La psicología de la perseverancia (inglés)

Perseverance separates the winners from the losers in both sports and life. Are you someone who perseveres despite difficulties and setbacks, or do you tend to throw in the towel and call it quits when faced with a challenge or adversity? What makes some people able to keep pushing and complete a task while others habitually fizzle and don't follow through?

Dopamine is the fuel that keeps people motivated to persevere and achieve a goal. You have the power to increase your production of dopamine by changing your attitude and behavior.  Scientists have identified higher levels of dopamine -- also known as the "reward molecule" -- as being linked to forming lifelong habits, such as perseverance.

Neuroscientists have known for years that dopamine is linked to positive behavior reinforcement and the 'ding, ding, ding' jackpot feeling you get when you accomplish a goal. Recently they have also discovered the specific receptors that link dopamine directly to the formation of good and bad habits.

A study released on December 22, 2011 found that key receptors for dopamine function like 'gateways' that are essential to enable habit formation. "Dopamine neurons regulate circuits all over the brain but they need to be regulated too," said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, Co-Director of the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at Georgia Health Sciences University.  Dr. Tsien says that this discovery opens the door to speeding up the process of forming good habits and, possibly, selectively removing bad ones such as drug addiction or smoking since the same circuits are seemingly involved in both.

Part of my work with The Athlete's Way is to make neuroscientific knowledge a tool that can be used to create behavioral changes in your life. Currently I am fine tuning the message to help get teens and pre-teens self-motivated to be more physically active. In this article I will give people of all ages a simple prescriptive of ways to trigger the release of dopamine. I will show you seven simple ways to tap your brain's internal 'pharmacy' and trigger dopamine production on demand so that you can create a habit of perseverance. Perseverance is the key to success in sports, competition and life.

WHY IS PERSEVERANCE SO IMPORTANT TO YOUR SUCCESS?

On a recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to talk about personality traits that lead to changing behavioral habits with an Associate Professor of Exercise and Health Sciences at U Mass Boston named Jean Wiecha, who is also the Director of the GoKids program there. Dr. Wiecha has been conducting community-based research on child health for 20 years.  Her work has focused on childhood obesity and environmental and policy influences on nutrition, diet, and physical activity.

Jean Wiecha and her team are taking the emphasis off talk of "obesity" and shifting it to empowering kids to want be healthy because they learn to love the feelings and consequences of being physically active and eating better.  The biggest pay-off isn't simply the shedding of pounds or lowering BMI, it is the broad spectrum of improvements that activity and health brings to their personal and academic lives. Dr. Wiecha and her team are focused on finding ways to help teens and pre-teens improve health, wellness, overall outlook and to stay in school--not just losing weight.

Dr. Wiecha's crystal clear blue eyes sparkled and her face lit up as she told stories of the metamorphases she has witnessed with teens and pre-teens in her program. She has seen hundreds of kids transform their lives through the GoKids program. When I asked her what the biggest predictor of long-term success was she simply said: "Perseverance." She believes that regular physical activity is the most effective way to begin to hardwire the habit of perseverance. Anytime you lace up your sneakers and start moving your body and achieve a goal you are reinforcing a mindset of perseverance that bleeds into all aspects of your life.

Jean Wiecha believes that if someone can stick with an exercise regimen long enough so that physical activity is no longer viewed as a 'disagreeable' experience that a type of 'conversion experience' occurs.  People go from thinking of exercise as something they have to do to something they want to do. Once physical activity and being healthy becomes a labor of love -- not just a matter of sheer will power or discipline -- Dr. Wiecha has noticed that behavorial changes become lifelong habits.

But the riddle remains: How can an outsider persuade someone who is resistant to adopting a habit of perseverance learn to have more grit? After my conversation with Dr. Wiecha, I went back to my neuroscientific roots and asked myself the million dollar question: Why are some people more inclined to persevere and others to quit?

Neuroscientific research shows that higher levels of dopamine might separate the internal drive some people have to persevere while lower dopamine levels cause others give up. Obviously, there are a wide range of factors that come into play when someone decides to persevere--but dopamine can be harnessed and used as a prime motivating force to help you keep pushing and achieve your goals.

HOW DOES THE DOPAMINE REWARD SYSTEM WORK?

Your internal "Reward System" is a collection of brain structures that regulate your behavior by making you feel good when you achieve a goal. Everything necessary for the survival of our species - eating, mating, sleeping, and physical perseverance - is rewarded by a flood of neurochemicals that make us feel good. This is a very generous biological design and at the same time necessary for our survival. All animals seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, nature created an internal reward system that reinforced lifestyle habits necessary to survive. Dopamine floods your body and mind with a rush of satisfaction and reward anytime you succeed at achieving something biologically necessary for your survival.

In a modern world we still get the same rush of dopamine when it comes to primal things like dating or salivating over a meal - but it becomes less automatic when trying to achieve goals that are not part of our primal instincts. We have evolved to have hard work, sweat and perseverance trigger the release of dopamine. Unfortunatlely, in a modern world these achievements are not viewed biologically as a matter of life or death and do not automatically release dopamine.  Luckily, you can use your large prefrontal cortex and  the 'executive function' to trigger the release of dopamine using the seven methods below:            

1. PICTURE YOURSELF AS A HUMAN "LAB RAT" IN A SKINNER BOX

In 1954, researchers James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that the low-voltage electrical stimulation of certain regions of the brain of the rat reinforced positive behavior and learning when they were trying to teach the animals to run mazes and solve problems. Olds and Milner realized that they had found the 'pleasure center' of the brain. When the rat achieved a goal they rewarded the rat with a jolt that triggered the release of dopamine. The rats began to associate success at a task with a biological reward of feeling good. You can do this too.

You have the power to tap your own dopamine reserves simply by visualizing yourself as having your finger on a 'joy-stick' of pleasure, just like a rat in a skinner box with a lever.  Learn to associate perseverance and accomplishing a mission with feeling good. The motivation at a biological level is just to get the hit of dopamine--but in the real world this drive translates into you following through and achieving goals. Everytime you complete a task in your daily life visualize that you have just self-administered a hit of 'feel good' dopamine and that habit will be reinforced.

2.  THE 'PLEASURE PRINCIPLE' TRUMPS 'WILL-POWER' EVERYTIME

Perseverance is synonymous with pain and suffering to many people. Because all animals instinctively seek pleasure and avoid pain, you have to flip your perspective on perseverance 180-degrees and view struggle and perseverance as a doorway to pleasure. Stop viewing perseverance as drudgery but as an opportunity to neurochemically boost your confidence and make you feel good. When framed correctly, the process of perseverance becomes a hedonic experience. This is an explanatory style that makes certain people keep pushing and others to quit. As Henry Ford said, "There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something."

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