Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita

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 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 or I want to be a good example or all these other kinds of reasons that you might these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier being fitter or whatever not eating the cake. We show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake and we think it's because it's giving people meaning. These are higher order things that I care about and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kentaro Fuja, 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 exttrinsic motivation. These are topics that are very misunderstood out there, but Dr. Fuja 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. Fuja coming on the podcast, people of all ages can make great use of the information and data from his studies. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Canaro Fujitta. Dr. Kentaro Fujitta, 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 and 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 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 Michelle 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 experimenttor was going to leave for a while, but if they could avoid eating the one or or basically hold out and not eat the one and it was still there when the experimentter came back, they could get two marshmallows. So, this is 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. 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 experimentter 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 otherwise self-control. Now, there were a series of experiments that we can talk about. um they use these experiments to learn a lot about the different tactics and ski uh 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 time. 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 to make more money, have more friends, have better physical and mental health, uh and also have lower incarceration uh and problematic behavior uh reports. Um 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. Other experimenters have shortened that time to 10 minutes and that's a little easier for children to do. Another really important thing about the marshmallow test is that the child has to trust the experimentter. If you don't trust the experimentter, why should you bother waiting, right? It's perfectly rational. just to go ahead and grab the one if you don't trust the experimentter is actually going to bring you two. Um, so there have been experiments in which the experimentter 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 it'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've done your homework." And then the kids see their parent looking at their phone. uh 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. Uh the most famous experiment of this, they brought in a blowup doll, which they clown uh and it was referred to as Bobo. Uh and kids either watched a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo. And then we're allowed to play with Bobo themselves. And those that watch, they'll punch the boowo. We're more likely to punch boowo themselves. So this suggests that children are very observant for our own behavior. And so if you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to learn. So I don't know that it's been done specifically 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 experiments, but they've received a lot of criticism over the years as have many paradigm shifting areas of psychology, right? I mean, 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 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 were not very good at articulating those for others to follow in kind of a recipe book. Mhm. 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 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 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 was 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 wellto-do and this matters and so when the researchers they had like 30 or 40 other coariant 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 tests are bunk. Now this has been controversial because the question is was that statistical adjustment appropriate and are we interpreting that statistical adjustment correctly. Um there have been other experimenters other researchers who have come along. One of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team. They took the same data set and they reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative. So rather than throwing in 30 coariantss, they put in theorydriven coariantss, 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. You know, some people have suggested that that that failure to replicate the 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 at 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 SCES 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 SCES 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 of these things have to be carefully controlled for and they were part of the original experiments. Again, not really well articulated. To the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger later reward, there does seem to be some predictive ability of this test. Now let me just say as a self-control researcher myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow tests is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. 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 that self-control predicts life outcomes. There have been many many other ways of testing this hypothesis. So I don't think we need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore. The most important thing about the marshmallow test that gets completely overlooked 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 Michelle and his team were teaching children the strategies of self-control. And when children learn them, their delayability got better. That is a really, really important lesson because it suggests that self-control isn't something innate. Instead, it's something that we learn over time. Let me just give you an example. So, one of the things that he taught children was, is it better to stare at the one marshmallow or close your eyes? Cover it up or close your eyes. Three-year-old children believe that it's better to stare at it because they think that's how I'm going to motivate myself. Like if I can see what I want, I'm going to be able to wait, right? I can see the one, I can imagine the second, I can wait longer. 5-year-olds learn that that's not going to work. And they learn to cover it up or close their eyes. In interestingly, this be 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 three-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 Michelle and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems. And those that understood the rules, the 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. 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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 like like acting but he's not letting himself do 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 uh 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 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. And 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 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 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 the engine uh 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 caveat everything I'm about to say with by saying it's all speculation. I personally don't know of research studies that look specifically at movement, but everything that you're saying makes total sense to me because the root, the Latin root for the word motivation is to move, right? So the motivation is supposed to be the energy force behind all of our movements. It impels action. So to me it makes sense that if I'm trying to motivate a particular behavior, being able to to act would be I mean it is essentially channeling my energy towards doing something. I mean, there are experiments that I can tell you a little bit about, Andrew, where, 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 to suggest 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 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, 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 not exactly sure, but there's some research suggests 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 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 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 the 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 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, 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, it's going to be much easier." While I acknowledge that can be true, I also acknowledge from my own experience that doing a bunch of hard things seems to exhaust some sort of mental andor 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? 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, 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 like by doing lots of hard things, you learn that you can do hard things and do other hard things. I 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 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. 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 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 and I have to wait in order for it to recharge before I can do 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 Michelle study have come under come under attack for whether or not they can replicate. And the conclusions are a 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 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 the lab. Could you uh just for clarity sake uh when you say it doesn't happen uh what specifically are you referring to? Let's say we have you um do a task where you have to write something down with your left hand. Okay. So this requires a lot of effort. It requires a lot of self-control to left-handers out there are like no opposite hand. Yeah. I just write in your non-dominant hand. Then then we ask you to uh you know do some other really difficult tasks 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. Um this requires inhibition. that 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 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? Because I got tired and so therefore my self-control is worse until it recharges. So one of these multilab experiments they try something like this using different tasks but I've given you a sort of an example of what kinds of experiments they run and they could not replicate the depletion effect. Another multilab experiment though smaller in scale and not by the original authors they were able to get the depletion effect. 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 because I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet, I think the way that we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good because much like the Walter 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 monkeying with the data. 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. 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. Though 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 the belief into my mind that doing hard things uh makes other hard things easier. Uh because I do believe in the belief effects um that you describe and that my colleague Ali Krum 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 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. The the point is that you have to get into that place of friction and then recognize something about where and how your mind and body go and start to work with that. And I think that because that's getting into 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 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. tell you that not hearing the um the the notes come out of the instrument that one would want to hear and that you're told should come out of the instrument is incredibly frustrating. I think it's every bit if not more frustrating than the inability to, you know, do something physical. So, it's not really about what we're doing, is it? It's really about being able to tolerate that friction, that frustration. Can people learn to recognize that state and push through that state and therefore translate it across everything from sport to instruments to school to parenting to whatever? I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts which I'm going to try to uh get out uh 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 um uh 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 um and usually through exposure, but again, I'm not an expert in this area. What I can speak to with respect specifically to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown to 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 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, right? 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 um that there's a picture frame around it. So, it's not real. It's just it's just a picture. Um 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 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 inhib inhibition is the active fighting of that temptation. Telling myself don't think about it. Don't give in. don't do something about. 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. 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 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 are involved in kind of more sophisticated uh processes where we can imagine oursel now think about our past think about our goals in the future kind of a high level strategy uh 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 uh want to vomit, they any number of things. These are hypothalamic. They're sort of deep limbic and hypothalamic circuitry. And I have this like very crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or it comes to aspirational behaviors like motivating to do something hard over time that when we find ourselves at a friction point like we don't want to do something we should or we're having a hard time resisting something that we shouldn't that we have to go a layer deeper into the lyic 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. That's like hardwired. So you So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit, right? We uh we don't want to get up and go to class because we're exhausted and fatigue is real. Fatigue is real. Shuts down our forebrain. So the circuits are impaired. our hypothalamus is driving us to like go back to sleep, but we have to think about the fear of showing up in class for an exam and not knowing, you know, 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 of 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 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, right? Because they argue that these liyic systems, these hot systems, these more quote unquote anim 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 and this is part of Walter Michelle'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 cooly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice. I think what's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire. So if this thing is pulling me, I'm going to find something that's going to push me away. Right. Um, 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 calm and collected state. The reason why I think what you're saying is true is that I have some other work looking at the other strategy which is you said finding love. So, in my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their wise, um, you know, the purposes behind their trying not to eat it, if I only think about cake related things, that could be really difficult. But if instead I asked 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 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 will avoid the the cake. And we think it's because it's giving people meaning. It's infusing the moment, as you say, fighting fire, like fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love. Like these are these are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. what you're highlighting is with your original example something a little bit different than that which is fighting fire by taking the positive and turning it into a negative and my PhD student Paul Stillman and a colleague of his um Caitlyn Woolly 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 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 refunks. 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. 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 Caitlyn Woolly's that we might be able to use the lyic system. We might be able to use our hot reactions. We don't have to assume that they're going to be bad, but or they're gonna they're going to pre predispose us to indulgence, but in 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. Um, and I'm so glad you you're doing that work. Um, you know, we had David Gogggins 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 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 was he went in the back changed and he like ran to the airport with his luggage. So, he's always been that way at least uh as long as I've known him. And I think one of the reasons David is such a shining example uh 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 flagagillates 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 um paramedic school. I think he's he's probably becoming a physician, too. I mean, he's 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, 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, bad, 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 use the word toolkit. Um my colleague Ethan Cross 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 your 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 spec uh 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 reactant, someone who says, "No, I can do it." then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you because you're going to react to it and say, "No, I'm going to do it." But if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say and you incorporate their perspectives and they're saying bad things about you, well then that's probably going to have a demotivating effect, right? So again, the strategy that works so well for one individual may not work for another. It may also be that certain self-control strategies work for certain contexts and not for others. So, for example, you know, for me, getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I have all I have litany of reasons why I don't want to do this today. And so, for me, the hardest part is just getting on the bike or starting to lift weights. You know, sometimes it's just putting on the workout clothes. The strategies I use for that, I usually tell myself like, you know, what would my heroes do in this situation? So, the quote unquote, what would Jesus do? I think it's a very effective strategy in those kinds of situations. You imagine someone that you really admire or you imagine someone who looks up to you and you 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 toward the end when I'm like just pumping out that last rep or I'm 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 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 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 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 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 adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and tastes great. 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For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a week supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. AGZ is something that I help design. It tastes great, and it's the only sleep supplement I take. It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep, both my slowwave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep, and I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkagg.com/huberman to get a week supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription. 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, you're like focus. I like to think I've tried to spread the gospel of 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 there's 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 is moving and then over time it becomes more and more concave and eventually focus you drop into a groove. But that takes time. It takes reps. It takes the mind picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, you know what, I just 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, they either haven't heard it or they don't believe it. But everyone, at least to my knowledge, has experienced it. We're not robots. We're not robots. And so, are there tools that people can use to either embed that knowledge or to, you know, move into focused states uh 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 thing to one thing to the next. And these are very different brain circuits. fascinating. I love this idea of attractor 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 Aliyia and folks who do growth mindsets think about. If you change sort of the cognitive orientation you have towards it, a different set of motivations can get activated. So if I say it's not an hour of pain, but instead of me becoming the better me, that set of cognitions, that set of thoughts activates a different set of motives that comes to bear and 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 offenseoriented component and a defenseoriented 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 um 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, 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. 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 preventionorient 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 not right. you're just not feeling right. You're not feeling fit. You know, there is research on regulatory fit and it suggests 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 Scholer and David Mey, 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 you thinking about losses? Um are you going to be more in a sort of a a security or advancement or security mindset? They can tell us that if I think this way, if I think about security or 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 like Yorkxy dos Datson 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 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 Grogggins going absolutely crazy at a daycare soccer, you know, 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 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 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 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, um you know, I've been pursuing this goal for so long and I get it now. It's done. It 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's 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 psy and on self-control and grit, we know a lot more about persistence than we know about disengagement. And it's a 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 uh positive outcomes um when the person is unable to pursue a goal anymore. So for example, if you're a woman and you you always wanted to have children but you're now past the biological age where you can have children, it's probably healthy to disengage from the desire to have children. Similarly, if we age out of a sport or we experience some kind of catastrophic injury where we just can't do it anymore or the some window of opportunity has closed, right? 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 about the psychology of disengagement and how we know when to persist and when to disengage. It's a really important question, but we don't know very much about it. Partly because we tend to in our culture emphasize persistence and grit more than disengagement. seems like what we're trying to do when we want to get motivated or when we're engaging self-control is we're trying to bring together state of mind and body and concept. So there's the the thought piece like I'm I'm a person who works out even if he doesn't want to provided I'm not sick or injured, right? Because I think it's important to have those caveats. I don't believe in the no days off thing. I take a day off every week. I cycle my training, etc., etc. But I also believe in state of mind and body. And one of the things that's kind of um well that just isn't discussed enough among high performers and I think in athletics in academics in music etc is that once you taste a really great workout once you taste flow state once you taste neuroplasticity like you grind it out and you learn something and you now have mastery of something there's this temptation to need to be in that perfect state in order to feel like you can do it at all. like as you ascend the staircase that somehow like that's going to happen more and more often and many people will assemble their entire lives trying to recreate those states and I think one of the beautiful things again about people like David Gogggins we we've also had Coleman Ruiz and other uh SEAL team tier one operator DJ Shiffley uh Jaco Willink I think what's beautiful about that community is the way that they describe doing hard things but actually they were weaned in Buds and 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 in the rest of the world certainly not in academia it's like get great sleep um 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 of that's great. It's one of the reasons I don't like the notion of optimization because ultimately optimization is about for that moment and the 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, I 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 workouts at 3:00 a.m. igoggin. But I don't do that, right? I like being rested, caffeinated. Do you see what I'm getting at? Yes, I I 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. interesting because I do think we know from research that people are incredibly creative at coming up for justifications to not engage in self-control. So, you know, I'm supposed to work out today. Um, my gym clothes don't match. Or, you know, I'm supposed to work out today, but it's too sunny. I'm supposed to work out today, but it's not sunny enough. It's it's raining too much. It's raining too. 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 like and again I don't know that anyone's actually studied this but this is there might be sort of this bias or at least we we capitalize on a bias that things have to be just right for me to do it. Like it has like I I think of this when I'm writing but um you know I think a lot of us have this idea that like I don't feel like writing today like the conditions just aren't right so I won't I'll just put it off till like the muses hit me and it's just right. Right. Um, and you know, you learn over time that like your every day is going to be that not so perfect day. And so you just have to learn to deal with it. And then once you get into it, as you were talking about earlier, you might warm up to a point where now it's actually optimal, but it takes some time to get there. I think one of the things that's really about the sort of optimization culture may be that we're embracing this partly because optimization is an exciting idea, but also it's a great justification for not ever doing the really hard things because the conditions aren't quite right. And again, I think people are incredibly creative at coming up with reasons why they shouldn't do the the hard things. In the moment of choice, it seems perfectly reasonable. And that's one of the things that's really frustrating and challenging about self-control because you mentioned the 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 like that's that's the right thing to do. That's the thing that I really want. But when next year becomes today, right, all of a sudden my 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-control is as that moment passes and you're looking back at it sometime in the future, right? So now that the the the data start has come and gone and now you're looking back on it. You have distance again and the clarity comes back and you're like why didn't I do what I was supposed to do? So again, one of the frustrating things about 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 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 to somebody else or it's hypothetical. When it's far away from me, it's not imminent. I'm more likely to think about it in terms of desiraability, 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 much more 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 how's 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 farther away from me, and I'm looking back at it be like, but that was something I really, really wanted to do because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how. So in order to try to overcome that in in my lab, we've conducted experiments in which we have people think about um we we we bring them in and we have them think about their goals and why they're pursuing their goals or how they're going to pursue those goals. We then give them a self-control conflict that's unrelated to those goals. So they're just thinking generally about why or generally about how. 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, we've essentially warmed them up and then we give them a self-control task and they have much better self-control when they've thought about wise than house. And again, we argue that this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant than when it was close. But that's the problem with hard things. When they're in the distant future, it seems like a really good idea, but and we can think about why we want to do it. When it's when we actually have to do it, we don't think about why anymore. We think about how. And the how just sucks. And then again, as 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 the thing that we really wanted to do. I would also um add and feel free to disagree that the the rewards that come after challenges to meet those rewards are are the real rewards. You know, I' I've been going on and on online for a few years now that, you know, uh dopamine and other forms of chemical reinforcement that come without effort. Um while there are examples of those that can be healthy or innocuous, most of them are are pretty uh detrimental, but there's nothing quite like rewards that follow intense prolonged effort. It's really interesting that you mention this because I think when we think about self-control, we tend to think about it as a binary, you know. So, again, if we're going to use um you know, 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, right? And those two goals are in conflict and 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 I was mentioning before it's really important to think about your your wise. I I'm using that in plural. 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 when it there's no reason why resolving a self-control dilemma should be a fair fight. Like why should you give the temptation a a fair one-on-one challenge? Instead, I think you're you're kind of highlighting that growth, self-discovery, confidence, self-esteem, you know, um all these other things can also if we can leverage them, we we can become much more um 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 right the the more positivity you experience uh and so it's a 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 I am the person I was worried I was and all these you can just sort of hear this negative selft talk and you can see it becoming a negative downward spiral so I really find what you're saying really interesting like like really f like 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 you know 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's it shouldn't be a fair fight. We should stack the deck in our favor. Yeah. If the temptation is limbic, come in with more limbic as well as high high level concepts. Spread them out over time is what I'm hearing. what's the benefit now? What's the drawback now of making the wrong decision? And then extend that out to like tomorrow, the next day. Spending a little bit of time on these things can can mean a lot. And in the end, what we're saying is a lot of time is really like a minute. Yes. Like it's not like you 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 right we know the mind likes to practice and be in the same places I think at more over time it should become faster and faster so this idea of warming up which I really 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 in the brain uh of either awake animals or in some cases I had the benefit of of seeing this in humans. I have a friend who's a neurosurgeon and if you look at a a an animal or a person doing a task and and you you could use functional imaging so it's more non-invasive um or you could use electrodes you could use calcium imaging and monitoring the activity of lots and lots of neurons you you don't see that like the 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 not the kind people smoke, but it's like it sounds like on 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's these attractor states and that the signal to noise goes way way up. And I was watching this and going oh these are like simple behavioral tasks or perceptual tasks of like telling you know uh you know a person trying to say oh you know the dots are moving up or the dots are moving you know on average down and you just see like the brain goes through this like transition state and then and then as people get sleepy it gets a little noisier and then it comes back again. I was like, "Oh, this kind of like explains a lot of my experience trying to study or to do things." One uh piece of knowledge that I'm really excited about that I'll just pass along, there's a guy down at University of Pittsburgh, Peter Strick, um who's an exerciser. He happens to like doing exercise, but he also maps neural circuits. And he discovered that the brain areas that control movement of the large musculature, when those become active, they actually activate the release of adrenaline when we move. And the adrenaline then feeds back on those circuits. This is a 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 5 minutes of warming up, you're like you're more motivated. It's it's not purely psychological. Anyway, I just kind of throw that out there. I'm curious about the role of of competitiveness. Um, you know, when I was a posttock, I was confronted with being uh in an area of science where a lot of tools were coming in. It was super competitive and it was kind of a first come first serve. There was some creative work involved, but like we all knew what the tools were and we were all like going hungry hippos for these and I was in competition with really big labs. And that competition fueled me in a way that I wasn't familiar with. I'm not 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? Um certain things I'm competitive about but not others. But what I noticed was having a 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 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 a normal distribution or is it a binary distribution in terms of competitiveness? And to what extent are people that are competitive like we have the example like Michael Jordan who apparently was like he was competitive about everything apparently. To what extent are those people the people we call motivated are they just really really competitive because a lot of endeavors in life are not competitive but a lot of them are right getting at the you know the setting the curve being the one student who could or two students who can get A+ in the class like you and I you know you went to Harvard I'm at Stanford you know and you know it's a very competitive environment the sort of the apex of competitive academic environments so how does competitiveness play into willpower and tenacity and self-control over time. Are those people just better at it? But what happens when you remove the enemy? You remove the competitor. interesting. Um, 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. Um, the closest work that I can think of in my sphere and there might be other research on competitives 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 the I think competitiveness actually often comes out of achievement achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is 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 at the 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 where now you're rivals and that fuels you to go higher and higher. We do know that achievement motivation is a motivation like many other motivations that's probably normally distributed. Uh so so that ach the desire for achievement and achievement recognition uh 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 um 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 the different motivations that we have that might motivate behavior in just as productive a manner. So I'm I'm I'm examining for I'm thinking about for example we know that belonging motivation is really important for humans. Humans as a social species we survived because we were in groups and we had others. A human alone is not very powerful but a human in large groups is very powerful. So, we've evolved this motivation um to be connected and 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 they will bend, you know, heaven and earth to get back in that group and just do amazing things. So I and there are many other motivations too. motivations for power, motivations uh for um uh you know control, uh you name it. There's there's a whole motivations for self-esteem, motivations for for competence. Um and so you know when I think of motivations, I try not to think of any one motivation, but sort of think about the aggregate motivation impelling pushing us towards a particular uh behavior. So again, we were I was talking a little bit before about not giving the temptation a fair one-on-one uh fight, but actually bringing to bear all the motivations that might help you overcome it. If you know what motivates you, you should use those and activate those when you need them strategically. Right? So if I'm someone who is competitive, then I might use achievement motivation to fuel my desire to to do really hard things. Um, but…

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