The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: WHAT GETS YOUR
DOPAMINE NEURONS FIRING?
Do you know what your own dopamine triggers are? Food? Alcohol? Shopping? Facebook?
Something else? This week, pay attention to what captures 
your
attention. What unleashes that
promise of reward that compels you to seek satisfaction? What gets you salivating like Pavlov’s
dogs or obsessed like Olds and Milner’s rats?

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A PRESCRIPTION FOR ADDICTION
Perhaps the most striking evidence of dopamine’s role in addiction comes from patients being treated
for Parkinson’s disease, a common neurodegenerative disorder caused by the loss of dopamine-
producing brain cells. The main symptoms reflect dopamine’s role in motivating action: slow or
impaired movement, depression, and occasionally complete catatonia. The standard treatment for
Parkinson’s disease is a two-drug combo: L-dopa, which helps the brain make dopamine, and a
dopamine agonist, which stimulates dopamine receptors in the brain to mimic the action of dopamine.
When patients begin drug therapy, their brains are flooded with way more dopamine than they’ve seen
in a long time. This relieves the main symptoms of the disease, but also creates new problems that no
one expected.
Medical journals are full of case studies documenting the unintended side effects of these drugs.
There is the fifty-four-year-old woman who developed insatiable cravings for cookies, crackers, and
pasta, and would stay up late into the night binge-eating. Or the fifty-two-year-old man who
developed a daily gambling habit, staying at the casino for thirty-six hours straight and running
through his life’s savings.
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Or the forty-nine-year-old man who all of a sudden found himself
afflicted with an increased appetite, a taste for alcohol, and what his wife called “an excessive sex
urge” that required calling the cops to get him to leave her alone. All of these cases were completely
resolved by taking the patients off the dopamine-enhancing drug. But in many cases, confused loved
ones and doctors first sent patients to psychotherapy and Alcoholics or Gamblers Anonymous. They
were unable to see that the new addictions were a brain glitch, not a deep-seated emotional problem
that required psychological and spiritual counseling.
While these cases are extreme, they aren’t so different from what happens in your brain whenever
you get hooked by the promise of reward. The drugs that the Parkinson’s patients were on simply
exaggerated the natural effect that all these things—food, sex, alcohol, gambling, work—have on the
reward system. We are driven to chase pleasure, but often at the cost of our well-being. When
dopamine puts our brains on a reward-seeking mission, we become the most risk-taking, impulsive,
and out-of-control version of ourselves.
Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward—combined with a growing
sense of anxiety when we think about stopping—is enough to keep us hooked. If you’re a lab rat, you
press a lever again and again until you collapse or starve to death. If you’re a human, this leaves you
with a lighter wallet and a fuller stomach, at best. At worst, you may find yourself spiraling into
obsession and compulsion.

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