You should probably ask a doctor. This is too intense for me personally. My feeling is that we are going to need a lot of therapists for our AI when they become sentient. If you can over analyze yourself this bad, the AI don’t have a chance in our world.

A lot of what you type is based in reality so I presume youve done a lot of reading on it. Willpower is a finite resource: if you have to expend a lot of delayed gratification in one are a of your life you have to be mindful of other areas that require willpower as you will be more prone to failure. As you stated it's hard to gauge how you are feeling in respect to how you felt a week, month, years ago and its hard to accurately gauge whether burnout is approaching.

You should do more reading on the matter. I think there would be a fairly good framework somewhere that could be boiled into a few variables for your game. I doubt you'd have to come up with anything groundbreaking, read a couple books on willpower, addiction (will verse you in what happens when motivation goes awry) and the like.

Some general things I think may prove useful:

• A key to happiness is having intrinsic motivation. This goes against your motivations. If a person does things purely because they want to, for themselves, even if you fail, you will probably have more resolve to keep going. As opposed to more extrinsic motivation like having others compliment you for your success. Being the former is definitely more conductive for happiness and probably reducing burnout risk too.
• Look up how compromised decision making (and ultimately willpower) is when sleep deprived, hungry, stressed, and generally bothered by something. Its huge.
• Goals must be actionable, realistic (SMART), and achievable in small increments
• People need time off to recouperate. For instance I believe I read something that said humans need to write and defragment their thoughts for like an hour a day because we process so much information welose track on whats important. We intake and process data all day long and seldom spend time pany of it and thinking and untangling it all
• I woud probablylook into the 80/20 rule thats a neat catch all phenomenon that applies to many things in life. For example 80% of the most productive work results from 20% of your time working. This can be applied by thinking about diminishing returns. Eventually its time to call it a day and relax knowing that you are risking future burnout for lowered productivity. For example boxing off allocated times or even days where its strictly no work to unwind.
• Look up supernatural stimuli. Its not just crack cocaine and heroin that is making people ruined in terms of discipline and motivation and willpower. Sugar, social media, porn, games, drugs, alcohol, junk food, iphones. Its all stimuli we didnt evolve to handle and sustained overuse ruins your brain chemistry making it harder to stay motivated in day to day life.

My main takeaway is you should probably have an intrinsic/extrinsic motivation variable in your game. See it this way, if you are extrinsically motivated (money, status), you may rally to slog on but it may be at the expense of internal happiness. If you set out to do something because you simply enjoy it, want to thrive and such, you may be happier, but it might not make you pursue a high money, high pressure job. Extrinsically motivated people may be more successful materially but you never 'get there'. Youre always chasing the dragon, its fleeting as you say. So there is probably an internal/external tradeoff to beinputting into your game. Perhaps it can even calculate how internally/externally motivated you are through several variables. And the tradeoffs will be apparent. (money/status vs self actualization/contentness). Read a book on drugaddiction andhow it impacts decision making to get a good grasp on how willpower can fluctuate and include that. Supernatural stimuli and the such will would have negative impact on longterm sustained work and tenacity. Lack of self defragmenting through journalling, positive affirmations, talking therapy, mentoring and such would have a negative impact on self actualization / internal motivation

Another variable I would look into is 'LOVE'. And not meaning a partner. Love broadly speaking would mean acceptance and valued in community, a number of friends who are lifelong friends who you trust to confide with and speak freely without fear of consequence (like family), strength of connections with others. Remember that humans are social creatures and its the cornerstone of life. It definitely has its place in your game. Social isolation makes people mentally ill. Look up how solitary confinement changes the brain. A lot of people live to that level of social depravity despite not being in prison.

Hope this helps

:) Hahaha. Thanks for your response. Yeah, I agree it's overly analytical. It's the challenging part of software development... you can't just handwave around an idea and have it materialize - the idea has to be so clear as to express with logic. It does feel like it borders on insanity in attempting to articulate the underlying processes, though. Hopefully the game itself comes off less intimidating and more insightful.

This was great, thank you. It'll take me a bit to give you a strong response. I have done some reading (Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, Thinking Fast & Slow), but I agree there's more to be done to get a handle on it.

You're right that I didn't touch, at all, on sources of motivation and intrinsic/extrinsic motivators and it's pretty clear that extrinsic motivation would lead to more cyclic behavior. I suppose Atomic Habits touches on it a bit by encouraging less goal-oriented behavior and more identity-driven behavior.

I'll probably update my response here a bit in the morning. Thanks again for taking the time to thoughtfully respond, really appreciate it.

You should consult with a psychiatrist. For your game. They would have all the information about how human brains work.

I love that you are trying to rationalize this concept, or at least to take a step in that direction. Your project touches in some of my favorite areas of thought, so I apologize in advance for this verbose comment.

I don't think you can explore the idea of willpower or pushing yourself without looking at thresholds. Physical exertion is a great model for this. When we deviate incrimentally from what we understand to be our capacity, we slowly change our concept of that capacity just as much (if not more than) we change our actual capacity.

In 2017 I was severely overweight and made the decision (motivated by fear for my health) to join a gym with instruction. Early on, a coach asked me if I could do a pushup. I did not know, having been bullied extensively and avoiding PE altogether in school, I had never tried. My self-concept was that I could not do it at all. I made the attempt and was able to do a few, 5-10. That surprised me and made me want to push myself to my physical extremes to see what I was capable of. Fortunately, I had a good coach who encouraged me to increase those numbers incrimentally. This has proven continuously true for me throughout my fitness journey over the past 6 years.

Sometimes, I must actively recognize that I am not aware of a perceived capacity for work, and intentionally push myself as hard as I can, measure that data, and model future work off of it. I now coach adaptive athletes and individuals with high BMI and use a RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort) model to design their initial programming, founded in the idea that aligning our perceived ability to exert effort with our actual physical limit, paired with metrics, is the most efficient way to improve our actual physical limits.

That's in the gym, though, where we are actively seeking metrics and designing plans which are then tested and used to create more metrics, etc. It's much harder to approach your question when it comes to messier or more esoteric habits. When it comes to my capacity to complete tasks such as writing reports, I would look to past experiences and try to model them against future forecasts.

For many years, I worked as a case worker and routinely developed comprehensive wraparound treatment plans. These were significant time investments with a pretty heavy load for preparation. A seasoned professional like me can write one in 4-5 unbroken hours with a good degree of focus, but to be thorough and minimize stress, they were usually parsed over 2-3 full work days. If necessity demanded, I could bang out several of them in a few days, generally relying upon both external motivation as well as internal factors like self-belief. The important factor that you could operationalize, though, is that the closer I was to a period of rest, the more I could rely on my internal motivation. I think intuitively we understand there is sort of a "regeneration period" for willpower, and the fear of having to continually rely on it in the future makes our present tasks all the more daunting. Over time, I noticed that I was able to sequence together longer periods of relying on that internal motivation, thus requiring fewer "recharge" periods. When I began in my line of work, I couldn't really push myself to work hard for more than a week without the promise of a reward. By the time I left the field after about 10 years, I could push myself to take on relatively herculean workloads with the promise of a 3-day weekend 6 weeks down the road.

Finally, I think our outlook on the future plays an enormous role in how much willpower we are willing to commit to a task. I think of this as an interfering factor against our rational plans for the future. For example, I may know that I have a long weekend coming up in 6 weeks, but if I am worried that a subordinate is going to quit and I'll have to take on extra work, that projected rest becomes worth less and I must rely more on my internal motivation.

In summary, I see willpower as a matter of 3 recursive elements:

1. Remembered experiences of the durability and efficacy of internal and external motivational factors
2. Applying those experiences as forecasts against our planned future events (give or take for our expectations of variability)
3. An emotional impression of the final outcome which is actualized when we reach a period of rest.

Should I push to achieve my goals? Should I instead acknowledge the lack of sleep and rest? Is it reasonable to make a decision here while only considering today, or should the past weeks effort be considered? In essence, how do I know if pushing myself to encourage growth of self-determination is appropriate for any given event? Conversely, how do I know if allowing myself to rest is allowing for healthy recuperation and not just a convincing argument for following the path of least resistance?

This idea is incredibly fun to think about. Without going too far off the beaten path, and trying to consider your central goal of operationalizing all this, I have a few thoughts.

I think that the best or most rational choice cannot be known in any of these instances. Rather, the choices that we make show where we are on the spectrum of valuing internal motivation. Let us say, hypothetically, that there are 100 composite choices within the group of "self-growth vs relaxation." By defining each of these choices, we see a profile of an individual that exists on a spectrum.

For example: John decided to finish his essay, pay his taxes, and hit his eating targets 100%. He made 95/100 of daily self-growth vs. relaxation choices toward self-growth. He now defines himself as a 95% self-growther, and when he sees a single future task that requires anything at or below a 95% level of effort to perform, he will need a standard level of anticipated rest to pursue it 100% of the time. If he perceives something as requiring 99% of effort, though, and he forecasts that he will have to wait double the amount of time he would like before he can rest again, he may underperform at that task and re-adjust his self-perception. He may even decide against pursuing that task.

The next day, he comes to work and sees doughnuts. He knows it's going to be tough to resist, but hey, he's a 95%-er. However, his boss comes in and lets him know half his department has been fired and he's going to have to triple his workload and cancel his vacation next month. Even though his perceived value of self-motivation is very high, he forecasts a long need for expenditure and is going to start rationalizing choices that provide some external motivation to supplement. Because he's now going to have to extend his willpower 3 times more than expected, its perceived value is lowered two a third of its pristine 95%.

He chooses to go into the kitchen and have a doughnut to settle his nerves, but this throws him off his macronutrient plan. He's on his way to lowering his self-perceived willpower value, which was already stretched thin by his circumstances. Not only is John's overall perception of the value of his willpower decreasing, but he may also have specific triggers pertaining to food. In past years, he struggled with overeating and his index of self-perception of willpower as it comes to food in particular is very low (20%, we'll say). Perhaps his self-perceived ability to resist the next doughnut is a factor of the index of his overall willpower value and his food-specific willpower index.

Here's where I think it gets really interesting. Playing with these indices as percentages is fun, but can we say behavior is just random? If I have an overall index score of 50% when it comes to making healthy food choices, is it just a flip of a coin as to whether I go for the extra doughnut? I think this is where goals and goal prioritization come into play.

Let's say I have three major definable goals: making healthy food choices 100% of the time, taking my dogs on a walk once per day, and going to bed by 10:00 p.m. Because the goals are well-defined and achievable, I believe they will contribute significantly to my choices. If I had say, 10 goals, then they would be too diffuse to all be effective. If my goals are poorly-defined, I would also gain less from them. If I have a history of failing at my goals (for any reason) they're not going to mean as much to me in the present (the inverse being true as well).

I'm going to stop there and continue to think about an operationalized model for willpower and choice-making for some time to come. Good luck to you in your quest!

For me I use visceral sensations to tell me when to stop. Like a burning feeling in my head or my body feeling like it just ran a marathon. I've also experienced where I tried to push beyond what my willpower will allow. Then my brain will just start forgetting things - I've lost my phone, my bus card, my wallet in these scenarios, and everything starts taking twice as long than they should and I'll keep fucking up which requires even more time to correct my mistakes. I have no control over any of these things. Lately i just try not to go beyond my limits because my brain just rebels and I have no say in any of it.

This was beautiful :) I have a lot to take away from it