Analysis Of The Willpower Instinct By Kelly Mcgonigal

“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself…the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment,” said by Leonardo da Vinci. This was my favorite quote which explain the law of expression of eternal justice and the power of human’s inner world. Speak of inner world, willpower could be an essential content. Many people believe they could improve their lives if only they had more of this mysterious thing called willpower. In Kelly Mcgonigal’s nonfiction book “The Willpower Instinct”, it explains the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. When it comes to my willpower challenge of hard

In Mcgonigal’s article “Infected! Why Willpower Is Contagious” she displays that “Both bad habits and positive change can spread from person to person like germs, and nobody is completely immune” (186). Through Mcgonigal’s explanation, I learned the term called mirror neurons which means that they can reflect the feeling of other’s behavior on my mind. According to the article, building a model for ourselves and act accord to the image of this model in our mind could help us to catch our self-control. This evidence can relate to my life and my experience of conquer my willpower challenge because it reminds me my role model. He was one of my friend who has talent to get straight A’s but still try to fight as hard as he could. He never passed homework’s due date or miss any assignments. After we became the best friend, I set him as a role model to encourage and motivate myself to study as hard as him. When I saw he was doing his homework, some feelings of “guilty” force me to stop doing what I was addicted to and moved my attention to my homework. As a positive change I made, this role model influenced my willpower behavior and encouraged me to overcome my challenge

Self-blame and shame also triggers your body to seek a dopamine hit so it can feel good right now, which encourages indulgence. Same as Mcgonigal states in her article “What the Hell: How Felling Bad Leads to Giving in”, “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” (119). This evidence is closely-linked to my experience. For instance, when I missed my homework’s deadline, I started to convince myself since I already missed it how about keep playing my games instead of figure out any remedies to resolve the problem. In this case, I started to prevent myself from going over the cliff by exercising self-compassion. That sense of guilt force me to wallowed in self-blame and spiral into a cycle of bad feelings and failure. In Mcgonigal’s reading, she also provides me a way to overcome this struggle. She elaborates that contrary to common perception, studies show that those who forgave themselves for missing the mark on occasion, will quickly get back on track. Next time when I experiencing the guilty feeling I will try to forgive myself and get back on track as quick as I could to come up with solutions to overcome my willpower