Can Willpower Be Considered a Muscle? Exploring a Groundbreaking Study That Could Transform Your Life

What young people need is not just knowledge or learning this or that. Having willpower and thus being faithful to the trust means taking immediate action, focusing one's energy on a success, and doing the job to be done. –Ebner von Eschenbach

How would you react if your friend came to you and told you that willpower works just like a muscle? You would probably be surprised at first and then ask questions like “how so?” In this article, I will try to clear the question marks in your mind. You can think of me as a friend. 🙂

First of all, I would like to talk about the starting point of this article. I follow with pleasure on YouTube 'Lean Code' I decided to write this article while watching the video called 'Understanding Willpower' on the channel. From here, I would like to thank the owner of the channel, Bilgem Çakır, for the content he created.

Willpower, discipline and patience are just some of the important skills to have on the path to success. Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney wrote a book called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, which covers these features and examined the subject of willpower in detail.

Anyone can start; But only those with a strong will can finish it. – Eli Stanley Jones

In the book, the authors shared an experiment conducted by Mark Muraven from Case Western University. In the experiment, the participants are told that the purpose of the experiment is to measure taste perception, but what Mark actually wants to do is to measure the will of the participants. Some of the subjects taken into the room are asked to eat a cookie and ignore the radishes on the side, with a completely random choice, while others are told to eat a radish and ignore the cookies.

While those who eat cookies feel relieved, some of those who eat radishes take the hot cookies in their hands, smell them and put them back on the plate. Five minutes later, the researchers enter the room and tell the participants to wait fifteen minutes for the food they ate to fade from their emotional memories. In order not to get bored during this period, they answered an almost impossible puzzle by saying, “Actually, you can solve it very easily, we do not think it will take a long time.” They give it by saying.

The experiment actually starts from this point. Those who exhausted their willpower by eating radishes instead of cookies say how unlucky they are and that they are dealing with an unnecessary task by not wanting to solve the puzzle. Those who eat cookies try to solve the puzzle and make more effort than those who eat radishes. Because by eating cookies, they can devote the willpower they do not use to solving puzzles. Those who eat radishes cannot find enough willpower to solve puzzles because they use their willpower reserves to avoid eating cookies.

This experiment is repeated about 200 times, and all of them reach the conclusion that willpower is not a skill, but like a muscle in our arms and legs. Just like a muscle in our arm, our willpower begins to tire as we work. Just as we don't do any sports at all but suddenly do sports for 2 hours and then hate sports because of muscle pain, our willpower is in the same situation. If we don't work on it, it doesn't develop and at the first push, it reduces our resistance to life, just like muscle pain. We feel unhappy and unlucky, and we give up trying because we feel like we won't succeed anyway.

In a different section of the same book, it is written that willpower can be developed as a child and emphasizes the importance of engaging in sports or arts. In another study, they observed that children who were involved in a single sport or art branch at a young age were more successful in academic life and later in business life. Showing patience in a single desired area helps the willpower become a habit and prevents the muscle from getting tired. Is it too late for us? I don't think so, even reading a book we don't like until the end actually causes our willpower muscle to work. As our muscles work, our willpower increases. Being aware of the things we want and doing them consciously even though we don't want them increases our willpower and makes it a habit without tiring our willpower. Actually, there is no such thing as I can't do it, there is how I can do it even if I don't like it.

Nowadays, the abundance of options makes it very difficult for us to make decisions. When we decide on something, our mind remains undecided and we always say “I wonder”. For this reason, in case of the slightest failure or dissatisfaction, we immediately give up and consider another option. When we consider every option, we strain our willpower in making decisions and become unhappy, just like those who eat radishes.

Is the solution to reduce the number of options? I don't think so myself. It seemed to me that the only solution was to develop the willpower muscle. In this, I will make a list of the ways in which I use my willpower and where I have difficulty in using my willpower. From now on, when I feel tired and unhappy, I will think that my willpower muscle is tired and I will wait for it to relax by doing nothing and not thinking for a while. Maybe I can make better decisions with this method. As Shiller said, everything is in my hands.