How to Increase Willpower by Needing Less of It

The honest answer to how to increase willpower is that you mostly cannot, at least not in the way the question assumes. What you can do is arrange your day so that you rarely need it. The people who look disciplined are usually not resisting more than you are. They have fewer things to resist.

The research behind that claim has shifted a lot in the last decade. Three ideas most executives absorbed in business school or from airport reading have been tested at scale, and two of them came back smaller than advertised.

This piece sets out what the studies now show, then the five levers that do the work willpower was supposed to do: remove the cue, move the friction, commit in advance, decide once, and protect sleep.

What the Marshmallow Test Actually Predicted

Everyone knows the story. Walter Mischel’s team at Stanford offered four-year-olds one marshmallow now or two if they waited. Decades later, the children who waited longer were reported to have better test scores, better health and steadier lives. The lesson drawn in a thousand keynotes was that self-control is a fixed trait, visible at four, and that the rest of life follows from it.

In 2018, Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan reran the study on a much larger and more varied sample, drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Their paper in Psychological Science found that an extra minute of waiting at age four predicted a gain of about one tenth of a standard deviation in achievement at fifteen. That correlation was roughly half the size reported in the original work. Once the researchers controlled for family background, early cognitive ability and the home environment, two thirds of what remained disappeared. Links to behaviour at fifteen were smaller still and rarely significant.

One further detail matters for anyone who runs a team. Most of the predictive value came from the difference between children who could wait at least twenty seconds and those who could not. Beyond that short threshold, waiting longer added little. The test was picking up something about a child’s circumstances and basic regulation, and almost nothing about heroic restraint.

So the famous study does not say what most people think it says. Self-control at four is weakly related to outcomes at fifteen, and much of that relationship runs through the household the child grew up in. For an adult asking how to increase willpower, the practical reading is this: the environment did more work than the child did.

The Muscle That Did Not Tire on Schedule

The second idea is ego depletion. Roy Baumeister’s lab argued in the late 1990s that willpower draws on a limited resource, so that resisting a biscuit at ten in the morning leaves you with less restraint for a hard conversation at four. The metaphor was a muscle. It spread fast because it matched how a long day feels.

In 2016, Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis coordinated a preregistered replication across twenty-three laboratories with 2,141 participants, using a protocol the original researchers had approved. The pooled result was an effect size of 0.04, with a confidence interval that included zero. Across all those labs, people who had done a draining first task performed no worse on the second one.

That does not mean fatigue is imaginary. You know from your own calendar that the ninth decision of the day is worse than the second. What the replication undercut was the specific claim that willpower is a single tank which every act of restraint drains. If the tank model were right, the fix would be to ration restraint and refuel it. Since the model is at best shaky, rationing restraint is a plan built on sand.

Our piece on decision fatigue covers the same terrain from the other side: the quality of decisions falls across a day, but the cause looks more like attention, mood and sleep than a depleted store of virtue.

Why the Disciplined People You Know Are Rarely Resisting Anything

The third study is the one that should change how you plan a week. Marina Milyavskaya and Michael Inzlicht followed students through a semester, pinging them during the day to ask what temptations they were facing, how hard they were resisting, and how drained they felt, then checked who reached their goals. Their 2017 paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science reports that goal attainment tracked how many temptations people experienced. Effortful self-control, the act of gritting your teeth and resisting, was unrelated to reaching goals in every analysis they ran. Simply experiencing a temptation left people feeling depleted, and that depletion was the path from temptation to failure.

Read that again with a sales target or a fitness goal in mind. The people who hit their goals encountered fewer things worth resisting, and resisted no harder than anyone else. The person who keeps no biscuits in the office does not spend the afternoon being strong. She spends it working.

This is the finding that turns how to increase willpower from a character question into a design question. If experiencing temptation is itself the cost, then every temptation you remove from your line of sight is restraint you no longer have to pay for.

It also explains something you may have noticed in the founders and executives you admire. Charlie Munger’s advice on avoiding stupidity, covered in our piece on Charlie Munger’s mental models, is almost entirely about structuring the situation so the bad decision never gets a hearing. Naval Ravikant’s framing of wealth, examined in Naval Ravikant’s How to Get Rich, rests on the same move: choose games you can play without constant effort, and stop playing the ones that drain you.

The Five Levers, Compared

The levers below are in order of how much effort they save per unit of setup. Start at the top.

Lever	What it does	Example for a working day
Remove the cue	Stops the temptation from being experienced at all	Email closes at 6pm and the app is deleted from the home screen, so the urge to check never fires
Move the friction	Makes the bad choice slower and the good one faster	Gym kit packed and by the door the night before; the sofa remote in a drawer upstairs
Commit in advance	Removes the moment of choice by making it expensive to back out	A standing 7am session booked with a trainer who charges for no-shows
Decide once	Replaces a daily decision with a standing rule	No meetings before 10am, every day, no exceptions to negotiate
Protect sleep	Restores the capacity that every other lever depends on	A fixed wake time seven days a week, and a hard stop on work at a set hour

Remove the Cue

The cheapest lever is the one most people skip, because it feels like cheating. If the goal is to stop checking your phone during focused work, the willpower approach is to leave it face down on the desk and resist. The design approach is to leave it in another room. The first method costs you a flicker of attention every time the screen lights. The second costs nothing after the walk down the corridor.

Apply this to food, to news, to the notifications that reach you after dinner. The question is never whether you can resist the thing. It is whether you can arrange not to meet it. A biscuit tin in the cupboard is a decision you make once a week when you shop. A biscuit tin on the desk is a decision you make forty times a day.

Executives often resist this lever because it feels like admitting weakness. The research says the opposite. The people who reach their goals are the ones who never have to prove how strong they are, because the test never arrives.

Move the Friction

Where you cannot remove a cue, you can change the cost. Most of what feels like discipline in other people is a few seconds of friction placed on the wrong side of a choice.

Make the good choice the default and the bad one a chore. Clothes for a morning run laid out the night before. The healthy lunch ordered at breakfast, before the three o’clock version of you gets a vote. The streaming app logged out, so a lazy evening needs a password you have to go and find. None of these stop you from doing the wrong thing. They make the wrong thing require a small act of intent, which is exactly the point at which tired people give up and do the easy thing instead.

The same logic works in reverse for work you keep postponing. If a quarterly report keeps slipping, the fix is rarely more resolve. It is opening the file before you leave the office so that it is the first thing on the screen in the morning. Our piece on why you never finish anything goes through the mechanics of that stall in more detail.

Commit in Advance

Precommitment is the oldest trick in the book and still the most underused by people with real authority. Odysseus had himself tied to the mast. You can book the trainer who bills you for missing, tell your assistant that nothing goes in the diary before ten, or send the draft to a colleague with a date on it.

The principle is to decide at a moment when the decision is easy, and to raise the cost of reversing it at the moment when it would be hard. A senior person has an advantage here that junior staff lack: you can usually change the system rather than just your own habits. If the whole team knows Friday afternoon is for deep work and the calendar tool blocks it, nobody has to summon anything at two o’clock on a Friday.

The failure mode is soft commitment. A plan that lives in your head costs nothing to abandon and so it will be abandoned. The commitment has to involve someone else, or money, or a physical change that takes effort to undo.

Decide Once

Every recurring decision is a tax. Paid daily, it adds up to a lot of afternoons spent negotiating with yourself. The alternative is a rule, decided once, which turns a hundred small choices into zero.

Rules work because they remove the moment of deliberation, which is the moment when a tired brain looks for an exception. “I do not take meetings before ten” is easier to keep than “I try to protect my mornings”, because the second one invites a daily audit of whether this particular request counts. The people whose routines are studied for a living tend to run on rules of this kind. Our piece on Elon Musk’s daily routine separates the useful part of that story, the fixed structure, from the myth-making around it.

A rule needs to be short enough to say in one breath and specific enough to apply without judgement. If you find yourself debating whether the rule applies, the rule is too vague. Rewrite it until a stranger could enforce it.

Rules also travel. Someone who changes careers later in life, the situation covered in our guide to a career change at 50, often finds that the rules they built in one job are the only part of their discipline that moves with them. The habits tied to an old office stay in the old office. The rules come along.

Protect Sleep, Because Tired People Lose Every Argument With Themselves

The last lever underwrites all the others. Every form of restraint, planning and good judgement gets worse when you are short of sleep. If you want a single reason the four o’clock version of you keeps overruling the eight o’clock version, it is usually this.

The CDC’s guidance for adults aged 18 to 60 is seven hours or more a night, and it lists better attention and memory among the benefits of getting it. Attention is the resource that catches the impulse before it becomes an action. Starve it and no amount of resolve compensates.

Executives tend to treat sleep as the variable that absorbs everything else, which is exactly backwards. A fixed wake time, kept at weekends, does more for restraint than any morning routine built on top of five hours. Our pieces on whether six hours of sleep is enough and how to fix your sleep schedule set out what a bad week costs and how to repair it.

If you only have the energy to pull one lever this month, pull this one. The other four get easier automatically when you are rested, and nearly impossible when you are not.

How to Increase Willpower, Then, Is the Wrong Question

Put the three studies together and a different picture emerges from the one on the motivational posters. Early self-control predicts less than claimed, and much of what it predicts comes from the home. The willpower muscle did not tire on cue when twenty-three labs tried to tire it. And the people who actually reach their goals turn out to be the ones who felt tempted least often, not the ones who resisted hardest.

The useful conclusion for someone who makes decisions all day is that restraint is a poor tool and a worse strategy. Design is the better tool. Take the temptations out of the room, put friction on the wrong side of each choice, commit while the deciding is easy, replace daily choices with standing rules, and sleep enough that the rules survive contact with a Thursday afternoon.

Each of those moves costs effort once. Willpower charges you every time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can willpower be trained like a muscle?

The evidence is weaker than the metaphor suggests. The 2016 multi-lab replication found no reliable depletion effect, which also removes the main argument for training it through repeated resistance. What does improve with practice is the design skill: noticing which cues trigger you and removing them before they fire.

Why does my self-control collapse in the late afternoon?

Sleep debt, hunger and a day of decisions all reduce the attention you have left to catch an impulse. The fix is upstream: more sleep, a lunch that is already chosen, and fewer decisions scheduled for the hours when you know you are weakest.

What is the single most effective way to increase willpower?

Stop needing it. The Milyavskaya and Inzlicht study found that people who reached their goals experienced fewer temptations rather than resisting more of them. Removing the cue entirely, whether that is a phone in another room or a standing rule about meetings, beats any technique for resisting in the moment.

The disciplined person you are trying to become already exists in the rooms where there is nothing to resist. Build more of those rooms.