Facebook, Twitter and email harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol

A study of more than 200 adults finds that although desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, the lure of media and work proved the hardest to resist

February, 2012. Trying to resist that late-night tweet or checking your work email again? The bad news is that desires for work and entertainment often win out in the daily struggle for self-control, according to a new study that measures various desires and their regulation in daily life.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Asst. Prof. Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and lead author of the study, “Desires and Cravings: Food, Money, Status, Sex,” forthcoming in Psychological Science.

Determining how to best resist desires is not as easy as it seems

In the study of desire regulation, 205 adults wore devices that recorded a total of 7,827 reports about their daily desires. Desires for sleep and sex were the strongest, while desires for media and work proved the hardest to resist.

Even though tobacco and alcohol are thought of as addictive, desires associated with them were the weakest, according to the study. Surprisingly to the researchers, sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations,” said Hofmann.

Willpower depletion

Moreover, the study supported past research that the more frequently and recently people have resisted a desire, the less successful they will be at resisting any subsequent desire. Therefore as a day wears on, willpower becomes lower, and self-control efforts are more likely to fail, said Hofmann, who co-authored the paper with Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota.

The effects of willpower depletion explain why so many people have trouble resisting unhealthy food — the more they resist the food, the more they crave it.