Limited reserve of mental/emotional energy
Have you ever wondered why we feel less motivated after a tiring day at college or at work? Why does a cheat day or skipping the workout routine feels like heaven on such occasions? This article is tailored to give answers about that.
According to the researches of psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues, we the humans, seems to have only a limited reserve of mental/emotional energy. His researches shows that this reserve of energy could get depleted with tasks that demands mental/emotional effort. The conclusion he made was that the motivation to do other tasks requiring any mental/emotional effort are affected when our energy reserves are depleted and this later came to be called as the term ego depletion.
Ego depletion in short, is the depletion of mental/emotional energy reserve due to an effortful mental activity and subsequently affecting the extend of ones self control and will power. To put it in other words, ego depletion is simply the lack of motivation. Say for instance you performed a task involving self control (which is mental/emotional effort), you get less motivated to perform another task requiring same amount of mental/emotional work.
Let us take an example to understand this better. Suppose you decided to cut down your sugar intake as part of your new diet plan which required some amount of self control to resist the urge to feed on sugary snacks. Now, suppose that you had a very difficult exam today for which you had to prepare extensively. After the effortful mental work involved in attending the exam, your mental/emotional energy reserve goes to depleted state. When offered a sugary snack at such an instance, the probability of you happily ingesting the sugary snack is significantly higher. The reason being, the energy reserve doesn’t have much left to keep up with the self control and willpower that you otherwise would have had. In most such situations, we justify ourselves by saying “I worked too much today and have had a rough day, so I deserve to have this and to be happy!”. But now that you know the real culprit that snacks on your self control, let us see what can be done to overcome the effect of ego depletion.
The relation between our energy reserve and glucose was established in several of Baumeisters experiments. One could say without doubt that our nervous system consumes significant amount of glucose compared to the rest of our body. This implies that an effortful mental work (such as taking an exam or having a busy day at work) consumes fuel in terms of glucose. It was found by Baumeisters experiments that consuming glucose in such situations reverses the effect of ego depletion and subsequently elevated self control and willpower can be attained. Meaning, the probability of you having more will power to resist the sugary snack and keep up your self control would be higher if you have had a glucose drink after the exam!
I would like to point out that while the concept of ego depletion itself is a very influential topic, it has been a subject of debate and is still a research topic. Only with further data and observation we could prove ego depletion without any shadow of doubts and also the nature of its limited resources.
PS: It was not because of glucose deficiency that there was no article from https://www.tachyonvoyager.com for the past 1.5 months ;)