Website blockers remove the ability to access distracting sites during work hours; willpower isn’t required because access isn’t available. Commitment devices remove future choices, eliminating willpower demands. Being around people who eat poorly makes healthy eating require more willpower to maintain as an exception rather than the norm. Initial willpower investment creates lasting returns as habit maintenance requires a fraction of willpower compared to repeated conscious choice. This makes habit formation an extremely high-return willpower investment. Sleep disorders create chronic sleep deprivation, which severely impairs willpower. Thyroid disorders affect overall energy and cognitive function, including self-regulation. Addressing these foundational factors often produces dramatic willpower improvements without requiring additional training. Thus, the cross-talk of the hormone axes during their simultaneous response to a single stressor is not well-researched in humans. In contrast, the reported rodent studies use large hormone administrations before the stressor to examine the effect the hormone has on the reactivity of the opposing axis. Rodent studies show that large increases in the sympathetic catecholamines have a stimulatory effect on the HPA axis (Axelrod & Reisine, 1984; Tsigos & Chrousos, 2002). McClelland and colleagues found that students with a strong power motive (relative to their affiliation motive) had significant increases in norepinephrine, both immediately after the exam and 105 minutes later. Participants had significant increases in n Power and in epinephrine and norepinephrine only in the power-arousal condition. Steele experimentally manipulated power motivation arousal by having participants listen to power-arousing, achievement-arousing or non-arousing audio tapes and then measured changes in metabolites of the sympathetic catecholamines, epinephrine and norepinephrine, as well as changes in implicit motives. The low-ranking baboons had cortisol surges after darting, and Sapolsky discovered that administering a cortisol-like substance also led to decreases in testosterone, which suggests that cortisol dampens the testes’ sensitivity to endocrine signals (luteinizing hormone) that normally drive testosterone release. In animals, changes in cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine have a causal effect on changes in testosterone. A trained coder codes the stories for power imagery, and these scores can be summed to yield an overall n Power score for the individual. N Power is assessed by content-coding imaginative stories that research participants write in response to picture cues (typically 4-8); this procedure is called the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) (Smith, 1992; Winter, 1994). As the definition of n Power denotes, power-motivated individuals are concerned with having impact over others, and they derive reward and reinforcement from having this impact (Schultheiss, 2008; Winter, 1973).
