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

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME
Philippe Goldin is one of the most outgoing neuroscientists you’ll ever meet. This is not to say that
brain geeks aren’t a friendly bunch, but most don’t offer bear hugs to whoever wanders into the lab.
Goldin directs the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford University,
which is a fancy way of saying that he uses what he knows about the brain to help people who suffer
from depression and anxiety—social anxiety in particular. He’s the last guy in the world you’d think
would be interested in social anxiety disorder, a crippling form of shyness, but he’s made a career
trying to understand and treat the disorder.
The people who enroll in his studies are not just a little bit nervous in social situations. The mere
thought of speaking to strangers can provoke a panic attack. You know that nightmare when you
realize you are naked, and everyone is pointing and laughing at you? People with social anxiety
disorder feel like they are living that nightmare 24/7. They have a constant fear of embarrassing
themselves or being judged by others, and they are usually their own worst critics. They often suffer
from depression. Most avoid any situation—from parties to crowds to speaking in public—that
triggers their anxiety and self-doubt. As a result, their lives get smaller and smaller, and even things
that most people take for granted—meetings at work, making a phone call—can become
overwhelming.
Goldin studies what happens in anxiety sufferers’ brains when they worry. He has found that people
with social anxiety are worse at controlling their thoughts than the average person, and it shows in
their brains. When confronted with a worry—say, imagining themselves being criticized—the stress
center overreacts. When Goldin asks them to change what they’re thinking, the system of attention
control is underactivated. Borrowing from Wegner’s theory of thought control, it’s as if their
“operator” is exhausted and cannot point their minds away from the worry. This would explain why
people with anxiety disorders are so consumed by their fears—their attempts to push the thoughts
away are especially ineffective.
Traditional therapy for social anxiety disorder focuses on challenging thoughts like “There’s
something wrong with me” to get rid of the anxiety. This only makes sense if you believe that trying
not
to think something works. Goldin takes a very different approach. He teaches social anxiety
sufferers to observe and accept their thoughts and feelings—even the scary ones. The goal is not to
get rid of the anxiety and self-doubt, but to develop a trust that they can handle these difficult thoughts
and feelings. If they learn that there is no 
inner
experience that they need to protect themselves from,
they can find more freedom in the outer world. When a worry comes up, he instructs the anxiety
sufferers to notice what they are thinking, feel the anxiety in their body, and then turn their attention to
their breathing. If the anxiety persists, he encourages them to imagine their thoughts and emotions
dissolving with the breath. He teaches them that if they don’t fight the anxiety, it will naturally run its
course.
Because Goldin is a neuroscientist, he’s especially interested in how this approach might change
the brain. Before and after the intervention, he puts the anxiety sufferers in an fMRI machine to watch
their brains at work while they worry. These brain-scanning sessions could provoke anxiety and
claustrophobia in even the calmest of people. His subjects are forced to lie immobilized on their
backs, their heads trapped in the brain scanner. They have to clamp their mouths on dental wax to
prevent them from moving their heads or talking. The machine around their heads makes a regular

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clanging sound that is best compared to a jackhammer. As if that’s not bad enough, they are then asked
to reflect on different statements about themselves that appear on a screen in front of their face: “I’m
not OK the way I am.” “People think I’m weird.” “Something’s wrong with me.”
While the social anxiety sufferers are thinking about these statements, Goldin watches the activity
in two regions of the brain: a network associated with reading comprehension, which would reveal
how deeply a person was contemplating each statement, and the stress center, which would reveal
how much that person was panicking.
When he compared each person’s brain scan from before and after the training, he found an
intriguing change. After the intervention, there was much more activity in the brain network
associated with visual information processing. The social anxiety sufferers were paying 
more
attention to the self-critical statements than they had before the training. Now, to most people, this
would sound like a complete failure.
Except for one thing: There was also a major decrease in the stress center’s activity. Even as the
anxiety sufferers gave the negative thoughts their full attention, they were less upset by them. This
change in the brain came with big benefits in everyday life. After the intervention, the anxiety
sufferers felt less anxious overall, and they were spending less time criticizing themselves and
worrying. When they stopped fighting their thoughts and emotions, they found more freedom from
them.