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worked on the puzzles for about twenty minutes, as did a control group of students who were also hungry but hadn’t been offered food of any kind. The sorely tempted radish eaters, though, gave up in just eight minutes—a huge difference by the standards of laboratory experiments. They’d successfully resisted the temptation of the cookies and the chocolates, but the effort left them with less energy to tackle the puzzles. The old folk wisdom about willpower appeared to be correct after all, unlike the newer and fancier psychological theories of the self.
    Willpower looked like much more than a metaphor. It seemed to be like a muscle that could be fatigued through use, just as Shakespeare had recognized in Troilus and Cressida . The Trojan warrior Troilus, convinced that Cressida will be tempted “most cunningly” by the charms of Greek suitors, tells her that he trusts her desire to remain faithful but is worried that she will yield under strain. It’s folly to presume that our power of resolution is constant, he explains to her, and warns of what happens when it becomes frail: “Something will be done that we will not.” Sure enough, Cressida falls for a Greek warrior.
    When Troilus speaks of the “changeful potency” of willpower, he’s describing the sort of fluctuations observed in the students tempted by the cookies. After this concept was identified in the radish study and other experiments, it made immediate sense to clinical psychologists like Don Baucom, a veteran marital therapist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He said the Baumeister research crystallized something that he had sensed in his practice for years but never fully understood. He’d seen many marriages suffer because the two-career couples fought over seemingly trivial issues every evening. He sometimes advised them to go home from work early, which might sound like odd advice—why give them more time to fight with each other? But he suspected that the long hours at work were draining them. When they got home after a long, hard day, they had nothing left to help them overlook their partner’s annoying habits, or to be kind and considerate out of the blue, or to hold their tongue when their partner said something that made them want to respond in a mean, sarcastic manner. Baucom recognized that they needed to leave work while they still had some energy. He saw why marriages were going bad just when stress at work was at its worst: People were using up all their willpower on the job. They gave at the office—and their home suffered the consequences.
    After the radish experiment, similar results were observed over and over again in different groups of subjects. Researchers looked for more complex emotional effects and for other ways to measure them, like observing people’s physical stamina. A sustained exercise like running a marathon takes more than just conditioning: No matter how fit you are, at some point your body wants to rest, and your mind has to tell it to run, run, run. Similarly, it takes more than just physical strength to grip a hand exerciser and keep squeezing it against the force of the spring. After a short time, the hand grows tired and then gradually starts to feel muscle pain. The natural impulse is to relax, but you can will yourself to keep squeezing—unless your mind has been too busy suppressing other feelings, as in an experiment involving a sad Italian film.
    Before watching the movie, the subjects were told that their facial expressions would be recorded by a camera as they watched the movie. Some people were asked to suppress their feelings and show no emotions. Others were asked to amplify their emotional reactions so that their facial expressions would reveal their feelings. A third group, the control condition, got to watch the movie normally.
    Everyone then watched an excerpt from the movie Mondo Cane (“A Dog’s World”), a documentary about the effects of nuclear waste on wildlife. One memorable sequence