making a tough decision could adversely affect your ability to resist to ice cream

or force yourself to exercise later in the day.

This means one thing—we've got to maximize our self-control reserves to be

effective at changing ourselves. I include this just to show how other things can
undercut our willpower reserves, making the philosophy behind mini habits even
more important.

An Important Meta-Analysis Of Willpower

A meta-analysis is a “study of studies” that attempts to extract important
conclusions from the body of related work on a given topic. This helps to
smooth out possible aberrations from individual studies. If something holds true
over dozens of properly-conducted studies and thousands of participants, there's
a very high probability of that data being reliable, illuminating, and useful.

In 2010, a meta-analysis of 83 studies was done on ego depletion. 20 Ego

depletion essentially means the same thing as willpower or self-control
depletion, so I will use these terms interchangeably. From this meta-analysis, the
five biggest factors found to cause ego depletion were effort, perceived
difficulty, negative affect, subjective fatigue, and blood glucose levels. These
factors, then, are the five biggest obstacles that keep us from sustaining success
with a willpower-based strategy. What do we do once we've exhausted our
willpower? Is all hope lost then? According to the analysis, motivational
incentives, training on self-control tasks, and glucose supplementation promoted
better self-control of ego-depleted people. (Ibid.)

This gives us a wealth of information about how best to manage willpower. Here
is an important motivation and willpower recap to set up this next part about the
Mini Habits strategy for adding healthy habits to your life:

• New (or non-habit) behaviors are started by using motivation or willpower.

• Motivation isn't reliable, so it can't be the strategy for building habits.

• Willpower is reliable, but only if you don't run out of it.