The Science Behind Self-Control

Have you ever wondered why you can't bring yourself to choose the foods that are healthy over the ones you know are unhealthy? Researchers are not only trying to find out why, but what parts of the brain govern behaviors of self-control and how we can work to improve them. Ben Hayden is a neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. He offers his insights based upon his research and how it has the potential to apply not only to our choices in food, but also how it could help people overcome addiction and even problems like obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Music: Stellardrone, "Gravitation"

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How Self-Motivation or Self-Control can derived from the simple act of resting, an explanation and procedure from basic affective neuroscience

The neuroscience of rest is generally omitted in the psychology of motivation, but its neurology is arguably key to our capacity for self-motivation and a sense of purpose and positive feeling or happiness. This can easily be explained neurologically and demonstrated procedurally.

Rest, or the generalized inactivity of the covert musculature, is simple to describe as a somatic or bodily state, but is much more complex as a neurologic state. For one thing, it is pleasurable. The reduction of perseverative cognition (worry, regret, distraction) through meditation, eyes closed rest, or just walking on a beach thinking of nothing gives the musculature the time to completely relax, and this state of persistent or profound relaxation elicits a state of pleasure or mild euphoria due to the concomitant and sustained elicitation of endogenous opioids (or endorphins) in the brain. The sustained increase of endogenous opioids also down regulates opioid receptors, and thus inhibits the salience or reward value of other substances (food, alcohol, drugs) that otherwise increase opioid levels, and therefore reduces cravings. Profound relaxation also mitigates our sensitivity to pain and inhibits tension. In this way, relaxation causes pleasure, enhances self-control, counteracts and inhibits stress, reduces pain, and provides for a feeling of satisfaction and equanimity that is the hallmark of the so-called meditative state.

However, pleasure from a neurologic viewpoint is not a simple thing. Groups of opioid neurons or ‘nuclei’ populate a tiny region of the neural real estate in the midbrain, and as ‘hot spots’ are collectively no larger than the eraser on a pencil. Yet they are highly sensitive to inputs from different sources in the brain. One of the primary inputs come from dopaminergic neurons, whose nuclei are adjacent to opioid neurons. The axons for dopaminergic neurons project from the midbrain to the cortex, and dopamine systems are highly sensitive to cortically processed information, namely novel and positive act-outcome expectancies or surprises that populate our days. Dopamine is a neuromodulator, or a type of neurotransmitter that activates arrays of neurons in the cortex, and is responsible for learning and motivation. Dopamine induces attentive arousal, but not pleasure, but it can indirectly increase pleasure if it occurs concurrently with the co-activation of opioid systems. For example, eat a very tasty treat, and dopamine activity will increase as you snap to attention in response to the pleasure. Conversely, the florid description of a bottle of wine will make the wine taste better because of an increase in dopaminergic activity that in turn increases opioid levels in the brain (this is also the mechanism behind the placebo effect where positive expectations change affect). In sum, opioid and dopamine systems are synergistic, and if concurrently activated will co-activate each other.

So what does this have to do with resting and motivation?

Since resting protocols (e.g. mindfulness, eyes closed rest, meditation) induces opioid activity, that activity will be accentuated if an individual concurrently and persistently thinks of and pursues meaningful behavior (meaning will be defined as thinking of or doing actions that have branching novel positive implications, or a variant of positive thinking). Since meaningful behavior induces dopamine release, this establishes a ‘virtuous’ neurological circuit, when rest can be merged with meaning and lead to pleasurably aroused states or even ecstasy. We can infer these processes from variants of meditation such as ‘loving kindness’ meditation and savoring, as well as peak and ‘flow’ experiences where highly meaningful activity is coupled with non-stressed or resting states. Above all, meaningful behavior is productive behavior that has positive novel and unfolding implications, and when associated with positive affect from rest, can become in a sense ‘autotelic’ or rewarding in itself, allowing us to control our behavior through self-induced positive affect. By coming to terms with the neurologic reality of relaxation, we can realize it’s possibilities as essential to daily life and to self-control that make life worthwhile, pleasurable, productive, and ‘happy’,

Authors Note
As an academically trained and published psychologist, but a layman, you can pursue a much more expansive argument for a lay audience in my two open-source books and journal article below on the psychology of rest and the psychology of incentive motivation.
Also, my arguments above are not new science, but a new interpretation of the research of the distinguished affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, who was kind to vet my books for accuracy and to provide endorsements in their preface.

Meditation and Rest- The American Psychologist/David Holmes

The Psychology of Rest and Meditation, from the International Journal of Stress Management, by this author

For an excellent take on opioid and dopamine systems and how they act and interact, see
The Joyful Mind: Kringelbach and Berridge

A more formal explanation of this procedure from affective neuroscience is provided on pp. 44-52 in a little open-source book on the psychology of rest linked below. Flow is discussed on pp. 82-87

‘A Mouse’s Tale’ Learning theory for a lay audience from the perspective of modern affective neuroscience

Berridge Lab