Is it really possible to supercharge your willpower?

As it happened, I did none of it. No run, despite the looming race. The cutlery drawer remains dusty and the floors dirty-ish. What I did instead was meet a friend for an ice cream, after which I came home, flopped down on the sofa and turned on the TV. I didn’t move until just after midnight, when I woke with a start and dragged myself to bed.

You could say it was an achievement to finish the TV series I had only started that afternoon. But when contrasted against my intent, you’d have to write the day off as a failure of willpower.

Willpower is our capacity – whether innate (known as “trait”), or fleeting (“state”) – to resist short-term temptations in service of later, larger rewards or long-term goals. To quote a 2020 paper, “willpower is usually described as something a person has”. It’s strongly associated with success, so no wonder many of us want more of it. A 2012 survey by the American Psychological Association found that lack of willpower was the top reason people gave for failing to achieve goals such as losing weight, saving money or exercising.

Since the late 1990s, when it was first studied, willpower has been widely believed to be a finite resource, often likened to a battery that can be drained or a muscle that becomes fatigued with exertion. Improving your willpower, then, could be a shortcut to thriving; a hack akin to asking a genie for infinite wishes. But is it actually possible?

Roy F Baumeister believes it is, at least to an extent. Baumeister, a social psychologist and author of the 2011 book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, is the man who has all but defined our contemporary understanding of the subject. In particular he’s known for his findings, in a 1998 paper, that our ability to self-regulate is limited, and that “using up” our self-control in one area (say, by avoiding chocolate or alcohol) negatively affects our self-restraint in others. Baumeister termed this “ego depletion”.

“We could show that after people exert self-control, they’re less rational in their choosing,” he tells me. “After they make a lot of difficult choices, their self-control is impaired.”

Baumeister is speaking to me from Brigham Young University in Utah, where his wife, Dianne Tice, also a social psychologist, is a professor; their King Charles spaniel is sleeping just off-camera. Though “officially” retired, Baumeister continues to work on his own “fun” projects as a scholar-at-large. During our call, he breezes through his historic findings on willpower, reflecting his decades of speaking and writing about the subject.

After that influential 1998 paper, Baumeister went on to argue that willpower is like a muscle: it becomes tired and less effective with exertion, and can be strengthened over time. It’s not surprising that the hypothesis sparked so much interest, given that willpower has huge potential to improve our lives. Baumeister thinks of it as the energy that enables self-control (though the terms are often used interchangeably, by scientists as well as laypeople).

“We know that good self-control contributes to all kinds of positive outcomes,” he says. “People are healthier. They commit fewer crimes. Relationships last longer. People do better in school, better in work and earn more money. So there are all kinds of benefits to society from anything you can do to boost self-control.” It’s hard to imagine there being any downsides to possessing great self-control – except perhaps, I venture, it being a rather joyless life. But Baumeister refutes this assumption. “We have papers on this: people with good self-control are happier.”

People with low self-control, on the other hand, “have screwed-up lives,” Baumeister says. “They’re constantly digging themselves out of holes; they’re always late for things; they have more fights with other people.”

Strengthening my willpower muscle is starting to seem just as important as working out at the gym. But how can I do it? When, in the past, I’ve consciously tried to break a bad habit, or adopt a good one, I’ve typically managed three weeks at most before slumping back into routine. Changes that have stuck, on the other hand, occurred gradually, almost without conscious effort.

For example, I never used to exercise; now I do so almost daily, without ever having made it a goal. The key difference between success and failure, at least in my case, seems to be mindset: when I enjoy something, it’s easy to do, but with any hint of obligation, I’m halfway to failure.

As it turns out, my experience reflects the science. After Baumeister conceived of willpower as a muscle, thinking on the subject started to focus on strategies for self-control, enabling us to apply our finite willpower more judiciously, and avoid the fatigue that leads to poor choices. “When you’re depleted, there’s a double whammy: in terms of temptation, you feel the urge more strongly, and have less power to resist it,” he says. “It’s no accident that people relapse with smoking in times of stress.”

This workaround might seem like cheating – not actually improving our willpower but avoiding the things we know are likely to test it. But Baumeister thinks it’s a valid – and effective – approach. When he set out to study people with high trait self-control – society’s supposed winners, who habitually display willpower – his hypothesis was that they would report resisting their desires more than people with low self-control. “That’s an obvious prediction, right? Only it was significant in the opposite direction,” he says.

What Baumeister found was that, instead of continually “overriding themselves”, those people used their willpower to break bad habits and form good ones. “They don’t put themselves in temptation’s way: if you’re trying not to drink, you don’t go to a bar with your friends,” he says. Over time, the desired behaviour becomes automatic, like most of our day-to-day choices and activities. “The mind seems to be designed so that, initially, you do something with deliberate, conscious control and then gradually it becomes automatic, so then life runs on autopilot. You don’t have to resist temptation if you can avoid it.”

Studies comparing people with high and low trait self-control have shown that their reserves are depleted in the same way, Baumeister adds. It’s this automation – setting yourself up so that you have to make fewer of the sorts of tough choices that drain your willpower – that makes the difference. He gives the example of those who automate transfers to their savings accounts on payday, so that they don’t think of the money as theirs to spend.

The Stoics, masters of self-control, also approached it as an exercise in virtue, not denial or restraint. Today, of course, resisting temptation is easier said than done. At least for those of us in rich, urbanised western countries, there has arguably never been a greater test for our limited willpower. Consider the infinite scroll of social media and streaming platforms, the impulsivity enabled by online shopping, the accessibility (and even greater affordability) of unhealthy foods.

Baumeister’s ego-depletion model seems to offer a persuasive explanation for why so many people now report being tired, unhappy and distracted: we’re constantly battling temptation. It’s a comforting idea, much like the argument that all our unhappiness can be blamed on smartphones: we’re not failing because we lack willpower, but because it’s continually being sapped. And yet it’s not so clear-cut.

Over the past decade or so, Baumeister’s ego-depletion model has been increasingly tested. A large 2016 study, and others, have failed to reproduce the effects he described. Research has also found that believing willpower is limited can make it so. Baumeister has consistently defended his work, arguing that other large studies have replicated his findings and the failure of the 2016 paper to do so reflected shortcomings of the method used.

As for the suggestion that finite willpower is a self-fulfilling prophecy, Baumeister has reservations. Mindset definitely makes a difference, he tells me now, but it can’t do much to counteract severe depletion. “If it were true that believing you had unlimited willpower [gives] you unlimited willpower, you’d think all cultures would adopt that view.”

There is some evidence, though, to suggest that willpower is culturally constructed, at least in part. A 2019 study found that Chinese college students were less inclined than their US counterparts to believe that mental resources could be depleted. Another paper, from 2017, likewise found that Indian individuals generally found exerting willpower “energising” instead of exhausting.

At the very least, the challenges to Baumeister’s work reflect the ongoing scientific interest in willpower, and the rewards perceived to be had from unlocking it. “It’s really at the core of so many of our behaviours, and outcomes that we’re all interested in – like health, wellbeing, job performance,” says Katharina Bernecker, a professor at Bern University of Teacher Education. But, she says, we’re a long way from being able to consistently harness its benefits. The key problem with Baumeister’s ego-depletion model, she argues, is that “we never knew what the ‘battery’ is supposed to be”. “Look at the evidence: this ego depletion is not a thing, and even if it was, if we don’t have the answer to what the ‘battery’ is, it’s just not a good theory. I’d guess this capacity for self-control is really a phenomenon that has multiple causes or mechanisms involved, like neurobiological things, motivational things, cognitive things – there’s so much going on.”

Without being able to say, with confidence, what “fuels” willpower, it is difficult to know how it’s depleted or how to replenish it. Studies might “observe fatigue, but that’s still not a self-control ‘muscle’,” says Bernecker.

As for efforts to train one’s willpower, any improvements recorded tended to be small and short-term. A 2024 op-ed, published in the Current Opinion in Psychology journal, reached a similar conclusion, arguing that state self-control (as opposed to trait) was essentially “fragile, unreliable and weak”, and the widespread focus on ways to increase it was setting people up to fail. For now, researchers have refocused on those definitional questions of “what we mean by ‘willpower’ and ‘self-control’,” Bernecker says.

In scientific literature, as well as our general understanding, it’s often assumed the ends to which we must apply willpower – say, exercise – are unpleasant, difficult or otherwise undesirable. The expectation of effort is key; one definition of self-control is “effortful regulation of the self, by the self”.

But someone could hate running but love yoga, or group fitness. Equally, a nutritious meal isn’t necessarily lacking in flavour. Some studies, though, have equated regularly exercising and eating healthily with possessing self-control, Bernecker says. Like Baumeister, she too says habit-formation strategies – such as clearing your cupboards of chocolate, or laying out your gym gear the night before – are still, for now, the optimum way of increasing self-control.

Motivation is another important factor: understanding your reasons for aspiring to a particular goal, and finding ways to enjoy your pursuit of it, “will really help you be consistent”, she says. In a 2020 paper, Bernecker found that incorporating elements of gamification could make a task seem less effortful and help people to persist for longer. But such positive strategies have only recently started to be reflected in the study of willpower, which has sometimes assumed, as Bernecker says, “that the good things in life come out of applying pressure, and getting yourself to do things that you actually don’t want to do”. “Sometimes I think our society is a bit obsessed with this idea that things have to be tough; that that’s the way to go and only that is of value.” But there could be “other, easier routes to the same outcome – or even a better one”.

That those haven’t been explored reflects the high value and even veneration of willpower, Bernecker agrees. People with high willpower tend to be seen as being not only more trustworthy but even more moral.

In the past, Baumeister has termed willpower “the moral muscle”, for its strong association with good behaviour. After all, he argued to me, “the seven deadly sins are mostly failures of self-control: gluttony, anger, lust…”

But other findings complicate this idea that positive change boils down to willpower alone. For example, in recent decades, researchers have exploded the assumption that obesity and weight gain are simply a product of overeating and therefore a lack of willpower, pointing to non-modifiable factors such as genetics. Difficulties concentrating or achieving at work or school may be chalked up to a lack of self-control when they could reflect undiagnosed ADHD, Tourette syndrome or another neurodivergent condition.

As for sloth, sometimes a lack of willpower may be a sign we’re over-stretched and need rest, says Bernecker. “Sleep, time off, leisure – they’re things we need. The suppression of all of this cannot be a good thing.”

I’m reminded of a time in my life a few years ago, when I was conscious of exerting great willpower – to meet my work deadlines, and spur me on to accomplish more than I could handle. After about six weeks, I came to an abrupt, agonised stop. The burnout took me the best part of a year to recover from; untangling the patterns of overworking, tied up with my identity and self-worth, took longer.

You could say my willpower “battery” was dead. The experience was so unpleasant, once I’d recharged, I completely restructured my approach to work, lest I risk draining it so violently again. (Perhaps explaining my spectacularly unproductive Sunday.)

Bernecker is hopeful that researchers will be better able to help people, now that the field is moving away from old models and outdated views of willpower as a moral good or finite resource. She is researching ways people can achieve their desired goals while also “having a good time”, she says. In a 2021 paper, looking “beyond self-control”, Bernecker went so far as to argue that “hedonic goals”, such as relaxing or to have more fun, are equally important for wellbeing as the virtuous ones to which we typically apply our will. “In a way, it’s really irrational to pick the harder way to do things,” she points out. “I would prefer the other, easier way. I mean, why not?”

Illustrations by Getty Images