Ever come home from work feeling just too drained to accomplish anything beyond browsing Netflix? You’re not physically exhausted, so it’s hard to explain your sapped state to friends and SOs, but you just want to become one with the couch.
Social psychologists call this feeling ego depletion, with some theorizing that, like physical energy, we draw upon a limited amount of willpower each day. Happy living, then, requires balanced spending of our daily willpower.
Does work routinely drain you? A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that watching funny videos combatted ego depletion and replenished willpower.
– Chris Butsch, “The Millennial Maximizer”