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telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier, and disturbing pictures made them more frightened and upset. Ice-cold water felt more painful to them than it did to people who were not ego-depleted. Desires intensified along with feelings. After eating a cookie, the people reported a stronger craving to eat another cookie—and they did in fact eat more cookies when given a chance. When looking at a gift-wrapped package, they felt an especially strong desire to open it.
    So if you’d like some advance warning of trouble, look not for a single symptom but rather for a change in the overall intensity of your feelings. If you find yourself especially bothered by frustrating events, or saddened by unpleasant thoughts, or even happier about some good news—then maybe it’s because your brain’s circuits aren’t controlling emotions as well as usual. Now, intense feelings can be quite pleasurable and are an essential part of life, and we’re not suggesting that you strive for emotional monotony (unless you aspire to Mr. Spock’s Vulcan calm). But be aware of what these feelings can mean. If you’re trying to resist temptation, you may find yourself feeling the forbidden desires more strongly just when your ability to resist them is down. Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.
    The problem can be particularly acute for people struggling with addiction. Researchers have long noticed that cravings are especially strong during withdrawal. More recently they’ve noticed that lots of other feelings intensify during withdrawal. During withdrawal, the recovering addict is using so much willpower to break the habit that it’s likely to be a time of intense, prolonged ego depletion, and that very state will make the person feel the desire for the drug all the more strongly. Moreover, other events will also have an unusually strong impact, causing extra distress and creating further yearnings for the cigarette or drink or drug. It’s no wonder relapses are so common and addicts feel so weird when they quit. Long before psychologists identified ego depletion, the British humorist Sir A. P. Herbert nicely described the conflicting set of symptoms:
    “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again!” he announced. “God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”

The Mystery of the Dirty Socks
    In the 1970s, the psychologist Daryl Bem set about trying to distinguish conscientious people from others by making up a list of behaviors. He assumed he’d find a positive correlation between “turns in school assignments on time” and “wears clean socks,” because both would stem from the underlying trait of conscientiousness. But when he collected data from students at Stanford, where he taught, he was surprised to find a hefty negative correlation.
    “Apparently,” he joked, “the students could either get their homework done or change their socks every day, but not both.”
    He didn’t give it much further thought, but decades later other researchers wondered if there was something to the joke. Two Australian psychologists, Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, considered the possibility that the students were suffering from the sort of ego depletion revealed in the radish experiment. These psychologists started by administering laboratory self-control tests to the students at different times during the semester. As hypothesized, the students performed relatively badly near the end of the term, apparently because their willpower had been depleted by the strain of studying for exams and turning in assignments. But the deterioration wasn’t limited to arcane laboratory tests. When asked about other aspects of their lives, it became clear that Bem’s dirty-sock finding hadn’t been a fluke.