Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita

the purpose is behind their decisions, the broader purpose is 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 "my children are looking at me." "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 fit, 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. Welcome to the human 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, 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,

and keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now, from my discussion, with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. Dr. Kentaro Fujita, welcome. Thank you, really excited to be here today. 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?

So, the marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments that was conducted by Walter Mascel 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. So, there's essentially a self-control problem, because you have a smaller sooner reward,

“and you're sort of trading that off with a larger later reward. In 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 of 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.

Now, there were a series of experiments that we can talk about. They used 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, so again, how long did they wait before they indulged in the one? One marshmallow, and 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, and what they found with 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. So, there's got people really excited about self-control because it suggested that it was a key

skill for important life outcomes, and this is what generated a lot of that excitement. Did any of the kids actually get two marshmallows as a reward? It depends on the data set, so research has now shown that the marshmallow test waiting times depend on a lot of things. So, in the original experiments, there was something like 15 minutes, others, 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 is actually going to bring you two. So, 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, and when experimenters are unreliable, children do not wait. They just go and grab the marshmallow,

and it's been argued that that's actually a sensible rational behavior. So, the setup here, it sounds really simple, but there's a lot of art behind this to make this experiment work the way that's supposed to. 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

done your homework, and then the kids see their parent look at their phone, does that reduce trust in the parents advice? 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 watch the video of adult punching bobo or being nice to bobo. And then we're

allowed to play with bobo themselves, and those that watch the adult punched bobo were more like it a punch bobo themselves. So, this suggests that children are very observant for home 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 many, many other behaviors, children are remarkably observant of what adults do.

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 neurosides, 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? 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 kind of intuitively understood what it took to get it right,

but we're not very good at articulating those for others to follow in kind of 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 four years old,

and then a bunch of different life outcomes at adolescents, and so they basically wanted to

see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test, and they, in principle, they should have, and they did and they did not, so if you looked at the simple correlation between did delay time, predict outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior,

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, and so when the researchers, they had like 30 or 40 other covariate variables that they were controlling for, when they controlled for all these other

variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes it was supposed to,

and so this paper got a lot of attention for basically saying, look, there's this, the marshmallow

test or 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's named Yukobunakata in her team, they took the same data set, and they reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative, rather than throwing in 30 covariates, they put in theory driven covariates,

ones that made sense from what we know already about research is supposed to like throwing in the kitchen sink, and 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. So, you know, some people have suggested that failure to replicate the original marshmallow test, they 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,”

you know, and the argument about social economics 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 data reward, but if you come from a lower SES family where rewards come and go and people, and you know, 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. So, all these things have

to be carefully controlled for, and they were part of the original experiments, again, not really while articulated, to the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger data 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. And 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, you know, that self-control predicts life-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 Michelle and his team, were teaching children the strategies of self-control, and when children learn them, their delay ability 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 I 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, right? 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 you think you should do in order to wait longer, and research shows that children who, well, let me, let me be more careful. Research shows that there are age-related differences, so at three-year-old, they don't know anything,

but at five-year-old they've learned, and then later on at 13-year-old, those children who correctly understand the quote unquote rules of self-control have less problematic behavior. So, Walter Michelle and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems, and those that understood the rules, the chicks that work, and the chicks that don't work, were less likely to have behavioral problems at that camp than those who did not. So,

knowledge matters. Self-control can be learned, it can be taught. You can learn by trial and

“error, and I think that's really important because it's just that rather than being something that”

we're born with, we can get better, we can grow, we can improve over time. I think this is a really important lesson that often gets overlooked with these studies. I'd like to take a quick

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and in many ways they reflect the behavior of adults, but in a much pure form. I recall one where

“I think it was a young boy where he's leaning into the marshmallow, and he's kind of doing”

like, like, like, like, like, he's not letting himself do, and he looks away, and it seems to be that he's aware he wants to move. He's letting himself move, but then he's pulling back. And as somebody who's currently training a puppy, I can tell you that the weight with placing food or treating front of the puppy, and getting that what neuroscientists call top-down inhibition, the suppression of impulse, getting that trained up, is so interesting because talking about a dog now, but my new

Bulldog mastiff puppy, he will intentionally look away from the food as a way he's so tempted to eat it. So I'll say, look at me, that actually makes it easier for him, so it makes it seem like he's more disciplined, but I think all mammals, probably all creatures that have this top-down inhibition, come up with these strategies, and I have to assume that they're pretty unique, not just by age, but to the individual. I remember one kid spinning around in his chair, and it does seem to be

that the impulse to do something is obviously involves movement, and it seems, and I'm curious if there's any research, looking at if people have an opportunity to actually move their body as opposed to rigidly and prevent movement, whether or not they're more effective in suppressing impulsive behavior. I mean, in cultures, many cultures, you have things like worry beads, to sort of dispelling anxiety. Some people when they get stressed will go for a walk or run,

and it does seem to work. It's almost like that there's a revving of the engine that drives movement. We can talk in rural circuits, but it doesn't really matter what those are, and when we're trying to suppress any kind of behavior, being able to channel that movement elsewhere seems useful, or as I was taught as a camp counselor for young kids, be a channel not a damn, because trying to get a bunch of young kids to sit still is pretty tough.

What you're saying is really interesting, so let me copy everything about to say by saying that 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 route, the Latin route 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 act, it is essentially

a little bit about Andrew, where, you know, to try to train self-control, they will have people,

quote unquote, "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're 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 suggests that this kind of automatic, you're not actually moving, but, you know,

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,

you know, it's not quite what you're talking about in terms of actual movement. I think there's also some research, again, this is not, not exactly sure, but there's some research suggests that, like, 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.

“And again, I'm not saying these be 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 something, some really interesting connection between movement and motivation, which I think, I mean, I think that's a trueism, but I think these are really interesting examples of that. 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, you know, limbic system or more autonomically activated, we feel like, oh, we don't want to do it, or we, 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, and can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, hey, you know what? By 8 a.m., I do a lot of hard things, anything else that I confront during the day is 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, or are you sleeping enough, but assuming all things being equal, I'm just curious, is there a self-control resource center? It could be distributed across the neural circuit, 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? There's two thoughts that, I mean, they come to mind with what you just said, the idea that, you know, you can learn by doing lots of hard things, you learn that you can do

“hard things and do other hard things. I mean, I think that's really interesting from a motivation”

perspective because you could argue that, you know, what's going on here is that there's some kind of self-efficacy component that when I've done hard things, my self-esteem goes up in my estimation and confidence to be able to do harder things increases and so, and 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 and there were some evidence for both of those. Unfortunately, those experiments have much like the Walter Michelle study have come under attack for whether or not they can replicate and the conclusions are bit mixed. There are some analyses they're called multilab 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 experimental bias. There are some multilab

replications that have tried to replicate this effect. So what you do in the lab is you do one

hard task that requires self-control and then you do a second one and the prediction would be if

“you've done a hard thing first, then you should be worse at the second one. So one multilab experiment”

did not show that it worked and another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work

Like 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. Could you just for clarity sake, when you say it doesn't happen, what specifically

“are you referring to? Let's say we have you do a task where you have to write something”

down with your left hand. So this requires a lot of effort, it requires a lot of self-control to left handers out there. All right, not if opposite hand. Yeah, yeah, I'm just seeing it. Non-dominant hand. Yep. Then we ask you to do some other really difficult tasks like some tasks that requires inhibitions. So the one example is the strup task, right? 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 to stop your behavior and research suggests that if you did the non-dominant hand

writing first and then you did the strup task, right? Your strup task should become worse. In

other words, you should have a harder time stopping yourself from just reading the word. Again, so if you've done the left-handed writing, then you make more mistakes and you are slower and

“your response is at the strup task. That's what's known as the depletion effect, right? Because”

I got tired and so therefore my self-control is worse until it recharges. So one of these multi-lab experiments, they try something like this using different tasks, but you have given you sort of an example of what kinds of experiments they run and they could not replicate the depletion effect. Another multi-lab experiment though, smaller in scale and not by the original authors, they were able to get the depletion effect. So there's a little bit of just mixed evidence and it's

not clear what the 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. Yeah, I think the way that we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good because much like the Walter Michelle 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 like cheating and munging 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 will power is depletable

and the more you believe it, the more you show these patterns. So there's amazing work

by Veronica Job. She has this little questionnaire that she asks, you know, 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, you know, 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

labeliefs about will power might really play a key role in whether doing hard things make you tired or whether doing hard things recharges you. 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 in that my colleague Ali Krom at Stanford is 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 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, you know, slow's 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, you know, screening for special operations. You know, we've had many people from the Seal team community as another 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 um, matrix math. The point is that you have to get into that place”

of friction and then recognize something about where and how you're 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, you know, no one thing can really, we can say is like the best tool. Like for

musician. I can say that not hearing the notes come out of the instrument that one would want to

“hear and that your 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 translated across everything from sport to instruments to school, to parenting to whatever. I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts. I'm

going to try to get out in an systematic and organized way. So 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't speak to with respect specifically to Willpower is that Willpower training paradigms have shown to shown very limited success. So for example, again,

imagine you're doing the stoop task and you're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of these trials. Another training exercises 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. And 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. So Willpower is one of the ways that we improve and enhance our self-control abilities, but it's not the only one. And so the other ones, I've already described some of them to you that Walter Michelle discovered with the delay of gratification

paradigm. So he wasn't studying Willpower. He wasn't seeing, 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 the 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 act of fighting of that temptation. Tell on myself. Don't think

“about it. Don't give in. Don't do something about it. And 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 or 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, you know, 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 yourself 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 or something that you can get better at, there I am not so sure. 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 ourselves now. Think about our past, think about our goals in the future. Kind of a high-level strategy, a 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. You want to mate. They make you want to vomit. Any number of things,

these are hypotherlamic, they're sort of deep limbic and hypotherlamic circuitry. And I have this on a very crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or it comes to aspirational

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 hypotherlamic.”

They 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 hard, like hard-wired. 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 hypotherlamic

is driving us to like 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, disgust, etc. 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 gotta imagine the cockroach or else I'll go back to sleep,

“I'll hit the snooze button." 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 suggest, 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 upregulating the temptation impulses. And so for years, and this is part of Walter Mousshell'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 your 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 calling across it. There's not actually very much research on that. The most 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 common collected state.”

The reason 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 wise, 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 asked 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. 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 fit, 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, fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love. 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. And my PhD student Paul Stillman and a colleague of his Caitlin Willey, they did some experiments in which they had people think about, if 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 like, like, think about the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake, right? So, and they show that that kind of 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. And they find that that's also very effective for 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 Willey, 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. But 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. Fascinating. And I'm so glad you're doing that work. We had David Goggins on this podcast,

David author of Kent 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 changing. He's 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 talks, 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 like

a more soft glove as approach. Like he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him. He's actually right now. 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 remarkable 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. Any time we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to cake, you know, there's going to be a subset of people out there. They're saying, oh, so, you know, what you're talking about is eating disorders, right? 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, bet both bad and good. Is that right? Sure, we have all of those in our toolkit. Completely agree with you. And I love the fact that you used it, we're toolkit.

My colleague Ethan Cross and I, we wrote a paper on which we talked about the self-control toolkit.

Basically, we argue, 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

how big and I have a demotivating effect. 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, you know, for me getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I've all, I've 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, you know, it's kind of situation.”

You imagine someone that you really admire or you imagine someone who looks up to you and you have, you want to be, 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 for at the beginning of exercise. But when it comes to the end, when I'm like 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. Like for me at that point, I just want to

explore the entirety of the self-control toolbox. You have to, 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, right? 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, I'm terrible person, I'm never going to get this. I just

have bad self-control, bad will power. 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 how I

“really screwed up a terrible person, my goals 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. 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

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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 as running, you got a jog a little bit before you”

you sprint. Certainly, we need warm upsets before we do our work sets, everyone understands this, but for some reason, I think people assume that focus and doing part things mentally or creatively should be like a step function where you show up to the work and 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. You can drop into a groove. I think the really interesting

research on both the hypothalamus, but also these higher brain states, if you will, the models say that they're sort of like an attractor model where, you know, you sort of like your brain state is sort of like a ball bearing on a flat surface that's kind of moving around and the ball bearings 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, I just got to 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 is, 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, you know, 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, you know, parenting or just about whatever it is. We have to move from one thing to the next. And these are very different

“brain circuits. I think what you're saying is really fascinating. I love this idea of a tractor”

states. In my own work, we don't have that kind of model and we don't use the language of warming up.

motivation that you're experiencing, right? So if a workout is, you know, oh, another hour of pain,

we're not going to get super excited about it. But if it's dead, you've changed your mindset about it. And again, this is the power of work that I'll be a crumb and folks who do growth mindsets think about. If you change sort of the cognitive orientation you have towards a different set of motivations, can you activate it? 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 of hand. Now that's not quite warming up. But in some senses, it is a warm-up. 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, 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 that, 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, 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, at times it might it 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 or 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 kind of not right, you're just not feeling right, you're not feeling fit. You know, there is research on regulatory fit, and it suggests that if you can, 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 Melee, we've shown that people have some insight into this. They know their certain tasks that your better, it's better to be promotion on this task, and it's better to be prevention on this task, and they also kind of know the thought processes that they have to

engage in in order to get there. So are you going to be thinking about gains or are you thinking about losses? Are you going to be more in a sort of a, again, a security advancement or

“security mindset, they can tell us that if I think this way, if I think about security, 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 right motivational type, not just the right amount, but the right type 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 you're like, you're oxy-dops, dots, and you're like the, you shape 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, you might choke because it means so much to you that you just, you just overthink things, right? 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 Gragans going absolutely crazy at a daycare, you know, like some children's soccer game, that would be bad,

“right? So you need to scale back motivation to 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,

and I love this idea. I've never thought about it as sort of 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, and I love this idea. You also mentioned this idea of switching, and there is an extensive literature in cognitive psychology, and it's called task switching, moving from one set of tasks the other,

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. Sort of zooming out a little bit, I think that's also related to research”

on disengaging, right? So, you know, I've been pursuing this goal for so long. 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, and 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. So, for example, if you're a woman and you always want 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. This is 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. 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 that 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 nowadays 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 well, that just isn't discussed enough, among high performers, and I think in athletics, in academics, in 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 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, like that's going to happen more and more often. And many people 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 one operator, DJ Schiffley,

“Jaco Willing, I think what's beautiful about that community is the way that they describe doing”

hard things. But actually, they were ween in Buds and in their other training from a place of suck, like as Jaco, 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 an academia. It's like get great sleep,

maybe caffeinate just enough, be on the right place of that U-shaped curve, right? Or inverted U-shaped curve, not too stimulated, not under stimulated. And on and on, and I think, well, all 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're, we start from a place of suck, like maybe I should be doing my workout to 3 AM, oligogans, but I don't do that, right? I like being rested, caffeinated. Do you see what I'm getting at? Yeah, 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. I think what you're saying is really interesting it, 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, you know, I'm supposed to work out today, my gym clothes don't match, or, you know, it's supposed to work out today, but it's too sunny. I'm

like people are remarkably creative at coming up with reasons to justify their indulging in their

temptations. So, 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.

“Like, I think of this when I'm writing, you know, I think a lot of us have this idea that, like,”

I don't feel like writing today. The conditions just aren't right, so I won't. I'll just put it off till, like, the muse is hit me, and it's just right. And, you know, you learn over time, that like, 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, early, 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, but we're suggesting about the sort of optimization culture, maybe 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 are quite right. And 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”

this sort of idea of aligning concept with body. When self-control conflicts are far away from us, so when I'm thinking about, you know, 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 is, so that makes it hard to follow through with your intentions, but what's also really frustrating about self-controls, as that moment passes, and you're looking back at it, sometime in the future, right? So 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 do I do what I was supposed to do? So 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. And 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. It's or distant future, or it's happening 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, right? It's going to be much more abstract. But as when that future becomes now, my mindset changes, and I'm thinking now, I'm more sure about feasibility, how am I going to do it?

And much more, much more concretely about what I have to do. And the problem is,

is a lot of these things that are hard. The wise are really positive, but the house are really negative, right? That's 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 want to”

do it. And then again, time passes, distance passes, it gets far away from me. I'm looking back, I'm going to be like, but that was something I really, really want to do because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again, instead of how. So 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, 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. So this is again, the frame of mind that we generally have when things are far away or the generally have frame of mind when they're close, you use the word warm-up. So you essentially warm them up and then we give them a self-control task and they have much better self-control when they thought about why's

than house. And again, we argue that this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant and 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. But and we can think about why we want to do it when it's when we're actually have to do it, we don't think about why anymore. We think about how and 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 was it's so clear to us that that was a thing that we really wanted to do. 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 online for a few years now that, you know, dopamine and other forms of chemical reinforcement that come without effort. Well, there are examples of those that

rewards that follow intense prolonged effort. 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.”

So again, if we're going to use cake as an example. So 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. I have to choose one of them. And that makes the decision actually kind of 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 wise. I'm using that in plural because it's not just the one why I want to lose weight. But it's, I want to, 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. You know, whatever all these

different motivations, there's no reason why resolving a self-control dilemma should be a fair fight.

“Like 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, you know, 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 a self, 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, right, 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 like, "I am the

person." I was worried I was, and all these, you can just put it here, this negative self-talk, and you can see it becoming a negative downward spiral. So I really find what you're saying, really interesting, like, like, really not just the phenomenon, but to really focus on it and say, like, "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.

As I said, it shouldn't be a fair fight. We should stack the deck in our favor. Yep, 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, right? 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.”

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 hurting 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 might be, we know the mind likes to practice and be in the same place as I think, at more over time, it should become faster and faster. So this idea of warming up, which I really like that you mentioned

before, the warm-up might get easier and easier and easier, the more I do it. 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, 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 electrodes,

you could use calcium imaging and monitoring the activity of lots and lots of neurons. You don't see that, like, the person or the animal, like, does this perception exercise, and all of a sudden, like, the circuit that's involved, like, lights up. What you see is there's a lot of noise, what we call a lot of hash, not the kind of people smoke, but it's like, it sounds like down the audio monitor. As they repeat the task over and over,

that 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 circuit just it sees attractor states, and that the signal of 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, 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, the transition state, and then, and then, as people get sleepy, it gets a little noisy, or, and then it comes back again, and I was like, "Oh, this kind of, like, explains a lot of my experience trying to study. We're going to do things." Yeah. One piece of knowledge that I'm really excited about, I'll just pass along. There's a guy down at University of Pittsburgh, Peter Strick,

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 warm-up 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. You know, 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 all like going hungry hippos for these, and I was in competition. We 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. But, 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, 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 that, you know, the setting the curve, being the one student who could, or two students who can get a plus in the class, like, you know, you know, you want to Harvard, I'm at Stanford, you know, and, you know, it's a very competitive environment. There's sort of the apex of competitive academic

“environments. So, how does competitiveness play into willpower and tenacity in self-control over time?”

Are those people just better at it? But what happens when you remove the enemy, you remove the competitor? 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, right? So achievement motivation is a lot like competitiveness in this, I think competitiveness actually often comes out of achievement motivation. It's even motivation. It's sort of like a recognition for doing really, really well on something,

and it's usually really, really well relative to other people, right? So like, achievement motivation, you really want to be the person all the way to top. Like that's maximal achievement motivation satisfaction. If you're number one, if you're number two, you might actually get to that situation we're now your 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 that 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 although achievement motivation may be sort of”

promoted by our particular culture, when I think of motivation, I think of much more of the the myriad or plethora of different emotions that we have, 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 survive 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, you know, heaven and earth to get back in that group and just do amazing things. So there are many other motivations to motivations for power, motivations

for, you know, control, you name it. There's all motivations for self-esteem, motivations for

“for competence. And so, you know, when I think of motivations, I try not to think of anyone”

motivation, but sort of think about the aggregate motivation impiling, pushing us towards a particular behavior. So again, I was talking a little bit before about not giving the temptation of fair one on one fight, but actually bringing to bear all the motivations that might help 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 that Pelotonian Structure said like, "If you don't want to see the leader board, get rid of it." For some other people, it's more about being on the bike with other people and that's 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 to explore

yourself, to really say like, "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 where 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. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an

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“I think I've been playing with a little bit recently. My own life is just striving for”

immense consistency in certain things, not trying to fail, but not focusing so much 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 not fully focused on this right now. I'm having trouble 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 not trying to get the best performance out. 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 always the case that we have to show up to the thing?”

Or at our best, or yesterday, I was supposed to do a hit workout, and I confess, look, happens to me too, folks. I was like, I was doing it 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? I'm going to have a two-part answer. So it might be a little bit long-winded. I hope remember both your thoughts. So the first part is 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,

was some huge number, because I managed to be consistent for a long time. So 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, any of that itself became motivating to me above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts. So the radical analyses have suggested that one of the things 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 and once in a while sporadically does not. So if you're able to tell yourself, I've done this every week for, you know, this every Sunday

for every week or for the last X number of years, that has a special motivational power that perhaps even 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, you know, we like the sense of completeness,”

the gistalt of having this pattern, whereas again, the sporadic doesn't have that sort of system orderly system, right? But one of the things that you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors, right? So when I was, when I had the street 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 was really stupid. So, you know, they can take a life of their

own, which in some cases keeps you good, but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad. So, it was this idea that there might be trade-offs associated with abstinence, like drawbacks of abstinence that got my student phone lay, and I really interested in, if there were other alternatives, and 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 laps. Now, I want to be clear here, this is not the same thing as failing, because failing or just, you know, justifying something post-hawk, you're, you're not talking about the pattern of behaviors. You make that decision in the moment and say, "Well, you know, the cake looks really good. It's sunny out. It's beautiful. I deserve the cake and you eat it."

That's sort of like a 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'm 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, you know, 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, and so we were really interested in some of the tradeoffs. You think about some of the tradeoffs abstinence, as I just mentioned, leads to really rigid behaviors, but computationally, like, 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 tradeoffs with this, like the rigidity. So, it's Monday, five p.m., it's your daughter's wedding, but you're getting the work out in. Why? Like, lack of flexibility is kind of crazy. Once the pattern is broken, it's all are none. It's gone. So, if you're absent and you have elapsed, the goal is done. You can't go back. My point here is that there are some tradeoffs 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. So, 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.

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 they're, if the night before an exam, now they're in conflict, do they exclusively study or do they give themselves a study break? And that kind of situation, a study break, might be okay because the taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying, so 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, and 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. So, you could have said that the moderation person has more self-control than the person who's

abstinence because that's intensible the easier decision, but this suggests to us is that there's 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. 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, you know, he said when I really hit the gas”

pedal on my academics, because that was coming from behind coming out of high school, he said, listen, he got to be a long distance runner in this game, you know, 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 like, what's the key to this whole thing? And he said, 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 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 can burnout is real. If physical burnout, mental burnout and what's not sustainable is not sustainable. I think one of the things that, you know, the idea is that we've been playing around with 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 say, like, you know, study when you're young, throw everything into it. That's not important. Put your effort into this. We're really a very gold-directed society. I think we raise our, I think, you know, we're really raising our kids to be that way saying like, you know,

“you got to do XYZ. So if you want to be an athlete, you have to do this, this, this, this, she”

want to be, you know, if you want to be a scientist, you have to do this, this, 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 of 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 endorse my artistic side. I want to endorse, you know, all these different goals. They, 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

So you're mentioning balancing work and non-work. I think this is fundamental, but when we think about what is success, we go back to that single goal-mind, right, that single goal-mode. And

“one of the things, again, I think that's why people prefer abstinence over moderation. They think”

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 other. 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, that tension between and do I pursue the one that's really important versus do I spread my effort among the many? Certainly in the United States, we love to

revere the examples of extreme performance, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, amazing gymnasts,

“Yoyo Ma, like all these people, but if you talk to them, or people from the Tier 1 operations”

community, they'll tell you there was very little balance and certainly what they were ascending the latter. 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 to extreme after I find it very selfish on the part of the public to, you know, like, revere these people, glean all the rewards of the incredible, you know,

photos of Jordan dunking in the dynasties and all that and then you're like, oh, well, he was, you know, compulsively competitive or something like that. Like, well, you want, like, I mean, obviously you did it for himself, hopefully more than yet for the adoration. But, you know, imbalance also brings extremes. I, you know, we're talking about training a dog, right? I mean, you can get these dogs that can do extreme things well beyond what their, their breed represents.

But that dog is not going to be like other dogs. It's 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 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. 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, you know, so sort of like, do I want to be a specialist or a journalist? 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 decisions. So, you know, 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, you know, 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, I think there's not much research on this. And I think that's what's really interesting to me about. We can have this conversation as a scientist. I'm a little frustrated that the science hasn't quite got cut up to these insights that we're talking about.

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. When it cuts text comes through a different phone. So, it's an 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 said, "Okay, that's Rob's" 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 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

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 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.

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-fokes, cup stackers are doing this for the

attention or they're doing it for themselves. And I would say 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 were exclusively externally motivated. Research suggests that yourself 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 a yell at fishbock has done and Caitlin willy as well, where they've shown that, you know, 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, right?

That's what I'd need 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 like 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 sort of like rule-imposed, this is what you're supposed to do. I'm not convinced that that's necessary 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 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 we have a horrible practice or I just couldn't do something and what kept me going wasn't the some desire to be better or some desire. It was really just the intrinsic love of

the thing itself, the intrinsic love of the process that kept me in the game when things were the hardest. So if I were to give advice to anyone about how best to cultivate self-control and

cultivate this ability to do hard things, it would first be make sure the thing that you were trying

to do that 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 massacistic, but I 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.”

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visit functionhealth.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. You perfectly queued up 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 being a scientist and and being in labs and and running a lab,

I can't say that people fall out into two bins or two, you know, distributions on this, but they're do seem to be people who, for whatever reason, instead of trying to correlate it

“with upbringing or something like, did they grow up on a farm or 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're doing them, they might be interesting,

they're like washing covers, acid washing covers slips, and, you know, and like, allocating antibodies. Like, 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 that technician could do it for you and you already know how to do it, you know, there are certain people who are like, can't to 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 shopwood 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 are very plug and chug about, other things I'm like, really, like, how to do 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 latter, the more low-level crap they give you to do, in addition to everything else. Actually, 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 somewhere 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 MDNEP, he 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 his 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 in terms of, for me, you just have to like scrub 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. 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 it's about its mundane and its trivial task as I could actually find. But, you know, the idea of ikigai is that sort of thinking about it. If that is your purpose, if that's your piece of the pie, like your part of this giant system, and this is the important cog that you fill,

people, it actually enhances well-being. They'll do it until they're like 90 years old. They'll still be doing it because 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 we”

a lot of traditions have rituals that people engage in and they engage in a perfunctory manner.

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 a Sunni 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 if we all go to a football game,

and we're all cheering at the same time, or we're going to a concert, and we're all singing Taylor Swift together, like, whatever your singer of choice might be, that they're 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 impusing 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, you're supposed to bow in in a certain way. And in some senses, it's like, "Oh, there's a stupid set of traditions." And again, you could just go through in 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 us and the people that came

to be. After us, again, as I mentioned, social belonging is one of the most powerful human

motivations. If we can create these bonds through these simple, realistic rituals, you know, those, 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, you know, this, this P.I 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, you know, perhaps it was a way of sort of saying, like, "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. Yeah, I remember thinking back then,”

like, "What a badass." The guy also he and his co-worker, Emmanuel Minion, eventually found the gene of the erect, it's in their Rex and Hype of Creighton system, which has all these implications for hunger regulation, as implications for the treatment of OBC. Like, 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 a morning and evening sunlight in my eyes would set my circadian rhythm, because the guy used to work, like, a heroic hours. He was sleeping, like, four, five hours and night, and he was like, "You just have to stay on a circadian schedule." Turns out you need a

little more sleep than that, 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, 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 tool seemed 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 Sam or Hottar is a scientist, and he talked about how

he was very, very overweight, and 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 for the past, linking the present to that end to a future concept. What we're talking about is, 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 it or this, like, "Oh, some people don't eat when they get anxious, but a lot of people just

become anxious eaters," or, you know, for people in 12-step for alcohol, it's like never be, like,

“what is it, like, angry, tired, etc, for these very reasons? I think what you're saying is”

fundamental to understanding self-control, self-control fails when we are not able to move in distance, right? So, 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. And so, many of the most effective strategies

or psychologically distancing myself, finding ways to either to activate the mindset that I have

when the thing is distance, 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, you know, 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. And so, in my lab, we sort of stress knowing your why's as one way to extricate yourself psychologically from the situation that you're

currently in. Now, you mentioned things like, you know, being drunk or being angry or being tired, it is 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. And, you know, strong emotional states, being, you 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 sort of, there's like, chapter state towards being very concrete and thinking about how, and which, again, brings us actually proximal to the temptation. So, I'm not sure that it's necessarily harder to do in a sense that, like, it's that much more effort in all else is being equal. It's just that the situation has put us in a situation where it's a lot easier, think, proximally than think distantly. So, 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 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, right? So, I might say,

what does Ken want to do in the 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, you know, what would Jesus do, for example? He did this with kids. It's Angela Docworth and Rachel Carlson at the University of Minnesota. They brought kids in, and in one condition,

they just had them do a task that requires self-control as they normally would, but in the experimental condition, they, for the boys, they gave them very, sorry, 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 cape and cow. And then they were simply asked, as you do this task, we want

“you to ask the question, what would that character do? So, a boy might say, what would Batman do?”

And 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. These search has suggested that the simulation of someone else's mind. In order to simulate 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. 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, you know, when you are tired and drunk and mad and everything else, one way, if you can't think about your wise 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. 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, you know, in the 2000s, you would go into an office or a school and there'd be these pictures,

it would be like, you know, inspiration when, you know, the moment meets the opportunity and then it'd be like a sunrise or something. And like, and I'm not trying to make light of those better those than like a bunch of other things. But, 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

“like the safe concepts. That's what I have struggling. But like, what is the value of telling oneself, like,”

Andrew, you got this? Or telling someone else, like, I'm gonna 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

potent tool? And I have a feeling you're going to say all of them. I think they could all have

“their place. But as I mentioned before, I think different, 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 you're positive self-talk, you literally feel better if it's negative self-talk if you're worse, 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 distance and strategy, one distancing strategies 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 like 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 the neighbor spawn in a way that makes it seem like you are on the same wavelength. That creates an experience known as share-veality. People put a special premium in truth value to those interchanges then when

you don't have that. So let me just give you an example. And a lot of college campuses today, you will 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 sure

“or how effective those are. I think there are 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're 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 the self-control by saying, well, if, you know, so you talk that 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 then 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, you know, I'm going to do this and they're like, uh-huh, 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 I by writing it, my thoughts are becoming real and have more power over, um, those are much more like good to have an effect. Again, this is all pure speculation,

but I think it fits what we know about psychology. That's incredible. I'm remembering a recent

conversation where, you know, we're just kind of playing with the idea with someone, you know, like it's the old, uh, you know, riddle if a tree falls in the woods, you know, and no one's there to, uh, 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 can 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. Um, this can go in multiple directions. I'm reminded of, uh, just very brief story. I have a good friend. His name is Ken Ride out. He's one of these incredible parents and his husband to his wife, and he comes from a really hard scrabble 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, the, I think it was like the African, it was like the goby desert. I think it's what it was. And he's super competitive with himself and everyone else, but he, 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, man, or 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, and I, any one, of course, in Ken Ride out typical fashion. Uh, he's amazing guy. He has a book out that's like really, it's super

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 Ride out gets tired. But there's something about externalizing seeing that validated that makes it more true to ourselves. And that's a kind of, uh, a competitive example. But there are 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 possibly certainly experienced that in a non-competitive arena. So, something there, I guess that's a note to the, uh, to the person or people hearing somebody's goal or wish, um, to like tune in, because those are

potent moments or potentially potent moments. I'm always struck that, you know, are the impact

that we have on our students, especially our graduate students and stuff. Um, they're not the things I think they're going to be, they always remember these side conversations where, you know, 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 verified some of these thoughts had an incredibly uplifting. As you say,

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, have a, have a, have a truth to them. They could be incredibly damaging. Um, 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 share of 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 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, right? So yeah, now it's not me. It's words on the page and that brings another level of power that didn't have and they're just floating. So again, I think all of these strategies that you're talking about self-talk, writing, talking to other people. I think they're all, they can all be powerful

in the right way for the right person, but they may also exist on a continuum of potential potency, both good and bad. One of my about has sort of gets into the realm of like, performance, but I could imagine it being used for any number of things. You know, 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 like 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. I hear them and I tell of for it back. You know, is it possible to build these anchors? You know, like like have a song or something 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 chalk 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 around this?

Not that I'm aware of. The best work that I can link to this is work that I know is it's done on nostalgia. And nostalgia is traditionally portrayed in most media, something really negative. It's like a negative bittersweet state. But there research and psychology suggests that nostalgia actually has a very functional 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

I might feel like I don't really know myself. I don't know who I am. And nostalgia is a way as you meant use 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 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 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 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 that 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.

are in the first place, right? 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 and 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?”

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 intrins-- 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 outcome's being they observed that some of these kids drew last or gave up drawing,

because the conclusion that was that these kids now were doing it for the rewards as opposed to the activity itself. Did those results hold up over time? 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, right? So being paid for your job is something that you-- is an extrinsic reward, is an extrinsic

reward for something that you may or may not be intrinsically interested in. And so the 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 enjoyed playing with markers, and then all of a sudden, in one condition,

they were said, 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, right? And where you saw intrinsic-- 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. So they were-- does 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 at that confusion might be less likely to happen than if I'm not as clear about what I 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's not can't be true. I think there are multiple theories about how intrinsic motivation works and I'm drawing for those expert readers experts listeners from the attributional approach.

“And what matters here is the conclusions one draws from one's actions. And why am I doing this?”

As that, depending on how I answer that, we'll dictate how my motivation flows. If I'm doing it because I'm trying to get the extras like rewards then it becomes extras like I 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. Interesting. And as adults, we can also connect dots and expand our wise, you know, say, well,

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 chairman 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 going to make far less money than you deserve for most of your career."”

And then you're going to make far more money than you deserve 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 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 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

world, I think it can create a lot of dissonance, like 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 chopwood carry-water notion and the EKI. Is that he pronounced it?”

EKI. EKI, 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 and 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 along. 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 you were doing in the early to maybe mid portions of your career when you were climbing the wrongs. It's almost like a mental

muscle. Yeah, it seems to me a little bit like, I guess I mentioned before like staying connected to the process, to the way that 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 talk to people, one who is anciently motivated and one who's

“extranely motivated, you have to pay the extranely motivated person a lot more money to do the same”

job than the person who's anciently motivated, but it begs a lot of questions about fairness. Should you really be paying two people different 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, this is always as concerned that they could be exploited, because we know,

because they derive some value from the work itself. 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. 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, in 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, you know, looked at. 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 kind of, which is sword fighting. I've never actually thought about this question, so the question that you've asked is, is it really tough 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 the 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 stereotypes that they work all the time,

so maybe they have just the same problems that we do. But from the outsiders perspective, at least the notion of mindfulness suggests that there are times where we need to not be so gold-directed and so driven, but instead just enjoy the moment. But it's not even enjoy the moment 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 maybe perhaps it's not quite answering your question.

this notion of lobby society that there's beauty and decay and non-perfection. And again,

“I think that's an idea that can be formed in the western cultural space where”

we think about our landscaping or we think about what we want, the way that we dress 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 what not. We always, you're mentioning word optimization before that.

We things have to be perfect where isn't in Japanese culture, there's a beauty in the imperfection. In fact, you want you actually intentionally build in the imperfections that have beauty. 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 really interesting idea that might sort of explain some of the lack of happiness that we're 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 down stream. And I wonder if that too might be an interesting idea worth exploring. It's interesting to think about your answer in the context of the mundane or the chopwood carry-water type, think plug-in chug, whatever people want to call it, because they're in seems to be, at least part,

if not all of the operations that we're applying to the big lofty goals just on repeat with this thing that this concept, like I'm going for this big whatever trophy degree, founding a company, building this like, and 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 that they thought they could scripted out according to their family album from the past. I don't wish that, you know, these hardships on anyone and yet, they're kind of like the stuff that make life great too in a weird way. Yeah, that brings us back to the idea of Wattbe Saudi, like beauty in the imperfection, beauty in the decay, and yeah, like we can embrace what is not perfect, which seems, you know,

just sort of thinking about my own life, like, wow, in some sense, that's totally foreign, you know, you're taking pictures and it has to be the perfect picture, you're, you're saying this perfect family, like 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 like, other like being, giving some degrees

“of freedom in that and finding meaning in that, I think that's a really interesting idea.”

Yeah, 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 everyone's in a while, someone will come along and very authentically, like confess a failure or come along and, and just, you know, express a hardship that they're going through, or a win that they, 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, there's a natural kind of magnetism to these, like, just human elements. So I

appreciate you being willing to take that answer to answer that question, excuse me, on the fly, because, you know, it's not within your, your PubMed profile, but you're, I do believe that the, the people we are, comes to the science we do, and, and numerous times throughout today's discussion, I've detected these elements of, like, who you are in this, and it's impossible to tell you. Absolutely. So, so thank you for the consideration. And as a final question,

I'm actually just really curious what you want to do now. Like, 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, you're very focused on it, and we're very grateful that you're doing this work. But, you know, like, what, what, where's your, what do you most excited about right now? 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, you don't get your goal

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. And I think one of these,

“why we haven't studied it 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 sort of embracing the pursuit of the many. To the extent that we have, it's usually like two goals, so like work-life balance will look at how people navigate those, but as I mentioned before, we have more than two goals in 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? And then, and related to that is sort of fitting goals into the broader constellation of all the things that we want, like 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 like the wise of a particular, like when you think about your goals, the broader motivations of what motive is. How did that come to be? Like, did our system just know that these things were aligned and now retrospectively we're making the connections, or just making the connections have an important impact. So not just multiple goals, but also levels of goals and how they connect to more fundamental motives and how

“we know that what a goal is right for us, I think fundamental requires understanding whether they resonate”

with these broader motives that we had. And again, as you mentioned, also like getting things aligned, like that alignment idea. And 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 do we know it was the right thing to do?

Like there's no textbook, there's no wiring, there's so 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 nephological development, but I think those are the big questions I'd like to see us address. Awesome. Awesome. I look forward to seeing what you and your colleagues discover next. And 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 web page 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 it working bed 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 setting these things in isolation is served as 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 and considering yes there are answers, they vary. You need a dynamic tool box 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. Really honored to be here. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Cantaro 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

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