Top Highlights

• We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations.
• Baumeister elected to use Freud’s term for the self: ego. Thus was born “ego depletion,” Baumeister’s term for describing people’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
• But now it turns out that there are signals of ego depletion,
• In these experiments, while depleted persons (once again) didn’t show any single telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all
• kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier, and disturbing pictures made them more frightened and upset. Ice-cold water felt more painful to them than it did to people who were not ego-depleted.