more resilience—play more games. Or at the very least, provoke your brain with challenging learning opportunities in the same ways that good games do.
Here is one of Dr. Willis’s favorite ways to spike dopamine in the brain. It’s not a game, but it’s very gameful. She uses this simple technique with patients and clients to help them recover from mental burnout. And it’s your next quest!
QUEST 12: Make a Prediction
What to do: Make a prediction about something—anything—that you can personally verify the outcome of sometime in the next twenty-four hours.
It can be big or small, silly or serious. Just make a prediction—and see if you’re right!
Examples: Here are some things SuperBetter players have made predictions about.
• The winner of a sporting event
• “The exact amount of money in my bank account at this moment, down to the penny”
• “The number of emails I’ll receive in the next hour”
• “What mood I’ll be in this exact time tomorrow”
• “Whose snoring will wake me first tonight: husband versus dog. I predict husband!”
• “What song my favorite band will play first at their concert”
• “What score, on a scale from 1 to 10, my best friend will rate the movie we’re watching together”
• “How fast I can put the dishes away without breaking anything. Prediction: two minutes, fifteen seconds!”
• “How many hugs I will get from former teachers, coaches, and friends in the next twenty-four hours. I’m visiting my hometown, from thirty years and many miles away, so I think it will be a very high number!”
Why it works: Making a prediction is one of the most reliable and efficient ways to prime the reward circuitry of the brain. “Every prediction you make triggers an increase in attention and dopamine,” says Dr. Willis. That’s because every time you make a prediction, two highly rewarding outcomes are possible. You might be right—which will feel good! Or, you might be wrong—which will give you information that will help you make a better prediction next time. Surprisingly, this will also feel good—because your brain loves learning. In fact, “the dopamine boost is often greater when you learn something new and useful than when you succeed,” Dr. Willis says.
Dozens of scientific studies back up this claim. Gamers get a dopamine hit even during failure and losses—as long as they have a chance to try again.20
So go ahead and make a prediction—any prediction! Whether you’re right or wrong, you’ll get a dopamine boost. It’s a win-win game. Use this trick whenever you’re bored, frustrated, or stressed. It’s a quick and natural way to provoke curiosity and attention, while strengthening the neural circuitry that promotes determination, ambition, and perseverance. (And if you’re with someone who is bored, frustrated, or stressed, ask them to make a prediction!)
Tip: For an extra dopamine boost, try to get someone else to make a competing prediction. The added social stakes will increase your anticipation of a potential reward.
A SuperBetter Story: The Job Seeker
A few weeks ago I heard from my good friend Calvin. He’s thirty-five years old, married, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. We’ve known each other since graduate school at UC Berkeley. Over the past decade, Calvin has worked both in the tech industry and in university research labs. Recently, he decided to take a leap of faith and look for a full-time academic position.
“Career adventures are coming fast and frequent at this point,” he wrote me in an email. “I’ve landed interviews at five universities.” He sounded upbeat in the letter, but he admitted to being pretty stressed out about one of his interviews at a top research university.
“A friend of mine who interviewed there last year said he was practically crying by the end of the meeting. Apparently, this one professor had started the interview by telling my friend that his dissertation work was complete crap, and that the university had made a huge mistake in inviting him to interview.” Not the most encouraging story, considering that Calvin was slated to meet with the same professor!
Job interviews are stressful even in the best circumstances, but when Calvin got to campus for the two-day interview, the tension only increased. “The first few people I met with all warned me about my upcoming interview with this same professor, telling me how notoriously vicious he is with junior researchers. Everyone had a war story about meeting with him. Even the chair of the hiring committee said they had second thoughts about including him on my schedule.
“Needless to say, the night before that day I was pretty nervous. I had to get a grip. I thought ‘How can I make this meeting into a game, rather than into something I’m dreading?’ So I decided to create a bingo game. I tried to predict the worst possible things he could say to me, whatever would upset me most. I wrote them down, plus the ‘free square’ in the middle. I folded that bingo card and put it in my pocket when I went in for the interview.”
Calvin sent me a photo of the card so I could see his gameful solution for myself. His custom bingo squares included the kinds of moments that would make any interviewee cringe: “Personal attack/critique,” “Tests my knowledge/skills,” “Points out flaw/error/mistake in my work,” “Cites references I’m not familiar with,” “Says my work is derivative, obvious,” “Dismisses it as not important,” “Accuses me of being unprincipled.”
And did it help? Unequivocally, yes. “Turns out, he did say lots of those negative things to me, but it didn’t bother me at all,” Calvin said. “Every time he tried to make me feel small, I got to mentally check off a bingo square. It brought a lot of humor to a really stressful situation.”
Calvin won twice. First, he scored a bingo. “The professor got the whole middle horizontal row,” he told me. “He really was as bad as everyone said!” But later Calvin scored the real victory: he got a job offer from the university. Ultimately, he decided to take a job somewhere else, but having multiple offers helped him negotiate the best deal.
I’m so impressed by Calvin’s clever solution to a nerve-racking situation. He might not have been intentionally hacking into his dopamine pathway, but he was definitely giving himself a dopamine boost every time he filled in a bingo square. And because the mere act of making a prediction heightens attention and boosts dopamine, just creating the bingo board put Calvin in a much more determined and optimistic state of mind.
“Worst-case-scenario bingo” may not be a game you look forward to playing—because really, who wants to be in a stressful or unpleasant situation? But if you do need to tap into your determination and grit, this gameful intervention is a brilliant way to prepare your brain for resilience and success. While you’re at it, why not create a “best-case-scenario” bingo card for your next big day? Think of all the good things that could happen to you on a trip, or at a big work event, or on a special occasion. After all, you can benefit from determination and optimism on fun days just as much as on tough ones!
Now you know: game play supercharges self-efficacy, work ethic, and determination. So what kinds of real-life
