That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Willpower

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind our willpower and when it fails. 

Hi, my name is Olive Kirk Olson, and I'm neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So today I want to talk about something that almost everyone thinks they understand. Everyone tries and almost everyone gets wrong. I myself battle with willpower to make certain changes in my life all of the time. I'm committed to losing weight. and sometimes my willpower just fails. You know the feeling.

You tell yourself that tomorrow's the day. Tomorrow you're going to eat better. Tomorrow you're going to exercise. Tomorrow you're going to stop scrolling on your phone at midnight. Tomorrow you're going to sit down, open the laptop, and finally do the thing you've been avoiding. And then tomorrow comes, and for a while maybe it works. You feel motivated.

You feel in control. You'll feel like this time is going to be different. and then at some point the brain starts negotiating. I do this so much. Just one cookie. That's why you say one cookie, six cookies later. All right. I'll do it after lunch.

I'll start then. I'll start again Monday. I'm going to be serious. It's going to be Monday. And suddenly this thing we call willpower feels like it's vanished. So on today's podcast, the neuroscience of willpower. So what is willpower? Is it a real thing in the brain? You know, it has to be because we all experience it, but what does that really mean?

So why does it seem strong in some moments? Like, why is your willpower there? And other times, it's non-existent. And most importantly, if willpower is unreliable, how can we design our lives so we do not have to depend on it so much? Something I'm being thinking about a lot. Let's start with a big misconception. Willpower is not a fixed character trait. It's so tempting to think that some people simply have it and some people don't. It's an easy hour, right? I don't have willpower. All right? You know, that person does. You know, discipline people, wake up at 5 in the morning, drink green tea smoothies, run marathons, answer every email, never have eaten a potato chip in their lives. And the rest of us, we're just weak. That's not how the brain works. What we call. What we call willpower is actually a real collection of processes. It involves attention, motivation, emotional regularization, habit, reward learning, fatigue, stress, and executive control. So there's no single willpower region in the brain. It's a network of these brain regions working together. And there's no voice in the front of your brain shouting out saying, do not eat the donut, right?

It'd be great if that was there. It really would. So what's really going on? Willpower is basically what happens when different brain systems are competing with one another. One system's focused on the immediate reward. The donut tastes good. The phone is interesting. The couch is comfortable. Avoiding the task makes anxiety go right down. Another brain system is focused on the future. I want to be healthier. I want to finish the project.

I want to save money. I want to wake up tomorrow without feeling like I sabotage myself again. So willpower is a tug of war in the brain between immediate reward and future reward. And if you've listened to the podcast, you know the tug of war language comes up a lot because so much of the brain is about competing systems. So the prefrontal cortex is a major player here. The prefrontal cortex, especially areas like the dorsalateral prefrontal cortex, they help with planning, inhibition, working memory and goal-directed behavior. It helps you hold the long-term goal in mind

while the short-term temptation is sitting right in front of you. If you're trying not to check your phone while working, that's the prefrontal cortex keeping the goal active. It's saying, I'm working right now. This matters. The phone can wait. But sadly, the prefrontal cortex doesn't work by itself and it's not all-powerful. In fact, it can fail at times.

The prefrontal cortex is interacting with reward systems, emotional systems, memory systems, inhabit systems. It's why willpower is not just rational thought winning over desire. It's more complicated than that. So let's talk about reward. We've talked about it a lot, but it plays such a big role in our lives. It's worth doing. So when something's immediately rewarding, dopamine systems assign value to it. This doesn't mean dopamine is just a pleasure chemical. And I've said this before, that's too simple. Dopamine is involved in motivation, prediction, learning, and wanting.

It helps the brain say, pay attention to this, move towards this. This is something that might matter. Immediate rewards have a huge advantage in the brain because they're right there right now. The cookies in front of you. The notification, you can see it on your phone screen. Amazon is always waiting for you. And the future version of you, the one who wants lower cholesterol or a finished book or a better sleep schedule, is an abstract version of yourself. The future self just doesn't land with the same sensory force. The dopamine responses are actually reduced.

So this is one reason why self-control is so hard. The brain discounts the future and we've talked about reward discounting before. A reward now often feels more valuable than a lot of larger one later. So we call that delay discounting. The longer we have to wait for something, the less valuable it feels. And we've talked about that. So when you choose between a small reward now and a bigger reward later, the brain's not doing a simple moral calculation or math calculation. It's doing a value calculation. And sometimes, and this is a way we're hardwired, that immediate value wins. Now, this is where people often say, well, I, I just need more discipline. Maybe. But the more useful question is, why is the immediate reward winning?

Is it because you're tired, stressed, hungry, lonely, bored, overwhelmed, surrounded by cues, trying to use willpower at the world's possible moment in your life. Because willpower is state-dependent. It changes depending on the condition of the body and the brain. I'm actually in Europe right now, And for a couple of days after I got here, I was jet lag, tired, and I made some poor dietary choices. Because those were things that were very rewarding. I told myself, you know, we just don't have good kebabs in Western Canada. And here, they're amazing. And if you don't know what a kebab is, definitely try to find one. It's a slice of heaven. Sadly, it's not that great for you. And sleep plays a role in this, right? You know, we've talked about sleep. pull out on the podcast. When you're sleep deprived, basically your prefrontal cortex doesn't function

as well. And that was exactly me the other day. I had a horrible sleep because of jet lag. So what happens, your ability to inhibit the impulses you're experiencing, they just drop. Your emotional system, and we've talked about this before, goes on hyperdrive. And as a result, your reward system becomes so much more sensitive to immediate rewards. And that's a terrible culmination. It basically means that the very moment when you need self-control is the moment when the brain is least equipped to provide it. That's why a bad night of sleep can turn into a day of bad decisions. You eat worse. You move less. You get more irritated. You procrastinate more. Not because you became a worse person overnight, of course, but because the brain systems that support self-control,

they're just operating under poor conditions. And that's not an excuse. All right? You had a figure out a workaround. I know I do when I travel. You know, stress plays a role in this too. If you're under stress, the brain shifts towards short-term survival, which makes total sense. It's an evolutionary response. And if you're under threat, the brain doesn't want a 10-year strategic plan. It wants action. It wants relief. It wants the thing that makes the stress feel smaller right now. So if eating, scrolling, drinking, shopping, avoiding, or snapping at someone reduces the unpleasant feeling in the short term, the brain learns that and does that very quickly. It's not a weakness. It's actually a form of reinforcement learning. The behavior is reinforced because

it changes your state. It makes you feel better, even briefly. The problem is what works for the next five minutes may be terrible for the next five months. And that is the central willpower problem. The brain is excellent at solving immediate discomfort, even when the solution creates future discomfort. Now, we've talked about habit formation as well, but habits are a huge part of this as well. A lot of what we call wellpower is actually habit competition. If you have a strong habit, you don't need a lot of willpower. You just do things automatically. This is me going for walks in the morning. I'm up and out the door, you know, within 10 minutes of waking up. It's a habit of built, and it's a great habit to have. So it just happens to me automatically.

Brushing your teeth doesn't require, you know, a heroic act of self-control. Maybe it does with young kids. I know my son, actually that's unfair to my son. He was always very good about keeping his teeth clean. In fact, he's much better at it than me, so I have to redact that statement. but I know that some parents have trouble with their kids brushing their teeth. But you do brush your teeth every night just because it's a routine, it's a habit, and there's a reward for it. You know that it's going to lead to healthier teeth. But when you're trying to build a new behavior, the habit's not automatic.

The old behavior is easier because the brain has practiced it. The cues fire, the routine comes online, it's well learned, and you're halfway through the behavior before you consciousness leads to, decided anything. This is me when I go shopping. I actually end up buying stuff I shouldn't have in the house, but I think, well, you know, I might have company come over, so I should have some potato chips, and then I end up eating them. This is why environment matters so much. If your phone is beside you, it's not just an object, it's a queue. This is why when I sleep at night, I actually leave my phone in the other room, all my electronics. If the chips are there, the ones I bought, they're not just food.

They're a cue. A basketball game on and hey, I got potato chips. If your running shoes aren't beside the door, they're deep in your closet, there's no cue there. If you don't have a book out at a place where you read frequently, you're not going to read more. So people of good willpower often don't have superhuman brains. In fact, they rarely do. They generally create better environments for themselves. They remove temptation. they make good behavior easier. They reduce the friction for the things they want to do and increase the friction for the things they want to avoid.

This is important because the best use of willpower is often not resisting temptation in the moment. The best use of willpower is designing the situation before the temptation arrives. So that's a lot on the neuroscience of willpower. Hopefully you found it interesting. I know I did, and I need to learn from the research I did for this episode, because at least in terms of eating, I need to create better habits and better environments for myself. So the practical lesson is simple. Use willpower. Don't worship it.

Use it to design your life so you need less of it later. Remove friction from the behaviors you want. Add friction to the behaviors you do not want. Protect your brain state. Make plans before temptation. arrives. And when you fail, don't punish yourself, study what went wrong and fix it for the next time. All right, don't forget to check out Etsy and Patreon. They're both linked on our website, that neuroscience guy.com. Remember anything you buy, the money goes to graduate students,

helping to pay their bills. So please support us. Buy a t-shirt, put a dollar a week into Patreon. It goes to grad students. Thank you so much for those of you that do. Don't forget to follow us on social media, X threads Instagram, at that neurosag guy. And you can also email us, That Neuroscience guy at gmail.com, and tell us what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. And of course, I always say this, but the podcast itself, thank you so much for listening. And please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olaf Craig Olson, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.