Kelly McGonigal: The Willpower Instinct

[Applause] and joining us now in studio Kelly McGonigal author of the willpower instinct hello nice to meet you nice to meet you too thanks for having me okay I want to start sort of the beginning because when I think of willpower I think of my inability or ability to resist or give in to temptation is is that what willpower is that's one part of willpower I actually call that won't power the ability to not do something even when every cell in your body says I want to eat this or smoke this or drink this but there are two other components of willpower that are just as important one is what I call I will power and that's the ability to do something even though maybe it's hard or uncomfortable or some part of you would rather put it off so sometimes we have to restrain ourselves but sometimes we really have to motivate and propel ourselves and the third aspect of willpower is what I call I want power and that's something we rarely think about but it's a real skill to be able to keep your goals and your values in mind so that when you're tempted by something or distracted by something that some part of you remembers what your long-term goals are so I will I won't and I want and the three of them play together in tandem they do okay why is all this important in modern society well it turns out that willpower is kind of like intelligence it's a general strength that improves everything and in fact willpower is a better predictor of how well you do in school or how successful you are at work then intelligence people have more willpower they're happier in their relationships their marriage is last longer and they actually even live longer so it seems like it just it basically is this ability to do what matters most even when we have other conflicting goals or opportunities you said I would do better in school if I had more willpower how do how does that work yeah I mean a big part of willpower is the ability to remember what your goals are and to choose to do things that are consistent with those goals so maybe you need to study instead of watch TV or maybe you need to be able to calm down your anxiety when you're faced with a test so that you can actually focus on the work at hand instead of getting overwhelmed by your emotions and this ability to to regulate what's going on inside of you your thoughts and your emotions and also all of the temptations and distractions around you I mean that that is you know the key to success okay key to success my marriage you also it willpower is also evident in my marriage so explain that ways anything well I mean besides the obvious it's good not to be fooling around on the side I mean that takes a little power for some but even just small things like do you know how to sustain attention to your partner or are you constantly distracted you know whether you're texting or you know doing the dishes and avoiding your partner that's an aspect of willpower are you able to control your emotions so that every time you're irritated you don't fly off the handle take it out on your partner and again this ability to pay attention and to regulate your emotions that's all fueled by willpower we hear you know when we talk about self-control it's sort of like a think of it and sort of a modern sense you know goes along with things like ambition which is a big word we use all the time but why do we have willpower is that something innate in this it is it's a basic survival strategy and in fact if you think about humans we have two different mains strategies for survival there's the part that we're used to thinking about where you know we eat something if we're hungry or we run away if we're scared or we'll defend ourselves if we're under attack we have these kind of base instincts for survival and it seems like we evolved this other strategy for survival that is basically to slow us down so we don't get into trouble and so we have this ability to keep longer-term goals in mind and it evolved because humans are such social creatures that it's no longer enough just to eat something when you're hungry or mate with the first opportunity you have but we actually need this ability to slow down so that we don't get into trouble with all those other instincts but the modern world is I mean much different than environments say like a hundred thousand years ago and the challenges that our ancestors face so how does this disconnect between the two worlds create willpower challenges yeah so if you think of a neuroscientist think of us as having one brain but two different minds these two different survival strategies are two ways of relating to the world and back when our brains were evolving we didn't have quite so many temptations and distractions all the time this ability to exert willpower it was more like something you did every now and and when you were really confronted with a conflict but in our modern world we have temptations all the time distractions all the time and so we have a brain that really hasn't caught up to the fact that we're living in a society that requires a lot more willpower than maybe when this ability originally evolved it's important you argue to not though view our primitive self as sort of the enemy that and tried to conquer him at her explain to me why you say it I mean this is something a lot of us have we know we feel like our cravings or our desires or our the stress and anxieties we said we sometimes think of that as being like the bad self and and we think we need to control that version of us or even get rid of it but we need that part of ourselves too I mean there's plenty of research if you look at medical case histories of people who have had brain damage to areas that create stress or create fear or even create desires those people aren't doing too well you know they might be depressed or they might be unable to get out of bed in the morning or they we actually need both aspects of ourselves and sometimes we talk about self control we think that I'm gonna be this the supremely controlled person who has no desire and no stress and no feelings and that's not very functional either they become robots ya know we need a balance you talked about in your book about the famous story of Phineas Gage he said looking at past cases tell me the story well this is a case from 1848 and we're still talking about it 150 years later because it is such a it taught us so much about where self control lives in the brain Phineas Gage was a young man who worked for the American railroad and his job was to lay down explosives so that they could you know blow up rocks and make way for the railroad so one day he's tamping down the explosives and the explosion goes off too soon and his tamping iron goes right through his head and literally blows through an area of the brain right behind the forehead called the prefrontal cortex and you would think well that must have killed him but incredibly it didn't and they were able to grab pieces of the skull off the craft like his head back together but he lost a big chunk of this area of the brain behind the forehead and his entire personality changed so even though he seemed to heal he suddenly he'd been such a righteous upstanding hard-working man before and suddenly he was impulsive he would make all these plans but not follow through with them he was cursing and swearing and he was basically it was as if he'd lost all ability to censor himself and all of his animal instincts were Unleashed and that was really the first case study that taught us how important this particular area of the brain behind the forehead is and that's where self-control seems to live in the brain it lives in that prefrontal cortex yeah and what's fascinating is so most of us don't have to worry about having you know tamping iron blow through our sky fully that's one of the things I can put off my work but there are a lot of things we do every day that give us what neuroscientist called temporary brain damage so we can become a little bit like Phineas Gage from things like getting drunk which we know is not great for self-control but one of the reasons is it actually puts that area of the brain to sleep and speaking of sleep sleep deprivation is another thing that turns us into a little bit of a Phineas Gage that when we don't get enough sleep the first area of the brain that becomes sluggish and less responsive is the prefrontal cortex and so if you don't sleep enough you're more susceptible to stress and temptations and and all the things we usually try to control gaining weight gaining weight in fact actually researchers now think that one of the reasons there's been such an increase in obesity the last couple decades is because people are sleeping less than they used to is there any payoff to having this is this thing that you talked about that the need to meditate in the book oh yeah so while there are lots of things that can impair the prefrontal cortex you can actually increase the size and the the efficiency of your prefrontal cortex by meditating and I should a couple of things that seem to train the brain in this way physical exercise is another one so I usually tell people you know if you want more willpower you can sleep more or meditate even as little as five minutes a day has been shown to to literally beef up the willpower center of the brain or you can exercise and exercise seems to make the brain healthier specifically in the self-control regions they don't need to escape some ashram in India to meditate oh you don't five minutes a day in the comfort of my own home yeah and particularly breath focus meditation so nothing complicated you just sit down and you focus your attention on your breath okay we've got all heard of the flight-or-fight response you argue that willpower it is like stress but that it's also a very physical bodily response yeah how does it manifest itself that in fact it's actually the opposite of the stress fight-or-flight response so you know I talked about these two different survival strategies fight-or-flight get your heart rate up your blood pressure up all of your your energy your blood sugar goes to your muscles to help you run or to fight and the willpower response is the opposite of that your heart rate slows down your breathing slows down your blood pressure lowers and all that energy instead of going to your muscles it actually gets shunted up to your prefrontal cortex so that your brain has the energy it needs to slow you down and this whole mind-body response is really about slowing you down so that you actually don't do something that might get you into trouble and it's actually really interesting if you look at people who are struggling with willpower and you tempt them or you distract them you can predict whether or not they'll give in by whether they have this kind of typical stress response or whether they show this slowing down response one study looked at alcoholics and would put a glass of alcohol in front of them and look at whether their heart rates sped up or slowed down and that actually predicted whether or not people would be able to stay sober so if my heart red sped up I would have you'd be more likely to drink and more likely to fall off the wagon over time right because you're having a kind of stress response and so one of the neat things about learning all this from the science of willpower is that we can actually learn to slow down our breath and slow down our heart and have this common response when we're in the face of temptation or distractions so stress is the enemy of willpower it basically is and in every way you can think about it I mean stress pushes us to prioritize immediate gratification an immediate survival and so we're going to express our emotions or we're going to you know eat that tempting piece of cake and willpower is is the opposite it requires us to have this big picture view and to think about what's going to happen 10 months 10 years down the line okay that's no longer a glass of pretend alcohol it's now a piece of cheesecake okay what's happening in my brain when I'm looking at I like cheesecake so what's happening in my brain well so there are two things that happened first of all if that were cheesecake and you like cheesecake you're gonna have a craving probably first and the area of your brain that produces the feeling of wanting something is going to release a chemical called dopamine that's gonna make you now obsessed with this cheesecake and you're gonna start to feel like you must have this cheesecake it's the only thing that can make you happy and at the same time your brain may start to produce stress hormones too so now not only do you think that cheesecake is going to make you happy you're gonna start to feel this anxiety like I have to get that cheesecake or I'm gonna die okay so your brain is now doing its best to make you eat this cheesecake if you are lucky if you have thought about goals for health and this is presuming of course that you don't want to eat that cheesecake because if if you have no conflict with the cheesecake you should just eat it but let's say that you're maybe trying to maintain your health or lose weight if your brain recognizes that you're about to do something that conflicts with that goal that's when the prefrontal cortex is gonna slam down the brakes and that's when you're gonna see this change in the body and in the heart rate and the prefrontal cortex in theory should be able to to talk to the cravings and the stress centers of your brain and make you no longer want that cheesecake so much okay my brain isn't working that way because I'm now eating the cheesecake and what's happened to me though while I'm eating that just because I'm feeling terribly guilty about oh yeah that doesn't help very common in fact the relationship between guilt and willpower is fascinating because most people think that guilt will give you more willpower so you may think like the worse I feel about eating this cheesecake it's gonna make me stop but in fact they're even studies where they induce guilt and they ask people to think about how guilty they'll feel if they eat a piece of cake and the first thing you find is that that makes people think eating the cake will make them happier we have an we have this natural association between guilt and pleasure so as soon as you're feeling guilty about something you actually expect it to taste better and to make you happier so it's gonna fuel your continued doing of whatever you feel guilty about and then the other problem is that guilt is a kind of stress and so it actually makes the brain more susceptible to temptation it makes it harder to find yourself control and guilt like stress turns out to be one of the big enemies of being able to slow down and control yourself just so you know your head has now turned into a cheesecake I'm kidding how does marketing plan to all this well people who want your money actually know a lot about this research and there are a lot of strategies to try to get your brain to want something and so if you were to say walk into a store or the mall you may notice that there are some really wonderful smells in the environment and that's because researchers know that smells produce this chemical dopamine and the state of wanting and when you smell something good it actually makes your brain look for something to buy because it's in the state of heightened expecting a reward and so now there's a lot of scent marketing that's trying to get you to buy things there's you can also create create once or desires just by associating a product with something we know triggers natural desires I mean we know that sex sells but it's not just sex but basically we're living in a world that's trying to hijack the survival instinct because they know that if they can get your brain to produce this chemical you're gonna be in this kind of frenzied state where you won't be satisfied until you buy something okay but you know how I'm supposed to deal with that so tell me what I do well so first of all what's interesting is that when you bring awareness to this process it already starts to change the process there's something about the automaticity of all of this that makes it work so if you're aware that someone is trying to manipulate you already it's less effective and I teach this class the science of willpower and one of the first things I have students do if they struggle with temptation is to go out into the world and be like a detective and look for the ways that people are trying to trick you smells and stores or signs or you know you can get that the dopamine firing in your brain just by promising someone a sale or a discount and to look at all these things that might be your particular triggers and as soon as you're aware of that and you know what it feels like to be in the state of wanting it actually gives you more self-control awareness itself starts to shift the brain into self-control mode so I walk into the mall I now know that they're trying to dupe me the fact that I'm aware of that it actually gives people more self-control and it's funny because people don't always predict that that would be true but try it next time you're out at the mall and it's like you'll be in on the joke and it's a lot harder for these unconscious forces to to determine our behavior when we know that they're they're working does that willpower work only on an individual basis or does it work on a societal level as well you know it's interesting because it seems like we evolved willpower because of how complex our societies were becoming and so in some ways that's good but it also turns out that humans because we're so profoundly social our brains seem to be built to follow what other people are doing and so there's research suggesting that we can catch willpower but we can also catch temptation and bad behaviors from other people and there's a lot of thinking now that one of the reasons we see these changes in society towards greater obesity or towards addiction or away from addiction is because of how social we are and how contagious these behaviors are so you may think that you have a lot of willpower and you aren't influenced by others but we actually will pick up quite a bit on what other people are doing so willpower is contagious willpower is contagious I can catch it you can catch it so for example let's say we're friends and we both smoke if I quit smoking research suggests that down the line you're much more likely to quit smoking than if I hadn't but it's also contagious in the other direction so if I pick up a bad habit you're more likely to pick it up or if I gain weight you're more likely to gain weight over time and part of that is just because we are thoughts about what is normal and what is good is based on what other people are doing and so that's just sort of very natural I want to put it in the context of the time that we're living in you know we're always being told about the economy yeah about the distress that it's saying about austerity does will plower play into you know even a more collective experience well so one thing we know is that whatever is going on in our economy or in our culture it actually has a big impact on our willpower so whenever the economy goes down or when there's an increase in terrorism for example research shows that the stress that people feel drives them to more behaviors we would typically control so after terrorist attack or when the economy is going down people will eat more junk food they're more likely to smoke or go back to smoking they drink more and there's something about this collective stress and undermines our individual willpower to prove that in the post 2008 economic crisis we're drinking more we're smoking more we're getting fatter and you know what's so fascinating is it's it also is totally illogical I mean there's one study that came out around that time showing that the more worried people were about the economy and their debt the more likely they were to shop to feel better and again it's this disconnect because when we're under stress we actually lose the ability to really think long term so even if we're stressed out about money we may be more likely to spend money to try to soothe ourselves in the short term okay that's our problem I want to talk a little bit about the fix so we need more self-control and how is it how do I do that it acts how well so one of the most exciting things to come out of the science of willpower in the last decade is this idea of self-control as a muscle something that you can train and it turns out that when you start to think more about willpower even just bring some attention to it you tend to get more willpower so first of all just even defining everyday life challenges as being something that requires you to do this thing of remembering your goals of slowing down of not being in stress just thinking of it in that way gives people more self-control and then you can also start to exercise your willpower muscle so let's say you have a specific goal maybe you want to get out of debt save money or maybe you want to lose weight to pick to pick something small that you're going to do that's consistent with that goal and do that every day until it's easy and it turns out that creating this kind of willpower workout yourself gives you more willpower and strengthen self-control and the thing is most of us we wait for it to get easy to start we think like tomorrow I'll wake up and I won't want to eat that cheesecake or tomorrow wake up and I won't want to buy something but if you think of yourself as a willpower athlete it's easier to realize that you actually have to do something a little bit difficult but it gets easier with time let's stay with the athlete analogy if I'm a good runner generally I'm probably better at other sports as well than someone who's not an athlete in one sport so if I exert a lot of self-control one area let's take losing weight focusing on that am I going to succeed at another or am I going to fail at that one well it depends on whether you look at the short term or the long term and it actually is a lot like like physical exercise so someone who runs on a regular basis they are gonna be better at dancing or swimming or walking but if they just ran a marathon they're gonna be exhausted and you ask them that you know to go for a walk and it's not going to be easy so it seems to be the same with willpower that if you strengthen your willpower you know you're used to challenging yourself you are going to be better and other forms of willpower too so you know going through the process of losing a lot of weight will probably also give you the ability to conquer procrastination or or control your temper in the long term but research also shows that when you're in those first stages of doing something really difficult it is a lot harder to manage other areas of your life and why is it limited well it seems to go back to that idea of willpower being a brain response if we know that our physical muscles are very sensitive to how much energy they use and your muscles will get tired and it seems like the prefrontal cortex is like that that when you ask your brain to continue pay attention and control impulses it gets tired the way muscles do and your prefrontal cortex will become a little bit more reluctant to do the heavy lifting so I have to train my willpower muscle you say like going to the gym I'm going to focus on it be attentive to door there are other things I can do to train it well pretty much anything you do that requires using your brain in this way will train your willpower and as we've already talked about meditation and exercise seem to directly increase this area of the brain and it's a to do hard work but something people don't often realize is things that that don't look like willpower can restore this area of the brain things like relaxation actually being in nature seems to restore the prefrontal cortex anything that's kind of the opposite of stress so if you've been spending all day using your willpower and you don't want to go home and clean out the fridge because you're so overwhelmed and out of willpower you can do these small things like practice yoga or you know go for a walk or even just watch a funny YouTube video has been shown to help the brain sort of reset and restore willpower if we go back again through evolution why was this limit a benefit you know it's interesting because the brain is tracking how much energy you have literally how much blood sugar you have it seems like it's using that as a proxy for how much food is in your environment so you have to imagine go back you know hundreds of thousands of years ago when it was really hard to get food now not so hard but the brain would use the levels of energy that are available to you as a measure for how secure your environment was and if the brain thinks that if there's not a lot of energy available right now if we're using a lot of energy it may not be that abundant in our environment and so the brain actually will push you to take more risks to to eat food whenever it's available even to mate research shows that when you're low in physical energy or blood sugar you're more willing to cheat on your spouse and you're more willing to take big risks and the idea is that you know if there's not a lot of food in your environment it would make sense to take risks but the funny thing is now the brain is still using low blood sugar as this proxy for something that's not the case at all and this is why people say you shouldn't make important decisions when you're hungry and you certainly shouldn't go shopping when you're hungry I want to give you one last example Jared Diamond's collapse details the large-scale deforestation of Easter Island Society and you know which privilege - this short-term impulsive gain over long-term goals so given what you have now taught me and what we what you know about willpower should we heed this warning and you know not write it off simply as I quell those were you know primitive civilization that didn't know any better or should be full of some of that advice I think we do need to think about this I mean how many times have I heard people say what were they thinking not cutting down the trees and turning to cannibalism like couldn't somebody see where this was heading before the civilization completely collapsed and I we do tend to think that we're above all of that but I think we are replicating that a lot in our own society you know making choices that are not sustainable and I think this is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human and to have these two minds in one brain and unless we make a very conscious choice to try to predict the future and override our tendency to to privilege immediate outcomes I mean it I think it's not too strong to say we might be headed in the same direction okay we're gonna continue our conversation tomorrow but I do want to ask you before we go what's your biggest willpower challenge oh well I'm someone who's definitely used the ideas in the book to help me shop less but my biggest willpower challenge has actually been more related to that idea of I will and overcoming anxiety or overcoming discomfort and it's flying and I actually have to use willpower to do something that is physically uncomfortable that makes me nervous and I think it's a good example of you know being willing to do something that is uncomfortable because it's consistent with how you want your life to be thank you very much we will continue our conversation tomorrow we'll see you then support Ontario's public television donate at TV org

Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 128,349

Keywords: brain, neuroscience, psychology, health and research

Id: LfAlS_FRU00

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 22 2012

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