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Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita
02:28:04
Kentaro Fujita, PhD, is a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University and an expert in the science of self-control and motivation.
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- [00:00]
A
In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation. So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if you said, oh, I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet, that doesn't have much magic to it, but if instead I'm saying things like, I need to do this for my family, I want to look good for my children's wedding photos, or, you know, my children are looking at me, or I want to be a good example, or all these other kinds of reasons that you might, these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake. And we think it's because it's giving people meaning. These are higher order things that I care about and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out.
- [00:51]
B
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kentaro Fujita, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and an expert in the science of self control and motivation. If you're somebody who has ever struggled with procrastination, sticking to a goal, or coming up with the goals for your life, today's episode is for you. We start off today's discussion talking about the famous two marshmallow experiment. The one where they placed kids in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they delayed gratification for that marshmallow, marshmallow, meaning they didn't eat it, they would then get two marshmallows. Those experiments received a lot of attention in that they were supposed to predict whether people would be successful later in life. We talk about the criticism of those experiments, but also how some of those conclusions were valid and more importantly, how people of any age, including you, can build mental resilience and your ability to experience deferred gratification toward your goals. We also talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. These are topics that are very misunderstood out there, but Dr. Fujita clarifies that when we receive rewards for something we are naturally inclined to do, meaning that we love it, does not reduce our motivation to do that thing. And this is an important point and we go into it in terms of the practical steps for building and maintaining your progress on goals. We also talk about what the data say about the specific steps that are most effective to both initiate and reach short and long term goals. We also talk about how to get out of impulsive states and states of procrastination. What the data say about how to do that. Today's episode is really focused on science and more importantly, practical takeaways, several of which I plan to incorporate into my own life. I only wish I had this knowledge when I was younger. But now, thanks to Dr. Fujita coming on the podcast, people of all ages can make great use of the information and data from his studies. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. Dr. Kentaro Fujita, welcome.
- [03:11]
A
Thank you. Really excited to be here today.
- [03:14]
B
I'm super excited to talk to you. We hear so much about motivation, discipline, willpower, tenacity, but we really haven't had a modern update on the psychology of these in a long while. Not just on the podcast, but I think most people have heard of the so called marshmallow experiment, which hopefully you could explain to us, tell us what it revealed, some of the criticisms, maybe even some criticisms of the criticism, because I think the marshmallow experiment, which everyone will learn about momentarily if they don't already know what that is, sort of stands as this symbol of whether willpower is somehow innate or whether it's something that can really be cultivated. So if you would, what is the marshmallow experiment?
- [03:57]
A
So the marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments that was conducted by Walter mischel in the 60s to 70s to 80s at Stanford. And what happens in the classic paradigm is a child comes in and is seated in front of a plate with some kind of thing that they really want. Generally speaking, it was a single marshmallow and the children were told that the experimenter was going to leave for a while, but if they could avoid eating the one or basically hold out and not eat the one and it was still there when the experimenter came back, they could get two marshmallows. This is essentially a self control problem because you have a smaller sooner reward and you're trading that off with a larger later reward. The key dependent variable here was how long the child could wait. Now, the dirty little secret about the marshmallow experiments is that no child waited the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was gone. But what you could do is you could basically, as soon as the door closed, you would start the timer and then the amount. And you were just basically looking to see how long the children would wait. That was interpreted as the child's delay of gratification, ability, or otherwise self control. Now, there were a series of experiments that we can talk about. They use these experiments to learn a lot about the different tactics and tricks and tools that kids could learn to use to improve their delay of gratification. But that's not what everybody knows. What everybody knows about these experiments is that many years later, they analyzed data in which they looked at children's delay times again. How long did they wait before they indulged in the one marshmallow? Then they saw to what extent it was correlated with important life outcomes like academic achievement, career success, income, even things like incarceration, social relationships. What they found was shocking. The longer children could wait before eating the single marshmallow, the more likely they were to do well in school, more likely to make more money, have more friends, have better physical and mental health, and also have lower incarceration and problematic social behavior reports. This got people really excited about self control because it suggested it was a key skill for important life outcomes. And this is what generated a lot of that excitement.
- [06:21]
B
Did any of the kids actually get two marshmallows as a reward?
- [06:24]
A
It depends on the data set. So research has now shown that the marshmallow test waiting times depend on a lot of things. In the original experiments, there was something like 15 minutes. Other experimenters have shortened that time to 10 minutes. And that's a little easier for children to do. Another really important thing about the marshmallow test is that the child has to trust the experimenter. If you don't trust the experimenter, why should you bother waiting? It's perfectly rational just to go ahead and grab the one. If you don't trust, the experimenter's actually going to bring you two. There have been experiments in which the experimenter looks reliable or unreliable in front of the child, so they forget something or they remember to do something. When experimenters are unreliable, children do not wait. They just go and grab the marshmallow. It's been argued that that's actually a sensible, rational behavior. The setup here, it sounds really simple, but There's a lot of art behind this to make this experiment work the way that it's supposed to.
- [07:20]
B
Is it a leap to assume that the adage that children who observe their parents doing the thing that the kids are told not to do are less likely to follow instruction? For instance, if parents say, listen, no electronic devices until after dinner and you've done your homework, and then the kids see their parent looking at their phone, does that reduce trust in the parents advice?
- [07:42]
A
I don't know if it reduces the trust in the parents advice, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling. The most famous experiment of this, they brought in a blow up doll, which is a clown, and it was referred to as Bobo. And kids either watched a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo and then were allowed to play with Bobo themselves. And those that watched punched Bobo were more likely to punch Bobo themselves. So this suggests that children are very observant for our own behavior. And so if you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to learn. So I don't know that it's been done specific on self control. It may have, but certainly in many, many other behaviors, children are remarkably observant of what adults do.
- [08:24]
B
I won't hold you responsible for defending or holding up the marshmallow experiments, but they've received a lot of criticism over the years, as have many paradigm shifting areas of psychology. Right. I mean, or neuroscience. You know, I think it's important for everyone to know that the moment that there's sort of a theory put forth, like growth, mindset, or for the developmental neurobiologist, the idea that all neurons in the cortex migrate radially like two, five years later, someone's going to find an exception to that. And then the whole thing seems to crumble. But then it sort of comes back where the answer is both. In terms of the marshmallow experiment, I've heard a lot of criticism. It wasn't as predictive as we thought. Maybe the experimenters were sort of biasing the data collection. What are the valid criticisms in your view and what are the criticisms of the criticisms in your view?
- [09:18]
A
So as I mentioned, the marshmallow experiments or marshmallow tests, they have to be set up right? And like a lot of other psychology experiments, I think the psychologists intuitively understood what it took to get it right, but were not very good at articulating those for others to follow in a recipe book. The most famous criticism, or the one that got the Most press recently is that there was a very large data set of children outcomes in which they completed the Marshmallow Test at 4 years old, and then a bunch of different life outcomes at adolescence. They basically wanted to see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test. In principle, they should have, and they did, and they did not. If you looked at the simple correlation between did delay time predict outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior? The answer was yes, it seemed to replicate. But then the researchers controlled for things like social economic status, which is one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies, because Stanford children, or at least the children that were going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were being conducted, were not your average American family mostly well to do. And this matters when the researchers, they had like 30 or 40 other covariate variables that they were controlling for. When they control for all these other variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes. It was supposed to. This paper got a lot of attention for basically saying, look, the marshmallow tests are bunk. Now, this has been controversial because the question is, was that statistical adjustment appropriate, and are we interpreting that statistical adjustment correctly? There have been other experimenters, other researchers who have come along. One of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team, they took the same data set and they reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative. So rather than throwing in 30 covariates, they put in theory driven covariates, ones that made sense from what we know already about research, as opposed to throwing in the kitchen sink. When they did that, they still found that delay of gratification predicted reports of problematic behavior, which suggests a very clean replication of the original marshmallow test. Some people have suggested that failure to replicate the original marshmallow test, that got a lot of attention, but it may not have been the final answer because these experimenters again came along, looked exactly the same data set, and came to the opposite conclusion. So there's still a bit of a debate out there, but I think the main point to take away here again is that the way that you set up the marshmallow test is really important. You have to have trust. And the argument about socioeconomic status is that kids who grow up in high SES environments, they're very stable, they're very predictable. So when you wait, you are more likely to get the larger later reward. But if you come from a lower SES family where rewards come and go, just because you save now doesn't mean it's going to pay off later, they're not going to wait. And so it's not as indicative for them. All of these things have to be carefully controlled for. And they were part of the original experiments. Again, not really well articulated. To the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger later reward, there does seem to be some predictive ability of this test. Now let me just say as a self control researcher myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow tests is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. That's very nice to convince people that self control is important. If I'm applying for federal grant money, for example, that's probably the first sentence that I write that self control predicts life outcomes. There have been many, many other ways of testing this hypothesis. So I don't think we need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore. The most important thing about the marshmallow test that gets completely overlooked goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew. Is it an innate talent or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments. Walter Mischel and his team were teaching children the strategies of self control. When children learn them, their delayability got better. That is a really, really important lesson because it suggests that self control isn't something innate. Instead it's something that we learn over time. Let me just give you an example. So one of the things that he taught children was is it better to stare at the one marshmallow or close your eyes, Cover it up or close your eyes. Three year old children believe that it's better to stare at it because they think that's how I'm going to motivate myself. Like if I can see what I want, I'm going to be able to wait. I can see the one, I can imagine the second, I can wait longer. Five year olds learn that that's not going to work and they learn to cover it up or close their eyes. Interestingly, basically you can create a written test where you can ask or a verbal test where you can ask children what do you think you should do in order to wait longer? Research shows that children who. Well, let me be more careful. Research shows that there are age related differences. At 3 year old they don't know anything, but at 5 year old they've learned. Then later on, at 13 years old, those children who correctly understand the rules of self control have less problematic behavior. Walter Mischel and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems and those that understood the rules, the tricks that work, and the tricks that don't work were less likely to have behavioral problems at that camp than those who did not. Knowledge matters. Self control can be learned. It can be taught. You can learn by trial and error. I think that's really important because it suggests that rather than being something that we're born with, we can get better, we can grow, we can, we can improve over time. And I think this is a really important lesson that often gets overlooked with these studies.
- [15:09]
B
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- [19:37]
A
What you're saying is really interesting. So let me caveat everything I'm about to say by saying it's all speculation. I personally don't know of research studies that look specifically at movement, but everything that you're saying makes total sense to me because the root, the Latin root for the word motivation is to move, right? So the motivation is supposed to be the energy force behind all of our movements. It impels action. So to me it makes sense that if I'm trying to motivate a particular behavior, being able to, to act would be, I mean it is essentially channeling my energy towards doing something. I mean there are experiments that I can tell you a little bit about, Andrew, where to try to train self control. They will have people approach or avoid an object with a joystick, right? So if you see something that you're supposed to avoid, you pull the joystick back. So you creating psychological distance from the temptation versus on the things that you're supposed to approach. Like the broccoli you're supposed to eat. You're supposed to move the joystick forward. And there's some research to suggest that this kind of automatic, you're not actually moving but you're taking action. That's often associated with movement, that that can actually help improve people's self control over time, help develop evaluations such that, okay, for dieters, for example, the chocolate cake is bad, but the broccoli is good. Having these movements towards the good stuff and away from the bad stuff does seem to improve self control afterwards. Again, the question is it's not quite what you're talking about in terms of actual movement. I think there's also some research, again I'm not exactly sure, but there's some research suggests that if you fidget you might learn better than when you don't fidget. There's also some research where if you are taking notes with pen and paper as opposed to a computer, you can learn better. Again, I'm not saying these just because I think they're so important, but rather I just Think they're nice illustrations of exactly what you're suggesting, which is there's some really interesting connection between movement and motivation, which I think, I think that's a truism. But I think these are really interesting examples of that.
- [21:43]
B
One thing I've been just grappling with for a number of years now is this concept that doing hard things makes it easier to do other hard things. And on the one hand that seems obvious because it's a process, the learning to recognize what I call limbic friction. That's obviously not a real scientific term, but that limbic system autonomically activated. We feel like, oh, we don't want to do it, or we're afraid to do something and we have to push ourselves to do it. That's a process that translates across things. Sure, I fully accept that. But as much as I believe that getting up in the morning, getting outside, getting sunlight, maybe taking a cold shower, getting a workout in can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, hey, you know what, by 8am I did a lot of hard things. Anything else that I confront during the day, it's going to be much easier. While I acknowledge that can be true, I also acknowledge from my own experience that doing a bunch of hard things seems to exhaust some sort of mental and or physical resource that actually makes it harder to both avoid certain things and to push through hard things later. And so obviously this depends on how hard you exercise. Are you eating enough, are you sleeping enough? But assuming all, all things being equal, I'm just curious, is there a self control resource center? It could be distributed across neural circuits. It could be psychological too, of course. But does something like that exist and is there any evidence for that in your work or the work of others?
- [23:16]
A
There's two thoughts that immediately come to mind with what you just said. The idea that you can learn by doing lots of hard things. You learn that you can do hard things and do other hard things. I think that's really interesting from a motivation perspective because you could argue that what's going on here is that there's some self efficacy component that when I've done hard things, my self esteem goes up and my estimation and confidence to be able to do harder things increases. We do know that as self efficacy goes up, your ability to do things, your motivation goes up and your ability to perform also goes up. So we definitely know that self efficacy is a really important thing. The other thing that you mentioned is the possibility of exhaustion. And I find this really interesting because it's a Highly controversial topic in social psychology. There was a big boom of experiments in the 2000s that suggested just what you're saying, that self control is kind of like a muscle, and if I use it for one type of task, I exhaust it for all others and I have to wait in order for it to recharge before I can use it again, much like any other muscle. Also, like any other muscle, if I keep using it, over time it should get stronger. There were some evidence for both of those. Unfortunately, those experiments have, much like the Walter Mischel study, have come under attack for whether or not they can replicate. And the conclusions are a bit mixed. There are some analyses, they're called multi lab experiments, where a whole bunch of labs get together and they try to see if they can replicate something, and that way you get rid of experimenter bias. There are some multilab replications that have tried to replicate this effect. What you do in the lab is you do one hard task that requires self control and then you do a second one. The prediction would be if you've done a hard thing first, then you should be worse at the second one. One multilab experiment did not show that it worked, and another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work was led by people who conducted this research in the first place. So it was seen as very damning. If they can't get this experiment to work, then it doesn't exist. And so I think the consensus in the field is that it doesn't actually happen, or at least we can't get it to work in the lab.
- [25:26]
B
Could you just for clarity's sake, when you say it doesn't happen, what specifically are you referring to?
- [25:32]
A
Let's say we have you do a task where you have to write something down with your left hand. Okay. So this requires a lot of effort, it requires a lot of self control.
- [25:41]
B
To left handers out there are like opposite end. Yeah, I'm just seeing a non dominant.
- [25:47]
A
Then we ask you to do some other really difficult tasks, like some tasks that requires inhibition. So the one example is the Stroop task. So you see words in different color fonts. You're supposed to identify the font color, but if you see the word blue in red ink, although the right response is that it's red because it's written in red ink, you automatically read the word blue. So you want to say blue. This requires inhibition. It requires you to stop your behavior. Research suggests that if you did the non dominant handwriting first and then you did this Stroop task, your Stroop task should become worse. In other words, you should have a harder time stopping yourself from just reading the word again. If you've done the left handed writing, then you make more mistakes and you are slower in your responses. At the Stroop task. That's what's known as the depletion effect because I got tired. Therefore my self control is worse until it recharges. One of these multilab experiments, they try something like this using different tasks. But I've given you an example of what kinds of experiments they run and they could not replicate the depletion effect. Another multilab experiment, though smaller in scale and not by the original authors, they were able to get the depletion effect. There's a little bit of just mixed evidence and it's not clear whether depletion really is a thing. Now let me say as a researcher myself, I mean it's really uncomfortable position where I actually think depletion is a real phenomenon because I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet I think the way that we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good because much like the Walter Mischel studies, I don't think the original authors were very good at trying to explain what exactly you need. What are the implicit decisions that they're making to set up this experiment that makes it work. There have been some accusations of cheating and monkeying with the data. I don't know about that, but my own take on this is I think depletion is real. I just don't think we figured out how to bottle it up in the lab. We do know that people believe that self control is depletable or at least willpower is depletable. And the more you believe it, the more you show these patterns. So there's amazing work by Veronica Jobe. She has this little questionnaire that she asks if you engage in a strenuous task, do you feel recharged or do you feel more tired? And those people who say they feel recharged act recharged after doing a really hard task. So it's hard people doing hard things. But for people who say that no, I think it's exhausting. Then when they're asked to do the experiment, they actually show the depletion effect. So there's some evidence that people's lay beliefs about willpower might really play a key role in whether doing hard things makes you tired or whether doing hard things recharges you.
- [28:28]
B
Well, I'm going to stamp the belief into my mind that doing hard things makes other hard things easier because I do believe in the belief effects that you describe and that my colleague Ali Crum at Stanford has described for a number of different categories of thinking and behavior. I also happen to like exercise, and I happen to like the sorts of things that are supposedly building up willpower. So I'm going to tell myself this, but your point is taken, which is that our narratives about willpower matter a lot for whether doing hard things makes subsequent hard things harder or easier. I'm curious about the specificity of these kinds of effects. For instance, if people do any number of hard things but they're told to pay attention to their internal process, like can they feel their stress go up and then go down? Maybe they learn to do some long exhale breathing to lower their autonomic tone, which we know slows heart rate, et cetera. Can people learn a process that then they can apply across different scenarios? Because I think one of the fascinating things to me about school, about exams, about sports, or at the extreme, about screening for special operations, we've had many people from the SEAL team communities and other special operation communities on this podcast is this notion that maybe it doesn't matter so much whether it's cold water or it's exercise or it's matrix math. The point is that you have to get into that place of friction and then recognize something about where and how your mind and body go and start to work with that. And I think that because that's getting to a deeper layer of willpower and tenacity that no one thing can really, we can say is like the best tool. Like, for instance, you're a well trained musician. Having been a failed musician, I suppose I'm still a failed musician.
- [30:25]
A
I too am a failed musician.
- [30:26]
B
I can tell you that not hearing that the notes come out of the instrument that one would want to hear and that you're told should come out of the instrument is incredibly frustrating. I think it's every bit, if not more frustrating than the inability to, you know, do something physical. So it's not really about what we're doing, is it? It's really about being able to tolerate that friction, that frustration. Can people learn to recognize that state and push through that state and therefore translate it across everything from sport to instruments to school to parenting to whatever?
- [31:00]
A
I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts which I'm going to try to get out in a systematic and organized way first. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, but we do know that people have differential distress tolerance, how much unpleasantness they're willing to put themselves through. And there are individual differences. As far as I know, it probably can be trained and usually through exposure. But again, I'm not an expert in this area. What I can speak to with respect specifically to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown to show very limited success. So for example, again, imagine you're doing the Stroop task and you're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of these trials. Another training exercise is you literally go home and you practice doing everything with your non dominant hand as opposed to using your dominant hand. So these willpower exercises, you do them for a week and you come back. Some experiments have suggested that they do in fact improve self control, others say that they don't. And on average, reviews of this literature have suggested that the effect is much smaller than you might hope, despite all the work that you put in. And it's very variable. So some people will see some gains, but they'll be small. But many people will see no gains. That's about willpower specifically. This is at the point where I have to get a little bit more detailed. I think there's a difference between willpower and self control. Willpower is one of the ways that we improve and enhance our self control abilities. But it's not the only one. The other ones, I've already described some of them to you that Walter Mischel discovered with the delay of gratification paradigm. He wasn't studying willpower. He wasn't testing whether children could just gut it out and use their own brains to inhibit their behavior. Instead, he was looking at things like covering your eyes or covering the bowl or turning your head, or imagining the marshmallows to be puffy white clouds, or imagining that there's a picture frame around it. So it's not real, it's just a picture. All of these different behavioral and psychological strategies that children were using, these enhance self control without leveraging willpower. At this point you could ask, what is willpower? And it's not actually clear in psychology what that actually means. But most people understand willpower to be the effortful inhibition or suppression of impulsive tendencies. So there's a yummy piece of cake in front of me and I'm really tempted to eat it. Willpower or inhibition is the active fighting of that temptation, telling myself, don't think about it, don't give in, don't do something about it. I think this is sort of the paradigmatic sort of Version of self control in which you use your mental muscles to push down those ideas. Those trainings are the ones I was telling, are not very effective. But training, some of the other strategies that we might have, like closing your eyes or imagining a cockroach crawl across the cake, or asking yourself what your children would say if they saw you eating the chocolate cake after saying that you wouldn't. All these other strategies, behavioral and psychological strategies, or tools as we might refer to them, those can be taught and those can in fact improve your self control. So whether or not self control is something that you can learn to get better at, I think the answer there is yes. Whether willpower is something that you can get better at, there I am not so sure.
- [34:28]
B
I have this kind of running theory in my mind, which is anchored in neuroscience. We know that areas of the brain are involved in kind of more sophisticated processes where we can imagine ourself now, think about our past, think about our goals in the future. Kind of a high level strategy formation definitely involves the forebrain, but it's a distributed phenomenon. I think everyone agrees on that. And then we have brain areas that we know from stimulation during neurosurgery, brain lesions, et cetera, that they're kind of like switches. It's like they make you want to eat, they make you want to mate, they make you want to vomit. Any number of things. These are hypothalamic. There's so deep limbic and hypothalamic circuitry. And I have this very crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or it comes to aspirational behaviors like motivating to do something hard over time, that when we find ourselves at a friction point, like we don't want to do something we should, or we're having a hard time resisting something that we shouldn't, that we have to go a layer deeper into the limbic system and hypothalamus, we just have to come up with contingencies that are much grosser than the. Like you said, like a cockroach on a marshmallow. It's like, sugar's good. We have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary things, fatty things. Yum. That's like hardwired. So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit. Right. We don't want to get up and go to class because we're exhausted. And fatigue is real. Fatigue is real. Shuts down our forebrain, so the circuits are impaired. Our hypothalamus is driving us to go back to sleep, but we have to think about the fear of showing up in class for an exam and not knowing. It's the nightmare everybody's had at least once, right? So I feel like the control strategy seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgusting, et cetera. How well does the opposite work? Like, how good is aspiration for good stuff? Because those are also powerful drivers of human behavior. And I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between sort of fear and love, if you will, to put it broadly, to allow us to navigate all sorts of circumstances. But I love the idea that chasing love, chasing desire, all these great things, but there are times when we have to be like, oh, no, I got to imagine the cockroach. Or else this whole, I'll go back to sleep, I'll hit the snooze button.
- [36:51]
A
I think what you're saying, Andrew, is something super profound, more profound than you might think. So for years, self control researchers have assumed that the secret to self control is actually doing exactly the opposite of what you suggested, which is turning off the hot system. Because they argue that these limbic systems, these hot systems, these more quote unquote animalistic systems, are the things that make the temptation so powerful. And so by activating those systems, all we're doing is we're up regulating the temptation impulses. And so for years, and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model, for example, and many, many others, they talked about making your cognitions cooler. In other words, shutting down the emotional system and thinking very coolly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice. I think what's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire. So if this thing is pulling me, I'm going to find something that's going to push me away. And as you said, the example would be like, there's a piece of chocolate cake and I imagine a cockroach crawling across it. There's not actually very much research on that. Most of the dominant models in self control really talk about cooling your cognitions. You're told not to fight fire with fire, that you need to be in a calm and collected state.
- [38:07]
B
State.
- [38:08]
A
The reason why I think what you're saying is true is that I have some other work looking at the other strategy, which is you said finding love. So in my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation. So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if I only think about cake related things, that could be really difficult. But if instead I ask myself, and even if you said, oh, I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet that doesn't have much magic to it, it's kind of sterile, so it doesn't move me in any way. But if instead I'm saying things like I need to do this for my family, I need to do this to get to my children, I want to look good for my children's wedding photos or my children are looking at me or I want to be a good example or all these other kinds of reasons that you might, these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake. And we think it's because it's giving people meaning, it's infusing the moment. As you say, fighting fire, like fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love. Like these are, these are higher order things that I care about and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. What you're highlighting is with your original example, something a little bit different than that, which is fighting fire by taking the positive and turning it into A negative. My PhD student Paul Stillman and a colleague of his, Caitlin Woolley, they did some experiments in which they had people think about. It's usually when you think about self control, you think about the short term or long term gains. They instead had people think about the short term losses of indulging. So what are some of the things think about the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake. They show that that served much like you were talking about the vomit response. It pushes people away far enough. They're in the short term mindset, they're thinking about short term things. The short term is pulling them in. So they fight that with a short term repellent. They found that that's also very effective for self control. So your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say, the status quo in self control research. But for that reason I'm super excited because my own work is starting to challenge that idea, as is Paul Stillman and Caitlin Woolleys, that we might be able to use the limbic system, we might be able to Use our hot reactions. We don't have to assume that they're going to be bad or they're going to predispose us to indulgence and make us susceptible to indulgence. But instead they might be what inspires us and gives us the motivation to do the right thing. And I think that is really exciting,
- [40:57]
B
fascinating, and I'm so glad you're doing that work. We had David Goggins on this podcast. David, author of Can't Hurt Me and famed for doing hard things all day long. I knew David before he had a book, before he was public facing. And I can tell you I met him at a meeting and afterwards he said he was running to the airport. And I thought he meant like rushing to the airport, because that's what that means to me. He was literally running to the airport. We were 16 miles away from San Jose airport. He went in the back change and he like ran to the airport with his luggage. So he's always been that way, at least as long as I've known him. And I think one of the reasons David is such a shining example of motivation is that he is very open about the fact that he listens to negative comments from social media in his headphones when he runs. He's talked about that. He tells himself what a piece of garbage he is if he doesn't do this. I mean, he basically flagellates himself into doing these things. And any attempt to suggest to him like, oh, maybe you could take a more soft gloves approach, he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him. He's actually right now, I think he went back to the military. He's also in paramedic school. I think he's probably becoming a physician too. I mean, he's a REM example of that approach. It's an approach that's very hard for a lot of people. And some people would say it's pathological. I don't believe it is because it clearly works for him. And the alternative was far worse. He'll tell you that as well. We could even talk about eating disorders, right? Anytime we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to eat cake, there's going to be a subset of people out there that are saying, oh, so what you're talking about is eating disorders, switching the contingency, if I can avoid it, that's rewarding, which is associated with certain eating disorders. I love the idea that there's this other side that you could entice yourself with the positive outcome. What I'm hearing you say is that if it's a short term battle, like right now, think about the downside or the upside right now. If it's a long term battle, you want to think in terms of long term outcomes, both bad and good. Is that right? Should we have all of those in our toolkit?
- [43:08]
A
I completely agree with you and I love the fact that you used the word toolkit. My colleague Ethan Cross and I, we wrote a paper in which we talked about the self control toolkit. Basically, we argued we have lots of different ways to enhance self control. We speculate that certain tools might work better for certain people at certain times. We don't currently have a very good framework for predicting what would be the right strategy for this kind of person in this kind of situation. And so if your listeners are saying, wow, that totally would not work for me, that's okay by me too. I don't think there's going to be one tool that's going to work for everybody. The self control toolbox approach explicitly embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people. So if you're the kind of person who's very reactant, someone who says, no, I can do it, then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you because you're going to react to it and say, no, I'm going to do it. But if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say and you incorporate their perspectives and they're saying bad things about you, well, then that's probably going to have a demotivating effect, right? So again, the strategy that works so well for one individual may not work for another. It may also be that certain self control strategies work for certain contexts and not for others. So for example, for me, getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I have litany of reasons why I don't want to do this today. And so for me, the hardest part is just getting on the bike or starting to lift weights. You know, sometimes it's just putting on the workout clothes. The strategies I use for that. I usually tell myself like, you know, what would my heroes do in this situation? So the quote, unquote, what would Jesus do? I think it's a very effective strategy in those kinds of situations. You imagine someone that you really admire, or you imagine someone who looks up to you and you want to be that person that you admire, or you want to be that person that people see in you. That for me, helps me get going at the beginning of exercise. But when it comes toward the end when I'm just pumping out that last rep or I'm just the last minute of a really hard climb, these things don't work so well for me. For me, at that point, I just want to grit my teeth and get it done. And so willpower might be a better strategy. So I think we have to explore the entirety of the self control toolbox and through trial and error, find what works best for us. This is another reason why I would like to stress to your listeners that self control is a skill that you tailor for yourself and it's a lifelong journey. I'm not going to be able to get up here and say, do xyz and all of a sudden people are going to be amazing. Instead, they have to try and they have to fail. And it's in the failure where you actually learn the most because you say, oh, that's not for me. Or at least that wasn't for me at this time. The reason why I find this approach really exciting and also hopeful is that I think a lot of people when they fail at self control, they just say, oh, I'm a terrible person. I'm never going to get this. I just have bad self control, bad willpower. But instead, the learning approach, the toolbox approach, just says, okay, that tool didn't work this time. And failure represents an opportunity for self growth and exploration and discovery, which makes it a lot more positively toned as opposed to, wow, I really screwed up. I'm a terrible person, My goal is forever gone. And I think that's a really important implication of understanding self control not as an innate skill, but something that you grow and cultivate over time with things that you learn.
- [46:45]
B
As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. And of course, we should all eat high quality whole foods, but most of us are probably not getting enough prebiotics, vitamins and minerals, and AG1 ensures that those gaps are filled. I get asked all the time by people if they were to take just One supplement. What would my recommendation for that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it's just been so critical for supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health and performance by covering those nutritional, what we call foundational bases. And I know from my own experience and from everyone I've heard that I recommended it to, that they simply feel much better in a number of different ways when they take it regularly. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drink ag1.comhuberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a week's supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. AGZ is something that I helped design. It tastes great and it's the only sleep supplement I take. It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep, both my slow wave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep. And I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkag1.com Huberman to get a week's supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription. Is motivation something that needs warming up? I've long chuckled at the fact that we understand that you need to warm up before exercise. Even it's running, you got to jog a little bit before you sprint. Certainly we need warmup sets before we do our work sets. Everyone understands this, but for some reason I think people assume that focus and doing hard things mentally or creatively should be like a step function where you show up to the work. You're like, focus. I like to think I've tried to spread the gospel of look, it's going to take a little bit of warming up. Your mind's going to flip to other things and you can drop into a groove. I mean, I think the, the really interesting research on both the hypothalamus, but also these higher brain states, if you will. The models say that there's sort of like an attractor model where your brain state is sort of like a ball bearing on a flat surface that's kind of moving around and the ball bearing is moving and then over time it becomes more and more concave and eventually focus, you drop into a groove. But that takes time, it takes reps, it takes the mind picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, you know what, I just gotta get this thing out of the room. That focus isn't just like a switch. Motivation isn't just like a switch. And I don't Think people really either haven't heard it or they don't believe it. But everyone, at least to my knowledge, has experienced it. We're not robots. We're not robots. And so are there tools that people can use to either embed that knowledge or to move into focus states more quickly or more effectively as well as move out of motivated states? Has anything been studied about transitions between tasks as something useful? Because we have dynamic lives, right? It's not just about the workout or just about the class or just about parenting or just about whatever it is. We have to move from one thing to the next. And these are very different brain circuits.
- [50:17]
A
I think what you're saying is really fascinating. I love this idea of attractor states in my own work. We don't have that kind of model and we don't use the language of warming up, but we do know that there is a dynamic interplay between how you think about something and the motivation that you're experiencing, right? So if a workout is, you know, oh, another hour of pain, like we're not going to get super excited about it, but if instead you change your mindset about it. And again, this is the power of work that Alia Krum and folks who do growth mindsets think about. If you change sort of the cognitive orientation you have towards it, a different set of motivations can get activated. So if I say it's not an hour of pain, but instead of me becoming the better me, that set of cognitions, that set of thoughts, activates a different set of motives that comes to bear and can then be applied to the task at hand. Now that's not quite warming up, but in some senses it is a warmup. It's sort of finding the right set of thoughts that are working through your mind to maximize the motivation that you're experiencing at a given time. Another interesting thing to think about is that there's sometimes it's not just about the amount of motivation, but it's also the type of motivation. For example, many sports have an offense oriented component and a defense oriented component and they probably require very different mindsets and they probably also require different motivational orientations. One of the most important orientations that we know for motivation science is an orientation towards nurturance and advancement, moving forward gains versus an orientation towards safety and security, preventing losses. And there's been some speculation, and there's been some research to support this, that having the right kind of motivation for the right kind of tasks enhances performance. So if I'm playing offense, right, there's Always that notion that you don't want to play not to lose, you want to play to win. And that's particularly true of offense. So in offense you want to be about advancement, promotion, gains, but when you're on defense, right at times it might very well might be about preventing losses. And so if that were true, and again, that's not true for every sport, but if that is true for a particular sport, you might do better if you're in a more promotion motivational state when you are on offense and a more prevention oriented motivational state when you're on defense. And if you get that mixed up, you won't be as effective. So when you get the match, research suggests that you enhance performance. But if you get a mismatch, you kind of have like not quite grooving and you won't perform as well. You're not right, you're just not feeling right, you're not feeling fit. There is research on regulatory fit and it suggests if you can get task motivation fit, if you can find the, if you can get yourself in the right motivation for the task at hand, you'll have enhanced performance. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because research that I've conducted with my colleague Abigail Scholar and David Mealy, we've shown that people have some insight into this. They know there are certain tasks that it's better to be promotion on this task and it's better to be prevention on this task. And they also know the thought processes that they have to engage in in order to get there. So are you going to be thinking about gains, Are you thinking about losses? Are you going to be more in a sort of again, security or advancement or security mindset. They can tell us that if I think this way, if I think about security or I think about advancement, I will do better on this task, which suggests that people have some insight into what not just the amount of motivation, but the right type of motivation to do well. And so part of what you're talking about warming up might be that people are sort of trying to cobble together the right set of thoughts to get the right motivational type, not just the right amount, but the right type of in order to do the task at hand. There may also be an additional complexity with the amount because we know not enough motivation is not good, but we also know too much motivation is bad. And so like Yerxi Dodson rule, like the U shaped functions, you kind of want to be in the middle for ideally you want to be amped up to be able to do the task at hand. But if you have too much right, you might choke because it means so much to you that you just. You just overthink things. So there might also be regulation, not just to maximize motivation, but the right type and at the right level for the task at hand. So you can imagine your colleague David Goggins going absolutely crazy at a daycare soccer, like some children's soccer game, that would be bad. So you need to scale back motivation. Find that sweet spot. So I think there is a lot of this regulation that people kind of do intuitively. Some people probably do it better than others. I love this idea. I've never thought about it as warming up because it might take a couple of moments to actually get all the ducks lined up in a row so that the system is operating functionally, both cognitively, motivationally, biologically, at all levels, to maximize performance. I love this idea. You also mentioned this idea of switching. There is an extensive literature in cognitive psychology through and it's called task switching. Moving from one set of tasks to the other and rapidly switching back and forth. There's something known as the switch cost. There's a sort of delay and a decrease in performance at the very point of switching because there's kind of a cognitive inertia. You're still operating under the old set and it takes some time to figure out how to switch into the new one. Zooming out a little bit. I think that's also related to research on disengaging. I've been pursuing this goal for so long and I get it now. It's done. It doesn't really make sense to keep going because you've already accomplished it. It's time to move on to something else. There is some research suggests that that disengagement process is very difficult. We actually don't understand it nearly as well as we understand persistence. So because of research on self control and grit, we know a lot more about persistence than we know about disengagement. And it's an area of research that is really important for us to get into. We do know that disengagement is related to lots of positive outcomes when the person is unable to pursue a goal anymore. For example, if you're a woman and you always wanted to have children, but you're now past the biological age where you can have children, it's probably healthy to disengage from the desire to have children. Similarly, if we age out of a sport or we experience some kind of catastrophic injury where we just can't do it anymore, or some window of opportunity has closed. Research suggests that for people who are more adept at disengagement, they experience better mental well being outcomes and they're able to re engage in a new set of goals much faster. But beyond that, we have to really understand more about the psychology of disengagement and how we know when to persist and when to disengage. That's a really important question. But we don't know very much about it, partly because we tend to in our culture emphasize persistence and grit more than disengagement.
- [57:30]
B
Seems like what we're trying to do when we want to get motivated or when we're engaging self control is we're trying to bring together state of mind and body and concept. So there's the thought piece like I'm a person who works out even if he doesn't want to, provided I'm not sick or injured. Right, Because I think it's important to have those caveats. I don't believe in the no days off thing. I take a day off every week, I cycle my training, et cetera, et cetera. But I also believe in state of mind and body. And one of the things that's kind of, well, that just isn't discussed enough among high performers, I think in athletics, in academics and music, et cetera, is that once you taste a really great workout, once you taste flow state, once you taste neuroplasticity, like you grind it out and you learn something and you now have mastery of something, there's this temptation to need to be in that perfect state in order to feel like you can do it at all. Like as you ascend the staircase, that somehow that's going to happen more and more often and many people will assemble their entire lives trying to recreate those states. And I think one of the beautiful things again, about people like David Goggins, we've also had Coleman Ruiz, another SEAL Team Tier 1 operator, D.J. shipley, Jocko Willink. I think what's beautiful about that community is the way that they describe doing hard things, but actually they were weaned in buds and in their other training from a place of suck. Like as Jocko, who's a good friend of mine, says, you know, we start where it sucks when your weapons are wet and you're cold and it's sandy. That's the starting line. So that you completely recalibrate this notion of optimal performance. And I think that's something that we don't really have an analog for in the rest of the world. Certainly not in Academia, it's like, get great sleep, maybe caffeinate just enough, be on the right place of that U shaped curve.
- [59:22]
A
Right.
- [59:23]
B
Or inverted U shaped curve, not too stimulated, not understimulated and on and on. And I think, well, all of that's great. It's one of the reasons I don't like the notion of optimization, because ultimately optimization is about for that moment. And the idea that we're trying to attain a perfect state before we can do the real work, I think is one of the more popular concepts about motivation. So is it possible that we can rewire our thinking so that we start from a place of suck? Like maybe I should be doing my workouts at 3am a la Goggins, but I don't do that. Right. I like being rested, caffeinated. Do you see what I'm getting at?
- [60:00]
A
Yes.
- [60:01]
B
Because in terms of building real mental toughness, the ability to push into something when everything is like pushing back on oneself, that seems to require crap conditions.
- [60:13]
A
I think what you're saying is really interesting because I do think we know from research that people are incredibly creative at coming up for justifications to not engage in self control. So I'm supposed to work out today. My gym clothes don't match. Or I'm supposed to work out today, but it's too sunny. I'm supposed to work out today, but it's not sunny enough. It's raining too much, it's raining too little. People are remarkably creative at coming up with reasons to justify indulging in their temptations. What's really interesting about what you're suggesting here is that you can just. And again, I don't know that anyone's actually studied this, but there might be sort of this bias, or at least we capitalize on a bias that things have to be just right for me to do it. I think of this when I'm writing. I think a lot of us have this idea that I don't feel like writing today. The conditions just aren't right. So I won't. I'll just put it off till the muses hit me. And it's just right. And you learn over time that every day is going to be that not so perfect day. And so you just have to learn to deal with it. And then once you get into it, as you were talking about earlier, you might warm up to a point where now it's actually optimal, but it takes some time to get there. I think one of the things that's really interesting about what you're suggesting about the optimization Culture may be that we are embracing this partly because optimization is an exciting idea, but also it's a great justification for not ever doing the really hard things because the conditions aren't quite right. Again, I think people are incredibly creative at coming up with reasons why they shouldn't do the hard things in the moment of choice. It seems perfectly reasonable. And that's one of the things that's really frustrating and challenging about self control, because you mentioned the idea of aligning concept with body when self control conflicts are far away from us. When I'm thinking about exercising more next year, but not today, next year, it's really easy to be able to say that's the right thing to do. That's the thing that I really want. But when next year becomes today, all of a sudden my mindset's in a different place and that choice is really hard. Again, it becomes really, really hard. The clarity that I once had is gone. What's also frustrating with self control, that makes it hard to follow through with your intentions. But what's also really frustrating about self control is as that moment passes and you're looking back at it sometime in the future, now the data start has come and gone and now you're looking back on it, you have distance again and the clarity comes back and you're like, why didn't I do what I was supposed to do? Again, one of the frustrating things about self control is that it's distance dependent. The right thing to do is really clear when it's far away, but when it's close, it's hard to figure out what I should be doing. Research that I've done suggests that this exists in part because our minds shift in how we think about the event. When the event is in the distant future, it's more abstract or distant future, or it's happening to somebody else, or it's hypothetical. When it's far away from me, it's not imminent. I'm more likely to think about it in terms of desirability, why I'm doing it. It's going to be much more abstract. But when that future becomes now, my mindset changes. And I'm thinking now much more about feasibility, how am I going to do it, and much more concretely about what I have to do. And the problem is a lot of these things that are hard, the whys are really positive, but the hows are really negative because they're hard. And so just at the point where I have to do the hard thing is when I'm thinking about why it's so hard the most. And then that's why I say I don't want to do it. Then again, time passes, distance passes, it gets farther away from me and I'm looking back at it and be like, but that was something I really, really wanted to do. Because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how in order to try to overcome that. In my lab, we've conducted experiments in which we have people think about. We bring them in and we have them think about their goals and why they're pursuing their goals or how they're going to pursue those goals. We then give them a self control conflict that's unrelated to those goals. So they're just thinking generally about why or generally about how. This is again the frame of mind that we generally have when things are far away or they generally have frame of mind when they're close. You use the word warm up. So we've essentially warmed them up and then we give them a self control task and they have much better self control when they've thought about whys than House. And again, we argue that this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant than when it was close. But that's the problem with hard things. When they're in the distant future, it seems like a really good idea and we can think about why we want to do it when we actually have to do it. We don't think about why anymore. We think about how. And the how just sucks. And then again, as time passes on, we look back, we're completely perplexed as to why we didn't do the thing when it's so clear to us that that was the thing that we really wanted to do.
- [65:19]
B
I would also add, and feel free to disagree that the rewards that come after challenges to meet those rewards are the real rewards. You know, I've been going on and on and online for a few years now that, you know, dopamine and other forms of chemical reinforcement that come without effort. While there are examples of those that can be healthy or innocuous, most of them are pretty detrimental. But there's nothing quite like rewards that follow intense, prolonged effort.
- [65:53]
A
It's really interesting that you mentioned this because I think when we think about self control, we tend to think about it as a binary. Again, if we're going to use cake as an example, if I'm trying to lose weight and there's a piece of cake in front of me, usually it's a binary. I have this goal to lose weight. I also have this goal, to eat the yummy cake. Those two goals are in conflict and I have to choose one of them that makes the decision actually hard because it's one against one. One of the things I think really interesting about what you're saying about doing hard things is that those are additional motivations that have nothing to do with losing weight. Right. Those are additional motivations that fuel the long term goal. So I was mentioning before, it's really important to think about your whys. I'm using that in plural because not just the one why I want to lose weight, but it's I want to be healthier, I want to be a good example for my kids. I want to show that I can do this. I want to become the better me. All these different motivations, there's no reason why resolving a self control dilemma should be a fair fight. Why should you give the temptation a fair one on one challenge? Instead, I think you're kind of highlighting that growth, self discovery, confidence, self esteem, all of these other things can also, if we can leverage them, we can become much more powerful against the temptation because we just find additional sources of motivation to push through the things that we really don't want to do. And ironically, it's an upward cycle because the more you do it, the more positivity you experience. And so it's sort of a virtuous cycle. Whereas you can also imagine the opposite. If you give up, then you say I'm not capable and all those motivations start to collapse. I'm not going to become that person, I'm not going to grow. I am the person I was worried I was. And all these, you can just sort of hear this negative self talk and you can see it becoming a negative downward spiral. So I really find what you're saying really interesting. Not just the phenomenon, but to really focus on it and say I'm doing the hard thing, not just for the one goal, but because I want that dopamine rush. I want my system to learn how to take this on and I want to prove to myself that I can do it. But as I said, it shouldn't be a fair fight. We should stack the deck in our favor.
- [68:19]
B
Yeah, if the temptation is limbic, come in with more limbic as well as high level concepts, spread them out over time is what I'm hearing. Like what's the benefit now, what's the drawback now of making the wrong decision and then extend that out to tomorrow, the next day? Spending a little bit of time on These things can mean a lot. And in the end, what we're saying is a lot of time is really like a minute.
- [68:39]
A
Yes, Right.
- [68:40]
B
Like, it's not like you just have to sit down and do a journaling exercise. Although I think from your work it's clear that that can be beneficial.
- [68:46]
A
I do also think that, like, it should get easier over time because as you said, we have these attractor states in our mind. And you know, the first time we try to pull these thoughts together, it's herding sheep. Right. So you're trying to get all these ideas and these motivations and these thoughts and these biological systems, motivational systems, cognitive systems, all lined up. The first time you do that, that might take more work, but the more you do it right, we know the mind likes to practice and be in the same places. I think more over time, it should become faster and faster. So this idea of warming up, which I really like that you mentioned before, the warmup might get easier and easier and easier the more I do it.
- [69:20]
B
Well, the concept of warming up came to me years ago when we would record neural activity in the brain of either awake animals or in some cases, I had the benefit of seeing this in humans. I have a friend who's a neurosurgeon. And if you look at an animal or a person doing a task and you could use functional imaging, so it's more non invasive, or you could use electron, you use calcium imaging and monitoring the activity of lots and lots of neurons. You don't see that the person or the animal does this perception exercise. And all of a sudden the circuit that's involved lights up. What you see is there's a lot of noise, what we call a lot of hash. Not the kind people smoke, but it's like, it sounds like that on the audio monitor. As they repeat the task over and over, the signal becomes very, very clear. And you haven't made any adjustments to the equipment. Sometimes you have and you start getting great signal to noise because the surrogate just, it's these attractor states and the signal noise goes way, way up. And I was watching this and going, well, these are like simple behavioral tasks or perceptual tasks of like telling, you know, you know, a person trying to say, oh, you know, the dots are moving up or the dots are moving, you know, on average down. And you just see like, the brain goes through this, like, transition state. And then as people get sleepy, it gets a little noisier and then it comes back again. I was like, oh, this kind of like Explains a lot of my experience trying to study or to do things. One piece of knowledge that I'm really excited about, I'll just pass along. There's a guy down at the University of Pittsburgh, Peter Strick, who's an exerciser. He happens to like doing exercise, but he also maps neural circuits. And he discovered that the brain areas that control movement of the large musculature, when those become active, they actually activate the release of adrenaline when we move. And the adrenaline then feeds back on those circuits. So this is a reminder to anyone that doesn't feel like working out. The warmup serves to increase these chemicals that then bring more signal to noise in the neural circuits that control movement. So it makes sense why, like, after five minutes of warming up, you're like, you're more motivated. It's not purely psychological anyway. I just kind of throw that out there. I'm curious about the role of competitiveness. When I was a postdoc, I was confronted with being in an area of science where a lot of tools were coming in. It was super competitive, and it was kind of a first come, first serve. There was some creative work involved, but, like, we all knew what the tools were and we were all like, going hungry hippos for these. And I was in competition with really big labs. And that competition fueled me in a way that I wasn't familiar with. I don't consider myself an innately competitive person about most things. I won't, like, be the guy who has to win at ping pong. Right. Certain things I'm competitive about, but not others. But what I noticed was having an enemy was incredibly motivating. And in the end, they got some and we got some, and we ended up being more or less friends at the end. And it brought out our best. I like to think that it brought out our best. Do people tend to kind of distribute along a normal distribution or is it a binary distribution in terms of competitiveness? And to what extent are people that are competitive? Like, we have the example, like Michael Jordan, who apparently was like, he was competitive about everything, apparently. To what extent are those people, the people we call motivated? Are they just really, really competitive? Because a lot of endeavors in life are not competitive, but a lot of them are, right? Getting at the, you know, setting the curve, being the one student who could or two students who can get A plus in the class like you and I, you know, you went to Harvard, I'm at Stanford, you know, and, you know, it's a very competitive environment. The sort of the apex of competitive Academic environments. So how does competitiveness play into willpower and tenacity and self control over time? Are those people just better at it? But what happens when you remove the enemy, you remove the competitor?
- [73:01]
A
I think what you're saying is really interesting and I too have heard a lot of these stories and I've always thought they were very interesting. I personally don't know of any direct work looking at competitiveness and self control. The closest work that I can think of in my sphere, and there might be other research on competitiveness outside of the work that I typically read mostly has to do with achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a lot like competitiveness in this. I think competitiveness actually often comes out of achievement achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a recognition for doing really really well on something. And it's usually really, really well relative to other people achievement motivation. You really want to be the person all the way at the top. That's, that's maximal achievement motivation satisfaction if you're number one. If you're number two, you might actually get to that situation where now you're rivals and that fuels you to go higher and higher. We do know that achievement motivation is a motivation like many other motivations that's probably normally distributed. So the desire for achievement and achievement recognition will be stronger in some people and weaker in others. The thing to think about I think is, is although achievement motivation may be sort of promoted by our particular culture, when I think of motivation, I think of much more of the myriad or plethora of different emotions that we. The different motivations that we have that might motivate behavior in just as productive a manner. So I'm examining for, I'm thinking about, for example, we know that belonging motivation is really important for humans. Humans as a social species, we survived because we were in groups and we had others. A human alone is not very powerful, but a human in large groups is very powerful. So we've evolved this motivation to be connected and socially intertwined with other people. But I'm sure you know, folks that are super belonging motivated and people who are not so motivated and the people who are really motivated to belong to a group will do amazing things in order to belong to the group. If they get rejected from that group, they will bend heaven and earth to get back in that group and just do amazing things. And there are many other motivations too. Motivations for power, motivations for control, you name it. There's motivations for self esteem, motivations for competence. When I think of motivations, I try not to think of any one Motivation, but think about the aggregate motivation impelling, pushing us towards a particular behavior. So again, I was talking a little bit before about not giving the temptation a fair one on one fight, but actually bringing to bear all the motivations that might help you overcome it. If you know what motivates you, you should use those and activate those when you need them strategically. Right? So if I'm someone who is competitive, then I might use achievement motivation to fuel my desire to do really hard things. But maybe I'm not that kind of person. And you see this all the time. I do peloton and you see the peloton instructor say, if you don't want to see the leaderboard, get rid of it. For some other people, it's more about being on the bike with other people and staying with the group. Not being in front of the group, but staying with the group is what fuels them to do things that they didn't think they could do before. Again, just taking the idea of the self control toolbox really seriously. Different strategies are going to work differently for different people. And so I think it's really important to explore, and not just explore different strategies, but to really explore yourself, to really say what really does motivate you. I'm not sure that we always do know what really motivates us. I think a lot of times we kind of discover what our motivations are by saying, oh, I like this and I don't like this, but it's only through exposure. So to go and explore and figure out what makes you tick and then to exploit and use those in your strategies. And again, the constellation of tools that works for me may not work for other people.
- [77:08]
B
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes When I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.comhuberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's DrinkElement.com Huberman to claim a free sample pack. One thing I've been playing with a little bit recently in my own life is just striving for immense consistency in certain things. Not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on, on peak performance. But just without fail, every single night I have a particular practice before I go to sleep. And just no matter what, I show up to it. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. There are times I'm like, I'm not fully focused on this right now. I'm having trouble fully focusing on this. But for me, it's really become an experiment in consistency. I think I'm like two years and some change now into it. And so it's tapped into this different part of myself that I'm not so familiar with, which is like not trying to get the best performance out. Right. But that's great when it happens, but it's different. And earlier we were talking, before we went on Mike, we were talking about abstinence versus moderation. And I'm curious what the data show. And when I hear abstinence, obviously it sounds like people trying to avoid certain behaviors, but I think we could flip it the other way too. Is it, is it always the case that we have to show up to the thing at our best or like yesterday I was supposed to do a hiit workout and I confess, look, happens to me too, folks. I was like, I was due for a high intensity interval training workout. And I was like, things were getting really compressed. I thought what would happen if I just did the eight rounds of this on the assault bike? But I didn't go all out. And I'm going to just do the first two. Not lazy, but semi lazy. And I noticed by the third or the fourth, of course, my motivation started to increase and I was like, oh, this is really cool. It was informative for me because it showed Me where the barrier was. It wasn't necessarily about the effort, it was about the concept. So what's the deal with abstinence versus moderation? When can we tap into this as a useful tool?
- [80:17]
A
I'm going to have a two part answer. So it might be a little bit long winded, I hope. Remember, take your parts. So the first part is that generally speaking, psychology has tended to emphasize abstinence or consistency in self control over the alternative, which is moderation. So we have a lot of self control theoretical models which stress the importance of patterns over isolated acts. Once you have a pattern of behavior in place, it carries a special hold over you that a non pattern does not. So let me give you an example. So I have an apple watch and it tells me if I've closed my ring for the day. And there was a point in time where that number was some huge number because I had managed to be consistent for a really long time. And let's say it was 500, I had 500 and I wanted that to keep going. And just knowing that I had that unbroken streak of 500 in and of itself became motivating to me above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts. These theoretical analyses have suggested that one of the things that, that helps us maintain self control is the knowledge of the pattern. The pattern itself has strength over us in a way that doing something once every once in a while, sporadically, does not. So if you're able to tell yourself, I do this, I've done this every week for, you know, this every Sunday for every week for the last X number of years, that has a special motivational power that perhaps even the same number of, in the same number of times you've done the activity, if you've done it more sporadically, it doesn't have that power. Perhaps it could be just because you have the habit, perhaps the habit locks you into place. And it's possible that we have psychological and cognitive things that help us in place. Others have argued that we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern. Whereas again the sporadic doesn't have that orderly system. But one of the things that you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors. So when I had the streak going, I was up at the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in just because I wanted to keep the pattern, which is really stupid. They can take a life of their own, which in some cases could be good but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad. It was this idea that there might be trade offs associated with abstinence, like drawbacks of abstinence that got my student Feng Le and I really interested in if there were other alternatives. The most common alternative is some version of moderation. So at its extreme, abstinence is doing like never indulging in the temptation or always doing the goal directed option. And moderation is generally doing the thing that's good for the goal, but allowing yourself to have the occasional lapse. Now, I want to be clear here. This is not the same thing as failing. Because failing or justifying something post hoc. You're not talking about the pattern of behaviors. You make that decision in the moment and say, well, the cake looks really good, it's sunny out, it's beautiful, I deserve the cake. And you eat it. That's adjusting justification in the moment. When we're talking moderation, it's more kind of like, I have the goal in mind. And with the goal in mind, I understand that indulging once isn't going to kill that goal, right? So it's not that I don't have the goal in mind and I just want the temptation. I have the goal in mind. I'm integrating it with the indulgence and saying this one instance isn't going to destroy my goal. It's a lot like saying eating chocolate cake once isn't going to make you fat, or eating a salad for lunch one day isn't going to allow you to lose weight. What matters is the sustained behavior over time. But you have choices about that pattern. You can either have it be completely consistent, one thing, or you can have cheat days. We were really interested in some of the trade offs. You think about some of the trade offs. Abstinence, as I just mentioned, leads to really rigid behaviors. But computationally, the choice is already pre decided for you. You sit down, it's Monday, five o', clock, that's your exercise time. You don't have a choice. If you're following an abstinence strategy, the choice is made for you. It's really easy. So it's computationally simple in principle. If you can hold onto that, it makes much more rapid progress because you never take a step back. You're always going towards the goal. But there are some trade offs with this, like the rigidity, right? So it's Monday, 5pm, it's your daughter's wedding, but you're getting the workout in. Why? Right? Like that lack of flexibility is kind of crazy. Once the pattern is broken. It's all or none, it's gone. So if you're abstinent and you have a lapse, the goal is done right. You can't go back. My point here is that there are some trade offs between abstinence and moderation. And we are really interested in trying to understand why people choose one versus the other for what kinds of tasks, what kinds of goals, and with the idea that maybe sometimes we're picking the wrong pattern for the goal at hand. For example, if I'm trying to be faithful to my spouse, abstinence is probably better than indulgence. Because the thing about being faithful to your spouse is that if you have the one lapse, you are no longer a faithful spouse, right? Sort of. By definition, that's a situation in which you have failed and that goal is gone forever. On the other hand, for a student studying for an exam, they can watch a little Netflix or they can study for their exam. Normally those two types of conflicts, those two goals aren't in conflict. But if the night before an exam, now they're in conflict, do they exclusively study or do they give themselves a study break? In that kind of situation, a study break might be okay, because taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying. We're kind of interested in whether people pick certain kinds of strategies for certain kinds of conflicts, and also whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategies. So if I'm the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go. If I'm the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better. Another thing that we're really interested in is why people pick the wrong one. One of the things that we've been finding, some initial findings that we have from our lab, is that when you present people with targets, other people who have engaged in abstinence versus moderation, at least the participants that we've asked generally say that the person who engaged in abstinence has better self control than the person who engaged in moderation, which is interesting to us because actually moderation is more difficult. You could have said that the moderation person has more self control than the person who's abstinent, because that's in principle the easier decision. But this suggests to us is that there may be a bias that when people are saying, okay, I want to go on a diet, I want to exercise more, I want to do whatever, they might be defaulting to abstinence when in Fact, they might be better off doing some version of moderation.
- [87:43]
B
Fascinating. Two of the best pieces of advice that I ever got for my academic career, but turned out to be valuable for all sorts of long term goal pursuits and just life is my dad, who's a scientist, he said when I really hit the gas pedal on my academics because that was coming from behind coming out of high school. So he said, listen, you gotta be a long distance runner in this game. There is a thing called burnout and you just have to figure out what you can do consistently. And then a neurologist at Berkeley who was also in the psychology department, Bob Knight. One time I asked him what's the key to this whole thing? And he said, find a non destructive way to reset yourself each week and figure out what you can invest five or six days per week and update that every five years or as your personal life changes. So what he was saying was what you can do as a graduate student is different than when you're a postdoc and when you have a family. And I said, what's your non destructive thing? And he goes completely mindless Activities in particular fishing. I don't want to insult any of the fishermen and women in the audience. I have a lot of fishermen on my mom's side, but he just would go fishing, not think about science, not think about anything. I don't know if he did it with other people or not. And that was his reset. And I think as simple as that advice is, it was really valuable to me, which is why I'm saying it now, because he was laying out a pattern. The week is, is a fundamental unit of work and you have to figure out how to reset so that you can continue to come back and be that long distance runner. Otherwise you could. Burnout is real physical burnout, mental burnout. And what's not sustainable is like not sustainable.
- [89:27]
A
I think one of the things that, you know, one of the ideas that we've been playing around with is this notion that there might be sort of two modes of goal pursuit that people have. One of them is the single goal. Like here's the most important thing in my life and I'm going to sacrifice everything for it. And again, that's very effective for getting things done. And I think some of the most highly productive, highly successful people specialize in that mode. And I think our society is actually really good at advancing that idea. Like they said, study when you're young, throw everything into it. That's not important. Put your effort into this. We're really A very goal directed society. I think we're really raising our kids to be that way, saying, you got to do xyz. So if you want to be an athlete, you have to do this, this. If you want to be. If you want to be a scientist, you have to do this, this, this. You have a doctor, this, this, this, this. So we kind of track them really quickly and then everything becomes about that singular goal. But humans, we never pursue one goal at a time. Like the truth is we are pursuing in our lives multiple goals. So I have a goal to spend time with, you know, to work, obviously, but I also want to spend time with family and friends. I want to exercise, watch out for my health. I want to indulge in my artistic side. I want to indulge all these different goals. They're kind of what my friend Abby calls invisible goals. They're goals that we're pursuing, but we aren't necessarily aware that we're pursuing them. And as a result we're not actually maximizing and giving them their fair due diligence for us to be the well rounded humans that we want to be. So you were mentioning balancing work and non work. I think this is fundamental. But when we think about what is success, we go back into that single goal, mine, right, that single goal mode. And one of the things, again, I think that's why people prefer abstinence over moderation. They're thinking about the one goal that is most important to them and they're going to subordinate all the other goals, sacrifice all the other goals that they have for that one goal. But there might be something really healthy and wholesome about understanding that you're actually pursuing multiple goals and then realizing that you have to divvy your effort among them and doing so systematically might end up helping all the goals in a way that's better than just pursuing the one and sacrificing all the others. In other words, the gain from pursuing all of them might be more than the gain of pursuing the one. And I think the philosophies of abstinence versus moderation kind of speak to that tension between do I pursue the one that's really important versus do I spread my effort among the many?
- [92:06]
B
Certainly in the United States, we love to revere the examples of extreme performance. Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, amazing gymnasts, Yo Yo Ma, like all these people. But if you talk to them or people from the Tier one operations community, they'll tell you there was very little balance certainly when they were ascending the ladder. But even to maintain high performance Very, very few people can do that over time and have a stable and healthy personal life. Some can. Many can't. These days there seems to be a kind of theme of demonizing people for being too extreme after. I find it very selfish on the part of the public to revere these people, glean all the rewards of the incredible photos of Jordan Duncan and the dynasties and all that, and then be like, oh, well, he was compulsively competitive or something like that.
- [93:06]
A
What do you want?
- [93:07]
B
I mean, obviously he did it for himself, hopefully more than he did for the adoration. But imbalance also brings extremes. We're talking about training a dog. I mean, you can get these dogs that can do extreme things well beyond what they're their breed represents. But that dog is not going to be like other dogs. Its neural circuits are honed around these training things. And that's what happens when you take young kids and you shape them around a certain behavior, academic or athletic. So it's easier to look at those examples and say, oh yeah, I don't want to deal with that and so let's demonize them. I think we should celebrate those people if that's what they genuinely wanted, and we should pay attention to the fact that they became asymmetric in their wiring, literally. And most of us probably don't want that or aren't willing to make those sacrifices.
- [93:55]
A
And I think we can be okay with that duality in our heads. Like, you know, there may be goals for which you pursue in that single single minded way and because they're so important to you as long as you're aware. So sort of like, do I want to be a specialist or a generalist? And you can't be both. So balancing your time and effort between those two modes I think is really important. You have to decide, okay, this goal is worth sacrificing for these other ones or not. And as long as we're aware of the trade offs, I think that's good. My concern is, I think we often aren't aware of the trade offs. We're only aware of the trade offs in retrospect after we've made the decision. So those who have sort of more balanced their goals, they say, I should have put more effort into the one. I didn't achieve all the things I wanted to. And so they're regretful of that. And you also see lots of stories of people saying like, I killed myself for this one goal, it did it, but I kind of wish I had this other. And so I think the more we can do it proactively as opposed to retrospectively. The closer we will be to where we want to be. Again, there's not much research on this and I think that's what's really interesting to me about it. We can have this conversation. As a scientist, I'm a little frustrated that science hasn't quite gotten up, caught up to these insights that we're talking about.
- [95:11]
B
If only dangerous words. I don't spend a lot of time on social media. I have an allocated set of time. I have a separate phone for it, which helps talk about moderation. That really helps. So when people send me things on X or Instagram, I can't see it because texts come through a different phone. So it's allocated time. That's just a little. It's been very helpful. But I have this kind of appreciation for. I don't know why there are these high speed cup grabbers. Do you know these people? So they set out cups or objects and everyone's like, oh, it was sped up. And they'll do other things like run a clock in the background so you can see that it wasn't actually artificially sped up. I'm like, this is so cool. And then I realize, I'm like, how much time did they put into this? And you know, I hope that they're happy in their high speed cup grabbing. I don't know what they're sacrificing for that. But it's kind of amazing in this day and age that because we can put everything on display, there's more and more incentive to become hyper specialized in something for mere attention. And I hope they're being rewarded handsomely in whatever way, psychologically or financially. But it's kind of interesting. I don't think this existed in the past. There might have been a traveling carnival or something where people would come through and do acrobatics. But we're in a time now where we can reach into our pocket and see the extremes of behavior, including these highly trained behaviors. So it's a very weird time that we're living in. And it sort of gives the impression that one has to be hypertrophied in one skill or one attribute, or else you're not really living. And nothing could be further from the truth.
- [96:35]
A
You're making really interesting observations about the current state of our society and also about the impact it could potentially have on motivation. I think the interesting angle for me and what you're just saying, you're asking whether these cup folks, cup stackers are doing this for the attention or they're doing it for themselves. And I would say that the research suggests that they probably do it because they themselves love it. It goes back to something that you said, a conversation we had earlier about doing hard things. Research suggests that when it comes to doing really hard things, especially sustaining that hard things over time, so you could do something hard maybe once when you're externally motivated. But sustaining that over time is really difficult if you are extreme. Exclusively externally motivated research suggests that your self control, or at least your performance and self control is enhanced to the extent that you're intrinsically motivated, that you enjoy it for the task itself. So there's research that Ayelet Fischbach has done and Caitlin Woolley as well, where they've shown that if you go to the gym and you only think about all the things that you benefit long term from the gym, that your attendance at the gym is okay. But if they include intrinsic positivity or intrinsic rewards, like just listening to your favorite music while you're on the treadmill increases your likelihood of going regularly. Right? So the idea here is that it's easier to sustain motivation over time, especially when things are hard. That's when you need to sustain it the most, when you love what you do. If you can't find something to love, then you might be able to do it short term. But over time you'll struggle to keep that motivation up, mostly because the rewards are not tracking with the difficulty of the task. That's led me to have some thoughts about how you build self control and how you teach self control. And I think the worst thing to do is to make someone the way that we currently teach self control. I think a lot is in the classroom where we make kids sit in the chairs really quietly and the rule and imposed, this is what you're supposed to do. I'm not convinced that that's necessarily the best way to teach self control only because that's all externally imposed. The child does not want to sit there quietly. The child wants to do their thing instead. I think the best way to cultivate self control for yourself or for others is to do it in a domain that you have intrinsic interest because there's something where you will put, you will do the hard thing for a long time, but you'll also be more willing to explore and find better ways of doing something because you love it so much, right? So I used to practice martial arts and I loved it and I would lose a competition or I would have a horrible practice or I just couldn't do something and what kept me going wasn't some desire to be better or some desire. It was really just the intrinsic love of the thing itself, the intrinsic love of, of the process that kept me in the game when things were the hardest. So, you know, if I were to give advice to anyone about how best to cultivate self control and to cultivate this ability to do hard things, it would first be make sure the thing that you are trying to do that's so hard is something that you love doing. Because if you don't love it, all of the external rewards are negative. They're all punishments and that's not going to sustain you. So unless there's something about the process itself that you enjoy, the pain. And that sounds masochistic, but I think, think most people who do hard things, they enjoy something about the process. That's what keeps us going and that's what gives us the consistent motivation to pursue things over time.
- [100:11]
B
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This question that I've had about people who have very low activation energy, which sounds like a bad thing, but it means they can just like get into action right away versus people that, you know, it takes a lot for them to get into motion to do things. And in being a scientist and in being in labs and in running a lab, I can't say that people fall out into two bins or two, you know, distributions on this. But there do seem to be people who, for whatever reason I used to try and correlate with upbringing or something. Like, did they grow up on a farm? Or like, were their parents structured at home? But they're these people who like, if they're a bunch of lab tasks, they're really boring. They're like really boring the first time you do them. They might be interesting, but like washing covers, acid washing cover slips and you know, and like aliquoting antibodies. Like there's, if you can listen to something or some music or something, like you can make it a little bit more bearable, but it's boring right the moment you realize a technician could do it for you and you already know how to do it. There are certain people who are like, can't a technician do this? But there are other people who just go, okay. And they just do it. And they seem to get energy from it. It's really interesting. And then there are other people. And I used to think, oh, these are going to be the people with better ideas or more creative and they won't do any of this what I call chop wood, carry water stuff. I haven't found that to be the case at all. Some people just have low activation energy. You give them a task, they might ask you why, but they just kind of do it. And then they don't waste any effort. Like no friction. Other people, it's like this whole process and I'm kind of pointing the mirror at myself now because certain things I'm very plug and chug about. Other things I'm like, really? Like after this and that, I will say that as one. You know, the interesting thing about academia that was told to me by my chairman years ago, he said, you know, academia is one of these funny careers because the higher you go up the, up the ladder, the more like low level crap they give you to do in addition to everything else. I actually think that might not be. It's a terrible thing on the one hand, but it might not be such a bad thing. And I'll just use one more anecdote. I worked at US in the Stanford sleep lab for a summer when I was in college, and there was a guy who ran the project on co. Ran the project looking for the gene for narcolepsy, which they eventually got. His name was Seiji Nishino, and he ran the Lab. He's an MD and a PhD, extremely talented, and they're hunting for this gene. It was a big deal, but he would come into lab and do like, the most rudimentary stuff with the technicians. And I remember asking him, I was like, what's the deal? And he said, oh, I just like to show people that I'll do this. And yet I also just like doing it because it makes everything else easier. And I thought, holy cow. Like, this guy's running a giant program and he's in there doing like, the most rudimentary stuff. No complaint, no nothing. And I thought, how do you get to be like that? And it turns out for me, you just have to, like, scruff yourself and make yourself do it. But some people just seem to naturally make the connect. What is that? Is it upbringing? Is it that some people just analysis paralysis or they think they're special? I haven't found the thing. I can't find it.
- [104:53]
A
I don't either. I don't know that I have a good answer for you. I can give you a sort of a scientific perspective, but I can also give you a philosophical perspective that comes from my own Japanese background. So I'll start with the philosophical one. In Japanese culture, I've been really interested about this concept of ikigai, which means you're doing a mundane task, but you are finding purpose in it. So, you know, your job might be to sweep the steps of a temple and you could ask like, wow, that's like, as bad, as mundane and as trivial a task as I could actually find. But, you know, the idea of ikigai is to sort of think about it if that is your purpose, if that's your piece of the pie, like, you're part of this giant system and this is the important cog that you fill people. It actually enhances, well being that they. They'll do it until they're like 90 years old. They'll still be doing it because. And they won't give it up because they find so much meaning in the simple task, this infusion of simple tasks. I think is also related to the notion of rituals. Right. So a lot of traditions have rituals that people engage in, and they engage in a perfunctory manner. But if you engage it in a meaningful way, it has this power to connect us to everyone else who has ever done the ritual and anyone who might in the future. So sort of expands us to include more people in us. And I'm really interested in this idea that we can draw sacredness from these mundane tasks. Again, this is all speculation. My colleague Shira Gabriel, she's at SUNY Buffalo. She studies what's known as collective effervescence. This idea of these magical experiences that we have when we're in a crowd, all kind of doing the same thing. So, like if we all go to a football game and we're all cheering at the same time, or we go to a concert and we're all singing Taylor Swift together, like whoever your singer of choice might be, that there's sort of like a magicness where we become we're doing something that's fairly mundane, but it feels sacred and special to us. It's infusing it with meaning. Just going back to your point, you know, I wonder, for some people, doing the simple tasks might just be a way of connecting to the essence of the science itself or the essence of the task itself. So when I was doing martial arts, you know, you're supposed to tie your armor on in a certain way and you're supposed to bow in in a certain way. And in some senses it's like, well, there's a stupid set of traditions. And again, you could just go through them perfunctory manner. But if you did them with meaning, it's not just the task itself, but it carries this. It's the connection that we have to people that came before and the people that came after us. Again, as I mentioned, social belonging is one of the most powerful human motivations. If we can create these bonds through these simplistic rituals. Again, these are all speculations that I'm drawing, but it could potentially be really, really powerful. And this idea that there might be sacredness in the mundane is an idea that I think really interesting to me. So perhaps this PI that you're talking about felt more connected to the lab by doing these mundane tasks that I personally would not want to do. But perhaps it was a way of saying, I'm still part of the science when I'm pushing paperwork at the higher levels of administration. Again, it's all purely speculation, but I think there is some basis in Science.
- [108:19]
B
Yeah. I remember thinking back then, like, what a badass, the guy. Also, he and his co worker Emmanuel Mignon eventually found the gene. It was in the Orexin hypocrisy system, which has all these implications for hunger regulation, has implications for the treatment of obesity like these. They were making fundamental discoveries. And like, there he was. And to this day, I still, like revere him in my mind. I was like, he's also, by the way, I'll just throw this out there. Incidentally, the guy who taught me that getting morning and evening sunlight in my eyes would set my circadian rhythm, because the guy used to work heroic hours. He was sleep like four or five hours a night. And he was like, you just have to stay on a circadian schedule. Turns out you need a little more sleep than that.
- [108:55]
A
That.
- [108:55]
B
But he's still going strong. So. Incredible. As we've been talking today, I've had this thing in the back of my mind which is like, there's something. And this is an obsession of mine, admittedly, there's something about our ability as humans to dynamically regulate our perception in time that is extremely valuable. Right. And it's especially salient when we think, okay, there's the cake. I want that. Okay, I'm not going to do that. You have to get out of. You can do things in space and not outer space, but in physical space, as these kids did with the marshmallow. You can turn around, you can put something in front of it. You could imagine a cockroach on it. But the powerful tools seem to be when we incorporate some exit from the moment into a future moment, or we could think back. I mean, David Goggins will tell you, and I have a friend who's come on the podcast before and Samer Hattar is a scientist and he talked about how he was very, very overweight and he. He's doing great now with his health. But David will tell you too, like, the fear of being that again is also a motivator. So thoughts to the past, linking the present to that and to a future concept. What we're talking about is mental time travel. And this is a pretty high level thing that I'm assuming my dog, when I put a piece of meat in front of him on the floor, can't do unless I give him a command. And I take it away if he doesn't obey the command, which is how he learned it so fast. So when we're talking about dynamic time perception, we know that that's harder when we're under conditions of Stress when more, when we're more relaxed, it's easier to do. So does any of the work that you've looked at in self control actively incorporate the notion of self regulation? How calm or how anxious one is? Because we hear this like, oh, some people don't eat when they get anxious, but a lot of people just become anxious eaters. Or for people in 12 step for alcohol, it's like never be. What is it like? Angry, tired, et cetera. For these very reasons.
- [110:53]
A
I think what you're saying is fundamental to understanding self control. Self control fails when we are not able to move in distance. I talked about how self control is distance dependent. When it's far away it's easy, when it's close, it's really difficult. Many of the most effective systems, strategies and self control require either physically distancing yourself, as you've already talked about, or psychologically distancing myself. Finding ways to either to activate the mindsets that I have when the thing is distant, so I'm thinking about it as if it was distance even though it's proximal, or finding other ways to frame it as if it's distance. So as I said in my lab we talk about again, when things are far away, we tend to think about things in terms of why, but when they're close, we tend to think about them in terms of how. In my lab we stress knowing your whys as one way to extricate yourself psychologically from the situation that you're currently in. Now you mentioned things like being drunk or being angry or being tired as things that predispose us to self control failure. I don't know if it's necessarily that it's difficult or if it's just they bias us in one direction or the other. Strong emotional states. We know with alcohol it creates myopia. We know that when we're tired we tend to think more again, more myopically, more here and now because we just want to rest. We don't want to think about the long term that our mind there's a tractor state towards being very concrete and thinking about how, which again brings us actually proximal to the temptation. I'm not sure that it's necessarily harder to do in the sense that it's that much more effort and all else as being equal. It's just that the situation has put us in a situation where it's a lot easier to think proximally than think distally. What are some other ways in which you can think, get more distance from a Temptation that's not necessarily thinking about why versus how other ways might include. And these come from. From my colleague Ethan Cross, who I know has been a guest on your show, referring to yourself in the third person as opposed to me. So I might say, what does Ken want to do in this situation versus what do I want to do? And just simply referring to myself as other people, not me, but as other people, would create psychological distance in the space that allows that gives me just enough to think of it as far as opposed to close. I mentioned also a study that what would Jesus do? For example, he did this with kids. Angela Duckworth and Rachel Carlson at the University of Minnesota, they brought kids in and in one condition, they just had them do a task that required self control as they normally would. But in the experimental condition for the boys, they gave the children various costumes. They could pick the costume that they wanted to wear the most. It's like a little boy might put on a Batman and cape and cowl. Then they were simply asked, as you do this task, we want you to ask the question, what would that character do? A boy might say, what would Batman do? They show that thinking like Batman made them have better self control. Now, there's many reasons for this, but the reason that they emphasized was that Batman isn't the kid. And so they created distance by emulating somebody else. Research has suggested that the simulation of someone else's mind, in order to stimulate someone else's mind, we actually activate the neural circuitry necessary to have that mind. So if I ask myself, what would Batman do? I literally have to think like Batman, and I reactivate the kinds of thinking that I think Batman would have. In other words, literally turning me in my cognitive system into somebody else. So when you are tired and drunk and mad and everything else one way, if you can't think about your whys and you're having trouble finding distance from the object in front of you, it's not about not being emotional. It's really just finding some psychological space. And one way to do that potentially is to take on someone else's perspective, someone that you really admire.
- [115:00]
B
Incredible. I don't know if the following experiment exists, but maybe pieces of it exist in different experiments. I'm interested in the value of words spoken to self in one's mind. Words spoken to self out loud, but with no one around writing things down, words spoken to other people, pictures, et cetera, as either weaker or stronger motivators. For the obvious reasons, and I think all of us are familiar, at least in the 2000s. You would go into an office or a school and there'd be these pictures. It would be like inspiration when the moment meets the opportunity. And then it'll be like a sunrise or something. And I'm not trying to make light of those. Better those than a bunch of other things. And they're very innocuous too. Like in this day and age where no single historical figure seems to be immune from criticism, these have become the safe concepts. I sort of half chuckling, but what is the value of telling oneself, Andrew, you got this. Or telling someone else, I'm going to do this. I don't know. Maybe using AI to create a picture of yourself in the future doing something or having done something. Surely these experiments have been done. I know some of them. Your laboratory has done what is the most potent tool. And I have a feeling you're going to say all of them.
- [116:23]
A
I think they can all have their place. But as I mentioned before, I think different things will have better power over others for certain people. So, for example, if you tend to be the kind of person who already has a lot of self talk going on and the self talk means something to you, like they're meaningful voices to you that you listen to, then self talk presumably would be very effective for you, right? So if you're the kind of person where if there's positive self talk, you literally feel better, if it's negative self talk, you feel worse, you know, then perhaps strategically trying to change that self talk could potentially have a really powerful effect on you. Some people talk about visualization, so I mentioned one thing I forgot to mention with respect to distancing strategy. One distancing strategy is to take a third person perspective versus a first person perspective on the thing that you're looking at. This doesn't work for me at all because I'm not a particularly visual thinker. I think in words. So for me words are more effective than pictures. But if you're a much more pictorial person, and we know that this is a distribution, that some people are more pictorial and some people are more verbal, then perhaps visualizing yourself engaging in the behavior would be more effective. Let me add one more thing. There is research that suggests that when you communicate something to somebody and then they respond in a way that makes it seem like you are on the same wavelength, that that creates an experience known as shared reality. People put a special premium in truth value to those interchanges than when you don't have that. Let me just give you an example. On a lot of college campuses today, you will see, see banners that say you belong. And they're trying to promote inclusion and make everyone feel at home on the college campus. And my own intuition about this is. I'm not so sure how effective those are. I think they're a lot like the motivational posters that you're talking about that used to be in the offices. However, if someone says, hey, you know what? I think you really belong, I think I'm really happy that you're here. It's a very similar message. Maybe it might even use the same words. If it's conveyed in a way that makes you feel like they understand you and that you guys are on the same wavelength, that actually has a very powerful effect. And there's some ongoing research in my lab that, that actually, even though it's the same words, there's something about that exchange of like, we see the world in the same way that convinces me that what you're saying is true. And so therefore it has a much bigger impact on me. So I bring this all back to self control by saying, well, if you know, so you talked about, is self talk more effective than other talking? I suspect other talking would be much more effective if you were able to create this kind of reality, right? Where if you had this conversation and you said, I'm going to do this, and that other person says, I know you're going to do this, right? I bet that has a lot more power than you saying to somebody else, I'm going to do this. And they're like, good luck. Right? So there are. Because humans are social species, there is a special power when we can create a sense of oneness with others that makes our thoughts become real. So if by saying it, if by writing it, my thoughts are becoming real and have more power over, those are much more likely to have an effect. Again, this is all pure speculation, but I think it fits what we know about psychology.
- [119:46]
B
That's incredible. I'm remembering a recent conversation where I was kind of playing with the idea with someone. Like, it's the old riddle. If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to witness it, did it make a sound? It's sort of like if we have a thought or an experience and no one was there to hear it or witness it, did it really happen? And we know it happened, right? We could be alone and we can have a thought. But there does seem to be a sort of loop that closes and gets enhanced. And I'm not trying to be mystical here. When something that we say or do is witnessed and registered. This can go in multiple directions. I'm reminded of a just very brief story. I have a good friend, his name is Ken Rideout. He's one of these incredible parents and his husband to his wife. And he comes from a really hardscrabble background and, and he's this incredible endurance runner. And in his 50s, he's like crushing races. And he was doing a race in like the. I think it was like the African. It was like the Gobi Desert, I think is what it was. And he's super competitive with himself and everyone else. But he was hurting one day and I think he ran up next to the guy who was leading the race, took out his earbud and turned to him and he said in kind of psychological warfare manner, he said, you know, I don't know what it is about me, I just don't get tired. And he said he registered the fear on the other guy's face and he just crushed him that day. And he won, of course, in Ken Rideout, typical fashion. He's an amazing guy. He has a book out that's like really, it's super worth reading because of his trajectory, like David Goggins or these other guys. And the fact he wrote a book is interesting, right? It's not just. There's something about externalizing these, these thoughts. I am sure somewhere in his mind he didn't necessarily believe what he was saying. Everybody gets tired, right? Even Ken Rideout gets tired. But there's something about externalizing, seeing that validated, that makes it more true to ourselves. And that's a kind of a competitive example. But they're also beautiful examples of that, like you said, where someone's like, I believe in you, like you can do this. And it completely changes our notion of what's possible. I certainly experienced that, that in a non competitive arena. So something there, I guess that's a note to the person or people hearing somebody's goal or wish to tune in, because those are potent moments or potentially potent moments.
- [122:14]
A
I'm always struck that the impact that we have on our students, especially our graduate students and stuff, they're not the things I think they're going to be. They always remember these things, side conversations where you acknowledge some small thing that was going on in their life. But again, for them it was that sort of moment of like, I'm bringing to reality some of the thoughts that they were having and hearing me say them or hearing me verify some of these thoughts had an incredibly uplifting event, as you said. It can also have an Incredibly crushing event. So if I'm having insecurities and I'm sort of harping on those, acknowledging that those insecurities might have a truth to them, they could be incredibly damaging. But I'm always amazed by how inspiring it can be. Someone that you really respect, you know, they know you have this goal and then they say, like, I know you have this goal and I think you can do it. Like it brings. That's what I'm talking about. The shared reality, the social validation of this belief makes it more real and thus has more power. You know, we know that writing thoughts down can be a very powerful thing as well for emotion regulation and, and motivation. I think part of that is just the actual sharing part is the fact that now that I've written it down, I'm now looking at it as if it was not me, it's not me, it's words on the page. And that brings another level of power that didn't have when they're just floating again. I think all of these strategies that you're talking about, self talk, writing, talking to other people, I think they can all be powerful in the right way for the right person, but they may also exist on a continuum of, of potential potency, both good and bad.
- [123:46]
B
What I'm about to ask sort of gets into the realm of performance, but I could imagine it being used for any number of things. Music in particular, the music that we listen to at a particular stage of life is able to embody a lot without us having to script out complete sentences. It's sort of a time space travel of its own, right? There's certain songs, I'm sure for you too, you. I hear them and I teleport back, you know, is it possible to build these anchors, you know, like, like have a song or something that, that you associate with a time of like, working through struggle, that the process is captured in that and then you can reapply it. Like, do those tools really work? Because there was this phase from about like 1998 to about 2015 when like TED talks and books were chock a block full of this stuff. It's not clear to me that they work or that they don't work, but music's a powerful anchor. So has anything been explored around this?
- [124:46]
A
Not that I'm aware of. The best work that I can link to this is work that I know that's done on nostalgia. And nostalgia traditionally is portrayed in most media as something really negative. It's like a negative bittersweet state. But research in psychology suggests that nostalgia actually has a very functional process. Process. It serves a lot of different motivations. So for example, one of the things that it does is it helps make me feel connected. So a lot of times I might feel like I don't really know myself. I don't know who I am. Nostalgia is a way of, as you used the word anchor, it allows you to time travel and anchor and then more importantly, see a sense of self continuity. That I can see how I was there then and I can see how I am now. And I see, I feel a sense of connection, a sense of oneness. And that, that can have a lot of positive benefits to the extent that that's what you're looking for. So, you know, to the extent that music makes you nostalgic. And I think a lot of the music that we love most has an element of nostalgia to it. I do think it serves a very important distance traveling function, time traveling function. And you use the word anchor, which I really like too. It reminds us who we are, where we've been and who we've become. And we know for humans that's a very. That narrative, that sense of continuity is also very important for existential reasons, that I belong here for a reason, that there's a purpose. And so motivationally those can be very effective. Now, I don't know if it reinstates the motivations that you had during the time, but I think it at least allows you to connect to the time where you had those motivations. They may have changed, they may be stronger, they may be weaker. But that sense of connection, I think is really important for under understanding what your motivations are in the first place, how they've evolved over time and what they are now like. To the extent of the same, it might be able to reactivate, but to the extent that they're different, it actually might cause deactivation. But not in a bad way, but in sort of a good way in reminding you, okay, now what motivates you? Now it's changed. What do you care about now?
- [126:42]
B
I'd like to just briefly return to the concepts of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. As I recall, there was this famous set of experiments also done at Stanford where they had kids draw. Kids intrinsic. Excuse me, where kids drew intrinsically like drawing, they just observed which kids drew. Then they started rewarding those kids for drawing. And then they observed, at least as I recall, the outcomes being they observed that some of these kids drew less or gave up drawing because the conclusion was that these kids now were doing it for the rewards as opposed to the activity of itself. Did those results hold up over time?
- [127:17]
A
Generally speaking, the results have held up over time, although there are some situations in which they appear at odds with current practices and intuitions that we might have. And the best example I can think of is being paid for your job. Being paid for your job is something that is an extrinsic reward for something that you may or may not be intrinsically interested in. And so the big question is, if you love your job and then I pay you to do the job that you love, does the love that you have for that job go down? Now, I don't think this is that perplexing if you understand what was actually going on in those Stanford studies. So they were children. So again, the children were intrinsically enjoy playing with markers. And then all of a sudden, in one condition, they would say, okay, now I want you to play with these markers. And if you play with these markers, I will give you a reward. A second condition, they said, surprise, you just play with the markers, but we're going to also give you a reward. And then the third condition, there was no reward where you saw intrinsic motivation go down, is when the child knew before they got to play with the markers the second time that they were going to get the reward because they knew they were playing with the markers to get the reward. It's unclear to me whether that same confusion would happen with adults. So if I know I love this job and now you're paying me a lot of money to do this job that I love, is it possible that I will get confused and start to think, oh, I'm actually doing it because I'm getting paid? Yes. And I think we can think of people who have had that experience. But you can also imagine that as adults, I know what I love and I'm not even paying attention to how much money I'm being paid, even though I'm being paid. What matters here is the confusion. Why am I doing what I'm doing? And you could imagine with adults, if I'm really clear why I'm doing what I'm doing, that that confusion might be less likely to happen than if I'm not as clear about what I really, really love. Now I will say what I just said is very controversial. And I'm sure the psychologists who are listening to this are going to be all up in arms about how that can't be true. I think there are multiple theories about how intrinsic motivation works. And I'm drawing for those expert readers, expert listeners, from the attributional approach. And what matters here is the conclusions one draws from one's actions. Why am I doing this? Depending on how I answer, that will dictate how my motivation flows. If I'm doing it because I'm trying to get the extrinsic rewards, then it becomes extrinsically motivated and my motivation drops. But you can imagine again, with adults, those who really know that they love the thing and they're really certain they love the thing, they may be a little bit more resistant to that.
- [130:09]
B
Interesting. And as adults, we can also connect dots and expand our whys. Say, well, I love doing this thing, get paid for doing it. And those resources can help me provide for others who I also love. So it's sort of exponential. I remember a salary discussion with my chairman, not at Stanford, but when I was down at ucsd. I won't mention who it was. You'll never figure it out, folks. Because there were several chairmen during my time there. And I'll never forget, during a salary negotiation, he said two things. He said, a, you can't make more money than me. Which seemed fair. He's, you know, running the department. I was a junior professor. And he said, and never forget, you're gonna make far less money than you deserve for most of your career. And then you're gonna make far more money than you deserve for at the end of your career. And I remember thinking, like, that's the worst argument I ever heard to somebody who can't afford housing or whatever. Anyway, Stanford always treated me well, but. And in many ways, he was probably right. Nobody goes into academic science to make money. It's just not what you do. You can look at anyone running a lab, certainly in academia, and you can be sure that the amount of work that they're doing reflects their love of discovery and doing science. I feel very comfortable making that statement. But in a lot of careers, people do make a lot of money for something that they intrinsically loved. I'm thinking about performing artists, for instance, and from my friends who are in that world, I think it can create a lot of dissonance because they'll start taking tours and they'll start doing album deals simply for the finances, and they get used to a certain lifestyle. Which brings me back to this chop wood, carry water notion and the ikigai. Is that how you pronounce it?
- [131:47]
A
Yes, Ikigai.
- [131:47]
B
Ikigai notion. Earlier, you know, several of the people who I've observed have incredibly long, super successful creative careers. I've been fortunate Enough to speak to some of these people and know a few of them, and 100% of them will say that they still engage in a lot of mundane tasks throughout their day. Yeah, they have a lot of hired help and things like that, but they're still picking up after their kids. Some of them are still edging the lawn. They're still doing these things because when they didn't, they thought that all their time would expand into doing their creative work. And they found that wasn't the case. They actually had lower motivation. And I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I don't know, there's really something to this, like staying in the groove of what, what you were doing in the early to maybe mid portions of your career when you were like climbing the rungs. That's. It's almost like a. It's like a mental muscle.
- [132:39]
A
Yeah, it seems to me a little bit like just, I guess as I mentioned before, like staying connected to the process, to the way that, you know, I used to do things. I will say we have to be really careful though, because I think this relationship between external rewards and intrinsic motivation can be exploited. So there's some research suggests that when we know somebody loves the job, we don't feel the need to pay them as much because we know they'll do the job anyway. Right. So whereas if you took two people, one who is intrinsically motivated and one who's extrinsically motivated, you have to pay the extrinsically motivated person a lot more money to do the same job than the person who's intrinsically motivated. But it begs a lot of questions about fairness. Should you really be paying 2 people difference amount of money when they're doing exactly the same task just because they have differences in motivation? And in some respects, you're almost rewarding the person that you probably don't want doing the job, because they don't. They're just doing it for the money as opposed to. They really love what they're doing. I think a lot of employers would like to believe that they're or like to have employees who are intrinsically motivated, because people who are intrinsically motivated will often do the extra step. They'll do the hard work. But again, there's this always this concern that they could be exploited because we know, because they derive some value from the work itself, that we might have this perception that they don't need to be compensated quite enough. So there is this exploitation effect that's really dangerous and pernicious.
- [134:06]
B
Are there any elements of Japanese culture that you wish you saw more of in the United States for let's just say your students and for young people in general, but maybe adults as well, and vice versa, that in the context of your work, because they are very different places culturally, certainly there's overlap too. But numerous times across our conversation on and off microphone, we sort of touched into some of these really incredible concepts in Japan and Japanese culture. Certainly we have them in the United States and elsewhere too. But you're in a unique position to answer this, if you're willing. And I'm always interested in how concepts from other cultures and our own could be looked at.
- [134:48]
A
Well, I should say first and foremost I'm Japanese American, I'm Nisei, so I was born here. So I have never lived in Japan. So I think a lot of Japanese listeners might say, oh, he's not really Japanese. I'm definitely Japanese American. My connection to my culture mainly comes from food because I like eating and cooking, mostly eating. And I also, as I said, I used to practice martial arts. I used to practice the Japanese martial art kendo, which is sword fighting. I've never actually thought about this question. So the question that you've asked is really tough one for me. I'm going to have to just sort of think on the spot. I think for me one of the things I again, psychology I think is starting to come to grips with it. But a lot of the work on mindfulness I think is really interesting and important, but I don't know that we recognize enough is sort of the importance of breaks, opportunities to take your foot off the gas. Again, I'm not so sure Japanese culture, in society that they're good at that either. The stereotype is that they work all the time. So maybe they have just the same problems that we do. But from the outsider's perspective at least, the notion of mindfulness suggests that there are times where we need to not be so goal directed and so driven, but instead just enjoy the moment. But it's not even enjoy the moment like, like I'm going to enjoy this chocolate cake. It's like just enjoying being here in this moment. I think that's an interesting idea that I think in psychology we are wrangling with. There's a lot of research in this area, so perhaps it's not quite answering your question. The other notions that I think are interesting is just sort of the notion of this notion of wabi sabi, that there's beauty and decay and non perfection. And again I think that's. That's an idea that can be foreign in the Western cultural space, where if we think about our landscaping or we think about what we want, the way that we dress, it has to be perfect. So we get all this cosmetic surgery or we buy all these clothes and if it's one wrinkle, we have to change clothes or whatnot. You're mentioning the word optimization before that things have to be perfect where in Japanese culture there's a beauty in the imperfection. In fact, you actually intentionally build in the imperfections to have beauty. And I think again, in the context of this conversation that we just had, embracing the suck and starting from the place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better again might be an idea that we could incorporate. And we also already talked about ikigai. This idea of finding connection and expansion and meaning, purpose, and something really mundane or ritualistic or simple, I think is also a really interesting idea that might sort of explain some of the lack of happiness that we are currently experiencing in our own culture where we're constantly future oriented as opposed to. And we're always looking for bigger things as opposed to finding beauty in the simple things that we do. Like the most mundane tasks that we do might be the most important things that we do, but we just don't code it that way because our eyes are on the prize downstream. And I wonder if that too might be an interesting idea worth exploring.
- [138:11]
B
It's interesting to think about your answer in the context of the mundane or the chop wood, carry water type thing, plug and chug, whatever people want to call it, because therein seems to be at least part, if not all of the operations that we're applying to the big lofty goal. Just on repeat with this thing, this concept, like, I'm going for this big whatever trophy degree, founding a company, building this, like when we think about external things. But even for people who have like a really big family concept, it's beautiful, right? But I've seen a lot of people crushed under that pressure too. And then they end up with a kid who doesn't fit into their family concept. And it's like completely destabilizing for all their ideas. They thought they could script it out according to their family album from the past. I don't wish these hardships on anyone. And yet they're kind of like the stuff that make life great too, in a weird way.
- [139:06]
A
Yeah, that brings us back to the idea of Wabi Sadi, like beauty and the imperfection, beauty and the decay. And yeah, like we can embrace what is not perfect. Which seems just sort of thinking about my own life. Like, wow, in some sense that's totally foreign. You're taking pictures and it has to be the perfect picture. You're saying this perfect family, we have these mental models of what the goal is and we only achieve it when you're there. It's interesting to think about giving some degrees of freedom in that and finding meaning in that. I think that's a really interesting idea. Yeah.
- [139:42]
B
It's actually one place where social media has, in my opinion, has shown a bit of humanity, contrary to the stereotype. Like, you know, I see a lot of social media stuff and sure, like you'll see incredible feats of artistic or athletic or whatever and they'll get like tons of views and likes. But every once in a while someone will come along and very authentically like confess a failure or come along and just, you know, express a hardship that they're going through or a win that doesn't really fall within our normal notions of what a win is. And it's like an avalanche of interest in those. So I think there's a natural kind of magnetism to these just human elements. So I appreciate you being willing to take that answer to answer that question, excuse me, on the fly because it's not within your PubMed profile. But I do believe that the people we are comes to the science. We do. And numerous times throughout today's this discussion I've detected these elements of who you are in this and it's impossible to separate. So thank you for the consideration. And as a final question, I'm actually just really curious what you want to do now. What is the experiment you're working on now or the dream set of experiments that you think can really move the needle forward in your own concept of this work? Because clearly you're very focused on it and we're very grateful that you're doing this work. But yeah, like where's your. What are you most excited about right now?
- [141:13]
A
One is we tend to think about self control again at the tactic level. What do I do to overcome this temptation? And I think largely overlooked is this idea of what do I want to do again, because you don't get your goal from a single behavior. It's through repeated patterns of action. So to really come up with better ways to understand repeated patterns of action in the lab or in the field, I think is a major challenge that the field has to take on and hasn't. I think one of the reasons why we haven't studied it is because it's so hard. That's why we go back to these one shot deals. I think that's one of the most important things to think about. Another is, and again we talked about this two modes idea. Am I pursuing the one goal or am I pursuing the many? I think in psychology we have spent a lot of time focusing on the pursuit of the one. And we haven't really done a good job of embracing the pursuit of the many to the extent that we have it usually like two goals. So like work, life, balance, we'll look at how people navigate those. But as I mentioned before, we have more than two goals at any given time. So how do we integrate all of these goals, how we pursue them all the time? How are we juggling all these balls and keeping track of them? Are there goals that we have that we're not even aware of, that we are actually pursuing? Really interested in that. Related to that is fitting goals into the broader constellation of all the things that we want. Connecting goals to these big underlying values and motivations that we have. That link is not really well understood. So we talked a little bit about getting our ducks in a row. Seeing the whys of a particular. When you think about your goals, the broader motivations of what motivates them, how did that come to be? Did our system just know that these things were aligned and now retrospectively we're making the connections? Or does making the connections have an important impact? Not just multiple goals, but also levels of goals and how they connect to more fundamental motives? And how we know what a goal is right for us, I think fundamentally requires understanding whether they resonate with these broader motives that we had. And again, as you mentioned, also getting things aligned, that alignment idea, I don't know that we're really understand how people do this. It's magical. When we get it right, we do amazing things. How did we know it was the right thing to do? There's no textbook, there's no wiring. What are the cues? What are the signals? How do we discover what we really want? Those kinds of things, I think are the future of our science. I don't know that it's going to require a lot of methodological development, but I think those are the big questions I'd like to see us address.
- [143:57]
B
Awesome. I look forward to seeing what you and your colleagues discover next. I want to thank you. Thank you so much for coming here today, sharing the work that you've been doing in your lab. When I discovered your webpage and saw a few things you had done previously, I was Like I really, really want to sit down and talk to Ken, because I can tell that not only is the work embedded in something that we all grapple with, and that's extremely important to life advancement, no matter how ambitious or non ambitious somebody is, but it's also clear that you're bringing in a real understanding of just how dynamic our lives are. It's like not one goal. And studying these things in isolation has served us well, I think in the past in building a framework. But I think it's just terrific the way that you're throwing your arms around all of it. And as I mentioned before, it's clear whether you intended it or not, that you bring a lot of humanity to this in considering yes, there are answers, they vary. You need a dynamic toolbox. And yet there's evidence that certain things really work. So I know I'm going to incorporate a number of things that you shared today, and I know our listeners will as well. And so thank you for doing the work you do. Please come back again and update us as things evolve. And once again really appreciate you.
- [145:12]
A
Really honored to be here. Thank you.
- [145:15]
B
Thank you for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show. Note Captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcasts or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre sale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.