Or for me, on Tuesday I worked really hard, even forcing myself at the end of the day to get through a post. I was pretty burnt on Wednesday, not at all productive in the morning. So, did it take time for my willpower to replenish? That thought helped assuage some of the guilt I felt about not being able to buckle down and just get through the mountain of work facing me right now.

Like you, I have my doubts about how they are conceptualizing willpower and how they are operationalizing their experiments (easy for us to say as ethnographers…). “Willpower” certainly won’t look the same in a country with different notions of self, temptation, and all the rest–I’ve seen that in Colombia. And I am uneasy about the “practice” idea, because it implies that just training, trying harder, should make everyone have greater willpower–no context, no variability, no underlying process, and so forth.

As I’ll write in the near future, what we might call changes in “willpower” (for example, being able to successfully lose weight and maintain that over time) requires changes across an array of brain systems, in conjunction with experiences and relationships and contexts. Executive control, that buckling down sense, is not enough, even if phenomenologically and in some of this research, we can see glimmers of something more than energy expenditure or the like.