My opinion is that you body has a limited capacity to do anything. For example if you are weight training, you might improve year by year, but eventually you will hit a limit of what is humanly possible and won’t be able to make any gains.
Willpower is probably similar (but in a much shorter timespan). Willpower has to be a limited resource, since by doing different activities you consume energy and thereby have less energy available to do other things. The fact that you have less energy impacts your willpower.
However on the other hand, the human body is capable of much more than you think. That’s where the effect of the second wind comes in. At some points you are able to muster up your last amounts of energy and push through, right at the time you thought you were done.
There are also examples in the opposite direction. Heartbeat and breathing are active 24 hours a day. People can keep playing for hours. So it’s not like any human activity is necessarily limited to short intervals. I guess the proper question would be: “Why is willpower (sometimes) spent so fast?”
Which I guess cannot be answered until we look into details of what constitutes “willpower”. (And we may find that actually different forms of “willpower” consist of different components—maybe even that different people use different mental activities for dealing with the same kind of problem—so using a single word for all these meanings is confusing.)
My opinion is that you body has a limited capacity to do anything. For example if you are weight training, you might improve year by year, but eventually you will hit a limit of what is humanly possible and won’t be able to make any gains.
Willpower is probably similar (but in a much shorter timespan). Willpower has to be a limited resource, since by doing different activities you consume energy and thereby have less energy available to do other things. The fact that you have less energy impacts your willpower.
However on the other hand, the human body is capable of much more than you think. That’s where the effect of the second wind comes in. At some points you are able to muster up your last amounts of energy and push through, right at the time you thought you were done.
What exactly do you mean with “energy”? Something along the lines of chi or more like something measured in calories?
There are also examples in the opposite direction. Heartbeat and breathing are active 24 hours a day. People can keep playing for hours. So it’s not like any human activity is necessarily limited to short intervals. I guess the proper question would be: “Why is willpower (sometimes) spent so fast?”
Which I guess cannot be answered until we look into details of what constitutes “willpower”. (And we may find that actually different forms of “willpower” consist of different components—maybe even that different people use different mental activities for dealing with the same kind of problem—so using a single word for all these meanings is confusing.)