SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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after tough workouts. SuperBetter players have reported using the power breath technique to control their tempers with their kids, to battle the nausea of morning sickness, to fight insomnia, before going into a stressful meeting, and even to put themselves in the mood to make love. How will you use it?
What to do: Predict two situations in your life where power breathing for one minute could help. Make a decision now to use this technique the next time you find yourself in that situation.
Quest complete: That’s it—congratulations! You’ve increased your self-efficacy when it comes to battling stress, anxiety, discomfort, or pain. You’ve learned a new skill, and you’ve anticipated two specific problems it can help you solve. You’ve got a superpower—and you know exactly how and when to use it.
Hopefully, you’re starting to see how self-efficacy is created—and how it can supercharge your ability to do what’s difficult. However, there’s still one puzzling thing about the Re-Mission clinical trial results. It makes sense that participants in the study would develop more confidence and belief in their video game skills by playing Re-Mission. Playing a video game makes you better at that particular game and probably other games as well. But how did confidence in their ability to beat a video game translate into confidence to beat cancer in real life? It’s a hell of a lot harder to win the battle against a real life-threatening disease than it is to destroy virtual bad guys on a computer screen.
To solve this mystery, we need to turn to the neuroscience of video games. Because it turns out that while there are many ways to increase confidence in individual skills, nothing primes the brain for general self-efficacy—or the belief that you have the ability to conquer any problem you put your mind to—faster or more reliably than video games.
Video games create a rush in the brain as pleasurable and powerful as intravenous drugs. It was the first major breakthrough in the neuroscience of gaming, and it was rather shocking. The year was 1998, and a group of British scientists had just found that playing video games leads to a massive increase in the amount of dopamine, the “pleasure” neurotransmitter, in the brain.5 To their astonishment, they found that the increase in dopamine from game play was equal to the boost experienced when scientists injected amphetamines intravenously into the same study participants.
Games impact the brain in nearly an identical fashion to highly addictive drugs?! On the face of it, this finding might seem alarming—particularly given that, depending on the study, anywhere from 1 to 8 percent of video game players consider themselves at least periodically “addicted” to their favorite games.6 (The most common percentage reported in these studies is 3 percent; in Chapter 4 we’ll look at the factors that can lead to excessive game play and the most effective techniques for treating it.) Indeed, if you’re already familiar with the neurotransmitter dopamine, you’ve probably heard about it in the context of addiction. The pleasurable effects of many drugs, from nicotine to cocaine, are thought to stem from the large amount of dopamine they release in the mesolimbic pathways, the “reward circuitry” of the brain.
But the mesolimbic pathways are involved in many brain processes, not just pleasure and addiction. Dopamine in this region also stimulates memory, motivation, learning, emotion, and desire. In fact, for the vast majority of people, in the course of ordinary everyday life, increased dopamine in the reward circuitry is not a sign of addiction. More commonly, it’s a sign of increased motivation and determination.7
Here’s how it works. Every time you consider a possible goal, your brain conducts a split-second, unconscious cost-benefit analysis of whether it’s worth the effort to try to achieve it.8 How you conduct this analysis depends less on the facts of the situation than on how much dopamine is present in your brain.
When you have high dopamine levels in the reward circuitry, you worry less about the effort required, and you find it easier to imagine and predict success. This translates into higher determination and lower frustration in the face of setbacks. Meanwhile, when dopamine runs low in the reward circuitry—something that happens during a period of clinical depression, for example—you weigh more heavily the effort required, often magnifying it, and you discount the importance of your goals.9 You also tend to anticipate failure rather than success, which can lead you to avoid challenges altogether.10
Obviously, then, when you’re tackling a new goal or facing a tough obstacle, it’s a huge benefit to have high levels of dopamine. And the benefit extends beyond motivation and determination. High dopamine levels in the reward circuitry are also associated with faster learning and better performance.11 That’s because when we’re goal-oriented, we pay more attention to what we’re doing. We also respond more quickly and effectively to feedback, which makes it easier to learn and improve. This is the neurological basis of self-efficacy: high motivation to achieve a goal, combined with the increased determination and faster learning required to master new skills and abilities. This powerful combination makes you more ambitious and justifiably more optimistic about your odds of success.
For many video game researchers (and video game players!), these neuroscience findings make perfect sense. Gamers, after all, spend on average 80 percent of the time failing when they play their favorite games.12 Without the dopamine rush during game play, surely they would give up much sooner. But the high level of dopamine in the reward circuitry ensures that gamers stay focused, motivated, and determined to succeed. Meanwhile, thanks to the faster learning that occurs with continuous dopamine release, gamers are more likely to improve their skills and eventually achieve their goals.
No wonder frequent gamers work so hard, hour after hour, at their favorite games. Their brains are being primed for increased self-efficacy with every move they make. Scientists know that dopamine is released every time we anticipate feedback from a goal-oriented action—whether in daily life or in games. We get a rush of excitement to find out how we did. It just so happens that when we play video games, we take so many goal-oriented actions, so quickly, and get such immediate feedback, that the dopamine rush is as powerful as amphetamine drugs.
It’s not always beneficial to be optimistic and determined. In some contexts, a predisposition to try harder for more unlikely or difficult rewards can be counterproductive or even pathological—particularly when greater effort is unlikely to actually help. When it comes to gambling, for example, where luck is more of a factor than hard work, this mindset can lead to terrible consequences. Or in the case of a dopamine rush created by a drug like cocaine or nicotine, extreme motivation to achieve a reward (more of the drug) can lead to a dangerous discounting of the health costs involved with actually getting what we want.
But in many more everyday contexts, especially where hard work is likely to produce better results—such as trying to learn something new, completing a difficult assignment, training for a sport, rehabilitating from an injury, or even just trying to pull ourselves out of depression—a neurological bias toward effortful action can produce powerful and positive results.
But does the dopamine rush translate from video games to real-life challenges and problem solving? Do games rewire our brains to be more motivated and work harder only when we’re playing? Or can we translate our increased ambition and self-efficacy to the rest of our lives?
Researchers have found that frequent video gamers do indeed put more effort into difficult problem solving outside their favorite games. One recent study showed that gamers exhibited “a dispositional need to complete difficult tasks” and “the desire to exhibit high standards of performance in the face of frustration.”13 When given a series of easy puzzles to solve and difficult puzzles to solve, frequent game players spent significantly more time on the difficult puzzles. Infrequent players, on the other hand, gave up much faster and showed less interest in mastering the challenging task. Overall, the researchers reported, gamers showed much higher persistence and perseverance. They showed a habitual thirst for challenge and a striving to succeed even under difficult circumstances.
What accounts for this trait development? Previous studies (not on