Four Ways Willpower Affects Your Finances

Learn how willpower can impact your bank account, and how to strengthen it to resist financial temptation.

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Aside from our mothers’ nagging, our guilty consciences and Jiminy Cricket, willpower is the best thing we have to help us do the right thing when it comes to our money.

Accomplishing financial goals, from deciding whether to buy the perfect pair of wedges or start funding a fabulous honeymoon, often requires choosing between now and later, and needs and wants. Making the correct choice, however, demands the willpower necessary to turn down passing pleasures in favor of the long-term goals you want to achieve.

Luckily, it turns out that willpower functions exactly like a muscle—which means that while it can become tired and sore, it can also be strengthened, helping you reach your goals more quickly and efficiently.

Read on to find out how willpower works in your brain (no Ph.D. required!) and how you can build it up to achieve your goals—financial or otherwise.

MORE FROM LEARNVEST: Your Money Questions, Answered

What Willpower Is

Earlier this year, Roy F. Baumeister, a research psychologist, and John Tierney, a New York Times science writer, published a book called “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” detailing Baumeister and other scientists’ research regarding willpower, self-control and motivation.

Studies show that willpower—the determination to accomplish a difficult task, stay on a plan, break a bad habit and more—exists, but people have only one finite reserve of it. As a result, if you’re trying to accomplish a lot of goals all at the same time (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?), you’re more likely to fall short because your willpower is getting exhausted by everything that’s challenging it (that chocolate bar, the impulse to bite your nails, the urge to have a cigarette or a second drink). 

That’s why, the authors point out, marriages often go bad when stress at work is high—people use up all of their willpower at the office, and as a result have none left to avoid nagging their spouses about not doing the dishes or paying the bills on time. 

Even more groundbreaking?

It appears that willpower is actually dependent on glucose—the sugar that our bodies convert from food. Basically, if willpower were a car heading to a destination, glucose is the gasoline fueling the journey … and each mile empties the tank of glucose a little more.

What’s interesting is that it’s not just the resolve it takes to make “good for us” choices that wears out our reserves of willpower, it’s the mere act of deciding. The more decisions we make (about whether or not to go to the gym or how we should respond to our boss’s email), the quicker our stores of glucose are depleted, and the less willpower we have to make good decisions.