All of this has practical implications for how we think about effort, self-discipline and failure in everyday life. From a first-person perspective, the phenomenology of a ‘lapse’ – mind-wandering, craving a break, or suddenly rethinking your goals – may actually reflect this adaptive gear-shifting, not a failure of character or a depleted... See more

From this perspective, what looks like ‘depletion’ or fatigue might actually be a transition. After an extended period of persistence, the brain may ease into flexibility – not because it’s run out of mental fuel, but because switching gears is adaptive . From an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors likely gained a survival advantage from... See more

If the ego-depletion model doesn’t fit how people’s self-control or willpower actually works, we need a new way to think about it. One promising alternative is metacontrol theory – a framework that makes a conceptual shift away from the idea of ‘mental resources’ to mental modes . First proposed by the cognitive psychologist Bernhard Hommel, this... See more

ego depletion became wildly influential after its introduction in the mid- to late-1990s. Apparently backed by dozens of lab studies, it suggested that every act of self-control – resisting temptation, focusing attention, managing emotion – taps into the same limited internal resource (the same willpower muscle, if you like). Once that muscle is... See more