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Is The Will to Change a Matter of Free Will?

One of the goals of this website is to encourage people to take a more passionate, adventurous approach to their lives and whatever paths they travel in the course of those lives. Of course, accomplishing that end can, and usually does, require some level of change–or at least openness to change.
I think there are actually two kinds of change: the kind that happens to you, and the kind you consciously will yourself to make. The challenge of the first is to adapt enough to make the most of whatever change is occurring. The challenge of the second is to follow through with the intent to change well enough so that the desired change (switch careers, lose weight, lead a more healthy lifestyle, dump some bad habit or relationship, bring more adventure into your life, take up some new activity or skill, etc.) actually happens.
Unfortunately, intentional change is incredibly hard to accomplish. In a post I wrote a couple of years ago called “Change or Die: Why is it so hard to change?” I talked about some of the reasons for that (courtesy of Alan Deutschman, who wrote a whole book on the subject).
Recently, a new theory has arisen about why change may be so hard to accomplish. John Tierney, a science writer for the New York Times, recently co-wrote a book (with social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister) called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
The book’s premise, backed up by social psychology research, is that willpower is actually a tangible–and limited–energy substance in human beings. According to this school of thought, we have “X” amount of willpower available to us. If we use up too much of it resisting, say, the purchase of non-essential but desirable items, we may not have enough left to resist that cinnamon roll, or to motivate us to actually go to the gym.
What’s more, Tierney says in a New York Times article he also wrote on the subject, the energy we call willpower is “powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.” If we go without eating, in other words, our willpower will be weaker than if we eat regular meals. And, I suppose, a person would be better able to resist the temptation to buy an expensive dress if they’d just bought a cinnamon roll–both because of the glucose the roll would put in their system, and also because they wouldn’t have used up any of their mental willpower bank account resisting the cinnamon roll.
Tierney still has a number of strategies he suggests to stick to goals of change, including budgeting how much change you try to accomplish at one time, and publicizing (or wagering in favor of) your goals among friends or associates, so you have the shame of public failure to face up to if you go weak.
But before all of us get all happy about having an excuse to consume more sugar in the name of changing the rest of our lives … another New York Times article, by Stanford University psychologists Greg Walton and Carol Dweck, takes direct aim at that theory–in no uncertain terms. A “callout” in the article summarizes their opinion: “It’s easy to attribute our failures of will to our biology. But it’s wrong.”
Dweck and Walton argue that willpower is only limited by our beliefs. In research they did with students, the two psychologists found that students who were led to believe that willpower was limited, and would be depleted if called on too much, did, in fact, experience willpower fatigue when faced with multiple tasks requiring mental restraint. If they were led to believe that willpower strengthened the more they used it, however, their performance actually increased, the more willpower they had to use. (To a point. Even Dweck and Walton acknowledge that at a certain level of fatigue and hunger, energy for anything, including will, depletes.)
They even tested their theory against the glucose levels other researchers say plays such a big role in willpower. The result? “In our latest research,” Dweck and Walton wrote, “we found that when people believe in willpower they don’t need sugar–they perform well whether they consume sugar or not. Sugar helps people only when they think that willpower is sharply limited. It’s not sugar we need. It’s a change in mind-set.”
Of course, Dweck has written a book, published in 2006, called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. So a cynic might say she’s got her own turf to defend. On the other hand, Dweck and Walton might be right.
Truth be told, I find Dweck and Walton’s theory more resonant with my own experience in the world. Believe you can’t, and you can’t, and all that. And willpower–to survive, to summit that mountain no matter what, to keep going in the darkest hours of life–is something I’ve often found in people who don’t have a lot of glucose at hand, when they’re exhibiting all that remarkable endurance of willpower. Think about Beck Weathers, the doctor who miraculously survived an unsurvivable blizzard on the high slopes of Mt. Everest in the 1996 disaster chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. It’s doubtful he had more glucose in his system than his co-climbers who perished. But he did have a burning desire, and reason, to survive.
That’s not to say that it’s not easier to choose one or two things to focus on changing at a time, if you can. Or that Tierney’s other suggestions, like “pre-committing” to a goal won’t help, as well. But when it comes to making significant changes in one’s life, I think the bottom-line truth a mountain-climbing friend told me once still applies: “Whether or not anyone actually summits a peak isn’t a matter of how wonderful their training, or how great their gear is,” he said. “What it comes down to, in the end, is how badly you want the mountain.”

{ 3 comments… add one }
  • Brian V. Hunt April 20, 2012, 10:02 pm

    Hi Lane,
    I think a lot of what makes change seem difficult is the parameters we DON’T put around what we expect to change. Often goals are poorly-defined and the expected “change” too broad to reach. We often set out in pursuit and feel we stopped short of the goal when in fact, steps along the way were met and not measured as part of the journey. Maybe we need to be more careful about definitions when we set goals around change.
    Brian

  • Dee June 24, 2012, 11:52 am

    Desired change is distict from passion. Something merely wanted, like loosing weight or getting in shape is different than passionate drive. I think in your column the distinction is left out until the last line. Change that is thrust upon us is accomplished based on survival instinct. That seems to be bred into people. Passion to do things beyond that does not seem bred in, but is nurtured or embodied by people of a different cloth. We need a level of passion in our activity or career or our life. I know you write mostly of and about that passion either directly or indirectly in almost every column. I am wondering if that drive or passion can be grown in myself or is it only found? I assume that most people have interest in many things, but what force or luck allows or drives us to do those things? I fly my own plane, I build and ride old motorcycles, I am a Civil Engineer, I am preparing a car to run on the Bonneville Salt Flats. I have many more things that I am interested in, but the things I would like to do greatly exceed my allotted time. How do the things I actually do, rise to the point of getting done? Is it because I am more passionate about them or is it a chance happening upon the path? Why does a person want the mountain badly? No map, no guide,…

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