It is Monday evening. You promised yourself you would spend ten minutes looking at your accounts after dinner, but after a long day at work, the washing-up and the children’s homework, the sofa looks far more appealing. Tomorrow, then. Sound familiar? That does not make you weak or lazy. You are running into something almost everyone experiences: willpower is an unreliable engine for changing your behaviour in the long run.
In this article we look at what research says about willpower today, why habits are a sturdier foundation, and how you can build a small money habit that sticks, even on the evenings when you do not feel like it.
The story of the willpower muscle
In the late 1990s, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues (1998) carried out a well-known experiment. Participants who had to resist biscuits and eat radishes instead gave up more quickly on an unsolvable puzzle afterwards. The conclusion seemed clear: self-control works like a muscle that gets tired. If you have to resist a lot, you have less left afterwards. The idea became known as “ego depletion” and was treated as established fact for years.
Since then, the picture has become a good deal more nuanced. In 2016, researchers led by Martin Hagger tried to replicate the effect in more than twenty labs at once, following a pre-registered protocol. The effect they found was close to zero. Michael Inzlicht and Brandon Schmeichel (2012) argue that the fatigue after effort has more to do with motivation and attention: after a while, your brain would rather switch to something more enjoyable or more rewarding. And Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton (2010) found evidence that what you yourself believe about willpower plays a part in how quickly you give up.
To be honest, the debate has not been settled. But you do not have to wait for the final word to put it to use. Whether willpower is a muscle, a matter of motivation or a matter of belief, it remains a fickle resource. It depends on how well you slept, how much stress you feel and how your day went. That is precisely why it is wise not to build your entire financial household on it.
People with a lot of self-control use it less
A surprising finding comes from Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues (2012). They followed people for a week via their smartphones and asked them at random moments whether they had just felt a temptation. Those who described themselves as strong in self-control did not so much resist temptations more often as experience them less often. Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth (2015) reached a similar conclusion: people with a lot of self-control rely more heavily on good habits. They do sensible things on autopilot, so they do not have to fight every time.
That is good news. It means that what we call “strong willpower” largely comes down to arranging your life cleverly. And that is something you can learn.
What a habit actually is
The psychologist Wendy Wood and her colleagues (Wood, Quinn & Kashy, 2002) asked people to keep a diary and found that well over 40 per cent of their daily actions took place in the same context and with little conscious thought. In that sense, a habit is a link between a situation and an action: you come home and put your keys in the same little bowl, you make coffee and open your emails. The situation triggers the behaviour, without you having to decide each time.
How long does it take for such a link to form? Phillippa Lally and colleagues (2009) followed 96 people who wanted to adopt a new healthy habit, such as a glass of water with breakfast or a walk after lunch. On average it took 66 days for the behaviour to become more or less automatic, with large differences between people: from 18 to 254 days. So the familiar “21 days” story is not true. A reassuring point from the same study: missing a day did not noticeably derail the process. You do not have to be perfect, just consistent enough.
The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer (1999) calls these implementation intentions: you link a concrete moment to a concrete action. Not “I am going to pay more attention to my money”, but “when I have poured my first coffee on Sunday, I will open my banking app and look at the week’s spending”. Many studies show that plans like these make it more likely that you actually take action, because the moment itself reminds you.
An example: Lien and her Sunday coffee
Lien (34) works as a nurse, on rotating shifts. Every January she resolved to “get her finances in order”, and every year she kept it up for a few weeks. Then life took over: late shifts, tiredness, and the uncomfortable feeling that she would rather not look at her account.
This year she approached it differently. Instead of a big resolution, she chose one small action with a fixed anchor: every Sunday morning, with her first coffee, she opens her banking app and writes three numbers on a note on the fridge. What is in her current account, what is in her savings account and how much she spent on groceries that week. Nothing more. It takes five minutes.
The first few weeks it felt like a chore. Around March she noticed that she was opening the app before she had consciously thought about it. Twice she forgot because of a night shift, and she simply picked it up again the following week. After six months the note had become a familiar ritual, and she noticed something she had not expected: she worried less about money. Not because there was suddenly more in her account, but because she knew where she stood.
How to build a money habit yourself
- Choose one behaviour that is small enough. So small that you can do it even on a bad day. Noting down three numbers works better than “drawing up a full budget”.
- Attach it to an existing anchor. Something you already do every day or every week: your morning coffee, the washing-up, the bus ride to work. Phrase it as “when ..., then ...”.
- Make it easy. Put your banking app on your home screen and leave a pen next to the note. Every small hurdle you remove makes the behaviour more likely.
- Keep a visible record that you are doing it. A cross on the calendar shows that you are on track and gives you a small sense of progress.
- Think in months, not weeks. With Lally’s research in mind: give yourself time. If you miss once, simply carry on. One missed day is not a failure.
Want to put this into practice? With the 30-day action plan tool, you turn one goal into four small weekly actions that you can grow into a fixed routine.
Habits as a form of financial self-care
You might think habits are boring, the opposite of spontaneity. But putting your finances on a routine actually frees up space in your head. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Scarcity, 2013) describe how money worries take up mental “bandwidth”: if you constantly have to think about what you can afford, there is less attention left for the rest of your life. A good routine takes away part of that burden. You do not have to decide all over again every day whether to check, save or pay; it simply happens.
That is financial self-care in the true sense: not waiting for a moment of strong willpower, but giving yourself an environment in which good behaviour comes naturally. It will not deliver spectacular results after a week, but it will bring a quiet peace of mind after a few months.
Would you like to discover, step by step, what you want and how to align your money behaviour with it? The online course The road to financial well-being takes you through it, in ten parts and at your own pace.