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

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: DOPAMINIZE YOUR “I
WILL” POWER CHALLENGE
My students have dopaminized tasks they typically put off by using music, fashion magazines,
and television to help them work out; bringing dreaded paperwork to a favorite café and
finishing it over hot chocolate; and, in a truly creative gesture, buying a bunch of scratch-off
lottery tickets and placing them next to procrastinated projects around the house. Others
visualize the best-possible outcome of their hard work, to make the faraway rewards seem more
real. If there’s something you’ve been putting off because it’s so unpleasant, can you motivate
yourself by linking it to something that gets your dopamine neurons firing?

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A PROCRASTINATOR DOPAMINIZES HER “ I WILL” POWER CHALLENGE
Nancy, whose youngest son had graduated from college nearly a decade earlier, had a problem with
her empty nest. It wasn’t empty. She had turned her son’s old bedroom into the “spare” room, and
over the years, it had become more like a salvage yard. Anytime she didn’t know where to put
something, into the spare room it went. She wanted to clean it out and turn it into a guest room, not a
room she had to hide from visitors. And yet every time she opened the door, she was overwhelmed.
Cleaning out the room became her class willpower challenge, but it wasn’t until we hit on the
promise of reward that Nancy found her way in. She was inspired by a study that combined Christmas
music with holiday scents to increase shoppers’ enjoyment and desire to stay in a store. For many
people, a little Ho-Ho-Ho plus the smell of fresh fir trees brings up memories of the most wonderful
“promise of reward” we have ever experienced: waking up on Christmas morning to a pile of
presents. Nancy decided to bring out her holiday music and candles (conveniently enough, stored in
the spare room!) to get her through the task of cleaning. Though she’d been dreading it, she actually
enjoyed working on the room in small bursts. The overwhelm was worse than the actual process, and
the holly, jolly dopamine helped her find the motivation to get started.

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