6 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. In experiments first reported in 1998, Baumeister and his collaborators discovered that the will, like a muscle, can be fatigued. Immediately after students engage in a task that requires them to control their impulses — resisting cookies while hungry, tracking a boring display while ignoring a comedy video, writing down their thoughts without thinking about a polar bear or suppressing their emotions while watching the scene in “Terms of Endearment” in which a dying Debra Winger says goodbye to her children — they show lapses in a subsequent task that also requires an exercise of willpower, like solving difficult puzzles, squeezing a handgrip, stifling sexual or violent thoughts and keeping their payment for participating in the study rather than immediately blowing it on Doritos. Baumeister tagged the effect “ego depletion,” using Freud’s sense of “ego” as the mental entity that controls the passions.

      Baumeister his notion of will as being a muscle. Also ego depletion (tagged from Freud).

  2. Dec 2022
  3. Jun 2022
    1. Asking them to do that time and time again all day long is a lost cause. McGonigal calls this willpower fatigue—in essence, our willpower fades the more we use it, so the more frequently we ask students to exert their willpower, the less energy they have to do it next time.
  4. Feb 2022
    1. Even though results of these studies are currently under intensescrutiny and have to be taken with a grain of salt (Carter andMcCullough 2014; Engber and Cauterucci 2016; Job, Dweck andWalton 2010), it is safe to argue that a reliable and standardisedworking environment is less taxing on our attention, concentration

      and willpower, or, if you like, ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks...

      Having a standardized and reliable working environment or even workflow can be less taxing on our attention, our concentration, and our willpower leaving more energy for making decisions and thinking which can have a greater impact.

      Does the fact that the relative lack of any decision making about what to see or read next seen in doomscrolling underlie some of the easily formed habit of the attention economy? Not having to actively decide what to read next combined with the random rewards of interesting tidbits creating a sense of flow is sapping not our mental energy, but our time. How can we better design against this?

    2. Willpower is, as far as weknow today,[2] a limited resource that depletes quickly and is alsonot that much up for improvement over the long term (Baumeister,Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice, 1998; Muraven, Tice, andBaumeister, 1998; Schmeichel, Vohs, and Baumeister, 2003; Moller,2006).

      Willpower is a limited resource which depletes quickly and isn't something that can be improved with deliberate work or exercise.

  5. Nov 2013
    1. His moral sentiment does not even make an attempt to prevent this, whereas there are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power.

      A man's morals do not prevent him from the illusion and deceptions of the world, is it possible that will power alone will wake his desire for truth.