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People often have urges, desires, and natural tendencies that demand fulfillment. Giving in to such feelings will not always be pragmatic, socially acceptable, or healthy.
To deal with such challenges, individuals must exert self-control to regulate their actions. We often need to defer the gratification of these urges until a more appropriate time and place.
This kind of self-management takes a big chunk of mental effort, both emotional and cognitive. Some of these efforts demand less willpower, while others will require much more. Even moderately minor acts of self-control can take a toll.
woman lay exhausted in a chair with a low battery above her head
Ego depletionoccurs when people exhaust all of their available willpower on one task. As a result, they cannot exert the same level of self-control on subsequent, often unrelated tasks.
According to the strength model, self-control and willpower are finite resources determining the capacity for effortful control over dominant responses.
Once expended, it leads to impaired self-control task performance, known as ego depletion. The same idea behind this theory is that willpower can be compared to a muscle that can be both strengthened and fatigued.
For example, if you exhaust yourself in running sprints, you will be less capable of performing other physical tasks.
Self-control is important. Having good self-control is advantageous in several ways. People with high self-control levels may have better relationships and higher accomplishment levels.
On the other hand, those who lack self-control can experience social conflict and poor academic performance.
What happens when self-control is depleted?
So what impact does ego depletion have on your day-to-day life? There are several ways that this phenomenon can influence your behaviors and decisions.
Decision Making
Studies have also discovered that when shoppers experience ego depletion, they are more likely to make inadequate or impulsive purchasing decisions.
The mere number of choices customers face can lead to such depletion. Consumers are compelled to weigh an immense number of choices. This complexity leads customers to become frustrated and overwhelmed.
When a state of low self-control has been reached, consumers will buy items based on simple criteria such as the most inexpensive item or the product being linked to a higher status.
One has probably experienced this if one has ever resorted to grabbing something off the market shelf just due to the fact that it was the lowest priced or a name brand you recognized.
Substance Abuse and Addiction
There is research that suggests depleting self-regulation can also leave people susceptible to impulsive behaviors, which include excessive or chronic consumption of alcohol (Lewczuk, 2022). This can be difficult for individuals predisposed to substance use or abuse.
Exhausting self-control on unrelated tasks might make it tougher to resist and say no when temptation strikes. Another thing ego depletion has also been correlated to is quitting smoking, contributing to smoking cessation failure.
Mental & Physical Performance
Mental toughness, passion, and perseverance are critical for athletic performance, but researchers have found that these tend to decline following complex mentally-taxing tasks (Lewczuk, 2022).
This suggests that the exhaustion of willpower due to mental demands can degrade performance on physical tasks. For student-athletes, this might indicate that taking a challenging exam right before a game might actually harm their performance.
Risky Behaviour
Studies have suggested that ego depletion increases risk-taking. Specifically, ego depletion has increased self-reported sensation seeking and risk-taking and actual risk-taking in both incentivized and unincentivized tasks.
However, there are studies that have uncovered the opposite effect, where ego depletion reduces risk-taking (Koppel, 2019).
We will look more into the challenges of ego-depletion research. Nevertheless, other studies have found that the effect of ego depletion on risk-taking depends on factors such as trait self-control, the amount of effort required in the risk task, and intuition to guide decision-making.
Emotion Regulation
If an individual is at work all day and comes back home after dealing with difficult situations that force them always to respond calmly, their self-regulation will be depleted. Therefore, they will respond reactively to anything else that happens that day.
What causes ego depletion?
Various factors can contribute to ego depletion and make it harder to control yourself and regain willpower. Ego depletion is more likely to happen when a contributing factor is present.
The more factors you are facing, the faster your ego is depleted. It will become tougher to control yourself and regain willpower afterward.
Emotional Distress
Emotional distress is one factor in ego depletion – if one is feeling emotional distress, one’s willpower will be depleted more quickly.
Think about this situation: A former smoker’s spouse is in an accident and is taken to the hospital. Feeling upset and agitated, the former smoker buys a pack of cigarettes and starts smoking again. This is a widespread occurrence. But why? It stands to reason that the person’s willpower is exhausted due to emotional distress.
Unfamiliarity
Simply, it takes more energy to try something new. Being in an unfamiliar setting or doing strange things may hasten ego depletion. It takes more cognitive energy to deal with something new than to do the same things one is used to doing.
Illusory Fatigue
Simply, if one thinks a situation will be mentally taxing, one will become mentally fatigued faster. This is where one experiences illusory fatigue. Which essentially is when ego depletion occurs more often than you expect it to happen.
Research has proven that illusory fatigue uses more working memory capacity, causing you to become mentally drained faster (Lewczuk, 2022). Nevertheless, on the other hand, one can think that a situation will not be mentally taxing, and one can have more self-control.
Low Blood Sugar
Having lower blood sugar can make it more challenging to resist temptation. If one’s blood glucose is low, one has less energy generally. Researchers have found that people with lower blood glucose levels are less resistant to temptation (Hagger, 2010).
However, there are some studies that have indicated that another factor might be at play because just tasting something sweet can improve one’s willpower even if you do not eat it.
Choice
When one feels that one has no choice in reference to whether to do something or not, it depletes your willpower resources faster. One may be forced to do something, but when one is allowed to make one’s own decision, one is less likely to show self-control.
Cognitive Dissonance
Acting or saying something that goes against what one believes diminishes one’s self-control, too. Thecognitive dissonancebetween one’s actions and beliefs wears anyone out, causing ego depletion to happen faster.
Heart Rate Variability
Heart rate variability means no one’s heart beats at perfectly regular intervals. For example, there is a longer interval when one exhales than when one inhales. The heart rate can vary for various reasons, and researchers have found that when one has less self-control, one’s heart rate varies more (Hagger, 2010).
Age
Age could affect how fast ego depletion occurs. However, there has not been much analysis conducted on ego depletion across the human lifespan, so it cannot easily be told precisely how it truly affects an individual.
The majority of the investigations on ego depletion have used college students as test subjects. Only a few studies have indicated that older people are more resistant to ego depletion than their younger coequals.
Hormones
Offsetting Depletion in the Short Term
Research has provided multiple ways to encourage people to continue exerting self-control and to somewhat replenish the resource itself (Baumeister & Maranges, 2016).
Feeling Good
Feeling good has been proven to fend off depletion effects. Accepting a gift or viewing a comedy video offsets the effects of depletion.
Religion
Prayer before using self-control to restrict emotional reactions to a funny video improved performance on theStroop task, for example.
Likewise, reading words related to religiosities, such as divine or God, led to resistance against depletion effects for those who had to use self-control on a primary task and led to a better baseline.
Self‐Affirmation
The self and its ideals have been shown to neutralize depletion effects. For instance, considering the values most important to oneself or engaging in self-affirmation eliminated the depleting effects of a challenging writing task or stifling emotional reactions.
Tapping into the naturalistic use of self-control to monitor and edit emotions, thoughts, and behavior to reach a standard, researchers showed that keeping in mind one’s standards counteracts depletion (Baumeister & Maranges, 2016).
Persons who had to use self-control in prior activity and completed a phrase-making task with the word “I” did better than those who never referred to the self.
Agency
Activation of agentic responses can counteract depletion, emphasizing that motivations interact with self-control expenditures.
Directing people to take accountability for their actions and to feel autonomous can stave off depletion effects, for instance. Hearing an inspiring story of an athlete who overpowered many obstacles to become a world record holder also does so.
Participants’ statements in reference to perseverance led to better physical stamina on the task after a demanding puzzle task (Baumeister & Maranges, 2016).
In the same study, researchers gave some participants a cue of a man in a business suit and the phrase “You can do it!” These participants did better in physical effort after an attention control task than non-depleted participants (Baumeister & Maranges, 2016).
Power
A leadership position and power over a subsidiary during a laboratory activity led to better performance on a self-control task and counteracted the effects of depletion. However, when participants were directed
with an additional test they had not planned, they performed worse and showed deficits in self-control. This shows that the anti-depletion effects of power are very short-lived, and those situational incentives encourage individuals to expend diminishing resources rather than preserve them.
Money
Cues that remind people of money, such as income-related phrases, narratives about growing up affluent, or handling play money, activate bold responses and goal pursuit. This occurs even when the money is not directly connected to the task or offered as a reward.
Another study showed that unscrambling money-related phrases led to better performance on the task among fatigued participants.
Self‐Control Beliefs
Whether one believes self-control is restricted affects how well one does on self-control tasks. For example, personal hypotheses about self-control resources can be used with aquestionnaireemphasizing either a limited-resource model or a nonlimited-resource model.
Both preexisting and manipulated implicit theories regarding self-control resources have been found to affect self-control results and objective pursuit.
Planning
Effective planning diminishes the need to create new decisions at every step of a challenging process and gives a set of customheuristicsthat frees up self-control resources.
For example, in one set of studies, unless participants formed implementation purposes, an initial self-control task led to deficits in a second self-control task. Notably, subjects made implementation choices to prepare for the task and then showed less depletion on a second task.
Rest
Before performing another task, subjects took a break, during which they answered easy questions on test questionnaires.
Compared to just a one- or three-minute break, those who were given a ten-minute break did just as well as non-depleted participants on the following task, indicating that the break restored some self-control resources.
Strengthening Self‑Control in the Long-Term
Physical exertion, like self-control, leads to exhaustion and impairment in subsequent activities that require strength.
However, in the long run, physical exertion, such as exercise and practicing self-control, leads to increased strength and stamina.
Additionally, making plans to follow in potentially complex future scenarios decreases the number of decisions that must be made or impulses must be overridden at that time, saving self-control resources.
Exercise
Due to the fact that self-control is considered a domain-general resource, practicing self-control in one domain should lead to improvements in different tasks and in other domains. Indeed, practicing standing up straight to improve one’s posture, for example, can improve handgrip tasks.
Afterward, in a laboratory test, these people showed less depletion after overcomingprejudicialstereotypingthan those who had not performed these exercises.
Self-control training can even help people quit addictive behaviors. Two weeks of refusing to eat sweets or regularly squeezing a handgrip enhanced a smoker’s quitting success rate comparable to those who did not practice self-control or just did simple math problems for two weeks.
Self-control practice can lead to improvements in romantic relationships. Simple and regular application of self-control to use one’s non-dominant hand or avoid abbreviations and curse words for two weeks improved control over inclinations to respond with physical aggression to one’s partner’s provoking behavior.
Habits
Habits are highly instinctive responses and therefore, demand and deplete less self-control than overriding provocations and purposeful action.
Habits also resurface more often when people are depleted. Sound habits, then, counteract the adverse effects of depletion insofar as they are not depleting, and even when depleted, one can depend on them. Heading to the gym will make it easier to do it more frequently and consistently.
Thus, manylongitudinal studieshave proven long-term improvements in self-control abilities as a function of habitual and scheduled rather than random self-regulatory exercises. Indeed, one of the recent shifts in self-regulation theory has proposed that effective self-regulation operates through habits or habitual avoidance of conflict.
People with good self-control do not necessarily resist temptations and desires more often or more effectively than others. Instead, they seem to set up their lives to be less exposed to temptations.
Exercises, like using one’s non-dominant hand, can lead to significant improvements in the regulation of a seemingly unrelated domain, stressing the significance of self-control in meeting personal and social standards and the importance of practicing it.
Habitually practicing self-control – making the bed every morning, doing the dishes right after use, giving up sweets, or standing up straight – can improve your self-control in other areas.
It is packing a glucose drink in advance and planning precisely what time to turn off one’s computer to end the work day and when, how to get to the gym, and which workouts to do can lead to fewer conflicts or temptations while trying to reach a fitness goal, for example.
This also reduces the number of decisions that must be made during the workout. Planning, then, will not only make it easier to go to the gym again in the future but also will have beneficial effects on other applications of self-control, such as quitting smoking, consuming more healthfully, remaining calm during an argument, or opposing that impulse purchase.
How to overcome ego depletion
Eat the Frog!
This is a classic project management technique that takes things to a whole new depth in the context of ego depletion.
The concept behind the phrase “eat the frog” is that you must simply do the most challenging thing in your day first – even if that means actually eating an amphibian. Prioritize doing the most critical and formidable task before your willpower is depleted for the day.
Use If-Then Statements!
These are also known as implementation intentions (as we discussed earlier). These are views of what you plan to do if you get into a roadblock or temptation. For example, say you see something online you want to buy, you will put a plan in place to say that you will save the page for later to avoid any impulsive purchases.
Having a plan for situations where you know you are bound to break takes some of the strain out of thinking it over.
Indulge in a Little Sugary Treat!
As we stated before, there are some studies that suggest that there may be a link between blood glucose and willpower. Psychologists theorize that since glucose is energy for your brain, consuming sugar re-energizes it (Lewczuk, 2022).
Either way, if you find it hard to stay motivated to engage in good habits or avoid bad ones, try a little sugary treat which could include lemonade or gum to keep you going.
Be Positive and Mindful!
Similar to eating something sweet to potentially brighten your mood, a positive mood generally has been shown to fend off the effects of ego depletion. Therefore, try taking a break to watch a funny video or spend time with a special pet to reinvigorate your mind.
To make sure you are not distracted for too long, set a timer for five or ten minutes so you can return to your task at hand.
Be Well Rested!
Being well-rested is connected to both improved mood and sounder mental performance. A pleasant attitude and full mental ability help decrease the effects of ego depletion. Remember not to go overboard with a new sleep habit – that shift could take more effort than it restores.
Limit Exposure to the Tempting Thing!
In one study, those who aimed to eat fewer unhealthy snacks were most successful when they reported witnessing fewer friends eating. This indicates that restricting exposure to a bad habit makes it easier to dodge it. This makes intuitive sense, of course, because we know it is more difficult to resist something right in front of you.
Maybe you are trying to cut restaurant take-out or limit online shopping. Try to make it as difficult as you can to be in a position that requires you to use willpower. Take a different route home, or set specific blockers on your computer for your regular shopping sites.
Examples
There are many instances of how ego depletion can influence your behaviors in big and small ways. What might happen if you are low on self-control due to ego depletion?
Ego Depletion in Psychology
Ego depletion is, therefore, a critical topic in experimental psychology, specificallysocial psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to understanding human self-control processes. There have both been studies to support and question the validity of ego depletion as a theory.
An analysis was undertaken to examine the influence of ego depletion and expectancy beliefs about the limited willpower of self-control on task performance and task persistence.
There were two ego-depleted vs non-ego-depleted groups, a group with positive expectancy beliefs, a group with negative expectancy beliefs, and a group without any expectancy beliefs. The participants were undergraduates of the University of Sargodha who were randomly distributed to each of the six tasks adapted to manipulate the independent variables.
Working memoryand performance on problem-solving and task persistence were assessed, and scores and time were taken. The analysis indicated that the participants in the non-depleted group had significantly higher mean scores on problem-solving and working memory tasks than their counterparts in the ego-depleted group.
The group with the positive expectancy beliefs had the highest mean scores on working memory and problem-solving tasks compared to the other groups.
Ego Depletion in Finance
There are several ways that ego depletion can influence one’s finances. Sometimes decisions require thorough consideration and evaluation of all one’s choices, such as if one is looking at loan prospects. Other times, making a judgment call demands you to refrain from purchasing something alluring.
In both cases, you have to exert cognitive energy, which can be draining. After some time looking at your prospects or abstaining from spending, you may enter into a financial contract at the last minute or break your budget with a big splurge.
Researchers have found three leading causes of self-control failure that can cause consumer overspending (Turbo, 2021). One is that there is a conflict between the goal of getting what you want and the goal of saving money. The second happens when one does not track what you are spending. The third is that one spends more when one’s ego is depleted.
Ego Depletion in Athletes
Athletes are constantly confronted with self-control demands. According to the strength model of self-control, people have limited self-control strength, which can become temporarily limited following self-control demands such as attention regulation.
When self-control strength is depleted, in a state of ego depletion, athletes are less persistent during laborious physical exercise, are less likely to follow their exercise routines, and tend to perform worse under tension (Englert, 2016).
In sports, for top-level performance, it is imperative to control one’s impulses or behavioral tendencies: for example, athletes need to downregulate their anxiety levels in high-pressure contexts like sporting competitions to get calmer and more centered on the actual task at hand, like performing a basketball free-throw, forcing themselves to work persistently on a straining physical exercise, or pushing themselves to adhere to work out plans over extended periods.
Ego Depletion and Emotions
Ego depletion has also been shown to influence what is known as prosocial behavior, or social interactions designed to help others. When people reflect on their behaviors, they often times experience feelings of guilt. It is these guilty sentiments that sometimes lead people to behave in prosocial ways.
Studies have shown that people who are ego-depleted experience fewer sentiments of guilt. In examinations where people were induced into an ego-depleted state, these subjects were less likely to feel sensations of guilt and, therefore, less likely to engage in prosocial actions.
Ego Depletion and Food (Obesity)
Dieting is one of the most prominent examples of how ego depletion can sabotage one’s willpower. Research has found that chronic dieters are more inclined to ego depletion than non-dieters (Cherry, 2021). Because dieters use so much willpower to control their food intake, they become more prone to losing self-control in the face of temptation.
One might spend all day diligently sticking to the arranged diet. One eats a healthy breakfast and lunch and even resists the yummy doughnuts that a coworker brings into the office during the mid-afternoon break. That night, as one arrives home from work, one finds that the resolution has grown weak, and one can no longer have the self-control to stick to one’s diet.
Sticking to an incredibly restrictive diet can be extremely difficult. Dieting can present a challenge that other lifestyle changes do not. Because low blood glucose can cause one’s ego to deplete faster, one has to walk a fine line between eating less and too little. Adding to this is the mental fatigue that comes from altering a habit, and one can understand why dieting is challenging.
In one study, for example, participants (some who were dieting and some not) had to sit next to a bowl of tantalizing snacks or be far away from the desirable treats.
When the participants were afterward given a chance to eat ice cream, those who were dieting and had to sit near a bowl of treats ate more ice cream than the other participants. Because they had to use a lot of willpower to fight to consume the snacks, these participants exhausted their self-control resources.
Challenges to Ego-Depletion Research
Lack of Clear Definition of Self-Control
The field lacks well-articulated and generally agreed-upon functional definitions of self-control that can guide the current studies on ego depletion.
In spite of the fact that some investigations refer to inhibitory control as their functional definition, the terminhibitionis commonly used in a rather generic sense without actually being explicit to different inhibitory processes proposed in the literature.
Moreover, even more problematic is that some studies define self-control too broadly as the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behavior or any monitoring and transformation of behavior (Lurquin, 2017).
Even when some autonomous justifications are provided, the characteristics used to justify a task contrast greatly, including being intellectually demanding, requiring exertion, and simply being challenging.
Consequently, wide-ranging tasks like taking standardized tests or even balancing on one leg count as self-control tasks (Lurquin, 2017).
Lack of Empirical Validation for Self-Control Tasks
Various tasks used in ego-depletion research, such as observing a video while ignoring words emerging onscreen and writing essays without using specific letters, have not been independently validated as effectual measures of self-control.
Some such assignments have not been used outside ego-depletion research, and some even lack unembellished measures of task execution that could be used as indices of self-control (Lurquin, 2017).
This lack of independent validation of self-control tasks is problematic because it is difficult to derive a precise prediction for any ego-depletion study. For instance, according to the strength model, the ego-depletion effect should be observed only when tasks #1 and #2 – both involve self-control and come from the same self-control resources.
It is ambiguous, however, whether various task combinations used in ego-depletion research meet these essential conditions.
Lack of Well-Specified Models That Make Falsifiable Predictions
The existing models with the purpose of explaining the ego-depletion effect are currently too underspecified to permit other researchers to derive unambiguously testable projections.
Such critical resource consumption parameters must be more formally specified before one can resolve whether an experiment should produce the ego-depletion effect.
Despite some relevant historical precedent, this theoretical issue has been overlooked in ego-depletion research (Lurquin, 2017).
In a compelling critique, they articulated various problems with resource hypotheses, including the circularity issue and the ambiguity surrounding the hypothesized resource execution functions.
This critique led some theorists to abandon the resource idea altogether and others to attempt to identify better the nature of resources and their consumption processes in the form of computational models. Models of ego-depletion phenomena need such formalization.
References
Adil, Adnan & Kanwal, Asmara & Ghayas, Saba & Khan, Anam. (2019). Effect of Ego Depletion and Expectancy Beliefs on Working Memory, Problem Solving, Task Persistence, and Performance. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research. 34. 233-253. 10.33824/PJPR.2019.34.2.13.
Cherry, K. (2021, May 28).How Ego Depletion Can Sabotage Your Willpower. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/ego-depletion-4175496
Englert, C. (2016).The Strength Model of Self-Control in Sport and Exercise Psychology. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00314/full
Hagger, M. (2010, July).Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis. National Library of Medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20565167/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20strength%20model,performance%2C%20known%20as%20ego%20depletion.
Koppel, L. (2019, July 5).No Effect of Ego Depletion on Risk Taking. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46103-0?error=cookies_not_supported&code=c5570afe-024c-4a20-9db2-cbf15e86c9a8#:%7E:text=Most%20published%20studies%20have%20suggested,20%2C22%2C23%20tasks.
Lewczuk, K. (2022).Emotion Regulation, Effort and Fatigue: Complex Issues Worth Investigating. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.742557/full
Lurquin, J. H. (2017).Challenges to Ego-Depletion Research Go beyond the Replication Crisis: A Need for Tackling the Conceptual Crisis. Frontiers.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00568/full
Maranges, Heather & Baumeister, Roy. (2016). Self-Control and Ego Depletion.
Turbo (2021, April 26).What Is Ego Depletion and How Can You Overcome It?MintLife Blog.
Saul McLeod, PhD
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education
Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.
Mia Belle Frothingham
BA with minors in Psychology and Biology, MRes University of Edinburgh
Mia Belle Frothingham is a Harvard University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Sciences with minors in biology and psychology
