Did you know that Barack Obama only wears two colors of suits?
It’s not because he’s sartorially unimaginative; rather, he’s taking advantage of some of the latest psychology research on how to avoid decision fatigue; a problem that faces anyone who has to make tough calls on a regular basis.
Recent research has shown that you have a finite amount of energy to dedicate to analyzing information and making good judgment calls, so you should avoid fretting about insignificant decisions (like “does this tie go with a tweed jacket?”) if you know you’ll be facing big challenges on a regular basis.
We are going to look at how stressful situations could be affecting your running and your training more than you realize through ego depletion. We are going to show you how to prepare for it and how to avoid ego depletion as much as possible.
If you are struggling to see why your big breakthrough is not happening, this is probably the post you have been looking for.
Does Stressing Over the “Little Things” Limit Performance?
Runners don’t often face decision fatigue, but they do have to face a closely related problem that psychologist call ego depletion.
Much like decision fatigue, the premise of ego depletion is that willpower is a limited resource, so you are much less likely to be able to do something that takes a lot of willpower (like grind through the last mile of a 5k) if you’ve already had to will yourself to do a lot of difficult things earlier in the day.
Classic experiments that demonstrate ego fatigue involve having test subjects engage in one challenging activity, then moving on to a different task which is physiologically unrelated, and ideally one which can be measured and quantified.
One example is a 2012 study by Derek Dorris, David Power, and Emily Kenefick. The study described two distinct experiments. In the first, competitive rowers attempted to complete as many push-ups as possible following completion of a series of cognitive tests.
This experiment took place over two separate days. One day the cognitive tests were very easy, but on the other, they were very challenging.
As ego depletion theory would predict, the rowers were not able to complete as many push-ups after the difficult cognitive tasks as compared to the easy ones.
Is it Applicable to Other Sports?
Hypothesizing that athletes from a non-endurance sport might perform differently, Dorris, Power, and Kenefick conducted a similar experiment on hockey and rugby players.
The subjects engaged in cognitive tests, either easy or difficult, then attempted to do as many sit-ups as they could. Though their sport of choice was different, the results were the same—they could not do as many sit-ups after a cognitively challenging task.
The effect of ego depletion on endurance performance was underscored by a different paper published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 2009.
Check this out:
In this study, sixteen cyclists completed either 90 minutes of continuous cognitive testing (rapid identification of patterns of letters) or watched a 90 minute documentary on trains and sports cars. Then, all subjects completed a cycling ride to exhaustion at 80% of their peak power. This test was repeated on another occasion so that every subject had a chance to complete the ride after the cognitive testing and after watching the documentary.
After compiling the results, the authors found that the cyclists were able to ride for an average of 10.7 minutes at 80% of peak power after completing the 90 minute cognitive testing.
However, after watching a documentary for the same amount of time, they lasted 12.6 minutes—an 18% improvement!
Yes, you did read that right!
Are Cyclists and Runners Tougher Than Other Athletes?
To take a skeptical stance; rides (or runs) to exhaustion are known to exhibit much more variability than a straight-up time trial, and neither this study nor the previous one used a large number of subjects. Further, the person-to-person variability was quite high.
But a 2012 review paper by Michael Inzlicht and Brandon Schmeichel states that over one hundred experiments have supported the idea of ego depletion—doing two challenging tasks consecutively, even if they should not be related physiologically, impairs performance on the later task.
How Does this Affect Your Running?
To run your best, these studies indicate that you should avoid doing anything that’s very mentally challenging, or that takes a lot of mental effort or willpower before a race or an important workout.
Given that next year’s Boston Marathon is April 18th, maybe you shouldn’t wait until the last minute to do your taxes!
Running the 2016 Boston Marathon? Get our Boston-specific training articles, exclusive access to our VIP Boston events, and the latest on where, when and how to meet the RunnersConnect team. Click here to stay updated
If you work a tough job, an easy way to get around this problem is to do your runs in the morning. The only thing about getting up early is that you need to make sure you get enough sleep, too: dragging yourself out of bed at five in the morning surely depletes your mental reserves!
Can You Prepare for Ego Depletion?
It is all very well us suggesting to you to run in the morning, but what if that is just not possible.? What if you have other commitments that just do not allow for morning running, and besides, we all like to train through the winter, what can be done to offset the effects?
Now:
Earlier, we mentioned that willpower is a resource, and if that is the case, we should be able improve it, right? Through careful training, we can work to improve other limited resources at our disposal, like our glycogen stores, aerobic power, or muscular strength.
Persistence Priming
In one study, researchers at Universiteit Maastricht in the Netherlands examined whether a technique called “persistence priming” could be used to increase resistance to ego depletion.
Undergraduate students at the university were split into two groups. Like with other ego depletion research, each group underwent a test of physical ability (a hand grip squeeze to fatigue) following either a simple mental test (solving easy mazes) or a difficult one (challenging mazes).
Each group was provided with a short paragraph to read before the physical test to “prime” their mental state. To disguise the intent of the experiment, the participants were given a trivial reading comprehension task which involved the paragraph.
Imagine this:
One group received a neutral prime—their paragraph was a mundane description of the International Olympic Committee’s charter. The other group received a prime intended to boost their perseverance; it was a paragraph about Olympic speed skater Gerard Van Velde, who persevered in the face of numerous setbacks and disappointments to win a gold medal in 2002.
The group which received the persistence priming performed far better on the hand-grip endurance test following ego depletion than the group that received the neutral priming. The persistence priming allowed them to match their pre-depletion best, while the neutral prime group gave up earlier.
It gets better:
Surprisingly, the results were flipped when the test was conducted without an initial stage of ego-depletion—the group which read the neutral prime performed better than the group which received the persistence prime!
Even the authors themselves were puzzled by this result. One potential explanation they forwarded was that, in a state of mental freshness, the subjects were more likely to perceive themselves as different from the Olympic speed skater (“Wow, I’m not as tough and persistent as that guy!”).
The Stroop Test
A study published by Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran at the University of Sheffield in the UK took a different approach. In their experiment, undergraduate students were asked to stand on one leg and count backwards from 1000, either in multiples of seven (a difficult mental task) or multiples of five (an easier mental task).
Then they were asked to perform a Stroop test, a classic psychology examination that involves identifying the ink color of words printed on a page (e.g. the word “green” written in red ink). But in this experiment, the researchers used a strategy called “implementation intention” to attempt to offset the effects of ego depletion.
You might be wondering:
An implementation intention is a particular kind of command or instruction that you repeat to yourself. In this experiment, the subjects were asked to tell themselves, “As soon as I see the word, I will ignore its meaning and I will name the color ink it is printed in.”
The results showed that the subjects who used the implementation intention strategy performed just as well on the Stroop test after the difficult mental test as compared to the easy one; the same was not true for the subjects who did not use an implementation intention strategy—they performed worse, as expected.
Now:
These studies are a bit contrived, as early-stage psychology research tends to be.
You could easily point out that a hand-grip test or color identification is not the same thing as a 5k race, but that’s the fascinating thing about ego depletion: it doesn’t seem to matter what your activity of choice is; if you do it in a state of ego depletion, you’ll perform worse than if you were fresh.
Putting it into Practice
Fortunately, it’s easy to translate the findings of these studies into practical advice. To give yourself a “persistence prime” after a long day at work or a fatiguing multi-hour drive to a faraway race, listen to one of our inspirational podcast episodes on your drive; Kathrine Switzer’s Boston Marathon story, Chris McDougall’s story about the Natural Born Heroes in Crete or Laura Hillenbrand’s recall of Louie Zamperini’s story, or you could watch a short YouTube video of one of your running heroes winning a race.
Implementation intentions are even more useful. They should take the form of statements like “As soon as [some event] happens, I will do [something related to what you want to achieve].” We talked about this in our post with 9 Mental Tips and Tricks to Overcome Negative Thoughts in Race.
Give yourself a concrete goal-related task, and choose a cue for initiating it. For example, if you’re racing a 5k, you can tell yourself, “As soon as I pass the two-mile mark, I will push as hard as I can for the last 1.1 miles.”
Even though the research is fairly rudimentary for now, persistence priming and implementation intentions can be an extremely useful addition to your mental toolkit as a runner. Add these to your repertoire and you’ll be able to push yourself harder to achieve the results you want.
Can Ego Depletion be Avoided?
One way to prevent ego depletion is deceptively simple, and can be summarized in one word: habit. When we fall back on habit or routine, we’re not executing any overt cognitive control over our actions, which should spare us from needing to draw on our willpower reserves.
According to a 2006 scientific article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a habit, strictly defined, is an automated response that is triggered by external cues or preceding actions—think hanging up your keys as you walk in the door, swiping your phone’s unlock pattern to respond to a text message, or making a cup of coffee right after getting up in the morning.
You learn a habit by repetition; what starts out as a conscious action gradually becomes automated as your brain picks up on the external cues and actions that cause it.
Here’s the deal:
For most people, bad habits are a source of frustration. Plopping down on the couch and turning on the TV when you get home from work might not be what you want to be doing with your evenings, but if it becomes an engrained habit, it can be very hard to break.
A series of psychology experiments conducted by David Neal, Wendy Wood, and Aimee Drolet at the University of Southern California investigated the good and bad habitual responses of subjects in ego-depleted states in a variety of tests (one example was offering MBA students healthy snacks or junk food during or prior to a difficult midterm exam), and found that good habits work the same way as bad habits.
Your brain doesn’t really care whether habitual behavior is “good” or “bad”; when willpower resources are low, you’ll automatically fall back on habitual behavior. So, instead of willing yourself to get out of bed every morning to go run, what if you make it a habit?
The Importance of a Routine
A few years ago, I was talking with Nobby Hashizume, legendary New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard’s most dedicated pupil. He let me in on a secret for making morning runs a part of your routine. He would go to bed wearing his running shorts, and put his shoes and socks at the foot of his bed. In the morning, he’d roll out of bed, put on his shoes, and immediately head out the door.
Now:
It may take a while to establish a routine like this, but once you do, it’ll become as automatic as brushing your teeth or taking a shower! Moreover, you’ll be able to fall back on that habit and conserve willpower when you’re already overwhelmed by other things in life.
Other research by Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn, and Deborah Kashy suggests that relying on habitual behavior induces less feelings of stress.
By having a large group of undergraduate students record daily diaries of their activities and emotional states, then running statistical analysis on the aggregate data, Wood, Quinn, and Kashy were able to show that habitual behavior correlates with lower stress levels and higher feelings of control.
This is all the more reason to try to establish good running habits when you know your schedule will be swamped with other obligations future.
The core problem of ego depletion, according to Neal, Wood, and Drolet, is that “when [willpower] resources are limited, people are unable to deliberatively choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating their habits.”
Establishing good running habits is a convenient loophole that allows you to bypass this problem.
It’s not easy to establish a new habit, like heading out for a morning run every day, especially if it conflicts with an older habit (like hitting the snooze button), but once you do, there are numerous advantages.
When you’re overwhelmed or stressed out, you can turn your brain off and go on auto-pilot. Roll out of bed. Tie shoes. Put on watch. Head out the door.
Conclusion
This has been an extensive post, but we really wanted you to get an understanding of how ego depletion can affect your running performance in a way you may not have considered before. If you have been wondering why you are struggling in your training, or why that big PR just will not happen (especially when everyone around you is running them!), this might be your solution.
Although the research is limited in some areas, it provides a good insight into why we may struggle to mentally stay focused during those times we have a lot on our plate.
Hopefully this post helped you see how to overcome ego depletion, and if possible, prevent it in the first place!
