The effects of stress on willpower are a staple of romantic
comedies. A character goes through a
difficult romantic breakup, and in the next scene, she is sitting on the couch
smeared in ice cream with empty wrappers strewn on the couch.
All of us have experienced this kind of failure of
self-control. There is some bad habit we
are trying to avoid, and we succeed until life gets hectic. Suddenly, it is business-as-usual. Because
these breakdowns of willpower are so clear when they happen, you might think
that stressful situations bring out your worst behavior.
A fascinating paper in the June, 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology by David Neal, Wendy Wood, and Aimee Drolet
suggests a different possibility. They
argue that in times of stress, we fall back on our habits generally. When those habits are bad, then we experience
what we see as a failure of self-control.
But, we also fall back on our good habits. We don’t notice those as readily, because
those behaviors are helpful.
In a naturalistic study to support this view, the
researchers explored the behavior of a sample of college students. First, they looked at the strength of a
number of habits relating to eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. Some of these behaviors were good (like
eating hot cereal for breakfast), while others were bad (eating a pastry for
breakfast). For each person, some behaviors
were a strong part of their routine, while others were not. A particular individual might generally eat
hot cereal, but rarely eat pastry. That
person might also tend to read the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, but rarely
read the comics.
Over the next four weeks, the researchers continued to track
the students’ behavior. In two of those
weeks, the students had an intense series of exams, while in the other two of
those weeks, there were no major exams.
The researchers expected that the students would be undergoing more
stress in the exam weeks, and so their willpower would be compromised.
When a particular behavior was a strong habit for that
person, then they were more likely to engage in that behavior during the
stressful exam weeks than during the less stressful non-exam weeks. This reliance on habits was evident both for
the good behaviors and the bad ones. So,
the lack of willpower drove people to rely on their habits, regardless of
whether they were good or bad.
In several other studies, the researchers manipulated stress
level for participants. In one study,
the researchers tracked the behavior of participants over a series of
days. On a few of those days,
participants were asked to perform their daily activities with their nondominant
hand. So, if they routinely used their
left hand while talking on the cell phone, they should now use their right
hand. This manipulation is known to
cause stress to the willpower system by requiring a lot of effortful
self-control.
On the days when participants had to use their non-dominant
hand, they were much more likely to perform both good and bad habits than they
were on days when they were allowed to use their dominant hand.
Other studies in this paper demonstrated that people fall
back on their habits, because they are acting without thinking. They are not explicitly choosing to act based
on their habits when their willpower is depleted.
This study adds to a growing literature demonstrating the
power of habits in daily action. When the
going gets tough, the natural response is to fall back on the behaviors that
have carried you through so many other situations in the past.
That is why it is crucial to work on developing good
habits. It is hard to rise to the
occasion in times of stress. When you
have lots of exams, a big project at work, or are going through a stressful
period in a relationship, you simply do not have the mental energy to rise to
the occasion. Instead, you just want to
get through the day. In those cases,
your habits will drive a lot of your behavior.
The more that your habits push you toward behaviors that support your
goals, the better you will do in stressful situations.
