Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita

0:00 In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind their 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 I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet." That doesn't have much magic to it. But, if instead I'm saying things like, "I need to do this for my family. I want to look good for my children's wedding photos." Or, you know, "My children are looking at me. I want to be a good example." Or all these other kinds of reasons that you might these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter, or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake. And we think it's cuz it's giving people meaning. If these are higher order

0:46 things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools [music] 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

1:31 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

2:17 data say about the specific steps that are most effective to both initiate and reach short and long-term goals. We also talk about how to get out of impulsive states and states of procrastination. What the data say about how to do that. Today's episode is really focused on science and more importantly practical takeaways, several of which I plan to incorporate into my own life. I only wish I had this knowledge when I was younger, but now thanks to Dr. Fujita coming on the podcast, people of all ages can make great use of the information and data from his studies. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

3:05 And now for 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, you know, symbol of whether willpower is somehow innate or whether it's something

3:52 that can really be cultivated. So, if you would, uh what is the marshmallow experiment? >> So, the marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments that was conducted by Walter Mischel uh 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 or basically hold out and not eat [snorts] the one, and it was still there when the experimenter came back, they could get two marshmallows. So, this is essentially [snorts] a self-control problem because you have a smaller,

4:38 sooner reward, and you're sort of trading that off with a larger, later reward. And the key dependent variable here was how long the child could wait. Now, the dirty little secret about the marshmallow experiments is that no child waited the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was gone, but what you could do is you could basically, as soon as the door closed, you would start the timer, and then the the amount and and you were just basically looking to see how long the children would wait. That was interpreted as the child's delay of gratification ability or the otherwise self-control. Now, there were a series of experiments that we can talk about. Um they used these experiments to learn a lot about the different tactics and skill uh tricks and tools that kids could learn to use to improve their delay of gratification, but that's not what

5:23 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 uh one marshmallow, and then they they they saw to what extent it was correlated with important life outcomes like academic achievement, career success, income, uh even things like incarceration, social relationships, and what they found was shocking. The longer children could wait before eating the single marshmallow, the more likely uh they were to have to to do well in school, more likely make more money, have more friends, have better physical and mental health, uh and also have lower incarceration uh and problematic behave social behavior reports.

6:11 Uh and so this got people really excited about self-control because it was like it it suggested 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. Um so, in the original experiments, there were 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, right? It's perfectly rational just to go ahead and grab the one if you don't trust the experimenter's actually going to bring you two. Um so, there have been experiments in which the experimenter

6:57 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 uh 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 instructions? For instance, if parents say, "Listen, no electronic devices until after dinner and you've done your homework." and then the kids see their parent look at their phone, uh does that reduce trust in the parents' advice? I don't know if it reduces the trust in

7:43 the parents' advice, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling. Uh the most famous experiment of this, they brought in a blow-up doll, which they it was a clown, uh and it was referred to as Bobo. Uh and kids either watched the video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo, and then we're allowed [snorts] to play with Bobo themselves. And those that watched the the adult punch Bobo were more likely to punch Bobo themselves. So, this suggests that children are very observant for own behavior. And so, if you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to learn. So, I don't know that it's been done specific on self-control. It may have. Um but certainly in 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

8:28 experiments, but they've received a lot of criticism over the years. As have many paradigm-shifting areas of psychology, right? I I mean, I or or neuroscience. You know, I think it's uh important for everyone to know that the moment that there's sort of a 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 the marshmallow experiment, I've heard a lot of criticism. It wasn't as predictive as we thought. Maybe the experimenters were um sort of bi- biasing the data collection. What are the valid criticisms in your view? And what are the criticisms of the

9:15 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 4 years old and then a bunch of different life outcomes at adolescence. 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

10:03 like academic achievement and problematic behavior, the answer was yes. It seemed to replicate. But then the the the researchers controlled for things like social economic status, which is one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies because Stanford children, or at least the children that were going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were being conducted, were not your average American family. Mostly well-to-do. And this matters. And so when the researchers they had like 30 or 40 other covariables that they were controlling for. When they controlled for all these other variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes that was supposed to. And so this paper got a lot of attention for basically saying, "Look, there's this The marshmallow tests are bunk."

10:50 Now, this has been controversial because the question is was that statistical adjustment appropriate and are we interpreting that statistical adjustment correctly? Um there have been other experimenters other researchers who have come along. One of them is named Yuuko Muna- Kata and her team. They took the same data set and they reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative. So, rather than 30 throwing in 30 covariates, they put in theory-driven covariates, ones that made sense from what we know already about research as opposed to like throwing in the kitchen sink. Um 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 that that failure to replicate the

11:37 original marshmallow test, it 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 economic status is that kids who grow up in high SES environments, they're very stable, they're very predictable. So, when you wait, you are more likely to get the larger later reward. But, if you come from a lower SES family, where rewards come and go, 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

12:22 not as indi- indicative for them. So, all of these things have to be carefully controlled for, and they were part of the original experiments. Again, not really well articulated. To the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger later reward, there does seem to be some predictive ability of this test. Now, let me just say as a self-control researcher my- myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow test is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. And that 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's that self-control predicts life life outcomes. There've been many, many other ways of testing this hypothesis, so I

13:08 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, refer- goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew. Is it an innate talent, or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments, Walter Mischel and his team were teaching children the strategies of self-control. 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 cuz they think that's how I'm going to motivate myself. Like if I

13:53 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, this basically you can create a written test where you can ask or a verbal test where you can ask children what do you think you should do in order to to wait longer, and research shows that children who Well, let me let me let me be more careful. Research shows that there are age-related differences. So, at 3 year old they don't know anything, but at 5 year old they've learned. And then later on at 13 years old, those children who correctly understand the quote-unquote rules of self-control have less problematic behavior. So, Walter Mischel and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems, and

14:39 those that understood the rules that the the tricks that work and the tricks that don't work were less likely to have behavioral problems uh 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 suggests that rather than being something that we're born with, we can get better. We can grow. We can we can improve over time. And I think this is a really important lesson that often gets overlooked with these studies. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the bronze bar, has 20 g of protein, only 150 calories, and 0 g of sugar. I have to say these are the best tasting protein bars I've

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16:10 davidprotein.com/huberman. Right now, David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. You can also find David on Amazon or in stores such as Target, Walmart, and Kroger. Again, to get the fifth carton for free, go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Lingo. One of the most important factors in your short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage glucose over time. Glucose directly impacts our brain function, mood, and energy. You want your glucose relatively stable across the day without big peaks or valleys. This is why I use the continuous glucose monitor and app from Lingo by Abbott. Lingo provides minute-by-minute glucose data directly within the app showing you how your glucose responds to food, exercise, and

16:56 stress. This information can help you make smarter choices to support your health both now and in the long term. The CDC estimates that more than one in three American adults has pre-diabetes and that many of these people don't know they're living with pre-diabetes. Visibility about how your diet and activity affect your glucose can be the first step toward informed conversations with your doctor and making smarter daily choices. If you'd like to try Lingo, Lingo is offering Huberman Lab listeners in the US and UK 10% off a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com/huberman for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hellolingo.com/huberman. I'm smiling as you describe the strategies these children take because I've seen some of the videos and we'll provide a link to those in the show note captions. They're adorable and in many

17:43 ways they reflect the behavior of adults but in a much purer form. Uh I recall one where I think it was a young boy where he's like leaning into the marshmallow and he's and he's kind of doing like a yum yum yum yum yum like a like acting as if it but he's not letting himself do it and then 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 uh currently training a puppy, I can tell you that the weight with placing food or a treat in front of the puppy and getting that what neuroscientists call top-down inhibition, the the suppression of impulse, um getting that trained up is so interesting because talking about a dog now but um my new uh you know bulldog mastiff puppy, he will intentionally look away from the food as a way to he's so tempted to eat it. So, I'll say look at me, that

18:30 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. Agreed. And I remember one kid spinning around in his chair. >> Agreed. 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 sit rigidly and prevent movement whether or not they're more effective in suppressing impulsive behavior. I mean, in cultures um many cultures you have things like worry beads to to sort of dispel anxiety. Some people when they get stressed will go for a walk or a run and it does seem to work. It's almost like that there's a revving of the of

19:17 the engine that drives movement. We could talk neural 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 what as I was taught as a camp counselor for young kids, be a channel not a dam because trying to get a bunch of young young kids to sit still is pretty tough. What you're saying is really interesting. So let me copy out everything I'm about to say with by saying this is all speculation. I personally don't know of research studies that look specifically at movement but everything that you're saying makes total sense to me because the root the Latin root for the word motivation is to move. Right? So the I 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

20:03 particular behavior, being able to to act would be I mean it is a actually channeling my energy towards doing something. I mean there are experiments that I can tell you a little bit about Andrew where, you know, to try to train self-control, they will have people um uh 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 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

20:50 okay, the 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 um does seem to improve self-control afterwards. Again, the question is I I um you know, it's not quite what you're talking about in terms of actual movement. Um I think there's also some research. Again, this is I'm not I'm not exactly sure, but there's some research suggest that like if you fidget, you you might learn better um 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

21:38 I I mean, I think that's a truism, 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, right? Um because it's a process. The learning to recognize that the 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, "Ah, we don't want to do it." Or we we or we're afraid to do something and and we have to push ourselves to do it. That's a process that translates across things. Um sure, I 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,

22:23 getting a workout in can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, "Hey, you know what? By 8:00 a.m., I did 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, 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 neural circuits, it could be psychological,

23:08 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 immediately come to mind with what you just said. The idea that, you know, you can learn by doing hard 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 cuz 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 my self-esteem goes up and 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 your 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.

23:54 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. >> [snorts] >> There was a big um boom of experiments um in the 2000s uh 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. 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 um much like the Walter Mischel study, have come under come under attack for whether or not they can replicate. And the conclusions are a bit mixed. There's

24:40 some analyses, they're called multi-lab experiments where a whole bunch of labs get together and they try to see if they can replicate something. And that way you get rid of experimenter bias. There's some multi-lab replications that have tried to replicate this effect. So, what you do in the lab is you do one hard task that would 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 multi-lab experiment did not show that it was that it worked, and another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work was led by people who conducted this research in the first place, so it was seen as very damning. 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 lab. Could you

25:26 just for clarity's 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. Okay, so this requires a lot of effort, requires a lot of self-control to Left-handers out there are like, >> That's right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, opposite hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm just teasing. I'm just teasing. Then then we ask you to you know, do some other really difficult task, like some task that requires inhibition. So, the one example is the Stroop 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.

26:12 This requires inhibition, requires you to stop your behavior, and research suggests that if you did the non-dominant handwriting first, and then you did the Stroop task, that >> [snorts] >> your Stroop 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 in your responses at the Stroop task. That's what's known as the depletion effect, right? Cuz I got tired, and so therefore my self-control is worse until it recharges. So, one of these multi-lab experiments, they tried something like this using different tasks, but you have given you a 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,

26:57 they were able to get the depletion effect. So, there's a little bit of just mixed evidence and it's not clear whether depletion really is a thing. Now, let me say as a researcher myself, I'm in this really uncomfortable position where I actually think depletion is a real phenomenon cuz I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet, I think the way that we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good because much like the Walter Mischel studies, I don't think the original authors were very good at trying to explain what exactly you need. What are the implicit decisions that they're making to set up this experiment that makes it work. There have been some accusations of like cheating and monkeying with the data. I I 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.

27:42 We do know that people believe that self-control is depletable or at least willpower is depletable and the more you believe it, the more you show these patterns. So, there's amazing work by Veronica 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 lay beliefs about willpower might really play a key role in whether doing hard things makes you tired or whether doing hard things recharges you. Well, I'm going to stamp

28:29 the belief into my mind that doing hard things makes other hard things easier because I do believe in the belief effects that you describe and that my colleague Ali Crum at Stanford has described for a number of different categories of 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, uh but they're told to pay attention to

29:14 their internal process. Like, um can they feel their stress go up and then go down? Um maybe they learn to do some long exhale breathing to lower their autonomic tone, which we know, you know, slows heart rate, etc. 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 communities and other special operation communities on this podcast is this notion that maybe it doesn't matter so much whether it's cold water or it's exercise or it's um matrix math. It The point is that you have to get into that place of friction

30:00 and then recognize something about where and how your mind and body go and start to work with that. And I think that cuz that's getting to a deeper layer of willpower and tenacity that you know, no one thing um can can really we can say is like the best tool. Like, for instance, you're a you're a well-trained musician. Um having been a failed musician, I suppose I'm still a failed musician. I too am a failed musician. >> you that not hearing the um the the notes come out of the instrument that one would want to hear and that that you're told should come out of the instrument is incredibly frustrating. I think it's every bit, if not more frustrating, than the inability to, uh you know, do something physical. So, it's not really about what we're doing, is it? It's really about being able to

30:46 tolerate that friction, that frustration. Can people learn to recognize that state and push through that state and therefore translate it across everything from sport to instruments to school to parenting to whatever. I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts which I'm going to try to get out in a systematic and organized way. 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 there there it probably can be trained and usually through exposure, but again, I'm not an expert in this area. What I can speak to with respect specifically to willpower is that

31:32 willpower training paradigms have shown to shown very limited success. So, for example, if again, imagine you're doing the Stroop task and you're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of these trials. Another training exercise is you literally go home and you practice doing everything with your non-dominant hand as opposed to using your dominant hand. So, these willpower exercises, you do them for a week and you come back. Some experiments have suggested that they do in fact improve self-control, others say that they don't and on average reviews of this literature have suggested that the effect is much smaller than you might hope despite all the work that you put in and it's very variable. So, some people will see some gains, but they'll be small and 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.

32:17 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 Mischel 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 you 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 It's just the picture. Um all of these different behavioral and psychological strategies

33:03 that children were using These enhance self-control without leveraging willpower. At this point, you could ask what is willpower? And there it's not actually clear in psychology what that actually means, but most people understand willpower to be the effortful inhibition or suppression of impulsive tendencies. So, there's a yummy piece of cake in front of me and I'm really tempted to eat it. Willpower or inhibition is the active fighting of that temptation. Telling myself, "Don't think about it. Don't give in. Don't do something that." I think this is sort of the paradigmatic sort of version of of of self-control in which you use your mental muscles to push down those ideas. Those trainings are the ones I was telling are not very effective.

33:50 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 [snorts] these other strategies, behavioral and psychological strategies or tools, as we might refer to them, those can be taught and those can in fact improve your self-control. So, whether or not self-control is something that you can learn to get better at, I think the answer there is yes. Whether willpower is something that you can get better at, there I am not so sure. I have this kind of running theory in my mind, which is anchored in neuroscience. We know that areas of the brain

34:36 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 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, etc. that they're kind of like switches. It's like they make you want to eat. They make you want to mate. They make you want to vomit. They make any number of things. These are hypothalamic, these are deep limbic and hypothalamic circuitry. And I have this kind of what very crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or it comes to aspirational behaviors like motivating to do something hard over time that

35:23 when we find ourselves at a friction point, like we don't want to do something we should or we're having a hard time resisting something that we shouldn't that we have to go a layer deeper into the limbic system and hypothalamus. Like we just have to come up with contingencies that are much grosser than the than the like like like you said, like a cockroach on a on a marshmallow. It's like sugar's good, we have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary things, fatty things, yum. What is a like hardwired? So you So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit, right? We We don't want to get up and go to class cuz we're exhausted and fatigue is real. Fatigue is real. Shuts down our forebrain, so the circuits are impaired. Our hypothalamus is driving us to like go back to sleep. But we have to think about the fear of

36:08 showing up in class for an exam and not knowing, you know, it's the it's the nightmare everybody's had at least once, right? So I feel like the 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 and I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between sort of fear and love if you will to put it broadly to allow us to navigate all sorts of circumstances. But I love the idea that chasing love chasing desire all these great things but there are times when we have to be like oh no I got to imagine the cockroach or else this whole I'll go back to sleep. I'll hit the snooze button. I think what you're saying Andrew is something super profound. More profound

36:54 than you might think. So for years self-control researchers have assumed that the secret to self-control is actually doing exactly the opposite of what you suggested which is turning off the hot system but because they argue that these limbic systems these hot systems these more quote unquote animalistic systems are the things that make the temptations so powerful and so by activating those systems all we're doing is we're up regulating the temptation impulses. And so for years and and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model for example and many many others they talked about making your cognitions cooler. In other words shutting down the emotional system and thinking very coolly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice. I think what's profound about you're

37:39 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. Right? And as you said the example would be like there's a piece of chocolate cake and I imagine a cockroach crawling across it. There's not actually very much research on that. The most most of the dominant models in self-control really talk about cooling your cognitions. You're you're told not to fight fire with fire that you need to be in a calm and 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 whys. Um, you know, the purposes behind their

38:25 decisions, the broader purposes behind their what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation. So, if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if I only think about cake-related things, that could be really difficult. But if instead I ask myself, like and and even if you said, "Oh, I'm I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet." That doesn't have much magic to it. It's like 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 for my children's wedding photos or, you know, 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 fitter, or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that

39:11 increases the odds that people will avoid the the cake. And we think it's cuz it's giving people meaning. It's infusing the moment, as you say, fighting fire like fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love. Like these are these are higher-order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. What you're highlighting is it 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, um, Caitlin Woolley, they did some experiments in which they had people think about it's usually when you think about self-control, you think about the short-term or long-term gains. They instead had people think about the short-term losses of indulging. So, what are some of the things like what's the

39:57 like think about the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake, right? So, and they showed 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 found that that's also very effective for self-control. So your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say the status quo in self-control research. But for that reason, I'm super excited because my own work is starting to challenge that idea as is as is Paul Stillman and Caitlin Woolley's that we might be able to use the limbic system. We might be able to use our hot reactions. We We don't have to assume that they're going to be bad but or they're going to they're going to

40:44 pre- predispose us to indulgence but 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 you're doing that work. Um you know, we had David Goggins on this podcast. David author of Can't Hurt Me um and famed for doing hard things all day long. I 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 cuz that's what that means to me. He was literally running to the airport. We're 16 miles away from San Jose Airport and he was he went in the back changing and like ran to the airport with his luggage. So he's always been that way at least uh

41:30 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 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 he basically flagellates himself into into doing these things and any attempt to suggest to him like, "Oh, maybe you could take like a more soft gloves approach." Like he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him. He's actually right now um I think he went back to the military. He's also in paramedic school. I think he's he's probably becoming a physician, too. I mean, he's a 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

42:17 it's pathological. I don't believe it is cuz it clearly works for him and the alternative was far worse. He'll tell you that as well. We could even talk about eating disorders, right? Anytime we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to eat cake, you know, there's going to be a subset of people out there that are saying, "Oh, so you know, what you're talk talking about is 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,

43:04 both bad and good. Is that right? Should we have all of those in our toolkit? >> I completely agree with you. And I love the fact that you used the word toolkit. Um my colleague Ethan Kross and I, we wrote a paper in 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 you're if you're 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 uh

43:51 explicitly um embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people. So if you're the kind of person who's very act reactant, someone who says, "No, I can do it." Then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you because you're going to react to it and say, "No, I'm going to do it." But, if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say, and you incorporate their perspectives, and they're saying bad things about you, well, then that's probably going to have a demotivating effect, right? So, again, the strategy that works so well for one individual may not work for another. >> [snorts] >> 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 have all I have a litany of reasons why I

44:37 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 is a very effective strategy in those kinds of situations. You imagine someone that you really admire, or you imagine someone who looks up to you, and you 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 ex- 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

45:22 just want to grit my teeth and get it done. And so, willpower might be a better strategy. So, I think we have to explore the entirety of the self-control toolbox. We have to be 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

46:08 self-control, they just say, "Oh, I'm a terrible person. I'm never going to get this. I just have bad self-control, bad willpower." But instead, the learning approach, the toolbox approach just says, "Okay, that tool didn't work this time." And failure represents an opportunity for self-growth and exploration and discovery, which makes it a lot more positively toned as opposed to wow, I really screwed up. I'm a terrible person. My goal is forever gone. And I think that's a really important implication of understanding self-control not as an innate skill, but something that you grow and cultivate over time with things that you learn. 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

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48:28 Is motivation something that needs warming up? I I've long chuckled at the fact that we understand that you need to warm up before exercise. Even it's running, you got to jog a little bit before you you you sprint. Um certainly we need warm-up sets before we do our work sets. Everyone understands this. But for some reason, I think people assume that focus and doing hard things mentally um or creatively should be like a step function where you're like, "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. I mean, and you can drop into a groove. I mean, I think the the really interesting research on both the hypothalamus but also these these higher brain states, if you will, that the models say that

49:15 they're sort of like an an attractor uh model where, you know, you sort like your your brain state is sort of like a ball bearing on a flat surface that's kind of moving around, and the ball bearing's moving and then over time it becomes more and more concave, and eventually focus you drop into a groove, but that takes time. It takes reps. It takes the mind picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, you know what, I just got to get this thing out of the room. The that focus isn't just like a switch. Motivation isn't just like a switch. And I don't think people really they 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 uh more quickly or more effectively, as well as move out of motivated states?

50:01 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. It We have to move from thing to 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 attracter states. Um in my own work, we don't have that kind of model, and we don't use the language of warming up. But we do know that there is a dynamic interplay between how you think about something and the motivation that you're experiencing. Right? So, if a workout is, you know, oh, another hour of pain, like we're not going to get super excited about it. But if instead you change your mindset about it, and and again, this is the power of work that Aliya Crum and uh folks who do growth

50:48 mindsets think about, if you change sort of the cognitive orientation you have towards it, a different set of motivations can get activated. So, if I say, it's not an hour of pain, but instead of me becoming the better me, that set of cognitions, that set of thoughts, activates a different set of motives that comes to bear and and can then be applied to the task at 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

51:35 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 from motivation science is an orientation towards um nurturance and advancement, moving forward gains versus an orientation towards safety and security, preventing losses. And there's been some speculation that the And there's been some research to support this that having the right kind of motivation for the right kind of tasks enhances performance. So, if I'm playing offense, right? There's always There's always that notion that you don't want to play not to lose. You want to play to win. Right? And that's particularly true of offense. So, in offense, you want to be about advancement, promotion, gains.

52:21 But when you're on defense, right? 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 orient uh 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

53:07 motivation for the task at hand, you'll have enhanced performance. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because research that I conducted with my colleague Abigail Scholer and David Mealey, we've shown um that people have some insight into this. They know there are certain tasks that you're 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? Um Are are you going to be more in a sort of a uh uh uh again, uh security or advancement or security mindset, they can tell us that if I think this way, if I think about security or I think about advancement, I will do better on this task, which suggests that people have some insight into what not just the amount of

53:53 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 set 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 like Yerkes-Dodson rule, like the the U-shaped functions. You kind of want to be in the middle for ideal. You want to be amped up to be able to do the task at hand, but if you have too much, right, you might choke because it means so much to you that you just you just overthink things, right? So, there there might also be regulation not

54:39 just to maximize motivation, but the right type and at the right level for the task at hand. So, you can imagine your your colleague David Goggins going absolutely crazy at a daycare soccer you know, like some children's soccer game. That would be bad, right? So, you need to scale back motivation, find that sweet spot. So, I think there is a lot of this regulation that people kind of do intuitively. Some people probably do it better than others, 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 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

55:26 literature in cognitive psychology and it's called task switching, moving from one one set of tasks to the other and rapidly switching back and forth. There's something known as the switch cost. There's a sort of delay and a decrease in performance at the very point of switching because you're there's kind of an cognitive inertia. You're still operating under the old set and it takes some time to figure out how

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