{"id":18052,"date":"2026-01-21T08:29:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=18052"},"modified":"2026-01-21T18:36:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T02:36:44","slug":"what-exactly-is-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/21\/what-exactly-is-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"What Exactly is Energy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I argued that energy management<\/a>, not time management, is the key to productivity. It\u2019s far easier to make a schedule than to do the work. Available energy being more limiting than time helps explain why we so often fall short of our productive ideals.<\/p>\n

But what, exactly, is energy?<\/p>\n

It sounds obvious: We work, we get tired, and then it\u2019s harder to work more. You had energy, you used it up. Now you\u2019re running on empty, and work is difficult. Pretty straightforward, right?<\/p>\n

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Except, it\u2019s not so simple. The science behind this \u201cobvious\u201d idea is surprisingly complex, involving biological, psychological and sociological factors. Even a basic question, like whether it\u2019s harder to do an effortful task after doing another effortful task or an easier one, leads straight into one of the most infamous scientific controversies of the last two decades.<\/p>\n

So today, I\u2019m going to dive into some of this complexity. I know my appetite for esoteric social scientific debates is higher than average, and many people are simply interested in how to feel more energized and able to do their work.<\/p>\n

But to have any hope of managing our energy, first we must understand what energy even is. And in order to do that, we need to grapple with that complexity.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dive in. I promise it will be worth it.<\/p>\n

Is Energy a Resource?<\/h2>\n

A basic idea, built right into the idea of energy itself, is that it is some sort of resource: a metaphorical battery that is depleted and refilled. \u2028\u2028For a while, this was the scientific consensus. In the 1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues proposed the theory of ego depletion<\/a> that worked off of this premise.<\/p>\n

Self-control and, by extension, mentally effortful tasks tap a universal mental \u201cresource.\u201d As with any good scientific theory, it made a falsifiable prediction: people would be less successful at exhibiting self-control after a \u201cdepleting\u201d task than after a neutral control task. Energy would be used up, and they would be more likely to succumb to impulse or temptation.<\/p>\n

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Ego depletion also had an ancillary hypothesis: Not only was energy like a battery, depleted with use and recharged with rest, but the overall capacity could grow or shrink with use, much like a muscle. By exercising self-control regularly, we could become more disciplined.<\/p>\n

Both the battery and muscle analogies have a certain commonsense appeal. And, for a time, it appeared they had solid scientific support as well. To date, over 600 published studies in the literature have found support for ego depletion, and a 2010 meta-analysis<\/a> by Martin Hagger and colleagues found that not only was the effect statistically significant, but it was practically significant with an effect size about 50% larger than typically found in social psychology.<\/p>\n

As evidence accumulated, ego depletion researchers looked for a physical property in the brain that corresponded to the behavioral effects. And many believed they found it: glucose.<\/p>\n

The brain is a hungry organ. Despite accounting for only 2% of the body\u2019s weight, it consumes nearly 20% of our daily calories. Thinking, it turns out, is a costly business, and that price is paid in the currency of glucose.<\/p>\n

Once again, support<\/a> began to build not only for the behavioral reality of ego depletion, but its correlation to brain glucose levels. Drinking a sugar-sweetened beverage could temporarily boost glucose and stave off the energy-depleting effects of mental effort, whereas a placebo drink sweetened with an artificial sweetener would not.<\/p>\n

It was a textbook case of science done right: a commonsense observation was translated into an experimental hypothesis, the hypothesis was rigorously tested in controlled experiments, and, finally, research found the physical mechanism mediating the effect. Credits roll, end of story.<\/p>\n

Cracks in the Ego Depletion Story<\/h2>\n

Except, that\u2019s not what happened. Instead, research on ego depletion imploded, calling into question not only this theory, but the entire edifice of social science.<\/p>\n

The first cracks in the simple sugar-powered battery analogy came from an interesting 2010 experiment<\/a> by growth-mindset researchers Job, Dweck and Walton.<\/p>\n

In their experiment, they found that a person\u2019s beliefs about willpower moderated the ego depletion effect. If a person believed willpower was a like a battery that gets used up, they were more depleted in the follow-up task than if they believed willpower was unlimited.<\/p>\n

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\u2028But if ego depletion is drawing on a physical property of the brain, like glucose levels, how could mere beliefs about willpower itself influence the results?<\/p>\n

Other researchers found that incentives could influence depletion. Small rewards could eliminate the effect of depletion altogether<\/a>. This was another strike against a straightforward reading of the ego depletion theory. After all, if your car is out of gas and stranded on the highway, it\u2019s not as if throwing some cash on the dashboard will unlock a secret fuel tank.<\/p>\n

Attacks mounted against glucose as a biological mediator of the ego depletion effect. While the brain does consume a lot of glucose, any additional amount consumed owing to self-control is negligible. The amount consumed by the visual cortex is much greater<\/a>, but we rarely feel fatigued from simply looking at stuff.<\/p>\n

In light of these findings, other researchers proposed alternative accounts: perhaps ego depletion was better understood as a decline in motivation, not a resource, and so could be influenced by beliefs or incentives. Maybe effort is a perception of opportunity costs<\/a>? Or a kind of affective state<\/a>?<\/p>\n

All of these attacks would have been part of the normal back-and-forth of social science, the theory\/counter-theory jabs academics lob all the time, had it not been for a bombshell paper that came out in 2016.<\/p>\n

Ego Depletion and the Replication Crisis<\/h2>\n

By this point in the story, rumors were already circulating that some psychological results were not to be trusted. The field of social priming, where brief (sometimes subliminal) exposure to stimuli was thought to have large effects on behavior, had trouble replicating some of their classic experiments<\/a>. Science, if it is to have any meaning, has to be reliable. An effect that exists on Monday can\u2019t disappear on Tuesday when a different scientist runs the experiment.<\/p>\n

Researchers were coming to realize that practices like failing to publish null results, or tweaking an experiment or analysis until a significant effect appeared, weren\u2019t as innocent as they had thought. To quote one set of researchers<\/a>, \u201cEveryone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it\u2019s wrong to jaywalk. [But] simulations revealed it was wrong the way it\u2019s wrong to rob a bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

After correcting for unpublished null findings, one meta-analysis of ego depletion effects came up with much smaller effect sizes<\/a> than Hagger\u2019s original 2010 meta-analysis. Suddenly, hundreds of studies all pointing in the same direction felt more suspicious than confirmatory.<\/p>\n

To quell doubts, Hagger himself led a preregistered replication attempt. This asked many labs, all following standardized protocols with no possible p-hacking, to re-run ego depletion experiments. Published in 2016, the aggregate statistics found no statistically significant effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Run by one of the major ego depletion researchers, the 2016 study failing to replicate findings had a catastrophic effect on the field. Ego depletion as a theory was dead, a cautionary tale into the dangers of unrigorous science.<\/p>\n

Ego Depletion: Back from the Dead?<\/h2>\n

Except, of course, you knew it wouldn\u2019t be so simple.<\/p>\n

Ego depletion was wounded, and many of its early studies were fatally flawed, but it\u2019s still far from dead.<\/p>\n

The theory adapted<\/a> in the face of some of its challenges. For instance, the new theory suggests that, while ego depletion is real, we rarely find ourselves truly \u201con empty.\u201d Instead we conserve energy for future use when it is running low.<\/p>\n

To use a new analogy, think of it like spending money. After a pricey holiday season, you may feel a little overspent and decide to be more frugal with your spending in January to compensate. But it\u2019s not as if you\u2019ve literally spent your very last dollar\u2014if an emergency (or significant opportunity) came up, you\u2019d probably find a bit more money to spend.<\/p>\n

Beliefs and motivations can also be seen as inputs to our energy system<\/a>, rather than viewing things through the overly simplistic lens of a single limited resource governing all behavior.<\/p>\n

Defenders of ego depletion argue that many of the failed replications failed to fully test the theory.<\/p>\n

For one, there\u2019s the issue of dose. To coordinate many different labs using different tasks, many of the large-scale preregistered ego depletion experiments used very short self-control tasks to \u201cdeplete\u201d participants. These \u201cdepletion tasks\u201d may only have been 10 to 15 minutes in duration, which is likely too short to meaningfully fatigue the participants. Thus, the lack of significant effects could be due to the studies being underpowered rather than the effect itself being unreal.<\/p>\n

Second, there\u2019s the issue of the selected control task. Many experimental designs used boring tasks as the \u201cneutral\u201d condition. However, sticking to a boring task may itself deplete our mental energies, making the control and depletion conditions more similar than they should be.<\/p>\n

Third, there\u2019s the issue of whether the depletion task itself was properly validated. Many experiments used letter-crossing tasks, where participants were asked to read a short text and cross out certain letters, such as \u201ccross out any e next to a vowel.\u201d For theoretical reasons, this type of task was assumed to deplete self-control. However, researchers have pointed out that crossing out letters may be tedious, but it doesn\u2019t involve the type of motivational conflict that typifies self-control problems, such as choosing to eat broccoli versus cheesecake.<\/p>\n

Proponents argue that, when taking these into account, ego depletion is still real<\/a>, albeit weaker than previously thought, and more dependent on contextual factors.<\/p>\n

Even the biophysical basis is being revised. While the theory that glucose is the mediator of ego depletion is definitively dead, recent neuroscience work using brain wave monitors has found elevated levels of delta-wave activity (the kind normally seen in deep sleep) in the regions of the brain associated with self-control after a longer depleting task<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It may be that, unlike a fuel that gets burned up, ego depletion is more like garbage that builds up and needs to be collected, with metabolic by-products of neural activity increasing the incentive to take a mental break.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the State of the Understanding in 2026?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s clear that, despite the scientific roller-coaster ride, the consensus on energy is far from settled.\u2028\u2028 It\u2019s completely reasonable to have skepticism about ego depletion given its tarnished history. I know I certainly do.<\/p>\n

But, despite my enthusiastic promotion of an early alternative theory in terms of opportunity costs<\/a>, the evidence hasn\u2019t clearly aligned in support of an obvious successor. \u2028\u2028Instead, perhaps unfortunately, reality is simply messier than the original ego depletion theory permitted. The phenomenon of feeling drained after working hard on something is decidedly real, but the actual mechanisms through which it happens may be a mixture of depletion, motivation, attention and beliefs.<\/p>\n

There are important practical consequences of this messy picture as well. It means there isn\u2019t just a single factor, like glucose, that mediates the ease with which we do hard things\u2014we can\u2019t improve our energy just by drinking a soda anymore than we can make a car go faster by dousing it with gasoline.<\/p>\n

But that complexity is also an opportunity. If energy comes not from a single resource but from multiple factors, there are more levers we can pull when trying to get more energy out of ourselves and our work.<\/p>\n

The story of ego depletion is a twisting one, but it\u2019s just one aspect in the fascinating science of what makes us feel alive and energized. Next, I\u2019ll shift away from controversy to discuss some science with much more stable footing: how stress impacts our health and energy levels.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Work hard and you feel tired. Sounds simple, right? 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