Podcast #1,023: Is Self-Control Overrated?

Self-control, the ability to resolve a conflict between two competing desires, is frequently touted as the golden key to success. But many of the most popular ideas about self-control are actually at odds with how it really operates.

Here to unpack some of the lesser-understood and counterintuitive ideas around discipline and willpower is Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology who has studied the nature of self-regulation in depth. In the first part of our conversation, Michael unpacks the popular ego depletion model of willpower and how it hasn’t held up to scientific scrutiny. We then turn to the surprising fact that the people who seem to exhibit a lot of self-control don’t actually exercise a lot of discipline and restraint in their lives, that the achievement of goals is more a function of having virtuous desires, and what contributes to having those desires.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Self-control, the ability to resolve a conflict between two competing desires is frequently touted as the golden key to success. But many of the most popular ideas about self-control are actually at odds with how it really operates. Here to impact some of the lesser understood and counterintuitive ideas around discipline and willpower is Michael Inzlicht, professor of psychology who has studied the nature of self-regulation in depth. In the first part of our conversation, Michael impacts the popular ego depletion model of willpower and how it hasn’t held up to scientific scrutiny. We then turn to the surprising fact that the people who seem to exhibit a lot of self-control don’t actually exercise a lot of discipline and restraint in their lives. That the achievement of goals is more a function of having virtuous desires and what contributes to having those desires. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/control.

All right. Michael Inzlicht, welcome to the show.

Michael Inzlicht: Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you are a professor of psychology and you’ve done a lot of research on self-regulation and self-control, and a lot of your research has provided some counterintuitive insights about how we can get better at achieving our goals in life. So in a paper you wrote with some colleagues, you kind of went through the various models to explain how people go about in self-regulating and going about achieving their goals in life. Whether that’s saving money, losing weight, being a better father, being a better professor. The best known model I think people are likely familiar with is the resource model of self-control. This is all about willpower. For those who aren’t familiar with this model, can you walk us through this theory of self-regulation and self-control?

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, I’d be happy to. And I’ve spent a good part of my career first being a lover of this theory, a real admirer of this theory, to then being questioning, somewhat skeptical to then outright being hostile and a critic of it. So I’ve gone the full gamut. But let me just kinda tell you what the… Let me try to give steelman what this theory is about. So this is called the resource model of self-control, and it suggests, and it makes two propositions. So the first one is that there’s many different forms of behavior, kinds of behavior we might see in the real world. You mentioned a bunch of them, at the top there. So being a good researcher, being calm and cool and collected in the face of pressure or where you might get angry, expressing empathy or feeling empathy for someone else as opposed to seeing things through your own lens, exercising, eating well, studying, etcetera.

All these different kinds of behaviors, and I can go on and on, by the way, they all seem to rely on self-control. They all… Like the extent to which you can control yourself seems to predict how well you do each of these various behaviors. So there’s something common across many different behaviors, and this is the assumption of self-control being central. And maybe another version of that is saying it relies on some kind of central resource. Okay? So that first proposition is I would say more or less accepted. Although there’s been some pushback around the edges about that idea, but I think that idea is somewhat safe, so not controversial. The second idea is that that central thing, that central resource is actually a resource. It’s actually a depletable resource, like all resources are, that’s finite, and disappears or gets used or depleted and consumed the more you use it.

Okay? So the more I control myself, let’s say I go to work in the morning and my boss is being a jerk, and I’ve gotta regulate my… I’ve gotta control my own impulses, my own angry impulses. ‘Cause I know if I express anger to my boss, there’s a good chance I won’t have a job the next day. So I control myself. And then at lunch, I’m a good boy and I eat salad and not a burger. Or in Canada, what I love to eat is poutine.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: So doing those two things uses self-control and depletes the central resource. And what that means is that later on, later in the day, maybe I will be like really impatient with my children when I get home when they’re misbehaving ’cause I don’t have that resource. That resource is gone, I have less of it and I just kind of lose my cool, lose my… That’s possible. So the analogy that I like to use when explaining it is that self-control is kinda like a fuel, the resource you can think of the resource that we use as kind of like a fuel. When I drive my car to go from point A to point B or my motorcycle from point A to point B, I use fuel to get to point B. Now, if I’ve used up all that fuel, I will not be able to go to point C. But the only thing that will help me to go go to point C is getting the gas station and filling up again. Same thing happens with self-control. If I use that resource to, again, regulate my emotions with my boss, to eat well, I have less of it or I have none of it, so I can’t control myself any further.

So this is an idea that was exceedingly popular in what was first formulated by Roy Baumeister, someone who I spur with a lot, but someone who I admire as well. Just because I disagree with him doesn’t mean I don’t like him, I actually do like him. And it was first introduced, let’s say, in 1994. The first empirical paper was produced in 1998, but it really exploded in prominence in the early 2000s. And I would go to conferences and every, practically every talk was talking about this resource model of self-control. Oh, by the way, I haven’t used the term that Roy Baumeister coined. The term is called ego depletion. This is this notion that when I’ve used this resource, I’m in a state of depletion and he’s kind of hinting at Freud who talked about the ego, that my ego is depleted.

I have less willpower, I have less ability to express my agency. And again, because agencies is involved in so many different things, so many different aspects of our lives, it would mean that many aspects of our lives are compromised when we are in a depleted state. So tons of people got super excited, they applied it in different places, and perhaps like the apogee of excitement and interests was when then President Barack Obama in a very famous interview with Michael Lewis, alluded to his knowledge of the resource model of self-control. He said that he wore the exact same thing every single day except for that infamous ten suits, right? He wore the exact same thing every single day so that he did not have to decide what to wear that day, therefore not using resources and making that decision. These are inconsequential decisions. Let’s wear the same thing every day, and then I can spare that cognitive resource, that self-control resource to help do the work of the presidency. So exceedingly popular. So that’s the kind of, I hope the steelman version of the resource model of self-control.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Actually, I remember I read Roy Baumeister’s book, Willpower, that was back in 2011, 2012. We did a whole series about it, kind of summarizing. ‘Cause to me, it just seemed very like, yeah, this makes sense that we have this sort of finite source in our brain that as we use it, it gets depleted and it gets harder and harder to maintain self-control. So yeah, one of the studies that stood out to me, and I think a lot of people quote it similar to that Barack Obama thing, how he made fewer decisions, it was with judges. So it’s like they found that judges were more likely to deny parole as the day progressed, as it got towards more towards lunch. And then as it got closer to lunch, the idea is like, well, they just made all these decisions. So they just wanted to go the easy way and the easy way is just deny parole. And like, yeah, that makes sense. Everyone’s experienced that. You can get kinda tired, so you just… You don’t exercise your self-control as much. So talk about, you started… You liked this idea like a lot of people at the beginning, then became skeptical of it. Walk us through your skepticism.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, I definitely will, but if I don’t get to it, I wanna talk about that Israel judge study because it’s a famous study in this canon and it’s a bad study for lots of reasons.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Michael Inzlicht: But let me answer your question first. So why did my enthusiasm start waning? So it started waning initially because I just started noticing internal contradictions in the theory. Like the empirical evidence that was seen as supporting the theory actually didn’t. It undermined it. But it seemed like, and some of these empirical findings were being produced by some of the major proponents of the theory itself. And it just seemed they were like, hey, like that theory doesn’t make sense given what you’ve just found. So some colleagues of mine and I, we started writing a series of papers just pointing to the inconsistencies and suggesting that, hey, there’s probably something cool here, but it might not be the reason you think it’s happening.

So what are some of the inconsistencies? So the first one that I noticed is that if people were motivated to… Well, actually maybe let me back up one second. Let me just quickly describe the kind of typical study in this canon. So the typical ego depletion study uses what we call a sequential task paradigm. Okay? What that means is simply people in one condition are given a task that’s either in one condition, the task is very difficult, it’s effortful or requires self-control. And the other condition, it doesn’t require self-control, it’s not effortful, it’s easy. And the logic here is in that one, that first group, they’re engaging in self-control, therefore they’re using up their resource. And then afterwards, everyone in both conditions is given a second task that always requires effort, self-control, et cetera.

And the typical pattern of findings is that for those people who controlled themselves, who exerted effort at time one, they showed diminished effort, willingness or ability at time two. Okay? So just a simple example. Let me see if I can remember. Let me find a good one here for you. Okay. If at time one… This is a study done by Kathleen Vohs and a few others. Kathleen Vohs is like what I would consider the number two person in ego depletion world. She brought in dieters into a lab who were hungry. And at first, she had them all watch a kind of a shocking 10-minute clip. I think it’s tamed by today’s standards, but it’s a movie depicting kind of gross things. Maybe like a fear factor, you can think of it that way. And one group had to hide all their emotions. They had to like sit there with their face still, they’re being video recorded and they had to suppress all feelings. That’s hard. That’s difficult. Our natural response is like when something is disgusting, it’s a recoil. Second group could act naturally. So one group is using effort, they’re controlling themselves, the second group is not. And then afterwards, they were given like a bunch of ice cream.

They’re actually given nine scoops of ice cream to taste. Now you could conduct this experiment by having just a couple of teaspoons of ice cream or you can have all nine scoops. And the experimenters weighed the ice cream before and after to determine how much people ate. And people who first restrained their emotions ended up eating more ice cream afterwards than those who did not restrain their emotions. Evidence of ego depletion. You use this limited resource, you use it all up, therefore you couldn’t control yourself at time two with eating the ice cream. That’s one of like hundreds of studies. Okay. So why did I start becoming doubtful? If you started motivating people for that time two task to do the right thing, they could easily do it. So for example, if you told people we’ll pay you more money if you kind of restrain yourself from eating the ice cream in that second study, people could easily not eat the ice cream. If it’s a resource that’s actually been diminished, like fuel in your car, it doesn’t matter how much money I smack down on the hood of my car. My car’s not driving, it’s on empty. So me being motivated to get from point B to point C won’t help me. The only thing that will help me is refueling.

So motivation and all different kinds of motivations, even if you interact with a nice experimenter and they ask you to do the second task that’s hard, you’re more willing to do it as opposed to interacting with a, let’s say, less nice experimenter. Again, if it’s a resource that’s been depleted and used, what’s going on? That doesn’t make sense. That’s like one bit of evidence. Another bit of evidence is in some clever studies done by Ed Hirt at the University of Indiana. They gave people false feedback after the time one task. And they told people in one condition, hey, it looks like you’re really, really tired, you’re depleted, you have no energy. In another condition, they told them, wow, it looks like you’ve had a really great night of sleep last night, you have lots of vitality and vigor, you have lots of energy here. Now the trick is that they gave this feedback to people who were actually depleted or not. So some people did the really, really hard thing where supposedly the self-control was being used and depleted and told them, hey, it looks like you’ve got lots of energy. And some people who were not depleted, they were told, oh, it looks like you’re tired. And guess what happened afterwards?

On the time two task, what predicted the performance was not literally how much effort they expended at time one, but the perception of how tired and how much energy they had at that time. So those who were actually depleted but were told they had lost that energy, they performed the time two task as well as anybody else. Those who were not depleted but were given information about how they were really, really tired, they performed quite poorly. So again, if I believe that my car has lots of gas, but it’s empty, guess what? I’m out of luck. I’m not gonna be able to drive. So it can’t be a physical resource that’s being depleted. It’s just not possible. So it has to be something else. So that’s where the doubt started creeping in. And my colleagues and I started formulating alternative hypotheses suggesting that it actually has nothing to do with a resource, a physical resource.

There’s no fuel going on empty. It’s more about motivation. It’s more about willingness to exert effort. And if I’ve worked hard for an experimenter, or if I’ve worked hard for my boss, and I’ve been a good boy biting my salad, then god dammit, I just wanna do what I wanna do right now. And I’m tired of pleasing other people. And that might look like I’m losing control, but it’s actually that I’ve chosen to do something else. I’ve chosen to prioritize other things. So that was the kind of initial foray, trying to explain this phenomenon without any recourse to a resource. But that was my initial skepticism, and then it got a lot deeper. And I can talk to you about that if you’d like.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Talk about that judge experiment. Why do you think that was a bad experiment?

Michael Inzlicht: Oh boy. Okay. So that’s a bad experiment for few reasons. So the main reason is that it turns out that at least in these Israeli parole board hearings, the cases that judges are looking at are not randomly assigned. Meaning that it’s not the case that you get the same kind of case at the beginning of the day as at the end of the day, they’re actually staggered in an interesting way. And it turns out that they’re ordered, I don’t know exactly why they do this, but it’s ordered in such a way that the cases that are essentially slam dunk, you’re staying in prison, being denied parole are stacked towards the end of the day. They are stacked before lunch. And the ones where, again, there’s perhaps a greater chance of parole being actually given is more towards the beginning of the day.

That entire study’s premise is that the rates of paroles being given should be random. You should have an equal chance of being given parole or denied parole at the beginning of the day or the middle of the day and the end of the day. But if they’re actually ordered in some whatever sensical way, then this analysis doesn’t make any sense. So that’s reason number one. And then there’s also like this might be for statistics mavens here, but it’s something we call effect sizes. Okay? That’s just literally the size of an effect. How big should we expect something to be? And from psychology over doing this over a hundred years, we have a rough estimate for how large things should be. For example, on average, men are taller than women on average. That’s not true for everybody. I’m a short man.

I know plenty of tall women. But on average, men are taller than women. Now there’s an effect size to that, that effect size is pretty large. Again, I’d use a Cohen’s d of like one, you can forget about those numbers for the moment if you don’t care for them, but they’re large. I can see it with a naked eye. Okay? The judge study, the effect size was humongous. It was way bigger than the difference between how much taller men are than women on average. Okay? So we should have seen this with our naked eye. We didn’t need someone to publish a paper 10 years ago. We could have seen that a hundred years ago. So it should have led us to believe that something was wrong with that study. So that study, the ideas might be correct, but that study does not give evidence for those ideas.

Brett McKay: Okay, And then your doubts got even deeper with this theory, this resource model of self-regulation. Like there was a theory that the resource was glucose in your brain. So if you were like depleted on glucose, you had less willpower. And then there’s things you can do to conserve your glucose. Or maybe if you give yourself a sugary snack, you’ll have more glucose to make decisions. But then you found research, that doesn’t work. Another one is, there’s an idea with this theory that you could strengthen or increase your willpower by doing different things like focusing on your posture, using a different hand to brush your teeth, like little things like that by doing things that are a little bit harder, you could strengthen. But then you’ve also done research saying, no, that actually doesn’t work either.

Michael Inzlicht:Yeah, yeah. So there’s lots in there. [chuckle] So maybe I’ll say… I’ll say one thing about glucose and then I’ll say something more broad about the field of psychology and science and social science more generally. So glucose, it’s actually the study of glucose and how preposterous it is on basic principles that then led to an overturning of the entire idea of ego depletion. Okay? So when I say biologically preposterous, so first let me just kind of say again, steelman the idea. So for those of us who’ve taken any high school biology, you know that glucose is important. You know, that glucose is the the fuel that our cells use to produce things. So it would be not inconceivable that when we can’t do things, when we feel lack of energy, tired, wanting to go to bed, et cetera, that we are glucose deprived.

Okay? That would be like an intuitive kind of thing to think about. But guess what? We can actually measure glucose. We can measure it in the brain. And when we do actual good studies measuring the actual consumption of glucose in the brain through PET studies, I don’t mean pet as in your pet, as in positive emission tomography. It’s a kind of neuroimaging. You see that actually that thinking, thinking about things which controlling yourself, a volition is a kind of thinking does not consume that much glucose. It consumes remarkably little glucose.

Brett McKay: Yeah. People may have heard of this thing called the Stroop test. It’s a test where people are asked to name the color of the ink used to print a word, and the color of the ink contradicts what the color spells out. So like the word blue is printed in red ink. And in this test, it takes a fair… It’s hard. It takes a fair amount of cognitive effort to do. And even doing 10 minutes of the Stroop test only consumes one calorie of energy.

Michael Inzlicht: One calorie of energy. Okay? One calorie of energy. Now glucose is incredibly important for the brain. It’s so important in fact that the brain has mechanisms to ensure there’s an oversupply of glucose. The reason for this is because the brain… Once the brain is deprived of glucose, it leads to cell death, and then leads to body death, it leads to death. Okay? So the brain has mechanisms in place to ensure there is enough glucose around. So there is no way that one calorie is going to impair the brain. There’s no way that ten calories, a hundred calories is going to impair the brain such that we are run out of energy. Okay? It’s just not biologically possible. It doesn’t make any sense. So that’s one. So the glucose idea just is like, it’s implausible on its face and then it’s also irreproducible and non-replicable.

Okay? So that brings me to my bigger issue, which has led me from just critiquing the theory to whole scale doubting it, doubting at least its empirical foundations is that for over ten years now, the field of psychology, but other social sciences and other sciences in fact, have gone through what people are calling the replication crisis. And there’s this notion that many of our cherished findings, many of the things that we have been taught in university classrooms, taught in bestselling books, are based on science that cannot be replicated. Okay, what does that mean? Again, for those who have taken some science in high school, replication is the bedrock of science.

Because if I discover something in a lab, that’s not true. That’s not real in any meaningful way. It just means I found something. So I need to try it again and make sure I can reproduce it, make sure I can replicate it. So I wanna do it twice, three times, four times, five times. Better, I want other people with independent labs who maybe are even skeptical and critical of my ideas to replicate my ideas exactly. And then and only then will I say, okay, I might be onto something. And now let’s build a theory to understand these little factoids, these little facts on the ground. It turns out that in psychology, we’ve been really sloppy with replication. And it’s not psychology alone, it’s economics, it’s scary cancer biology. It’s areas in chemistry. There’s other areas where we’ve had like this… The incentives aren’t there for people to conduct replications. So people don’t. And as a result, we have these one-off studies that like sound good and are intuitive, and then we assume they’re real, et cetera. And I can go, I can talk for a long, long time about this. In fact, I have gone on many podcasts talking about this.

So we have the replication crisis. So what’s happened is probably the biggest victim of the replication crisis has been in fact ego depletion, this resource model of self-control. There have been now multiple attempts with thousands of participants, with labs all over the world to replicate some basic findings in ego depletion, in the canon of ego depletion. And I participated in a few of these myself. And I’m saying this, I did this as a proponent. Maybe I disagreed with the theory, but I believed in the phenomenon. Okay? And I was shocked when it was published eventually in 2016, when I first learned of the results of this big, big project. Well, again, I think I had about over 2000 participants all over the world, could not replicate the basic effect. We had zero. Could not replicate it at all. Baumeister, who’s one of the lead architects of this area was very doubtful. And he had good reasons for being doubtful and maybe some not so good reasons. But given the benefit of the doubt, he, well, I should say Kathleen Vohs, who again is number two in this world, was also skeptical, decided, I wanna do a better job of doing a mass replication. And she did. In fact, it was a massive improvement over the first one, but the results were unchanged.

Still, there’s an inability to replicate these basic findings. And that’s crushing. For me who have been in this field studying this for at least at the time for 10 some odd years, now much longer than that, it was crushing. What have I done for the past 10 years? So it led to really, really a lot of soul searching. Now, I’m gonna say something that it might be difficult for some of your listeners to grapple with. And that is that just because we’re unable to replicate this stuff in a lab setting does not mean the idea is wrong. It simply means that the tools we use to generate the idea are not up to task. And if we have other tools, maybe we can find evidence of that. And in fact, there are other tools. And I think of ego depletion as a kind of fatigue. You get tired. And Brett, you’ve been tired in your life. I know that for a fact because you’re a human. We’ve all been tired in life. And when we’re tired, our cognitive systems act differently. And we’re less able or willing to do certain things. And at some level, that’s kind of like what’s kind of what ego depletion is saying, but the paradigms used to get at ego depletion in the lab were kind of evoking it with really, really short tasks that were not very demanding, et cetera.

But when you look at good studies in the real world, it’s not that Israeli judge study, but other good studies in the real world, you see evidence of this. So for example, there’s a beautiful study. Hengchen Dai is the lead author. Katie Milkman, who’s a brilliant behavioral economist at Wharton is another another author looking at health care workers and getting tens of thousands of actual health care workers, real health workers who they have to wear these badges. And the badges have these remote IDs. And the ID would ping every time they enter a patient’s room. And in that room, there are also hand sanitizers. And this study was done pre-COVID, by the way. And there’s a rule in all these health care systems, these hospitals, you’ve got to sanitize your hands before and after you enter a patient’s room. So you can look at compliance with these hand sanitizing. First, the bad news, health care workers only sanitize at best, at best 50 percent of the time. But the longer their shift was in the day, the less likely they were to sanitize their hands. So that’s evidence that their compliance with some external rule is going down over hours, not over minutes, but over hours. So it’s kind of like the Israeli Judge study, but again, it’s something you can believe. So that is real. But again, all the lab studies that we’ve learned about, I no longer trust them.

Brett McKay: Okay. So the takeaway there is that something like ego depletion could be going on that diminishes our ability to make good decisions. It’s not that there’s like a single ego or self-control resource, it’s just that you’re just tired. And when you’re tired, not only does your body function less, but maybe your brain does, too.

Michael Inzlicht: Exactly. And the truth is, like when you frame it that way, isn’t it a lot less exciting and interesting than ego depletion and some magical resource being diminished after as little as five minutes?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: Fatigue is one of the oldest topics in psychology, and we’ve known about this for a long time. It doesn’t make it less important. It’s good to know that when you’re tired, maybe you don’t operate heavy machinery, but I don’t think people really need that lesson. So we’ve kinda known this already.

Brett McKay: Okay. So the popular ego depletion model isn’t the right paradigm through which to view how self-control operates. And then you’ve developed this other counterintuitive idea in your research as well, which I’d like to… I wanna dig into. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. We have this idea, I think in general about achieving goals that you have to white knuckle it, you have to be gritty and just wear a hair shirt. If it doesn’t hurt, then it’s like you’re not really working and you’re not really doing anything. But one of your counterintuitive findings in some of your research is that people who display more restraint in their lives, so people who are really successful at maybe restraining themselves from eating the cookie or who are really good at maintaining an exercise schedule. These individuals also report controlling themselves less, exercising self-control less. So how is it these people who are… It looks like they’re exercising a lot of self-control. They actually aren’t exercising a lot of self-control.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I just wanna clarify one thing. So I’m not the one who discovered this, at least initially. That would be Will Hoffmann, who is a brilliant German psychologist. So he conducted a really, I think brilliant study that many people have now copied and found similar results. And what he found was that when we look at people, people… And if you wanna use the word self-control, you could. I don’t think that’s the appropriate word given what you just said. But people who end up doing well in life, they might have what we call high trait self-control. I think a better term is what personality psychologists call conscientiousness. Okay? That’s a broad trait that describes the extent to which people are orderly, follow rules, are hardworking, have to some extent some traditional values, and show restraint. They’re thoughtful. When we look at those… And by the way, those are the kind of people we all wanna be.

I say this because there is so much research now showing that these kinds of people, they have all the goodies in life. So there’s this brilliant study was started in 1972, the year of my birth, and they tracked every single person that was born in the small city of Dunedin, New Zealand. And they’re still tracking them. And they measured various aspects of their personalities at a very, very young age, including the extent to which they’re controlled. I’m gonna stick with the term conscientious. If you like grit, you can call it grit if you’d like. And they were assessed on the level of conscientiousness, based on their behaviors, based on their parent’s report, based on their teacher’s reports. And they followed them for at least when this one study was published, I think it was 40 years at this point. And what they found was those people were higher in conscientiousness, higher in trait.

Trait is the important word here. Self-control. They had more money in the bank. They had better jobs. They were less likely to be convicted of a crime. They were healthier. They were less likely to be dead. They were less likely to use and abuse drugs. Just better in every way. Okay? And the thinking here was, well, look, this is the best endorsement we can come up with for the power of self-control. Now, by that I mean, state self-control. Exerting self-control in the moment. You called it white-knuckling it. Maybe that’s a good metaphor. Pushing through. You see the chocolate chip cookies. You see the salad. You want the chocolate cookies. They’re a lot better, they’re a lot tastier, but you white-knuckle it and you go for the salad instead. Okay? It turns out that conscientious people, at least in some of these studies now, a few, not only one or two, many now, they engage in less of this.

They engage in less white-knuckling. They restrain fewer of their impulses, not more. And the people who engage in more white-knuckling, and maybe this is a cruel way of referring to them, are the losers in life. The people who are not conscientious, the people who end up not having the money in the bank, who end up being convicted of crimes, they’re the ones who engage in the white-knuckling. So the problem, I think, and I just outlined this in a recent paper, is because we literally use the same word. We use the word self-control for both the person and the process. We got confused. And being a self-controlled person, or better yet, a self-regulated person, a conscientious person, that is good. But how do they get all those good things? We assumed it was white-knuckling. We assumed it was engaging in state self-control.

That’s not the case. We have ideas about what else they might be doing, but I think we were wrong for many, many years, decades, about how they got there. And I think the advice we’ve been giving people is also wrong. I don’t think greater white-knuckling is going to help people reach their goals, at least in the long term. And I wanna caveat that. At least in the long term. So for example, diets. Diets don’t work in the long run. They work in the short run. Okay? So if you wanna diet, and let’s say you’re trying to get into your wedding tuxedo, or my wife wants to get into a wedding dress and she wants to lose some weight, you can do it. You can starve yourself for a couple of months, and you’ll fit in your tuxedo slash or wedding dress.

You can make that happen. Actors famously lose weight for roles, gain weight for roles. But if you track people who are dieting and look at them two years out, three years out, four years out, five years out, most people have regained all the weight they’ve lost, or they’re even heavier. And that’s true for all forms, or many, many forms of kind of self-control kinds of tasks. You might have some temporary victories, but oftentimes, not always, oftentimes you regress. And so people who are in the field of behavior change, they talk about the… Oh, what’s the term I’m looking for now? It’s the habit change triangle, or the habit relapse, a behavior relapse triangle. You’re a smoker. You’re really, really motivated to quit smoking. You engage in some intervention. You reduce your amount of smoking. You’re a full pack smoker, now you’re down to a half pack smoker. A good number of people, most people, if you track them a year later, they’re gonna be back to being a full pack smoker. Okay? Now of course, people do quit. Not everyone relapses, but that is the modal pattern. So behavior change is really, really hard. And I’m no longer convinced it’s about gutting it out, it’s about white knuckling it. There are other things I think that are better.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this is really important ’cause I think this is really… This is going against pretty much the entire self-improvement industry that’s out there. It’s telling you discipline. You gotta exercise willpower. You gotta do it even if you don’t wanna do it. And it looks like the research says the people who are actually really successful in life, they’re not exercising that much discipline in the way we typically think. And I think there’s a lot going on here. Like culturally, I think we valorize the whole white knuckle discipline because it makes, I don’t know, it’s just something more moral about it. It feels like that’s the better way. If it’s hard, then it actually counts. And if it’s easy, then it doesn’t count for some reason.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. There’s this a beautiful paper came out number of years ago called The Moralization of Effort. If you give people a description of a person who has a very good outcome, they get an A on a paper or produce some work of art or produce, whatever, some construction project. And they either worked hard, they needed to work hard to get there, or they didn’t need to work that hard to get there. And you ask what the moral character of both those people, the people who worked hard are seen as better people. They’re seen as more morally righteous. So something in our culture, and not just our culture, I think it’s a lot of cultures that really valorize hard work. And there could be some good evolutionary reasons for that.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: But that is true. But getting back to your point about like this upends, our kind of notions of the whole behavior change industry, absolutely. And what we have found… First of all, I don’t really have any good answers. Like other than behavior change is really, really hard. Anyone who tells you that it’s easy in these quick steps, this is what you can do, they’re wrong. It’s not easy. People typically relapse. There’s a reason why self-help books that are about productivity keep on being best sellers by the same people buying those same books. If it was so easy, why haven’t they solved it? So it’s really, really hard. But we do have some hints. So for example, those really successful people, the conscientious people, for some reason, I don’t know how, I don’t know how they get there, but they seem to have, for lack of a better term, more virtuous desires. So when you put the salad and the cookies in front of them, they actually want the salad.

They like the salad, they prefer the salad. In other words, their desires are better and therefore they don’t need to restrain themselves. So as an example for me, and this is actually true, I’m not making this up. I love apples. I eat… I literally do eat an apple a day and I enjoy it. And if you give me a choice between an apple and like a cake, I’m not a big fan of cakes. Like I’m much more of a savory person than a sweet person. I’ll take the apple any day. But I did not use self-control to get there. I did not use any of it. In fact, I would need self-control to eat the cake ’cause it would be going against what I actually want. So it seems like our behaviors follow our desires. So maybe the trick is to have different desires.

In other words, if you have the desire for the unvirtuous thing, you might be successful in restraining that desire for a time. We have some research suggesting that people are successful at restraining their desires about half the time. Okay? That also means that half the time they’re not restraining their desires. And there are certain situations where we’re definitely not restraining our desires. So when you’re tired, we’re talking about depletion. When you’re tired, you’re less likely to restrain your desires. When you’re in a bad mood, I need to cope, I’m less likely to restrain my desires. When I’m in a good mood, I wanna celebrate. Less likely to restrain my desires. When I’m drunk or high, less likely to restrain my desires. So there’s all kinds of ways that we fail in restraining our desires. But if you don’t want the desire to begin with, then you’re good. So how is it that these conscientious people don’t have these desires? I wish I knew. I really wish I knew. And I don’t.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: The closest I can come up with is like they set goals and they make plans to reach their goals, perhaps. But I’m not sure that fully captures it.

Brett McKay: No, I think this is a really important point. This is something I’ve come along to in the past couple of years. That in order to be successful in life, you actually have to want the thing. Like really, really want it and enjoy it. That’s the way you do it. You have to use motivation instead of discipline to be successful in life. And what really got me thinking about this, making that shift, was Daniel Chambliss. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s a professor of sociology. He wrote a book about Olympic swimmers in the 1980s. But he wrote a paper called The Mundanity of Excellence. And so he followed these Olympic swimmers for a year or so and going into their practices and watching their coach. And one thing he noticed about these Olympic swimmers he wrote about in this paper, The Mundanity of Excellence, is that these elite level swimmers would get up at five o’clock in the morning and just swim nonstop, back and forth. It’s the most boring thing to do, laps in a pool.

But what he discovered would differentiate between elite swimmers and sort of like the sea level swimmers, the elite swimmers actually enjoyed it. It was just like, yeah, this is great. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And the sea level swimmers, the people who couldn’t get… Who were decent but couldn’t get to that Olympic level, they had to just use disciplines. Like I don’t wanna be here, but I gotta be here. And I’ve just seen that in my own life, too, where like the goals that I’ve been successful at, I’ve achieved them because I actually enjoyed pursuing that goal. So exercising. Like I exercise every day. Even if it’s Christmas, I exercise. It’s not because I’m exercising using these sort of disciplinary self-controls, I just enjoy exercising. It’s part of who I am, and I really enjoy it. So whenever I talk to young people and other people, like what can I do to be better at achieving my goals as I fail that, sticking to a diet or sticking to an exercise plan. I just tell them, pick something you enjoy. Pick something you enjoy and that will just take care of most. That will get you like 90% there.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. I fully agree. So as you were talking, I was thinking about my son actually, who’s 15, wonderful boy. And the other day, he’s really getting into food TikTok. And the other day, he starts whipping up this incredible food. And I just see him chopping, sitting there working, and you just see the joy in his face that he doesn’t really get with anything else other than maybe playing soccer. And then I think about myself. So I’m the one who cooks in my family. And I cook ’cause I feel it’s my duty and responsibility, but I don’t get the same kind of pleasure. And as a result, the meals I make aren’t as complicated. They probably aren’t as good either. And I can just see, like, oh, wow, he really loves it. Like he should lean into that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think, too, a lot of these, we call them like influencers or pop culture discipline gurus, they talk about you gotta wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning to exercise and just always be grinding. I actually think they enjoy it. That’s why they do it. They actually enjoy getting up that early exercising. They’re probably making money at spousing. So of course, they’re motivated to tell people that’s what you need to do.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah.

Brett McKay: I don’t think they’re actually exercising self-control or discipline, I think they actually enjoy doing that stuff.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. So I agree with you 100%. But the other thing we should be aware of with this kind of stuff is to be aware of what’s called selection bias. Okay? So if you’re successful in whatever endeavor and then you give advice, what kind of advice are you gonna give people? Are you gonna give people advice to do what I did? But you don’t have the counterfactual of, what about the people who do exactly what you do but don’t achieve your success? So how do you know it’s the things you’re doing or the things that you feel you’re consciously aware of doing as opposed to some other things? So we gotta be aware sometimes of people who are too readily dispensed with advice.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, I agree. So the takeaway there, you gotta get your desires right. And the trick is like, well, how do you desire good things? Like how do you actually want to do good things and not want bad things for you? And you said this is kind of a mystery, but…

Michael Inzlicht: It’s not a complete mystery.

Brett McKay: So what are some things we could do? Like what does the research say that we could do to shape our desires?

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. So it’s mostly a mystery, but there are some clues. So first, okay, so I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen or read A Clockwork Orange.

Brett McKay: No. I know about it though.

Michael Inzlicht: Okay. So excellent movie I recommend it to all your listeners. It’s gruesome. But there’s one famous scene. By the way, I’m not recommending this, I’m just kind of stating what we could do. There’s a scene… So the story there is this violent offender who just like loves, he loves raping. He loves raping and killing people. He actually enjoys it. So what do you do for someone who’s like he’s got bad desires? So what they did was they engaged in what’s called classical conditioning and they had him watch scenes of, movie scenes of violence. And then as he’s watching the movie scenes of violence, also gave him, I think, a drug that made him feel sick. So then he started associating violence with being sick. Of course, I would never, never, ever recommend people doing that, but it suggests this classical conditioning is involved. Like associating things you ought to be doing with reward, just conditioning will be helpful. So if someone can devise an ethical way getting people to desire the right things, we’re on the right step. But I think society has a place to play here.

Okay? So I’ll give you an example. Si I’m 52. I’m a Gen Xer, proud Gen Xer. And I’m of the generation where there’s a due date for something, that’s when it’s due. That’s when you submit it. So like my paper is due to my professor on September 1st, that’s when I submit it. And if I submit on September 2nd, I’m gonna get penalized. A number of years ago, it’s probably about a decade ago now, the biggest school board in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board started doing away with due dates, and mandated that all teachers accept assignments whenever. And they could not be penalized based on how late they are, as long as they’re submitted before the end of the year. And the reason for that is I’m sure it’s really well-intentioned. There are clearly some times where people have things that are out of their control that prevent them from handing things in on time. What that rule did was it sent the message that being on time is unimportant. Now this value of punctuality, of being on time, is not a cherished value. Of course, now we’re also being taught that it’s a product of white supremacy, but I’ll leave that aside. As you can probably tell from my tone, I don’t believe that’s true.

So now we’ve got this value of being on time degraded. So now the kids who are kind of born into this, they no longer value this. I now, as a university professor… Like I went from when I started, very few people would hand things in late, to now 20% to 30% of my students hand things in late. So I’m just using this as one example, just to say that society’s values, we communicate what we care about by the kinds of rules we have, and then we start, some people internalize these rules. And those conscientious people, by the way, those are people who tend to internalize the rules of society. So that might be the secret sauce. They see there are these certain kinds of things that I’ve been told by authority figures in my life, my parents, my teachers, who have you, what have you, that these are the ways I should act. They internalize that, and then they start acting in accordance with those values. Okay? So I know I’m like saying this, I sound like an old fashioned conservative maybe, but I think there are, there’s some value to norms of like the kinds of behaviors we expect.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it sounds like we can train people’s intrinsic desires through extrinsic motivators, like using the carrot and the stick. So maybe you don’t naturally wanna turn stuff in on time, or maybe you don’t naturally wanna exercise every day. You just don’t have that desire. But you can set up some sort of reward system for you. Well, if I exercise every day for a month, I’ll give myself this. Or you can even do this with your kids. And I think the idea is that as you do these things extrinsically motivated, hopefully you’ll eventually you’ll internalize it and actually just desire it, just want to do it.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, so you’ve just nailed that right there. Like it’s the interface between going between extrinsic to intrinsic. Like that to me is a mystery, but that’s exactly what we need to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: So for your listeners, extrinsic motives are things that are outside of you. So right? They’re like someone gives you money to do something, your job to some extent is extrinsically motivated. You probably wouldn’t do your job if you weren’t paid. Some of us would, and those are the people who love their job, and those are the people who are healthy and happy. Intrinsic motives are things you do out of love, you’re truly passionate about. And that’s where we want to be for the kinds of goals we set for ourselves. But how do I get myself to love broccoli if I can’t stand the flavor.

Brett McKay: You can learn how to cook it better, just like make it tasty.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, that’s true. That’s a great example. Cook it better. Broccoli is delicious. Who’s wrong here? But how do you get yourself to love exercise if you find yourself getting tired quickly, if you find moving laborious? I think you can get habituated, and you can get used to it, you can stomach it, but will you love it? It’s hard to know. But I think ultimately what you just said, going from extrinsic to intrinsic. If you receive enough messages from people you admire and respect about the value of that thing, then maybe you start wrapping your identity around that thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: And that could be one way of internalizing some of these norms, is wrapping it with identity, potentially. Elliot Berkman, who’s a friend and colleague at the University of Oregon, he’s talked a lot about this, about using identity as a tool to start loving things. So for some people who forget to go to vote and we wanna motivate people to vote, start identifying as a voter. I’m a voter. I’m a voter, of course I’m gonna vote. It’s not that I vote, I am a voter. I am a healthy person. It’s not that I’m trying to eat healthy, I’m a healthy person. So maybe that’s one way you can start internalizing some of these values and norms.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think the idea, maybe also joining up with a community of individuals who have that desire that you want, being around them. So it could be like a CrossFit gym, or it could be some sort of support group or something like that. That could also help, too. I think there’s that power of mimetic desire. Like you’ve seen what other people are doing, and you’re like, I wanna be like that. So you’re gonna just follow them, and that can help you internalize that desire. Okay. So I think that’s interesting. So we talked about willpower, not that great in helping you do what you wanna do in the long term. The people who are the most successful in life, they aren’t exercising a lot of what you call state self-control, so that white-knuckling gridding. And then if you really wanna be successful, you just have to select your desires. Actually want do the thing that you’re trying to do, and actually not to want those things you’re trying to avoid. Well, I wanna go back to this. You mentioned that conscientious people tend to do this, so individuals who are conscientious. This is a personality trait. And from what I understand, personality and temperament, a lot of it is inborn. Like you’re just kind of born generally a conscientious person. So what if you’re not? What if you’re not a conscientious person? Are you just kinda hosed for life?

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. Yeah. So personality is, as all traits, they’re strong genetic contributions. But it’s not fair to say it’s only born, there’s environment, there’s learning, but that doesn’t get you out of jail here because it’s typically early learning. So what if you’re a 20-year-old and you’re not as conscientious as you’d like to be, and you can blame your parents ’cause the genetics they gave you or the kinds of upbringing, the kind of house they raised you in? So it’s hard. Yeah, man, it’s hard for those people. So the conscientious people in life, they don’t need advice. They’re already figuring it out. It’s the low conscientious people who are having a tough time. So those are the people we should be trying to reach out to. And I think the advice that you hear, it’s hilarious, is that the people most likely to kinda listen to the advice are conscientious people.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: The people don’t need it. So I think the same principles that we kind of have been talking about for a little bit would apply to the non-conscientious person. It’s like, how can you develop tools to help you in your life? So the one thing I’ve started kind of thinking a little bit more about is planning and literally using a calendar to schedule things to help you kinda meet your goals. I think that’s like part of the battle is simply like planning in detail how you’re gonna reach your goal. So there’s a really old theory that is like as simple as anything out there, but it’s still powerful. And that is goal setting theory, which simply suggests if you set a goal, you’re more likely to be productive in that thing you’re trying to reach. And guess what? The more specific you are at setting your goals, the more time bound your goals are, the more likely you are to meet your goals. It’s simple, but actually works. So for the non-conscientious people, think carefully about what your goals are. Map it out, be specific, and then put those things in your calendar. I don’t mean I’m meeting Mark at 7:00 PM to go for drinks on a Wednesday night.

Yeah, you can do that, too. But I mean I’m gonna engage in this thing. So let’s say you’ve got a goal that has multiple parts, like writing a book, writing a paper, writing an article for a newspaper you’ve never done that before, an op-ed, let’s say. So break down those goals into smaller bits and schedule it in your calendar. So these are the kinds of things I think are, again, elementary seems stupid, but I believe that kind of thing could potentially be more effective than just white-knocking it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, so for non-conscientious people, I thought it was an interesting point you made that they’re the ones who need the advice of the most, but they’re probably not listening to it. So you gotta think of ways, especially if you’re a parent or a teacher, what can you do to reach those individuals? That’s tricky. I don’t have any easy solutions to that one.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure I have any easy solutions as a parent of two children. I’m not trying to give any parenting advice to anybody. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think it’s interesting, too. A lot of people who give the advice, well you shouldn’t just tell people exactly what to do, like micromanage them. They’re often probably conscientious people, so they don’t need to be micromanaged. But then if you give that to a non-conscientious person, they’re gonna flounder.

Michael Inzlicht: Yes, okay. So one advice, and this relates to some current work, what work we just published like a few months ago. It’s also… This advice has been out there already, perhaps made most famous by Carol Dweck, who’s a psychologist out of Stanford University. And she’s gotten some flack for some of her work and some of it’s not, I don’t think as robust as others. But she does make this point of giving advice to parents when they deal with children, where she talks about reinforcing or rewarding trying. Reinforcing effort, rewarding effort, not rewarding outcomes or performance. Now, I think to some extent you could take that too far. So when my kids were younger, they would be participating in soccer, everyone gets a trophy, literally every person gets a trophy.

And then it’s a rude awakening when, hey, one day you’re like, well, there’s actually variability in soccer playing ability. And guess what? The better soccer players end up on the team and the worse soccer players don’t end up on the team. But nonetheless, I still think that lesson is a good one. And why is that? So I like to think a little bit less these days about self-control and more about the exertion of effort. So what is effort? Effort is, you can think of it as the intensive… If we talk about mental effort, the intensification of a mental process to achieve some goal. So it’s thinking really hard, pushing yourself, slowing down. Typically, it involves some form of resistance. So again, you can see how self-control is related here ’cause self-control is about resisting temptation. There’s some other thing pulling you. So you got to resist that. With physical effort, it’s the same thing. It’s like you’re lifting a weight, there’s literal resistance, there’s literal weight that you need to overcome to lift that thing. And you need to exert effort to lift that weight. No matter how light it is, it’s still somewhat effortful. And it’s very heavy, it’s very effortful.

So I think exerting effort is something that’s required for many aspects of life. And effort feels a specific way in the body, a characteristic way that effort feels or the way it’s displayed. If we typically furrow our brow, we typically tighten our stomach, and our pupils tend to dilate, specific brain areas involved. But it has a feeling that we also are conscious of, we’re aware of it. And that feeling is there for many different forms of effort. Again, even physical effort shares a lot in common with mental effort. It feels the same way. Now, what would happen if you started pairing that feeling of effort with reward? Then what could happen, and this relates to that kinda Clockwork Orange thing I was talking about earlier, is you start reinforcing the feeling of effort. Effort becomes a secondary reinforcer. You’re like, oh yeah, when I have that feeling, not always, but sometimes, often, good things happen. I’m gonna keep on doing that thing.

So you wanna reinforce in children the exertion of effort, of trying. Just push yourself. And that’s fundamentally different than you don’t reward your kid for getting an A, you reward them for trying really hard. Now, if you try really hard, you might get an A. You also might not. But you keep on rewarding the effort, eventually people start tolerating the effort, liking the effort, and then maybe more willing to exert another aspect of their life.

Brett McKay: Yeah. ‘Cause in general, humans and other animals, we typically take the path of least resistance, which makes sense. Because when you expend less effort, you expend less energy, so it’s efficient. So I guess by rewarding effort, that’s a way to overcome that tendency to avoid effort. And this relates to something else your research has found, and it’s called the effort paradox. And I think this effort paradox relates to what we’ve been talking about. Because I think the reason people assume that doing effortful things takes self-control, takes discipline, is because we instinctively know that effort can be unpleasant. So if something’s hard, we’re gonna have to grit our teeth to get it done. But I think we also forget sometimes that hard things can also be pleasurable. There are hard things that we do that are both effortful and unpleasant in some ways, but they’re also deeply satisfying. It’s like they’re different kinds of pleasure. So tell us about that. Tell us about the research on the effort paradox.

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. So effort, as you describe this feeling, it typically, although I think there can be some argument coming in the pipeline soon, but for now at least we’re saying it doesn’t feel good. It’s not a pleasant feeling. All else being equal, we know this from every single animal we’ve ever tested. If you give an animal from an ant to a human a choice to exert high effort, low effort. For an ant, how do you do that? You put some food that they like at the end of a long path or at the end of a short path. For humans, you might say, hey, you’ve got to do this mental exercise to get that thing you like, money, let’s say. And then you look which one they prefer. If the rewards are the same, ants, grasshoppers, birds, rats, humans, chimps, we will prefer the easier route, the path of least resistance. And that’s true for physical effort and cognitive effort. As psychologists, we like to say that humans are cognitive misers. We’re intellectually lazy. We don’t like to think. So that’s true or seems to be true on the one hand.

But on the other hand, it looks like we love effort. So people on their spare time do things like climb mountains. They play jigsaw puzzles. They play Sudoku. They sometimes pay money for these things. So they’re willing to forego an actual resource, a material resource that could benefit them in some other way to engage in something that’s effortful. And some people might say, oh, they’re not going for it for the effort, they’re going it for the reward. Like that feeling of having climbed a mountain, for having completed that really difficult crossword puzzle. But now imagine the world in which that crossword puzzle was easy, was effortless. You weren’t climbing Mount Everest, you’re climbing like the 10-meter-high little hill in your town.

No one feels proud of climbing the 10-meter hill. So sometimes we do things precisely because they’re effortful. The effort is the point. We’re not doing it despite their effort, we’re doing it because it’s effortful. So it’s sometimes hard to reconcile these things. We seem to avoid it, but we also seem to love it, especially after the fact. So there’s this famous study now describing something called the IKEA effect. So IKEA, of course, is that famous Swedish retailer where they sell you relatively inexpensive furniture. But the trick is you gotta build it yourself. And they’re not easy necessarily to build, some of this IKEA furniture. And there are services out there where you can pay people to build it for you. So in a series of studies, these researchers, they had people either… They built a little box, a little IKEA box themselves. And you can imagine how good or bad those will look. Some of them will be okay.

Probably there’ll be some crooked pieces. There might be some like, why is there an extra screw? How come they gave me an extra screw? Or they’re given the box built perfectly by an expert. And then afterwards, these people are asked how much they like their boxes. How much would they be willing to sell the box to someone else? And it turns out that people like their own boxes more than the boxes that the experts built for them, which are objectively better. They required more money to part with those boxes. So it seems at least after the fact, people require more in return for things that required effort. If you do something that’s really hard, you feel more pleasure. And this is done at the level of self-report, at the level of the brain, the level of physiology. If you’ve done something really hard and you succeed, you show all signs of valuing that reward more than if you get the same reward, but had to do something really, really easy. So this is paradoxical nature of effort. We seem to loathe it. We seem to love it. So that’s what that effort paradox is.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So what are the practical implications of this? Like how can we use the effort paradox to help ourselves achieve our goals?

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah, that’s a good question. That’s a really, really good question. I think the first is to realize that just because something is hard, by that I mean effortful, doesn’t mean you should not choose it, even if the rewards seem the same. We’ve also found now some research, it’s not published yet, but we found over and over again that when we have people do something that’s truly meaningless. So we talked about the Stroop task. Now, psychologists are interested in the Stroop task, but doing that Stroop task for anything longer than a minute when it’s kind of a curiosity, gets boring and effortful and difficult and it’s not meaningful or interesting. If I give you a hard version of a Stroop task or an easy version of the Stroop task, you think the hard version was more meaningful, was a good use of your time. It was purposeful versus pretty much the same Stroop task, but a little bit easier, you find it less effortful. So realize that a lot of the kind of, maybe not joy we derive from life, but a lot of the meaning, the eudaimonia that we might derive from life might be at least in part coming from doing effortful things. And again, if you reward effort, you might cultivate a taste for it. So just because something is hard doesn’t mean we should avoid it. And sometimes some of the best things come only from effort, and you can only get them from effort.

Brett McKay: Okay, I like that. So don’t write off effortful things because maybe it doesn’t feel good in the moment ’cause on another level, it could provide satisfaction and even meaning. You might just need to work a little more to pay attention to that less obvious source of satisfaction. There can be things you both loathe and love at the same time. Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Michael Inzlicht: Yeah. If you’d like, you can go to my website. My website is simply my name, www.michaelinzlicht.com. And I know it’s a hard one to spell. Hopefully, it’ll be on the show notes. I’m also on Twitter @minzlicht, I-N-Z. I-N-Z for you Americans, L-I-C-H-T for Twitter. You can find me there.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Inzlicht, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Inzlicht: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Michael Inzlicht. You can find more information about his work at his website, michaelinzlicht.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/control where you can find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.