control on “have-to” tasks at Time 2, this effect is attenuated when participants are motivated to perform the Time 2 task [32], personally invested in the Time 2 task [56], or when they enjoy the Time 1 task [57]. Similarly, although performance tends to falter after continuously performing a task for a long period, it returns to baseline when participants are rewarded for their efforts [58]; and remains stable for participants who have some control over and are thus engaged with the task [59]. Motivation, in short, moderates depletion [60]. We suggest that changes in task motivation also mediate depletion [61].

Depletion, however, is not simply less motivation overall. Rather, it is produced by lower motivation to engage in “have-to” tasks, yet higher motivation to engage in “want-to” tasks. Depletion stokes desire [62]. Thus, working hard at Time 1 increases approach motivation, as indexed by self-reported states, impulsive responding, and sensitivity to inherently-rewarding, appetitive stimuli [63]. This shift in motivational priorities from “have-to” to “want-to” means that depletion can increase the reward value of inherently-rewarding stimuli. For example, when depleted dieters see food cues, they show more activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain area associated with coding reward value, compared to non-depleted dieters [64].

See also: Kurzban et al. on opportunity cost models of mental fatigue and resource-based models of willpower; Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping.

An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (h/t lukeprog) is a very interesting paper on why we accumulate mental fatigue: Kurzban et al. suggest an opportunity cost model, where intense focus on a single task means that we become less capable of using our mental resources for anything else, and accumulating mental fatigue is part of a cost-benefit calculation that encourages us to shift our attention instead of monomaniacally concentrating on just one task which may not be the most rewarding possible. Correspondingly, the amount of boredom or mental fatigue we experience with a task should correspond with the perceived rewards from other tasks available at the moment. A task will feel more boring/effortful if there's something more rewarding that you could be doing instead (i.e. if the opportunity costs for pursuing your current task are higher), and if it requires exclusive use of cognitive resources that could also be used for something else.

This seems to make an amount of intuitive/introspective sense - I had a much easier time doing stuff without getting bored as a kid, when there simply wasn't much else that I could be doing instead. And it does roughly feel like I would get more quickly bored with things in situations where more engaging pursuits were available. I'm also reminded of the thing I noticed as a kid where, if I borrowed a single book from the library, I would likely get quickly engrossed in it, whereas if I had several alternatives it would be more likely that I'd end up looking at each for a bit but never really get around reading any of them.

An opportunity cost model also makes more sense than resource models of willpower which, as Kurzban quite persuasively argued in his earlier book, don't really fit together with the fact that the brain is an information-processing system. My computer doesn't need to use any more electricity in situations where it "decides" to do something as opposed to not doing something, but resource models of willpower have tried to postulate that we would need more of e.g. glucose in order to maintain willpower. (Rather, it makes more sense to presume that a low level of blood sugar would shift the cost-benefit calculations in a way that led to e.g. conservation of resources.)

This isn't just Kurzban et al's opinion - the paper was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which invites diverse comments to all the papers that they publish. In this particular case, it was surprising how muted the defenses of the resource model were. As Kurzban et al point out in their response to responses:

As context for our expectations, consider the impact of one of the central ideas with which we were taking issue, the claim that “willpower” is a resource that is consumed when self-control is exerted. To give a sense of the reach of this idea, in the same month that our target article was accepted for publication Michael Lewis reported in Vanity Fair that no less a figure than President Barack Obama was aware of, endorsed, and based his decision- making process on the general idea that “the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions,” with Obama explaining: “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make ” (Lewis 2012 ).

Add to this the fact that a book based on this idea became a New York Times bestseller (Baumeister & Tierney 2011 ), the fact that a central paper articulating the idea (Baumeister et al. 1998 ) has been cited more than 1,400 times, and, more broadly, the vast number of research programs using this idea as a foundation, and we can be forgiven for thinking that we would have kicked up something of a hornet’s nest in suggesting that the willpower-as-resource model was wrong. So we anticipated no small amount of stings from the large number of scholars involved in this research enterprise. These were our expectations before receiving the commentaries.

Our expectations were not met. Take, for example, the reaction to our claim that the glucose version of the resource argument is false (Kurzban 2010a ). Inzlicht & Schmeichel, scholars who have published widely in the willpower-as-resource literature, more or less casually bury the model with the remark in their commentary that the “mounting evidence points to the conclusion that blood glucose is not the proximate mechanism of depletion.” ( Malecek & Poldrack express a similar view.) Not a single voice has been raised to defend the glucose model, and, given the evidence that we advanced to support our view that this model is unlikely to be correct, we hope that researchers will take the fact that none of the impressive array of scholars submitting comments defended the view to be a good indication that perhaps the model is, in fact, indefensible. Even if the opportunity cost account of effort turns out not to be correct, we are pleased that the evidence from the commentaries – or the absence of evidence – will stand as an indication to audiences that it might be time to move to more profitable explanations of subjective effort.

While the silence on the glucose model is perhaps most obvious, we are similarly surprised by the remarkably light defense of the resource view more generally. As Kool & Botvinick put it, quite correctly in our perception: “Research on the dynamics of cognitive effort have been dominated, over recent decades, by accounts centering on the notion of a limited and depletable ‘resource’” (italics ours). It would seem to be quite surprising, then, that in the context of our critique of the dominant view, arguably the strongest pertinent remarks come from Carter & McCullough, who imply that the strength of the key phenomenon that underlies the resource model – two-task “ego-depletion” studies – might be considerably less than previously thought or perhaps even nonexistent. Despite the confidence voiced by Inzlicht & Schmeichel about the two-task findings, the strongest voices surrounding the model, then, are raised against it, rather than for it. (See also Monterosso & Luo , who are similarly skeptical of the resource account.)

Indeed, what defenses there are of the resource account are not nearly as adamant as we had expected. Hagger wonders if there is “still room for a ‘resource’ account,” given the evidence that cuts against it, conceding that “[t]he ego-depletion literature is problematic.” Further, he relies largely on the argument that the opportunity cost model we offer might be incomplete, thus “leaving room” for other ideas.

(I'm leaving out discussion of some commentaries which do attempt to defend resource models.)

Though the model still seems to be missing pieces - as one of the commentaries points out, it doesn't really address the fact that some tasks are more inherently boring than others. Some of it might be explained by the argument given in Shouts, Whispers, and the Myth of Willpower: A Recursive Guide to Efficacy (I quote the most relevant bit here), where the author suggests that "self-discipline" in some domain is really about sensitivity for feedback in that domain: a novice in some task doesn't really manage to notice the small nuances that have become so significant for an expert, so they receive little feedback for their actions and it ends up being a boring vigilance task. Whereas an expert will instantly notice the effects that their actions have on the system and get feedback of their progress, which in the opportunity cost model could be interpreted as raising the worthwhileness of the task they're working on. If we go with Kurzban et al.'s notion of us acquiring further information about the expected utility of the task we're working on as we continue working on it, then getting feedback from the task could possibly be read as a sign of the task being one in which we can expect to succeed in.

Another missing piece with the model is that it doesn't really seem to explain the way that one can come home after a long day at work and then feel too exhausted to do anything at all - it can't really be about opportunity costs if you end up so tired that you can't come up with ~any activity that you'd want to do.

the video

Author and Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, PhD, talks about strategies from her new book "The WillPower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It" as part of the Authors@Google series. Topics include dieting/weight loss, health, addiction, quitting smoking, temptation, procrastination, mindfulness, stress, sleep, cravings, exercise, self-control, self-compassion, guilt, and shame.

I'm posting this because akrasia, procrastination and willpower are often discussed on LW. I haven't read the book, but for those that are interested "The Willpower Instinct" and "Maximum Willpower" are, from what I can tell, exactly the same books.

I recently read this book. I've tried to summarize the main points below -- you can read my notes here (MSWord doc). You might also find Derek Sivers' notes useful, which can be found here.

NOTE: The general model of willpower (as a finite resource consumed with use) used in this book does not seem to represent a scientific consensus -- see the comments for more detail.

General Claims

• Glucose acts as willpower fuel. As willpower levels drop, so do glucose levels. Willpower can be restored by raising your blood sugar. (pp. 44-48)
• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it, and you use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks. (p. 35)
• Willpower depletion amplifies emotions, desires, and cravings[i]. (pp. 30-31)

Willpower Depletion

• Controlling emotional reactions depletes willpower. (p. 25)
• Attempting to control thoughts (say, trying not to think of a white bear) depletes willpower. (pp. 26-27)
• Chronic pain causes ongoing willpower depletion. (p. 36)
• Being sick depletes glucose, which negatively affects willpower. Related note: Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated. (pp. 59-60)
• Making decisions (even trivial ones) costs willpower, and making decisions for other people costs less than making them for yourself. Making decisions that you enjoy costs less willpower than those which you do not. (pp. 94-95)
• 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.[ii] (p. 81)

Restoring Willpower

• Eating foods like white bread, potatoes, white rice, and sugary snacks produce boom-and-bust cycles because they are converted into glucose so quickly. Foods which are converted more slowly (providing fuel more steadily) include most veggies, nuts (like peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits (like apples, blueberries, and pears), cheese, fish, meat, and olive oil. (These foods are said to have a low glycemic index.) (pp. 59-60)
• Sleep helps to restore willpower – in particular, sleep deprivation causes impaired processing of glucose (and, over time, a higher risk of diabetes). (pp. 59-60)
• Being in a clean room appears to increase self-control, and being in a messy room appears to reduce self-control.[iii] (p. 156)

Miscellaneous

• Focusing on a single self-improvement goal increases your chances of success, as each simultaneous goal increases the demands on your willpower. (pp. 37-38)
• Conflicting goals cause increased worrying/rumination, decreased motivation, greater amount of physical sickness, and more depression and anxiety. (p. 67)
• Reluctance to give up options increases when willpower is low.[iv](p. 99)
• Focusing on past achievements seems to increase contentment with one’s current situation, while focusing on the road ahead increases motivation and ambition. (p. 120)
• People are often not very good at predicting how they will behave in an excited emotional state while in an unexcited state – this is often referred to as the hot-cold empathy gap. (p. 148)
• Precommitment can make it more likely that you will not succumb to temptation during times of low willpower.[v] (pp. 151-153)

I declare Crocker's Rules.

Since the beginning of September, I have been attempting a gluten-free diet. (I was tested and I'm not celiac, but eating wheat, and especially highly refined-flour foods like cookies, tends to make me bloated and give me diarrhea.) I also wanted to lose 5 to 10 pounds. I'm not overweight per se, but I possess a roll of belly fat that I (and my boyfriend!) would prefer to say goodbye too.

The first little while went well, and almost effortlessly. I was at the cottage with my family, exercising moderately (about 2 kilometers of swimming daily) and eating my mom's excellent-tasting cooking. After about one and a half weeks, I had lost 5 pounds, although I suspect a lot of it was water retention/bloating, since I had been eating wheat and various junk foods all summer.

Then school started, and with it my 16-hour days away from home, including one marathon session where I leave my parents' house at 5:00 am on Monday morning, sleep at a friend's house, and don't come back again until 11 pm on Tuesday, only to work 5:30 am to 4 pm at the pool the next day.

In short: my diet is quickly deteriorating and I have regained those 5 pounds. I find it next to impossible to stay gluten-free, since I have to be incredibly organized and pack everything from home, and inevitably it isn't quite enough for 16 hours. (I eat 3000 calories a day or more when not dieting. According to a metabolism study I participated in last year, this is actually how much I burn per day with the amount of exercise I get. If I eat much less, say less than 2000 for one day or less than 2,500 for several consecutive days, I get dizzy and weak when I exercise, which is really irritating.) I would probably be able to lose weight more easily if I exercised LESS, but this would a) kind of defeat the point, and b) be difficult because exercise is my main stress control method.

Willpower is a big issue, which is weird and annoying because usually it's not a big issue for me. Especially when I'm sleep deprived (nearly all the time), stressed, or bored to tears in my classes, I tend to comfort or reward myself with food, and nearly all my 'comfort foods' have wheat in them. I can resist to a degree if I have access to other reward/comforts, like sleep, or lots and lots of tea.

I've never really had to learn any willpower tricks for dieting, since I usually let my weight sit at its natural set-point. Does anyone have suggestions?

A surprisingly good New York Times essay on willpower / ego depletion:
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

As it turns out, the essay is based on an upcoming Roy F. Baumeister book, "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength", which will be available from Amazon in a couple of weeks (September 1, 2011) both as a hardcover and a Kindle edition.

Some quotes from the essay (italics and headings mine):

You spend the most willpower when you have to make AND implement your decisions:

which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

Willpower depletion makes you reluctant to make trade-offs:

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

Willpower depletion makes you more likely to take the path of least resistance:

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time).

Testing willpower depletion in rural Indian villages:

Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly.

Decision fatigue can be a factor in trapping people in poverty:

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class.

Glucose restores willpower in humans and dogs:

To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others:

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

Good decision makers structure their lives so as to conserve willpower:

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

In a recent article, the unusually well-researched comedy site Cracked.com discussed “5 scientific reasons the dark side will always win,” including:

• Clenching your fists and thinking evil thoughts can increase strength and willpower. (Hung & Labroo 2011, Schubert 2004, Gray 2010)
• Particular “power poses” raise testosterone and lower cortisol levels (in both men and women) and increase feelings of power and tolerance for risk. (Carney et al. 2010)
• Boosts in pride can allow you to work longer and harder on “effortful and hedonically negative” tasks. (Williams & DeSteno 2008)
• Negative moods can decrease gullibility, increase persuasiveness and social influence, and improve the accuracy of eyewitness recollections. (Forgas 2007, Forgas 2008, Forgas et al. 2005)

Perhaps, then, it could be useful to intentionally cultivate a Mysterious Dark Side, or just ask yourself “What would Voldemort do?” once in a while (please do not murder anyone). I’m definitely going to be giving some of these a try; fist-clenching and power-posing are easy, and as a source of evil thoughts and pride, I already have a dark lord alter-ego I could channel when necessary (I’ll probably need to flesh out his character a bit more than I have so far).

The Cracked.com article mostly links to news stories, so, for your convenience, here are the original papers they refer to:

• Frank, Mark G. and Gilovich, Thomas (1988). “The Dark Side of Self- and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(1), 74-85.

• Hung, Iris W. and Labroo, Aparna A. (2011). “From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation.” Journal of Consumer Research, 37(6), 1046-1064.

• Gray, Kurt (2010). “Moral Transformation: Good and Evil Turn the Weak Into the Mighty.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1(3), 253-258.

• Carney, Dana R., Cuddy, Amy J.C., and Yap, Andy J. (2010). “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance.” Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368.

• Schubert, Thomas W. (2004). “The Power In Your Hand: Gender Differences In Bodily Feedback From Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(6), 757-769.

• Tracy, Jessica L. and Robins, Richard W. (2008). “The Nonverbal Expression of Pride: Evidence for Cross-Cultural Recognition.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 516-530.

• Williams, Lisa A. and DeSteno, David (2008). “Pride and Perseverance: The Motivational Role of Pride.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(6), 1007–1017.

• Williams, Lisa A. and DeSteno, David (2009). “Pride: Adaptive Social Emotion or Seventh Sin?” Psychological Science, 20(3), 284-288.

• Forgas, Joseph P. (2007). “When sad is better than happy: Negative affect can improve the quality and effectiveness of persuasive messages and social influence strategies.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(4), 513-528.

• Forgas, Joseph P. and East, Rebekah. (2008). “On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on skepticism and the detection of deception.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5), 1362-1367.

• Forgas, Joseph P., Laham, Simon M., and Vargas, Patrick T. (2005). “Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41(6), 574-588.

• Wolff, Sarah E. and Puts, David A. (2010). “Vocal masculinity is a robust dominance signal in men.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 64(10), 1673-1683.