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?
What unleashes that promise of reward that
compels you to seek satisfaction?
• 
Neuromarketing and environmental triggers.
Look for how retailers and marketers try to
trigger the promise of reward.
• 
The stress of desire.
Notice when wanting triggers stress and anxiety.
Willpower Experiments
• 
Dopaminize your “I will” power challenge.
If there’s something you’ve been putting off,
motivate yourself by linking it with something that gets your dopamine neurons firing.
• 
Test the promise of reward.
Mindfully indulge in something your brain tells you will make
you happy but that never seems to satisfy (e.g., snack food, shopping, television, and
online time-wasters). Does reality match the brain’s promises?

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SIX
What the Hell: How Feeling Bad Leads to Giving In
W
hen you’re feeling down, what do you do to feel better? If you’re like most people, you turn to the
promise of reward. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the most commonly
used strategies for dealing with stress are those that activate the brain’s reward system: eating,
drinking, shopping, watching television, surfing the Web, and playing video games. And why not?
Dopamine promises us that we’re going to feel good. It’s only natural that we turn to the biggest
dopamine releasers when we want to feel better. Call it the promise of relief.
Wanting to feel better is a healthy survival mechanism, as built into our human nature as the instinct
to flee danger. But where we turn for relief matters. The promise of reward—as we’ve seen—does
not always mean that we 
will
feel good. More often, the things we turn to for relief end up turning on
us. The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated
as highly 
ineffective
by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of
people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Another study found that women are
most likely to eat chocolate when they are feeling anxious or depressed, but the only reliable change
in mood they experience from their drug of choice is an increase in guilt. Certainly not what most of
us are looking for when we reach for our favorite comfort food!
As we explore the effects of stress, anxiety, and guilt on self-control, we’ll see that feeling bad
leads to giving in, and often in surprising ways. Frightening cigarette warnings can make smokers
crave a cigarette, economic crises can make people shop, and the nightly news can make you fat. No,
it’s not logical, but it’s utterly human. If we want to avoid such stress-induced willpower failures,
we’ll need to find a way to feel better that doesn’t require turning to temptation. We’ll also need to
give up the self-control strategies—like guilt and self-criticism—that only make us feel worse.

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