Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita

1. 0:00 – 3:08

   Kentaro Fujita

   1. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita0:00

      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," 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, the cake. And we think it's 'cause it's giving people meaning. These are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's gonna motivate me to hold out.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman0:50

      [upbeat music] Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kentaro Fujita, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and an expert in the science of self-control and motivation. If you're somebody who has ever struggled with procrastination, sticking to a goal, or coming up with the goals for your life, today's episode is for you. We start off today's discussion talking about the famous two marshmallow experiment, the one where they placed kids in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they delayed gratification for that marshmallow, meaning they didn't eat it, they would then get two marshmallows. Those experiments received a lot of attention in that they were supposed to predict whether people would be successful later in life. We talk about the criticism of those experiments, but also how some of those conclusions were valid, and more importantly, how people of any age, including you, can build mental resilience and your ability to experience deferred gratification toward your goals. We also talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. These are topics that are very misunderstood out there, but Dr. Fujita clarifies that when we receive rewards for something we are naturally inclined to do, meaning that we love, it does not reduce our motivation to do that thing. And this is an important point, and we go into it in terms of the practical steps for building and maintaining your progress on goals. We also talk about what the data say about the specific steps that are most effective to both initiate and reach short and long-term goals. We also talk about how to get out of impulsive states and states of procrastination, what the data say about how to do that. Today's episode is really focused on science and, more importantly, practical takeaways, several of which I plan to incorporate into my own life. I only wish I had this knowledge when I was younger. But now, thanks to Dr. Fujita coming on the podcast, people of all ages can make great use of the information and data from his studies. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita.

2. 3:08 – 8:24

   Marshmallow Tests, Self-Control; Adult Modeling

   1. AHAndrew Huberman3:08

      Dr. Kentaro Fujita, welcome.

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita3:11

      Thank you. Really excited to be here today.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman3:13

      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 that can really be cultivated. So if you would, uh, what is the marshmallow experiment?

   4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita3:57

      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 gonna leave for a while, but if they could avoid eating the one, w- or basically hold out and not eat the one, and it was still there when the experimenter came back, they could get two marshmallows. So 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 fifteen 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, a- 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 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 ha- 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 behav- social behavior, uh, reports.Uh, and so this got people really excited about self-control 'cause 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.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman6:20

      Did any of the kids actually get two marshmallows as a reward?

   6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita6:24

      It depends on the data set. So i- it, research has now shown that the marshmallow test waiting times depend on a lot of things. Um, so in the original experiments, they 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 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 gonna bring you two. Um, so there have been experiments in which the experimenter looks reliable or unreliable in front of the child.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman7:00

      [laughs]

   8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita7:00

      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 it's supposed to.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman7:20

      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 parent's advice?

   10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita7:41

       I don't know if it reduces the trust in the parent's 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 a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo, and then were allowed to play with Bobo themselves. And those that watched the, the adult punch Bobo were more likely to punch Bobo themselves. So this suggests that children are very observant for our own behavior, and so if you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to learn. So I don't know that it's been done specific on self-control. It may have. Um, but certainly in many, many other behaviors, children are remarkably observant of what adults do.

3. 8:24 – 15:08

   Criticism of Marshmallow Tests, Learning Self-Control

   1. AHAndrew Huberman8:24

      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, I mean, I, or s- or neuroscience. You know, I think it's, uh, important for everyone to know that the moment that there's sort of a s- 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 gonna 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?

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita9:17

      So as I mentioned, the marshmallow s- 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.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman9:35

      Mm-hmm.

   4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita9:36

      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 x- the, the researchers controlled for things like socioeconomic 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 well-to-do, and this matters. And so when the researchers, they had like 30 or 40 other covariate variables that they were controlling for. When they controlled for all these other variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes it was supposed to. And so this paper got a lot of attention [tsks] 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, o- 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 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 n- 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 and 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 socioeconomic status is that kids who grow up in high SES environments, they're very stable, they're very predictable, so when you wait, you are more likely to get the larger later reward. But if you come from a lower SES family where rewards come and go, and people, and, you know, just because you save now doesn't mean it's gonna pay off laterthey're not going to wait, and so it's 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 ex- 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, li- 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 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 'cause they think, "That's how I'm gonna motivate myself. Like, if I can see what I want, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 a three-year-old, they don't know anything, but a five-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 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.

4. 15:08 – 17:34

   Sponsors: David & Lingo

   1. AHAndrew Huberman15:08

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5. 17:34 – 21:42

   Movement & Motivation

   1. AHAndrew Huberman17:35

      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 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, like, like acting as if-- 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 wait 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 newUh, 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.

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita18:44

      Agreed.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman18:44

      And I remember one kid spinning around in his chair.

   4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita18:46

      Agreed.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman18:46

      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 d- 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 the, there's a revving of the e- 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 w- 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-

   6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita19:34

      Mm

   7. AHAndrew Huberman19:34

      ... young kids to sit still is pretty tough.

   8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita19:37

      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 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 particular behavior, being able to, to act would be, it, 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 s- creating psychological distance from the temptation, versus on the things that you're supposed to approach, like the broccoli you're supposed to eat, you're supposed to move the joystick forward. And there's some research suggests that this kind of automatic -- You're not actually moving, but, you know, you're taking action that's often associated with movement, that that can actually help improve people's self-control over time, help develop evaluations such that, okay, 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. A- again, the question is, um, you know, it's not quite what you're talking about in terms of actual movement. Um, th- 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 m- you, you ma- 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, I mean, I think that's a truism, but I think these are really interesting examples of that.

6. 21:42 – 29:02

   Doing Hard Things; Exhaustion & Depletion Effect

   1. AHAndrew Huberman21:43

      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-

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita22:02

      Mm-hmm

   3. AHAndrew Huberman22:02

      ... obviously not a real scientific term, but that, you know, limbic system, we're more autonomically activated. We feel like, ah, we don't wanna 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, getting a workout in, can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, "Hey, you know what? By 8:00 AM, I did a lot of hard things. Anything else that I confront during the day, it's gonna 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 too, of course. But does something like that exist, and is there any evidence for that in your work or the work of others?

   4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita23:15

      There's two thoughts that immediately come to mind with what you just said. The idea that, you know, you can lear- like, by doing har- 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 'cause 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 s- 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, y- 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.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman24:21

      Mm-hmm.

   6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita24:22

      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 are some analyses, they're called multi-lab experiments, where a whole bunch of labs get together and they try to see if they can replicate something, and that way you get rid of experimenter bias. There are some multi-lab replications that have tried to replicate this effect. So what you do in the lab is you do one hard task that requ- 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 the lab.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman25:25

      Could you, uh, just for clarity's sake, uh, when you say it doesn't happen, uh, what specifically are you-

   8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:31

      Sure

   9. AHAndrew Huberman25:31

      ... referring to?

   10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:31

       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-

   11. AHAndrew Huberman25:41

       Left-handers out there are like-

   12. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:42

       Oh, sorry

   13. AHAndrew Huberman25:42

       ... all right, no, no, no-

   14. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:43

       [laughs]

   15. AHAndrew Huberman25:43

       ... opposite hand.

   16. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:43

       Right, so, so-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman25:43

       Yeah, yeah, no, I'm just teasing

   18. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:44

       ... you're writing in your non-dominant hand.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman25:46

       Yeah, yep.

   20. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita25:46

       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 wr- written in red ink, you automatically read the word blue, so you want to say blue. Um, this requires inhibition, it requires you to p- uh, stop your behavior, and research suggests that if you did the non-dominant hand writing 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? 'Cause I got tired, and so therefore my self-control is worse until it recharges. So one of these multi-lab experiments, they try something like this using different tasks, but you- 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 multi-lab experiment, though smaller in scale and not by the original authors, they were able to get the depletion effect. So there's a little bit of just mixed evidence, and it's not clear 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.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman27:14

       Mm-hmm.

   22. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita27:15

       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 don't know about that, but my own take on this is I think depletion is real. I just don't think we've 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.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman28:09

       Mm.

   24. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita28:09

       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.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman28:27

       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 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 gonna 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

7. 29:02 – 34:27

   Willpower vs Self-Control, Improving Self-Control

   1. AHAndrew Huberman29:02

      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, et cetera. Can people learn a process that then they can apply across different scenarios? Because I think one of the fascinating things to me about school, about exams, about sports, or at the extreme about, you know, screening for special operations, you know, we've had many people from the SEAL team communities and other special operation communities o- 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, 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, 'cause 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-

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita30:24

      I too am a failed musician

   3. AHAndrew Huberman30:25

      ... I can say 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, 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 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?

   4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita30:59

      I think what you're saying is really interesting, and I have a whole bunch of thoughts, which I'm gonna 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, 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 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 y- 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 e- 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 inhibi- inhibition is the active fighting of that temptation, telling myself, "Don't think about it. Don't give in. Don't do something about it." I think this is sort of the paradigmatic sort of version of w- 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

8. 34:27 – 40:55

   Aspiration or Fear for Motivation, Long- vs Short-Term Outcomes

   1. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita34:27

      not so sure.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman34:28

      I have this kind of running theory in my mind, which is anchored in neuroscience. Uh, we know that areas of the brain are involved in kind of more sophisticated, uh, processes where we can imagine ourself 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, et cetera, that they're kind of like switches. It's like they make you want to eat. They make you want to mate. They make you, uh, want to vomit. They m- any number of things. These are hypothalamic. They're sort of deep limbic and hypothalamic circuitry. And I have this, I don't know 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 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 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. W- that's, uh, like hardwired. So you, so we go towards, uh, the vomit reflex a little bit, right? We, uh, we don't want to get up and go to class 'cause we're exhausted, and fatigue is real. Fatigue is real. S- 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, so it's the nightmare everybody's had at least once, right? [laughs] So I feel like the, the control strategy, uh, seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgust, et cetera. How well does the opposite work? Like, how good is aspiration for good stuff? Because those are also powerful drivers of human behavior. And, 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 th- I'll go back to sleep. I'll hit the snooze button."

   3. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita36:51

      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 limbic systems, these hot systems, these more, quote-unquote, "animalistic systems" are the things that make the temptation so powerful. And so by activating those systems, all we're doing is we're up-regulating the temptation impulses. And so for years, and, and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model, for example, and many, many others, they talked about making your cognitions cooler. In other words, shutting down the emotional system and thinking very coolly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice. I think what's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire. So if this thing is pulling me, I'm gonna find something that's gonna 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 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 why I think what you're saying is true is that I have some other work looking at the other strategy, which is, you said, finding love. So in my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, um, you know, 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 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, um, 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, the cake. And we think it's 'cause 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 gonna 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, Kaitlin 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, 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 Kaitlin 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 gonna be bad, but or they're gonna, they're gonna pre- predispose us to indulgence, but ins- 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.

9. 40:55 – 46:44

   Self-Control Toolkit, Tool: Failure & Exploration

   1. AHAndrew Huberman40:56

      Fascinating. Um, and I'm so glad you, you're doing that work. Um, you know, we had David Goggins on this podcast, David, uh, 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, 'cause that's what that means to me. He was literally running to the airport. We were 16 miles away from San Jose Airport, and 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, 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 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, um, 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 it's pathological. I don't believe it is 'cause 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 gonna be a subset of people out there that are saying, "Oh, so, you know, what you're talk- talking about is an, 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 wanna think in terms of long-term outcomes ba- both bad and good. Is that right? Should we have all of those in our toolkit?

   2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita43:08

      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 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 gonna be one tool that's gonna work for everybody. The self-control toolbox approach spec- uh, explicitly s- um, embraces the idea that different things are gonna work for different people. So if you're the kind of person who's very act- reactant, [lips smack] someone who says, "No, I can do it," then you might wanna think about all the bad things people say about you because you're gonna react to it and say, "No, I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 a litany of reasons why I don't wanna 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 wanna be, you wanna be that person that you admire or you wanna 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 toward the end, when I'm, like, just pumping out that last rep or I'm just the last minute of a really hard climb, these things don't work so well for me. Like, for me, at that point, I just wanna 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 b- 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 gonna be able to get up here and say, "Do X, Y, Z," and all of a sudden people are gonna be amazing. Instead, they have to try, and they have to fail, and it's in the failure where you actually learn the most because you say, "Oh, that's not for me," or at least, "That wasn't for me at this time." The reason why I find this approach really exciting and also hopeful is that I think a lot of people, when they fail at self-control, they just say, "Oh, I'm a terrible person. I'm never gonna 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.

10. 46:44 – 48:28

    Sponsor: AG1

    1. AHAndrew Huberman46:44

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11. 48:28 – 57:30

    Motivation Warm-Up?, Tools: Mindset; Motivation Orientation

    1. AHAndrew Huberman48:28

       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, even it's running, you gotta jog a little bit before you, you, you sprint. Um, certainly ne- we need warm-up sets before we do our work sets. Everyone understands this, but for some reason, I think people assume that focusAnd doing hard things mentally, um, or creatively should be like a step function, where you, like, show up to the work and you're like, "Focus." I like to think I've tried to spread the gospel of, of, look, it's gonna take a little bit of warming up. Your mind's gonna flit 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, the, the models say that there's sort of like an at- an attractor, uh, model where, you know, you sort of 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 w- picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, "You know what? I just gotta get this thing out of the room." Th- 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 has, uh, 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. It- W- we have to move from thing to- one thing to the next, and these are very different brain circuits.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita50:17

       I think what you're saying is really 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 gonna get super excited about it. But if instead you change your mindset about it, and, and again, this is the power of work that Alia Crum and, uh, folks who do growth mindsets think about. If you change sort of y- 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 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.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman51:59

       Mm.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita52:00

       And there's been some speculation that the f- 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 wanna play not to lose, you wanna play to win, right? And that's particularly true of offense. So in offense, you wanna 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 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 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 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 Mealy, [lips smack] 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 gonna be thinking about gains, or are you thinking about losses? Um, are, are you gonna be more in a sort of a, a, a, you know, again, a security or advancement or security mindset? They can tell us that if I think this way, if I think about security or I think about advancement, I will do better on this task, which suggests that people have some insight into what, not just the amount of motivation, but the right type of motivation to do well. And so part of what you're talking about warming up might be that people are sort of trying to cobble together the right set of thoughts to get the right si- 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 a, an additional complexity with the amount because we know not enough motivation's 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 wanna be in the middle for ideal. You wanna 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, y- you just overthink things, right? SoThere, 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 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 literature in cognitive psychology. It's, um, 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 s- there's, there's kind of a cognitive inertia. You're still operating under the old set, and it takes some time to figure out how to switch into the new one. Sort of zooming out a little bit, I think that's also related to research on disengaging, right? So, um, you know, I've been pursuing this goal for so long, and I get it, and 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 to suggest 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 psych- on, 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 it, um, when the person is unable to pursue a goal anymore. So for example, if you're a woman and you al- 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 reengage in a new set of goals much faster. But beyond that, we have to really understand more about the, uh, 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.

12. 57:30 – 1:05:25

    Imperfect Conditions, Self-Control Conflicts, Tool: Why vs How

    1. AHAndrew Huberman57:30

       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, et cetera, et cetera. 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, et cetera, is that once you taste a really great workout, once you taste flow state, once you taste neuroplasticity, like you grind it out and you learn something and you now have mastery of something, there's this temptation to need to be in that perfect state in order to feel like you can do it at all. Like as you ascend the staircase, that somehow, like, that's gonna happen more and more often. And many people will assemble their entire lives trying to recreate those states. And I think one of the beautiful things, again, about people like David Goggins, we, we've also had Coleman Ruiz, another, uh, SEAL Team Tier 1 operator, uh, DJ Schiefelb, uh, Jocko Willink. I think what's beautiful about that community is the way that they describe doing hard things, but actually they were weaned in BUD/S and, and in their other training from a place of suck. Like a- as Jocko, who's a good friend of mine, says, you know, "We start where it sucks, when your weapons are wet and you're cold and it's sandy." That's the starting line so that you completely recalibrate this notion of optimal performance. And I think that's something that we don't really have an analog for in, 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? Uh, or inverted U-shaped curve, not too stimulated, not under-stimulated, and on and on. And I think while all that's great, it's one of the reasons I don't like the notion of optimization because ultimately optimization is about for that moment, and the, 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 s- we start from a place of suck? Like maybe I should be doing my workouts at 3:00 AM a la Goggins, but I don't do that, right? I like being rested, caffeinated. Do you see what I'm getting at?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:00:00

       Yes.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:01

       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.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:00:13

       I think what you're saying is really interesting because I do think, we know from research that people are incredibly creative at coming up for justifications to not engage in self-control. So, you know, I'm supposed to work out today. Um, my gym clothes don't match. Or, you know-

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:34

       [laughs]

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:00:34

       ... I, 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 little. Like, people are remarkably creative at coming up with reasons to justify their in- indulging in their temptations.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:49

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:00:49

       And so what's really interesting about what you're suggesting here is that you can justLike, and, and again, I don't know that anyone's actually studied this, but this is sort-- 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. Uh, but I'm, um... You know, I, I think a lot of us have this idea that like, "I don't feel like writing today. [swallows] 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 y-yo- every day is gonna be that not so perfect day, and so you just have to learn to deal with it. And then once you get into it, as you were talking about earlier, you might warm up to a point where now it's actually optimal, but it takes some time to get there. I think one of the things that's really interesting about what you're suggesting about the sort of optimization culture may be that we are embracing this partly because optimization is an exciting idea, but also it's, it's a great justification for not ever doing the really hard things because the conditions aren't quite right. And again, I, 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.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:01

       Mm.

    10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:02:01

        And that's one of the things that's really frustrating and challenging about self-control because y-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, to be able to say like, "That's, that's the right thing to do. That's the thing that I really want." [clicks tongue] 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 t- the, that data s- 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, "W-why didn't I do what I was supposed to do?" So again, one of the frustrating things about s- 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 [clicks tongue] in terms of desirability, why I'm doing it, right? It's gonna be much more abstract. But as when that future becomes now, m-my mindset changes and I'm thinking now much more about feasibility, how am I gonna do it, and much more ob- much more concretely about what I have to do. And the problem is, is a lot of these things that are hard, the whys are really positive, but the hows are really negative, right? That's 'cause 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 wanna do it. And then again, time passes, distance passes, it gets farther away from me, and I'm looking back on it and be like, "But that was something I really, really wanna 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 [clicks tongue] 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 gonna 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 used the word warm up, so we've essentially warmed them up, and then we give them a self-control task, and they have much better self-control when they've thought about whys than hows. 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 wanna 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.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:07

        [laughs]

    12. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:05:08

        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.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:18

        [clicks tongue] I would al-also, um, add, and feel free to disagree, that the, the rewards

13. 1:05:25 – 1:11:26

    Tool: "Whys" & Motivation Goals

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:25

       that come after challenges to meet those rewards are, are the real rewards. You know, I've, I've been going on and on and 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 p- are pretty, uh, detrimental. But there's nothing quite like rewards that follow intense, prolonged effort.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:05:53

       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 gonna 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. [clicks tongue] 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 kinda 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? Th-those are additional motivations that fuel the long-term goal. So I, I was mentioning before, it's really important to think about your wh- your whys. I, I'm using that in plural 'cause it's not just the one why I wanna lose weight, but it's I wanna l- I wanna be healthier. I wanna be a good example for my kids. I wanna show that I can do this. I wanna become the better me. Uh, you know, whatev- all these different motivationsWhen, when-- It, it is, 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 kinda highlighting that growth, self-discovery, confidence, self-esteem, you know, um, all of these other things can also, if we can leverage them, we, we can become much more, um, much more powerful against the temptation 'cause we just find additional sources of motivation to push through the things that we really don't wanna do. And ironically, it's a self-- it, 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 gonna become that person. I'm not gonna grow. I, I am the person I was worried I was," and all these. You can just sort of hear this negative self-talk, and you can see it becoming a, 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 wanna 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.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:18

       Yeah. If the temptation is limbic, come in with more limbic as well as high, high-level concepts.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:08:24

       Yes.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:24

       Spread them out over time is what I'm hearing.

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:08:26

       Yes.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:26

       Like, 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.

    8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:08:39

       Yes.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:39

       [chuckles] Right? Like, it's not like you just have to sit down and do a journaling exercise, although I think from your work, it's clear that that can be beneficial.

    10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:08:46

        I do also think that, like, it should get easier over time 'cause as you said, we have these attractor states in our mind, and, you know, the first time we try to pull these thoughts together, it's herding sheep, right? So you're trying to get all these ideas and these motivations and these thoughts and these biological systems, motivational systems, cognitive systems all lined up. The first time you do that, that might take more work, but the more you do it, right, we know the mind likes to practice and be in the same places. I think at more over time, it should become faster and faster. So this idea of warming up, which I really like, that you mentioned before, the warm-up might get easier and easier and easier the more I do it.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:20

        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, 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 [imitates static] it sounds like that on the audio monitor. As they repeat the task over and over, the, 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 the-

    12. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:10:12

        Right

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:12

        ... the signal of noise goes way, way up. And I was watching this and going, "Well, these are like simple behavioral tasks or perceptual tasks of, like, telling, you know, 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, 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. And I was like, "Well, this kind of, like, explains a lot of my experience trying to study-

    14. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:10:37

        Mm-hmm

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:37

        ... or to do things." [chuckles]

    16. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:10:38

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:39

        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. So th- this is, uh, a reminder to anyone that doesn't feel like working out. The warm-up serves to increase these chemicals that then bring more signal-to-noise in the neural circuits that control movement. So it makes sense why, like, after five minutes of warming up, you're like, you're more motivated. It's, it's not purely psychological. Anyway, I just kinda throw that out there. I'm curious about the role of, of competitiveness. Um, you know, uh, when I was a postdoc, I was confronted with

14. 1:11:26 – 1:17:13

    Competition, Tool: Motivation Types

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:26

       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 the, 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 th- that are competitive, like we have the example of Mi- 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, uh, 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?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:13:01

       I think what you're saying is really interesting, um, and I too have heard a lot of these stories and have 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, um, and there might be other research on competitiveness outside of the work that I typically read, mostly has to do with achievement motivation, right? So achievement motivation is a lot like competitiveness in the s- I think competitiveness actually often comes out of achievement, achievement motivation. Achievement motivation [lip smack] 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 wanna 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 [chuckles] 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. [lip smack] Uh, so, so that ach- uh, 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 h- the different motivations that we have that might motivate behavior in just as productive a manner. So I'm f- I'm, I'm examining for e- 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 s- 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 b- they will bend, you know, heaven and earth to get back in that group and just do amazing things. So I th- and there, there are many other motivations, too. Motivations for power, motivations [lip smack] uh, for, um, uh, y- you know, control, uh, y- you name it. There's, there's a whole b- 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 o- to do really hard things. [lip smack] Um, but maybe I'm not that kind of person, and, and you see this all the time. I, I do Peloton, and you see the Peloton instructor say like, "If you don't wanna see the leaderboard, get rid of it." For, for some other people, it's more about being on the bike with other people, and that's w- and, and staying with the group, not being in front of the group, but staying with the group is what fuels them to do things that they didn't think they could do before. Again, just g- taking the idea of the self-control toolbox really seriously, different strategies are gonna work differently for different people. And so I think it's really important to explore and not just explore different strategies, but to really, to explore yourself, to really say like, what really does motivate you? And I'm not sure that we always do know what really motivates us. Uh, I think a lot of times we kind of discover what our motivations are by saying, "Ooh, I like this, and I don't like this," but it's only through exposure. So to go and explore and figure out what makes you tick, and then to exploit and use those in your strategies. And again, the constellation of tools that works for me may not work for other people.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:07

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink

15. 1:17:13 – 1:18:33

    Sponsor: LMNT

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:13

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16. 1:18:33 – 1:27:48

    Abstinence vs Moderation, Consistency vs Rigidity

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:33

       for immense cons- consistency in certain things. Uh, not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on, on peak performance, but just without fail every single night I have a particular practice before I go to sleep and just no matter what, I show up to it. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. There are times when I'm like, "Ah, I'm not like fully focused on this right now. I'm not... I'm having trouble fully focusing on this," but for me it's really become an experiment in consistency, and I think I'm like two years and somechange now into it. And, and so it's tapped into this different part of myself that I'm not so familiar with, which is, like, not trying to get the best performance out, right? Um, but that's great when it happens, but it's different. And earlier we were talking, before we went on mic, we were talking about abstinence versus moderation, and I'm curious what the data show. Uh, and when I hear abstinence, obviously it sounds like people trying to avoid certain behaviors, but I think we could flip it the other way, too. You know, is it, uh, you know, is it always the case that, um, you know, we have to show up t- to the thing or c- you know, at our best? Or like yesterday I was supposed to do a HIIT workout and I confess, look, it happens to me too, folks. I was like, I was due to- for a high intensity interval training workout, and I was like, things were getting really compressed and I thought, what would happen if I just did the eight rounds of this on the assault bike, but I didn't go all out, and I'm gonna just do the first two, not lazy, but semi-lazy? And I noticed by the third or the fourth, of course, my motivation started to increase and I was like, "Oh, this is really cool." It was, it was informative for me because it showed me where the barrier was. It wasn't necessarily about the effort, it was about the concept. So w- w- what's the deal with abstinence versus moderation? When, when can we tap into this as a useful tool?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:20:17

       I'm gonna have a two-part answer, so it might be a little bit long-winded. I hope remember both parts.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:20

       Take your time.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:20:21

       So the first part is that generally speaking, um, psychology has tended to emphasize abstinence or consistency in self-control over the alternative, which is moderation. So we have a lot of self-control theoretical models which stress the importance of patterns over isolated acts. Once you have a pattern of behavior in place, it carries a, a, a special, [lips smack] uh, hold over you that a non-pattern does not. So let me give you an example. So I have an, I have an, uh, Apple Watch, and it tells me if I've closed my ring for the day. And there was a point in time where that number was some huge number 'cause I had managed to be consistent for a really long time, and it's, let's, let's say it was 500. And I had 500 and I wanted that to keep going, and just knowing that I had that unbroken streak of 500 in and of itself became motivating to me above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts, right? So these theoretical analyses have suggested that one of the things that helps us maintain self-control is the knowledge of the pattern. The pattern itself has strength over us in a way that doing something once every once in a while sporadically does not. So if you're able to tell yourself, "I do this e- I've done this every week for, you know, this every Sunday for every week for, for the last X number of years," that has a special motivational power that perhaps even the same number of things, e- even the same number of times you've done the activity, if you've done it more sporadically, it doesn't have that power. Perhaps it could be just because you have the habit, perhaps the habit locks you into place, and it's possible that, you know, we have like psychological and cognitive things that help us in place. Others have argued that, you know, we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern, whereas again, the sporadic doesn't have that sort of sys- orderly system, right? Um, but one of the things that you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors, right? So when I was, when I had the streak going, I was like up at the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in, um, just because I wanted to keep the pattern, which was really stupid. Um, so you know, they can take a life of their own, which in some cases could be good, but it can, but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad. So it was this idea that there might be, um, um, trade-offs associated with abstinence, like drawbacks with abstinence that got my student Phuong Le and I really interested in if there were other alternatives, and the most common alternative is some version of [lips smack] uh, moderation. So at its extreme, abstinence is doing, like, never indulging in the temptation or always doing the goal-directed option, and moderation is generally doing the thing that's good for the goal, but allowing yourself to have the occasional lapse. Now, I wanna be clear here, this is not the same thing as failing, because failing or ju- just, you know, justifying something post-hoc, you're, you're, you're not talking about the pattern of behaviors. You make that decision in the moment and say [lips smack] "Well, you know, the, the cake looks really good. It's sunny out, it's beautiful. I deserve the cake," and you eat it. That's sort of like a, a justification in the moment. When we're talking moderation, it's more kind of like I have the goal in mind, and with the goal in mind, I understand that indulging once isn't gonna kill that goal, right? So, so it's not that I don't have the goal in mind and I'm just want the temptation. I have the goal in mind. I'm integrating it with the indulgence and saying, "This one instance isn't gonna destroy my goal." It's a lot like saying, you know, eating chocolate cake once isn't gonna make you fat, or eating a salad for lunch one day isn't gonna allow you to lose weight. What matters is the sustained behavior over time. But you have choices about that pattern. You can either have it be completely consistent one thing or you can have cheat days. And so we were really interested in some of the trade-offs. You think about some of the trade-offs, [lips smack] abstinence, as I just mentioned, leads to really rigid behaviors, but computationally, like the choice is, is already pre-decided for you. You sit down, it's, it's Monday, 5:00, that's your exercise time. You don't have a choice, right? If, if you're following an abstinence strategy, the choice is made for you. It's really easy. So it's computationally simple. In principle, if you can hold onto that, it makes much more rapid progress 'cause you never take a step back. You're always going towards the goal. But there are some trade-offs with this, like the rigidity, right? So it's Monday, 5:00 PM, it's your daughter's wedding, but you're getting the workout in. Why? Right? Like s- that, that lack of flexibility is kind of crazy. Once the pattern is broken, it's all or none. It's gone.So if you're abstinent and you have a lapse, the goal is done, right? You c- you can't go back. My point here is that there are some trade-offs between abstinence and moderation, and we are really interested in trying to understand why people choose one versus the other, for what kinds of tasks, what kinds of, what kinds of goals, um, and with the idea that maybe sometimes we're picking the wrong pattern for the goal at hand, right? So for example, if I'm trying to be faithful to my spouse, right, abstinence is probably better than indulgence because the thing about being faithful to your spouse is that if you have the one lapse, you are no longer a faithful spouse, right? Sort of by definition, that's a situation in which you have failed and that goal is gone forever. On the other hand, for a student studying for an exam, they can hang-- they can, they can watch a little Netflix or they can study for their exam. Normally, those two types of conflicts, tho- those two goals aren't in conflict. But if they're, if the night before an exam, now they're in conflict, do they exclusively study or do they give themselves a study break? In that kind of situation, a study break might be okay because the w- taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying by itself. So we're, we're kind of interested in whether people pick certain kinds of strategies for certain kinds of conflicts, whether, and also whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategies. So if I'm the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go. If I'm the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better. Another thing that we're really interested in is why people pick the wrong one. And one of the things that we've been finding, some initial, uh, findings that we have from our lab, is that when you present people with targets, other people who have engaged in abstinence versus moderation, at least the participants that we've asked generally say that the person who engaged in abstinence has better self-control than the person who engaged in moderation. Which is interesting to us because actually moderation is more difficult. So y- you could have said that the moderation person has more self-control than the person who's abstinent 'cause that's the eas- that's in principle the easier decision. But this suggests to us is that there's a, there may be a bias that when people are saying, "Okay, I wanna go on a diet, I wanna exercise more, I wanna, uh, do whatever," [lips smack] they might be defaulting to abstinence when in fact they might be better off doing some, some version of moderation.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:43

       Fascinating. Uh, two of the best pieces of advice that I ever got for my academic

17. 1:27:48 – 1:35:17

    Burnout; "Invisible" Goals, Single Goal & Trade-Offs

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:48

       career, but turned out to be valuable for all sorts of long-term goal pursuits, um, and just life is my dad, who's a, a scientist, you know, he said when I really hit the gas pedal on my academics, 'cause I was coming from behind coming out of high school, um, he said, "Listen, y- you gotta be a long-distance runner in this game. You know, y- you-- there is a thing called burnout, and you just have to figure out what you can do consistently." And then, uh, a neurologist at Berkeley, who was also in the psychology department, Bob Knight, uh, one time I asked him, like, "What's the key to this whole thing?" And he said, uh, um, he said, "Find a non-destructive way to reset yourself each week, and figure out what you can invest five or six days per week, and update that every five years or as your personal life changes." So what he was saying was what you can do as a graduate student is different than when you're a postdoc and when you have a family and, and I said, "What's your, uh, non-destructive thing?" And he goes, "Completely mindless activities, in particular fishing." I don't want to insult any of the fishermen and women in the, in the audience. I have a lot of fishermen on my mom's side. Um, but he just would go fishing, not think about science, not think about anything. I don't know if he did it with other people or not, and that was his reset. And I think as simple as that advice is, it was really valuable to me, which is why I'm saying it now, because he was laying out a pattern. The week is, i- is a fundamental unit of work, and you have to figure out how to reset so you can continue to come back and be that long-distance runner. Otherwise, you could... Burnout is real. Physical burnout, uh, mental burnout, and what's not sustainable is, like, not sustainable.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:29:26

       I think one of the things that, you know, one of the ideas that we've been playing around with is th- this notion that there might be sort of two modes of goal pursuit that people have. One of them is the single goal, like, "Here's the most important thing in my life and I'm gonna sacrifice everything for it." And again, that's very effective for getting things done, and I think some of the most highly productive, highly successful people specialize in that mode. And, and I think our, our society's actually really good at advancing that idea. Like they say like, you know, s- study when you're young, throw everything into it, that's not important, put your, put your effort into this. We're really a very goal-directed society. I think we raise our... I think, you know, we're really raising our kids to be that way, saying like, you know, "Y- you gotta do X, Y, Z. So if you wanna be an athlete, you have to do this, this, this, this, this. If you wanna be, uh, uh, you know, if you wanna be a scientist, you have to do this, this, this. You have a doctor, this, this, this, this." So we kinda track them really quickly, and then everything becomes about that singular goal. But humans, we never pursue one goal at a time. Like, the truth is, we are pursuing in our lives multiple goals. So I have a goal to spend time with, you know, to work obviously, but I also wanna spend time with family and friends. Um, I wanna exercise, watch out for my health. I wanna indulge my artistic side. I wanna indulge, you know, all these different goals. They, they're kind of what my friend Abby calls invisible goals. Th- they're goals that we're pursuing, but we aren't necessarily aware that we're pursuing them. And as a result, we're not actually maximizing and giving them their fair due diligence for us to be the well-rounded humans that we wanna be. So you were mentioning balancing work and non-work. I think this is fundamental, but when we think about what is success, we go back into that single goal mind, right? That single goal mode. And one of the things, again, I think that's why people prefer abstinence over moderation. They, they think, they're thinking about the one goal that is most important to them, and they're gonna subordinate all the other goals, sacrifice all the other goals that they have for that one goal. But there might be something really healthyAnd wholesome about understanding that you're actually pursuing multiple goals and then realizing that you have to divvy your effort among them, and doing so systematically might end up helping all the goals in a way that's better than just pursuing the one and sacrificing all the others. In other words, the, the gain from pursuing all of them might be more than the gain of pursuing the one. And I think the I- the, the philosophies of abstinence versus moderation kind of speak to that, that, that tension between do I pursue the one that's really important versus do I, do I spread my effort among the many?

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:32:06

       Certainly in the United States, we love to revere the examples of extreme performance, Michael Jordan, um, you know, uh, Mike Tyson, um, amazing gymnasts, um, uh, you know, Yo-Yo Ma, like all these people. But if you, if you talk to them or people from the tier one operations community, they'll tell you, um, there was very little balance-

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:32:30

       Yes

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:32:31

       ... in, certainly when they were ascending the ladder. But even to maintain high performance, very, very few people can do that over time and have a, a, a stable and healthy personal life. Some can, many can't. These days, there seems to be a kind of theme of, of demonizing people for being too extreme after I find it very selfish on the part of, um, the public to, you know, like revere these people, glean all the rewards of the incredible, you know, photos of Jordan dunking and the dynasties and all that and then, and then be like, "Oh, well, he was, you know, compulsively, uh, competitive," or something like that. [chuckles] Like, well, what do you want? Like, I mean, obviously he did it for himself, hopefully more than he did it for, uh, for the adoration. But, you know, imbalance also brings extremes. I, you know, we're talking about training a dog, right? I mean, you can get these dogs that can do extreme things well beyond what their, their breed represents, but that dog is not gonna be like other dogs. Its neural circuits are honed around these training, uh, things, and that's what happens when you take young kids and you shape them around a certain behavior, academic or, or athletic. So it's easier to look at those examples and say, "Oh yeah, I, I don't wanna deal with that, and so let's demonize them." I think we should celebrate those people if that's what they genuinely wanted, and we should pay attention to the fact that they became asymmetric in their wiring, literally. And most of us probably don't want that or aren't willing to make those sacrifices.

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:33:54

       And I think we can be okay with that duality in our heads. Like, you know, uh, I, there, there may be goals for which you pursue in that single, single-minded way and because they're so important to you, as long as you're aware, you know, so sort of like, do I wanna be a specialist or a generalist?

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:34:11

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:34:11

       And you can't be both. So balancing your time and effort between those two modes, I think, is really important. You have to decide, okay, this o- this, this goal is worth sacrificing for. These other ones are not. And as long as we're aware of the trade-offs, I think that's good. My concern is I think we often aren't aware of the trade-offs. We're only aware of the trade-offs in retrospect after we've made the decision. So, you know, those who have sort of more balanced their goals, they say, "I should've put more effort into the one. I didn't achieve all the things I wanted to," and so they're regretful of that. And you also see lots of stories of people saying like, "I killed myself for this one goal, it did it, but I kinda wish I had, you know, this other..." And so I think the more we can do it proactively as opposed to retrospectively-

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:34:55

       Mm

    10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:34:55

        ... the, the closer we will be to where we wanna be. Again, I think, I, there's not much research on this, and I think that's what's really interesting to me about it. We can have this conversation. As a scientist, I'm a little frustrated that science hasn't quite gotten up, c- caught up to these insights that we're talking about.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:11

        If only. Dangerous words. Um, I don't spend a lot of time on social media. I have an allocated

18. 1:35:17 – 1:40:16

    Intrinsic Motivation for Sustained Goals

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:17

       set of time. I have a separate phone for it, which helps. Talk about moderation. That really helps. So when people send me things on X or Instagram, I, I can't see it when it, 'cause texts come through a different phone, so it's allocated time. That's just a little... It's been very helpful. But I have this kind of appreciation for, I don't know why, they're these, uh, high-speed cup grabbers. Do you know these people? So they set out cups or objects-

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:35:37

       Oh, yes. Yes

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:38

       ... you know, pshoo-pshoo-pshoo.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:35:38

       Yes.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:38

       And yet everyone's like, "Oh, it was sped up," and [chuckles] they, and they'll do other things like run a clock in the background so you can see that it wasn't actually artificially sped up. And I'm like, this is so cool. And then I realize, I'm like, how much time did they put into this? And, um, you know, I hope that they're happy in their high-speed cup grabbing. I don't know what they're sacrificing for that. But it's kind of amazing in this day and age that because we can put everything on display, um, there's more and more incentive to become hyper-specialized in something for mere attention, and I hope they're being rewarded handsomely in whatever way, psychologically or financially. [chuckles] But it's kind of interesting. I don't think this existed in the past. There might've been a traveling carnival or something where people would come through and do acrobatics. But we're in a time now where we can reach into our pocket and see the extremes of behavior, including these highly trained behaviors. So it's a very weird time that we're living in, and it sort of gives the impression that one has to be hypertrophied in one skill or, or one attribute or else you're not really living, and nothing could be further from the truth.

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:36:34

       You're making really interesting observations about the current state of our society and, and also about the impact it could potentially have on motivation. I think the interesting angle for me in what you're just saying, you know, you're asking whether the cup, these, these cup folks, um, cup stackers are doing this for the attention or they're doing it for themselves. And I would say the, the research suggests that they probably do it because they themselves love it. And it g- goes back to something that you said ear- uh, a conversation we had earlier about doing hard things. Research suggests that when it comes to doing really hard things, especially sustaining that hard things over time, so you could do something hard maybe once when you're externally motivated, but sustaining that over time is really difficult if you are exclusively externally motivated. Research suggests that your self-control, or at least your performance and self-control, is enhanced to, to the extent that you're intrinsically motivated.that you enjoy it for the task itself. So there's research that Ayelet Fishbach has done, uh, and Kaitlin Woolley as well, um, where they've shown that, you know, if you go to the gym and you only think about all the things that you benefit long-term from the gym, that your attendance at the gym is okay. But if they include intrinsic act- intrinsic positivity or intrinsic rewards, like just listening to your favorite music while you're on the treadmill, increases your likelihood of going regularly, right? So the idea here is that it's easier to sustain motivation over time, especially when things are hard, that's when you need to sustain it the most, when you love what you do. If you can't find something to love, then you might be able to do it short-term, but over time you'll struggle to, to keep that motivation up, mostly because the rewards are not tracking with the difficulty of the task, right? That's led me to have some thoughts about how you build self-control and how you teach self-control, and I think the worst thing to do is to make someone-- Like the way that we currently teach self-control, I think, a lot is in the classroom where we make kids sit in the, in the chairs really quietly and this sort of like rule imposed, "This is what you're supposed to do." I- I'm not convinced that that's necessarily the best way to teach self-control, only because that's all externally imposed. The child does not want to sit there quietly. The child wants to do their thing. Instead, I think the best way to cultivate self-control for yourself or for others is to do it in a domain that you have intrinsic interest, because there's something where you will put... Y- you will do the hard thing for a long time, but you'll also be more willing to explore and, and, and find better ways of doing something because you love it so much, right? So I used to practice martial arts, uh, and I loved it. And, you know, I, I would lose a competition or I would have a horrible practice or I just couldn't do something, and what kept me going wasn't the, some desire to be better or some desire... It was really just the intrinsic love of the thing itself, the intrinsic love of the process that kept me in the game when things were the hardest. So, you know, if I were to give advice to anyone about how best to cultivate self-control and to cultivate this ability to do hard things, it would first be make sure the thing that you are trying to do that's so hard is something that you love doing. Because if you don't love it, all of the external rewards are negative. They're all punishments [chuckles] and that's not gonna sustain you. So unless there's something about the process itself that you enjoy the pain, and that sounds masochistic, but I think most people who do hard things, they enjoy something about the process. That's what keeps us going and that's what gives us the consistent motivation to pursue things over time.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:11

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over

19. 1:40:16 – 1:41:53

    Sponsor: Function

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:16

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20. 1:41:53 – 1:49:03

    Meaning in Simple Tasks, Ikigai

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:41:53

       people who have very, uh, low activation energy, which sounds like a bad thing, but it means they can just like get into action right away, um, versus people that, you know, it takes a lot for them to get into motion to do things. And in being a scientist and in being in labs and in running a lab, I can't say that people fall out into two bins or two d- um, [tsking] you know, distributions on this, but there do seem to be people who, for whatever reason, I used to try and correlate with upbringing or something, like did they grow up on a farm or like were their parents structured at home? But there are these people who, like if there are a bunch of lab tasks, they're really boring. They're like really boring. The first time you do them they might be interesting, but like washing covers, acid washing cover slips and, you know, and, and like aliquoting antibodies. Like there's... If you can listen to something or some music or something, like you can make it a little bit more bearable, but it's, it's boring, right? The moment you realize a technician could do it for you and you already know how to do it, you know, there are certain people who are like, "Can't a technician do this?" But there are other people who just go, "Okay," and they just do it, and they seem to get energy from it. It's really interesting. And then there are other people, and I used to think, "Oh, these are gonna be the people with better ideas or more creative, and they won't do any of this," what I call chop wood, carry water stuff. I haven't found that to be the case at all. Some people just have low activation energy. You give them a task, they might ask you why, but they just kinda do it, and then they don't waste any effort, like no friction. Other people, it's like this whole process, and I'm kind of pointing the mirror at myself now because certain things I'm very plug and chug about. Other things I'm like, "Really? I have to do this and that?" I will say that as one, um, you know, the interesting thing about academia, um-That was told to me by my chairman years ago. He said, "You know, academia is one of these funny careers because the higher you go up the, up the ladder, the more, like, low-level crap they give you to do [laughs] in addition to everything else." I actually think that might not be -- It's a terrible thing on the one hand, but it might not be such a bad thing, and I'll just use one more anecdote. F- I worked at a s- in the Stanford sleep lab for a summer when I was, um, in college, and, uh, there was a guy who ran the, the project on, um, co-ran the project on looking for the gene for narcolepsy, which they eventually got. His name was Seiji Nishino, and he ran the lab. He's an MD and a PhD, extremely talented, and they're hunting for this gene. It was a big deal. But he would come into lab and do, like, the most rudimentary stuff with the technicians, and I remember s- asking him, I was like, "What's the deal?" And he said, "Oh, I just like to show people that I'll do this, and yet I also just like doing it because it makes everything else easier." And I thought, "Holy cow," like, this guy's running a giant program, and he's in there doing, like, the most rudimentary stuff, no complaint, no nothing. And I thought, "How do you get to be like that?" And it turns out, for me, you just have to, like, scruff yourself and make yourself do it. But some people just seem to naturally make the connect. What, what is that? Is it upbringing? Is it that some people just analysis paralysis, or they think they're special? I haven't found the thing. I, I can't find it.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:44:53

       I don't either. Uh, I, I, I don't know that I have a good answer for you. Um, y- I can give you a sort of a scientific perspective, but I can also give you a philosophical perspective that comes from my own Japanese background. Um, so, so I'll start with the s- the, the philosophical one. You know, in, in Japanese culture, I, I've been really interested about this concept of ikigai, which means you're doing, uh, a mundane task, but you are finding purpose in it. So, you know, y- your job might be to sweep the steps of a temple, and you could ask, like, "Wow, I-- that's, like, as about as mundane and as trivial a task as I could actually find." But, you know, the i- the c- the idea of ikigai is to sort of think about if, if that is your purpose, if that's your piece of the pie, like, you're part of this giant system, and this is the important cog that you fill, people... It, it actually enhances well-being, that, that, that, that they, they'll do it until they're, like, 90 years old. They'll still be doing it because-- and they won't give it up because they find so much meaning in the simple task. This infusion of simple tasks, I think, is also related to, uh, the notion of rituals, right? So we, a lot of us, a lot of traditions have rituals that people engage in, and they engage in a perfunctory manner. But if you engage it in a meaningful way, it has this power to connect us to everyone else who has ever done the ritual and anyone who might in the future. So sort of expands us, uh, to include more people in us. Um, and, and I'm really interested in this idea that we can draw sacredness from these mundane tasks. Again, this is all speculation. My colleague, uh, Shira Gabriel, she's at, uh, SUNY Buffalo, she studies what's known as c- collective effervescence, this idea of these magical experiences that we have when we're in a crowd all kind of doing the same thing. So, like, if we all go to a football game, and we're all cheering at the same time, or we go to a concert, and we're all singing Taylor Swift together, like, whoever your singer of choice might be, um, that there's sort of, like, a magic-ness where we become... We're doing something that's fairly mundane, but it feels sacred and special to us. It's sort of infusing it with meaning. Just going back to your point, you know, I wonder f- for some people, doing the simple tasks might just be a way of connecting to the essence of the science itself or the essence of the task itself. So when I was doing martial arts, you know, you're supposed to tie your armor on in a certain way, and you're supposed to bow in in a certain way, and in some senses, it's like, well, this is a stupid set of traditions, and you, again, you could just go through them perfunctory manner. But if you did them with meaning, uh, it's not just the task itself, but it carries this, it, it, it's the connection that we have to people that came before us and the people that came be- a- after us. Again, as mentioned, social belonging is one of the most powerful human motivations. Um, if we can create these bonds through these simplistic rituals, you know, th- th- those, again, these are all speculations that I'm drawing, but it could potentially be really, really powerful, and this, this idea that there might be sacredness in the mundane is a real- an idea that I think really interesting to me. So perhaps, you know, this, this PI that you're talking about felt con- more connected to the lab by doing these mundane tasks that I personally would not want to do. Um, but, you know, perhaps it was a way of sort of saying, like, "I'm still part of the science when I'm pushing paperwork at the higher levels of administration." Again, it's all purely speculation, but I think there is some basis in s- in science.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:18

       Yeah, I remember thinking back then, like, what a badass. The guy g- also, he and his, and his, uh, coworker, um, Emmanuel Mignot, eventually found the gene of the erec- it's in the orexin/hypocretin system, which has all these implications for hunger regulation, has implications for the treatment of obesity. Like, these, they were making fundamental discoveries, and, like, there he was, and to this day, I still, like, revere him in my mind. I was like, he's also, by the way, I'll just throw this out there, incidentally, the guy who taught me that getting, uh, morning and evening sunlight in my eyes would set my circadian rhythm 'cause the guy used to work, like, heroic hours. He would sleep, like, four or five hours a night, and he was like, "You just have to stay on a circadian schedule." Turns out you need a little more sleep than that, but he's still going strong, so incredible. As we've been talking today, I, I've had, uh, this thing in the back of my mind,

21. 1:49:03 – 1:55:04

    Self-Control Failure, Tools: Distancing, 3rd Person & Heros

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:49:03

       which is, like, there's something, and this is an obsession of mine, admittedly, there's something about our ability as humans to dynamically regulate our perception in time that is extremely valuable, right? And it, and it's especially salient when we think, "Okay, there's the cake. I want that. Okay, I'm not gonna do that." You have to get out of y- you can do things in space, um, and not outer space, but in physical space as these kids did with the marshmallow. You can turn around. You can put something in front of it. You could imagine a cockroach on it. ButThe powerful tools seem to be when we incorporate some exit from the moment into a future moment. We li- or we could think back. I mean, David Goggins will tell you, and I have a friend who's come on the podcast before, and, uh, Samer Hattar is a scientist, and he talked about how he was very, very overweight, and, you know, he, he, he's, he's doing great now w- um, with his health. But, um, David will tell you, too, like the fear of being that again is also a motivator. So thoughts to the past, linking the present to that and to a future concept. What we're talking about is, is mental time travel, and this is a pretty high-level thing that I'm assuming my dog, when I put a piece of meat in front of him on the floor, can't do unless I give him a command and I take it away if he doesn't obey the command, which is how he learned it so fast. So when we're talking about dynamic time perception, we know that that's harder when we're under conditions of stress. When more, when we're more relaxed, it's easier to do. So does any of the work that you've looked at in self-control actively incorporate the notion of self-regulation, how calm or how anxious one is? 'Cause we hear this, like, oh, some people don't eat when they get anxious, but a lot of people just become anxious eaters or, you know, for people in 12-step for alcohol, it's like never be, like, what is it, like angry, tired, you know, et cetera, for these very reasons.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:50:53

       I think what you're saying is fundamental to understanding self-control. Self-control fails when we are not able to move in dis- i- in distance, right? So I talked about how self-control is distance dependent. When it's far away, it's easy. When it's close, it's really difficult. Um, and so many of the most effective strategies in self-control require either physically distancing yourself, as you've already talked about, or psychologically distancing myself, finding ways to either, uh, to, to activate the mindsets that I have when the thing is distant, so I'm thinking about it as if it was distance even though it's proximal, um, or, uh, finding other ways, um, to frame it as if it's distance. So, um, as I said, in my lab, we talk about, you know, c- 'cause again, when things are far away, we tend to think about things in terms of why, but when they're close, we tend to think about them in terms of how, and so in my lab, we sort of stress knowing your whys as one way to extricate yourself psychologically, uh, from the situation that you're currently in. Now, you mentioned things like, you know, being drunk or being angry or being tired as things that predispose us to self-control failure. I don't know if it's necessarily that it's difficult, um, or if it's just they bias us in one direction or the other. And, you know, strong emotional states, um, being, uh, we know with alcohol, it creates myopia. We know that when we're tired, we tend to think more, again, more myopically, more here and now because we just want to rest. We don't want to think about the long term, that our mind sort of, there's an attractor state towards being very concrete and thinking about how and which, again, brings us actually proximal to the temptation. So I'm not sure that it's necessarily h- um, harder to do in the sense that, like, it's that much more effort and all else is being equal. It's just that the situation has put us in a situation where it's a lot easier to think proximally than think distally. So what are some other ways in which you can think, get more distance from a temptation that's not necessarily thinking about why versus how? Um, other ways might include, uh, and these come from my colleague Ethan Kross, who I know has been a sh- a, a guest on your show, referring to yourself in the third person as opposed to me, right? So I might say, "What does Ken want to do in this situation?" versus, "What do I want to do?" And just simply referring to myself as other people, not me, but as other people would create psychological distance in the space that allows, that, that gives me just enough to think of it as far as opposed to close. Um, I mentioned also, uh, a study that, uh, th- you know, what would Jesus do, for example. He did this with kids, uh, Angela Duckworth and, um, Rachel Carlson at the University of M- Minnesota. They brought kids in, and in one condition, they just had them do a task that required self-control as they normally would. But in the experimental condition, they, for the boys, they got, th- they, they gave them very, sorry, they, they gave the children various costumes. They could pick the costume that they wanted to wear the most. It's like the boy, a little boy might put on a Batman cape and cowl, and then they were simply asked, "As you do this task, we want you to ask the question, what would that character do?" So a boy might say, "What would Batman do?" And they show that thinking like Batman made them have better self-control. Now, there's many reasons for this, but the reason that they emphasized was that Batman isn't a kid. And so they created distance by emulating somebody else. Research has suggested that the simulation of someone else's mind, in order to simulate someone else's mind, we actually activate the neural circuitry necessary to have that mind. So if I ask myself, "What would Batman do?" I literally have to think like Batman. I reactivate the kinds of thinking that I think Batman would have. In other words, literally turning me and my cognitive system into somebody else. Um, so, you know, when you are tired and drunk and mad and everything else, one way, if, if you can't think about your whys and you're having trouble dist- finding distance from the object in front of you, it's not about not being emotional. It's really just finding some psychological space, and one way to do that potentially is to take on someone else's perspective, someone that you really admire.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:59

       Incredible. I don't know if the following experiment exists, but,

22. 1:55:04 – 2:03:51

    Words as Motivation, Visualization, Social Validation

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:55:04

       uh, maybe pieces of it exist in different experiments. I'm interested in the value of words spoken to self in one's mind, words spoken to self out loud but with no one around, writing things down, words spoken to other people, pictures, et cetera, asEither weaker or stronger motivators, um, for the obvious reasons. And I think all of us are familiar, at least, you know, in the 2000s you would go into an office or a school, and there'd be these pictures. It would be like, you know, um, inspiration when, you know, the moment meets the opportunity, and then it'd be like s- a sunrise or something. Like, and I'm not trying to make light of those. Better those than, like, a bunch of other things, but... And they're very innocuous, too. Like, in this day and age where no single historical figure seems to be immune from, of criticism, these have become the, like, the safe [chuckles] concepts. And I'm sort of half chuckling, but, like, what is the value of telling oneself, like, like, "Andrew, you got this," or telling someone else, like, "I'm gonna do this"? I don't know, maybe using AI to create a picture of yourself in the future doing something or having done something. Um, surely these experiments have been done. I know some of them, uh, your laboratory has done. W- what is the most potent tool? And I have a feeling you're gonna say all of them. [laughs]

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:56:23

       I think they can all have their place, but as I mentioned before, I think different, different things will have better power over others for certain people.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:33

       Mm-hmm.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita1:56:34

       Um, so for example, if you tend to be the kind of person who already has sel- a lot of self-talk going on, and the self-talk means something to you, like, like they're meaningful voices to you that you listen to, then self-talk presumably would be very effective for you, right? So if you're the kind of person where if it's positive self-talk, you literally feel better, if it's negative self-talk, you feel worse, um, you know, then perhaps strategically trying to change that self-talk could potentially have a really powerful effect on you. Some people t- talk about visualization. So I ment- and one, one thing I forgot to mention with respect to distancing strategy, one distancing strategy is to take a third-person perspective versus a first-person perspective on the thing that you're looking at. This doesn't work for me at all because I'm not a particularly visual thinker. I think in words. So for me, words are more effective than pictures. But if you're a much more pictorial person, and we know that this is a distribution, that some people are more pictorial and some people are more verbal, um, then perhaps y- like visualizing yourself engaging in the behavior would be more effective. Let me add one more thing. There is research that suggests, um, that when you communicate something to somebody, and then they respond in a way that makes it seem like you are on the same wavelength, [lips smack] that that creates an experience known as shared reality. People put a special premium and truth value to those interchanges than when you don't have that. So let me just give you an example. On a lot of college campuses today, you will see, um, banners that say, "You belong," and they're trying to imp- promote inclusion and make everyone feel at home on the college campus. And my own intuition about this is I'm not so sure how effective those are. I think they're a lot like the motivational posters that you're talking about that used to be in the offices. However, [lips smack] if someone says, "Hey, you know what? I think you really belong. I think, um, uh, I'm really happy that you're here," it, it seems, it's a very similar message. Uh, maybe it might even use the same words. If it's conveyed in a way that makes you feel like they understand you and that you guys are on the same wavelength, that actually has a very powerful effect, and there's some ongoing research in my lab that that actually d- even though it's the same words, there's something about that exchange of like, "We see the world in the same way," that convinces me that what you're saying is true, and so therefore it has a much bigger impact on me. So I bring this all back to self-control by saying, well, if, you know, so you talked about is self-talk more effective than other talking. I suspect other talking would be much more effective if you were able to create this kind of reality, right? Where if you had this conversation and you said, "I'm gonna do this," and then other person says, "I know you're gonna do this," right? I bet that has a lot more power than you saying to somebody else, you know, "I'm gonna do this," and they're like, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Good luck," right? So like, so there, there are, because humans are social species, there, there is a special power when we can create, um, a sense of oneness with others that makes our thoughts become real. So if, if by saying it, the, if by, by writing it, my thoughts are becoming real and have more power over, um, those are much more likely to have an effect. Again, this is all pure speculation, but I think it fits what we know about psychology.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:46

       That's incredible. I'm remembering a recent conversation where, you know, we're just kind of playing with the idea with someone, you know, like it's the old, uh, you know, riddle, if a tree falls in the woods, you know, and no one's, uh, there to, uh, witness it, did it make a sound? It's sort of like if we have a thought or an experience, um, and no one was there to hear it or witness it, did it really happen? And we know it happened, right? We can be alone and we can have a thought, but there does seem to be a sort of loop that closes and gets enhanced, and I'm not trying to be mystical here, when something that we say or do, uh, is witnessed and registered. Um, this can go in multiple directions. I'm re- uh, uh, reminded of a, [lips smack] uh, just very brief story. I have a good friend. His name is Ken Rideout. Uh, he's one of these incredible, um, parents and he's a husband to his wife and, and he comes from a really hardscrabble background and, and he's this incredible endurance runner, and, uh, in his 50s, he's, like, crushing races, and he was doing a race in, in, like, the, the, I think it was, like, the African, it was, like, the Gobi Desert, I think is what it was, and he's super competitive with himself and everyone else, but he, he was hurting one day, and I think he, he ran up next to the guy who was lead- leading the race, took out his earbud and turned to him and he said, in kind of psychological warfare manner, he said, "You know, I don't know what it is about me. I just don't get tired." And he said he registered the fear on the other guy's face, and he just crushed him that day. And, and I, and he won, of course, in Ken Rideout typical fashion. Uh, he's an amazing guy. He has a book out that's, like, really, it, like, it's super worth reading, um, because i- of his trajectory, like David Goggins or these other guys, and the fact that he wrote a book is interesting, right? It's not just, there's something about externalizing these, these thoughts. I am sure somewhere in his mind, he didn't necessarily believe what he was saying. Everybody gets tired, right? Even Ken Rideout gets tired, but there's something about externalizing it, seeing that validated, that makes itmore true to ourselves.

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:01:45

       Yes.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:01:45

       And that's a kind of a, a competitive example, but there are also beautiful examples of that, like you said, where someone's like, "I believe in you," like, "You can do this." And it completely changes our notion of what's possible. I certainly experienced that in a non-competitive arena. So something there. I guess that's a, a, a note to the, uh, to the person or people hearing somebody's goal or wish, um, to, like, tune in, 'cause those are potent moments or potentially potent moments. Yeah.

    8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:02:13

       I'm always struck that, you know, our, the impact that we have on our students, especially our graduate students and stuff, um, they're not the things I think they're gonna be. They, they always remember these side conversations where, you know, you acknowledge some small thing that was going on in their life. But again, for them, it was that sort of moment of like I'm bringing to reality some of the thoughts that they were having, and hearing me say them or hearing me verify some of these thoughts had an incredibly uplifting e- And as you say, it can also have an incredibly crushing event. So if I'm having insecurities and I'm sort of harping on those, ack- acknowledging that those insecurities might have a, have a, have a truth to them, it could be incredibly damaging. Um, but I'm always amazed by how inspiring it can be, someone that you really respect, you know, they know you have this goal, and then they say, like, "I know you have this goal, and I think you can do it." Like, it, it brings... That, that's what I'm talking about, the shared reality, the social validation of this belief makes it more real and thus has more power. You know, we know that writing thoughts down can be a very powerful thing as well for emotion regulation and, and motivation. I think part of that is just the actual sharing part, is the fact that now that I've written it down, I'm now looking at it as if it was not me, right? So, so I'm-- So now it's not me, it's words on the page, and that brings another level of power that didn't have when they're just floating. So I, again, I think all of these strategies that you're talking about, self-talk, writing, talking to other people, I think they're all-- they can all be powerful in the right way for the right person. But they may also exist on a continuum of po- potential potency, both good and bad.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:46

       What I'm about to ask sort of gets into the realm of, like, um, [tsks] performance,

23. 2:03:51 – 2:06:46

    Music, Anchors, Nostalgia

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:51

       but I could imagine it being used for any number of things. Y- you know, music, in particular the music that we listen to at a part- particular stage of life, um, is able to embody a lot without us having to, like, script out complete sentences. It's sort of a time-space travel of its own, right? There are certain songs, I'm sure for you too, I hear them and I, I teleport back, you know? Um, is it possible to build these anchors? You know, like, like, have a song or something that, that you associate with a time of, like, working through struggle, that the process is captured in that and then you can reapply it? Like, do those tools really work? 'Cause th- there was this phase from about, like, 1998 to about 2015 when, like, TED Talks and books were chockablock full of this stuff. Mm, it's not clear to me that they work or that they don't work. But music's a powerful anchor. Um, so has anything been explored around, around this?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:04:46

       Not that I'm aware of. The, the, the best work that I can link to this is work that I know that's done on nostalgia. Um, and nostalgia is traditionally, is portrayed in most media as something really negative. It's like a negative, bittersweet state. But there, research in psychology suggests that nostalgia actually has a very functional process. It serves a lot of different motivations. So for example, one of the things that it does is it helps make me feel connected. S- so a lot of times I f- I might feel like I don't really know myself, I don't know who I am. And nostalgia is a way of, as you me- used the word anchor, it, it al- it allows you to time travel and anchor and then, more importantly, see a sense of self-continuity, that I can see how I was there then and I can see how I am now, and I s- I feel a sense of connection, a sense of oneness, and that that can have a lot of positive benefits to the extent that that's what you're looking for. So, you know, to the extent that music makes you nostalgic, and I think a lot of the music that we love most has an element of nostalgia to it, I do think it serves a very important d- distance traveling function, time traveling function. And, and it sh- and you used the word anchor, which I really like, too. It, it, it, it reminds us who we are, where we've been, and who we've become. And we know for humans that's a very imp- that, that narrative, that sense of continuity is also very important for existential reasons, that I belong here for a reason, that there's a purpose. And so motivationally, those can be very effective. Now, I don't know if it reinstates the motivations that you had during the time, but I think it'll at least allows you to connect to the time where you had those motivations. They may have changed. They may be stronger, they may be weaker, but that sense of connection I think is really important for understanding what your motivations are in the first place, right? How they've evolved over time and what they are now like. To the extent they're the same, it might be able to reactivate, but to the extent that they're different, it actually might cause deactivation, but not in a bad way, but in sort of a good way in reminding you, okay, now what motivates you? Now what's changed? What, what do you care about now?

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:41

       I'd like to just briefly return to the concepts of intrinsic versus extrinsic

24. 2:06:46 – 2:14:11

    Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation, Job & Salary

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:46

       motivation. As I recall, there was this famous set of experiments also done at Stanford where they had kids draw, kids intrins- uh, excuse me, where kids drew intrinsically, like drawing. They just observed which kids drew, then they started rewarding those kids for drawing, and then they observed, at least as I recall, the outcomes being they, they observed that some of these kids, um, drew less or gave up drawing because, um, the conclusion that, was that these kids now were doing it for the, the rewards as opposed to the activity itself. Did those results hold up over time?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:07:16

       Generally speaking, the results have held up over time. Although, you know, th- there, there are some situations in which, um, they appear at odds with current practices and intuitions that we might have. And, and the best example I can think of is being paid for your job, right? So, so being paid for your job is something that you, um, i- is an extrinsic reward, uh, is an extrinsic reward for something that you may or may not be intrinsically interested in. And so the q- the big question is, if you love your jobAnd then I pay you to do the job that you love, does the love that you have for that job go down? Now, I don't think this is that perplexing if you understand what was actually going on in those Stanford studies. So they were children. So again, the children were in- intrinsically enjoyed playing with markers, and then all of a sudden, in one condition, they would say, "Okay, now I want you to play with these markers, and if you play with these markers, I will give you a reward." A second condition, they said, "Surprise, you just play with the markers, but we're gonna also give you a reward." And then the third condition, there was no reward, right? Um, and where you saw intrinsic m- intrinsic motivation go down is when the ch- child knew before they got to play with the markers the second time that, that they were gonna get the reward. So they were e- so they knew they were playing with the markers to get the reward. It's unclear to me whether that same confusion would happen with adults. So if I know I love this job, and now you're paying me a lot of money to do this job that I love, is it possible that I will confu- get confused and start to think, "Oh, I'm actually doing it because I'm getting paid"? Yes, and I think we can think of people who have had that experience. But you can also imagine that as adults, I know what I love, and I'm not even paying attention to how much money I'm being paid even though I'm being paid. What matters here is the c- the confusion. Why am I doing what I'm doing? And you could imagine with adults, if I'm really clear why I'm doing what I'm doing, that that confusion might be less likely to happen, um, than, than if I'm not as clear about what I really, really love. Now, I will say what I just said is very controversial, and I'm sure the psychologists who are listening to this are gonna be all up in arms about how that's not, can't be true. Um, I think th- there are multiple theories about how intrinsic motivation works, and I'm drawing for those expert readers, uh, expert listeners from the attributional approach. Um, and what matters here is the conclusions one draws from one's actions. Why am I doing this? Uh, that, uh, depending on how I answer that will dictate how my motivation flows. If I'm doing it because I'm trying to get the extrinsic rewards, then it becomes extrinsically motivated, and my motivation drops. But you can imagine, again, with adults, those who really know that, that they love the thing, and they're really certain they love the thing, they may be a little bit more resistant to that.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:09

       Interesting. And, and as adults, we can also, um, connect dots and expand our whys. You know, say, well, I love doing this thing, get paid for doing it, and, uh, those resources can help me provide for others, uh, who I also love. So it's sort of exponential. Um, I remember a salary discussion with my chairman, not at Stanford, but when I was down at UCSD. I won't mention who it was. You'll never figure it out, folks, 'cause, uh, there were several chairmen during my time there. And I'll never forget during a salary negotiation, he said two things. He said, "A, you can't make more money than me," which seemed fair. He's, you know, running the department. I was a, a junior professor. And he said, "And never forget, you're gonna make far less money than you deserve for most of your career, and then you're gonna make far more money than you deserve f- at the end of your career." And I remember thinking, like, that's the worst argument I ever heard to somebody who can't afford housing or whatever. Anyway, Stanford always treated me well. But, um, and in many ways, he was probably right. No one, nobody goes into academic science to make money. It's just not what you do. You, uh, you can look at anyone running a lab, uh, certainly in academia, and you can be sure that the amount of work that they're doing reflects their love of, of discovery and, and, and doing science. I, I feel very comfortable making that statement. But in a lot of careers, people do make a lot of money for something that they intrinsically loved. I'm thinking about performing artists, for instance. And, um, from my friends who are in that world, I, I think it can create a lot of dissonance. Like, uh, because they'll start taking tours, and they'll start doing album deals simply for, for the finances, and they get used to a certain lifestyle, which brings me back to this chop wood, carry water notion and the ikigai. Is that how you pronounce it?

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:11:46

       Yes, ikigai.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:47

       Ikigai, um, notion earlier. You know, s- several of the people who I've observed have incredibly long, super successful creative careers. I've been fortunate enough to, to speak to some of these, um, these people and know a few of them, and 100% of them will say that they still engage in a lot of mundane tasks throughout their day. Yeah, they have a lot of hired help and things like that, but they're still picking up after their kids. Some of them are still edging the lawn. They're still doing these things because when they didn't, they thought that all their time would expand into doing their creative work, and they found that wasn't the case. They actually had lower motivation. And I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I don't know. There's really something to this, um, like staying in the groove of what, what you were doing in the early to m- maybe mid portions of your career when you were, like, climbing the rungs. That's, it's almost like a, it's like a mental muscle.

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:12:39

       Yeah, it's, it, it seems to me a little bit like just stay, I guess as I mentioned before, like staying connected to the, to the process, to, to the way that, you know, I used to do things. I will say we have to be really careful though, because I think this relationship between external rewards and intrinsic motivation can be exploited. So there's some research suggests that when we know somebody loves the job, we don't feel the need to pay them as much 'cause we know they'll do the job anyway, right? So whereas if you took two people, one who is intrinsically motivated and one who's extrinsically motivated, you have to pay the extrinsically motivated person a lot more money to do the same job than the person who's intrinsically motivated. But it begs a lot of questions about fairness. Should you really be paying two people difference amount of money when they're doing exactly the same task just because they have differences in motivation? And in some respects, you're almost rewarding the person that youProbably don't want doing the job because they don't, they're just doing it for the money as opposed to they really love what they're doing. Um, I think a lot of employers would like to believe that they're, or like to have employees who are intrinsically motivated 'cause people who are intrinsically motivated will often do the extra step, they'll do the hard work. But again, there's this, there's this always this concern that they could be exploited because we know because they derive some value from the work itself, that we might have this perception that they don't need to be compensated quite enough. So there is this exploitation effect that's really dangerous and pernicious.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:14:06

       Are there any elements of Japanese culture that you wish you saw more of in

25. 2:14:11 – 2:20:56

    Mindfulness & Taking Breaks, Wabi-Sabi & Imperfection, Ikigai

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:14:11

       the United States for, let's just say your students and for, for young people in general, but maybe adults as well, and vice versa, that y- in the context of your work? Um, because they are very different places culturally. Uh, certainly there's overlap too, but, um, numerous times a- across our conversation on and off microphone, we sort of touched into some of these really incredible concepts in Japan and Japanese culture. Certainly we have them in the United States and elsewhere too, but you're in a unique position to answer this if, if you're willing. And, uh, I'm always interested in how, um, concepts from other cultures and our own could be, you know, looked at.

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:14:47

       Well, I should say first and foremost, I'm Japanese American. I'm Nisei, so I was born here, so I have never lived in Japan. So I think a lot of Japanese listeners might say, "Oh, he's not really Japanese." I'm definitely Japanese American. My connection to my culture mainly comes from food, um, 'cause I like eating and cooking, uh, mostly eating. Uh, and I also, as I said, I used to practice martial arts. I used to, I used to practice the Japanese martial art kendo, which is sword fighting. I've never actually thought about this question, so, so the question that you've asked is, is, is a really tough one for me. I'm, I'm gonna have to just sort of think on the spot. I think for me, [lips smack] um, one of the things I... A- again, psychology I think is starting to come to grips with it, but a lot of the work on mindfulness I think is really interesting and important. But I don't know that we recognize enough is sort of the importance of breaks, uh, opportunities to take your foot off the gas. Again, I'm not so sure it's Japanese culture, the, in society that they're good at that either. Um, you know, the, the stereotype is that they work all the time, so maybe they, maybe they have just the same problems that we do. But from the outsider's perspective, at least the notion of mindfulness, um, suggests that there are times where we need to [lips smack] not be so goal-directed and so driven, but instead just enjoy the moment. But it's not even enjoy the moment like I'm gonna enjoy this chocolate cake. It's like just enjoying being here, uh, in this moment. Um, I think that's an interesting idea that I think in psychology we are wrangling with. Uh, there's a lot of research in this area, so may- perhaps it's not quite answering your question. The other notions that I think are interesting is, is just sort of the notion of, uh, uh, this notion of wabi-sabi, that there's beauty in decay and non-perfection. And again, I think that's an idea that can be foreign in, in the, in, in the, in the Western cultural space where, you know, like if we think about our landscaping or we think about, you know, what we want, you know, the way that we dress, it has to be perfect, right? Like, you know, so we get all this cosmetic surgery or we, you know, buy all these clothes and if it's one wrinkle, we have to, you know, change clothes or whatnot. Like we, we always, we're, we're... You, you mentioned the word optimization before, that we, things have to be perfect. Um, where isn't, in Japanese culture, there's a beauty in the imperfection. In fact, you want, you actually intentionally build in the imperfections to have beauty. And I think, again, w- in the context of this conversation that we just had, you know, embracing the suck and, and starting from the place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better, um, again, might be s- an idea that we could incorporate. And, and, and we also already talked about ikigai, this idea of finding connection m- and, and, and, and expansion and, um, meaning, purpose in something really mundane or ritualistic or simple, I think is also a really interesting idea that might sort of explain some of the l- lack of happiness that we are currently experiencing in our own culture, where we're constantly future-oriented as opposed to, and we're always looking for bigger things as opposed to finding beauty in the simple things that we do. Like the most mundane tasks that we do might be the most important things that we do, but we just don't code it that way because we're, our eyes are on the prize downstream, and I wonder if that too might be an interesting idea worth exploring.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:18:11

       It's interesting to think about your answer in the context of the, the mundane or the chop wood, carry water type, uh, I think plug and chug, whatever people wanna call it, because therein seems to be at least part, if not all of the operations that we're applying to the big, lofty goals just on repeat with this thing, th- this concept, like I'm going for this big whatever, trophy, degree, founding a company, building this fa- Like when we think about external things, but even for people who have like a really big family concept. It's beautiful, right? But I've seen a lot of people crushed under that pressure, too. And then they end up with a kid who doesn't fit into their family concept, and it's like completely destabilizing for all their ideas. They thought they could script it out according to their family album-

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:18:56

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:18:56

       ... from the past. I don't wish that, you know, these hardships on anyone, and yet they're kinda like the stuff that make life great, too-

    6. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:19:04

       Great

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:19:04

       ... in a weird way.

    8. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:19:06

       Yeah, that, that, that brings us back to the idea of wabi-sabi, like beauty in the imperfection, in beauty in the decay. And, and, um, yeah, like we can embrace what is not perfect, which seems, you know, just sort of thinking about my own life, like wow, that's, at, in some sense that's totally foreign. You know, you're taking pictures and it has to be the perfect picture, or you're, uh, you're saying this perfect family. Like we have these mental models of what the goal is, and we, and we only achieve it when you're there. Um, it's interesting to think about, like-Other like being h- giving some degrees of freedom in that and, and finding meaning in that. I think that's a really interesting idea.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:19:41

       Yeah, it's actually one place where social media has, um, in my opinion, has shown a bit of humanity, uh, contrary to the stereotype. Like, uh, you know, I see a lot of social media stuff, and sure, like you'll see incredible feats of artistic or athletic or whatever, and they'll get like tons of views and likes. But every once in a while, someone will come along and very authentically like confess a failure or come along and, and just, you know, express a hardship that they're going through or a win that they, that doesn't really fall within our normal notions of what a win is, and it's like an avalanche of interest in those. So I think there's a, there's a natural, um, kind of a magnetism to these like just human elements. So I appreciate you being willing to take that answer, uh, to answer that question, excuse me, on the fly, um, because, uh, you know, it's not within your, uh, your PubMed profile, but I, but y- you're-- I do believe that the, the people we are comes to the science we do, and, and I-- numerous times throughout today's discussion, I've detected these elements of like who you are in this, and it's impossible to, to separate.

    10. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:20:48

        Absolutely. Absolutely.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman2:20:49

        So, so, so thank you for, for the consideration. And as a final question, I'm actually just really curious what you

26. 2:20:56 – 2:25:19

    Future Directions

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:20:56

       want to do now. Like what, what is the, the experiment you're working on now or the dream set of experiments that you think can really move the needle forward in your own concept o- of this work? 'Cause clearly you're, you're very focused on it, and, uh, we're very grateful that you're doing this work. But yeah, like w- w- where's your-- what are you most excited about right now?

    2. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:21:13

       One is we tend to think about self-control, again, at the tactic level, what do I do to overcome this temptation? And I think largely overlooked is this idea of what do I wanna do-- Again, 'cause you don't, you don't get your goal from a single behavior. It's through repeated patterns of action. So to really come up with better ways to understand repeated patterns of action in the lab or in the field, I think is a major challenge that the field has to take on and hasn't. And I think one of the reasons why we haven't studied it is 'cause it's so hard. That's why we go back to these one-shot deals. I think that's one of the most important things to think about. Um, another is, and again, we talked about this two modes idea. Am I pursuing the one goal, or am I pursuing the many? I think in psychology, we have spent a lot of time focusing on the pursuit of the one, and we haven't really done a good job of sort of embracing the pursuit of the many. To the extent that we have, it's usually like two goals, so like work-life balance, we'll look at how people navigate those. But as I mentioned before, we have more than two goals at any given time, so how do we integrate all of these goals? How do we pursue them all the time? How are we juggling all these balls and keeping track of them? Um, are there goals that we're, that we have that we're not even aware of, um, that we're actually pursuing? Really interested in that. Um, and then, and related to that is sort of fitting goals into the broader constellation of all the things that we want, like connecting goals to these big underlying values and motivations that we have. That link is not really well understood, so we talked a little bit about getting our ducks in a row, seeing like the whys of a partic-- like when you think about your goals, the, the broader motivations of what motivates them. How, how did that come to be? Like, did our system just know that these things were aligned, and now retrospectively we're making the connections? Or does making the connections have an important impact? So not just multiple goals, but also levels of goals and how they connect to more fundamental motives and, and how we know that whe- whether a goal is right for us, I think fundamentally requires understanding h- whether they resonate with these broader motives that we had. And again, as you mentioned, also like, like getting things aligned, like that alignment idea. I, I don't know that we really understand how people do this. It's magical. When we get it right, w- we do amazing things. How do we know it was the right thing to do? Like, there's no textbook, there's no wiring, there's-- So what are the cues? What are the signals? How do we discover what we really want? Those kinds of things I think are the future of our science. I don't know that it's gonna require a lot of methodological development, but I think those are the big questions I'd like to see us address.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:23:57

       Awesome. Awesome. I look forward to seeing what you and your colleagues discover next. And I wanna thank you. Um, thank you so much for coming here today, sharing the work that you've been doing in your lab. When I discovered, uh, your webpage and saw a few, uh, things you had done, um, previously, I was like, "I really, really wanna sit down and, uh, and talk to Ken," because I, I can tell that not only is the work embedded in something that we all grapple with and that's extremely important to life advancement, no matter how ambitious or non-ambitious somebody is, but it's also clear that you're bringing in a real understanding of just how dynamic our lives are. It's like not one goal, and, and studying these things in isolation has served us well, I think, in the past in building a framework, but I think it's just terrific the way that you're throwing your arms around all of it. And, um, and as I mentioned before, it's clear whether you intended it or not that you bring a lot of humanity to this in considering, yes, there are answers. They vary. You need a dynamic toolbox, and yet there's evidence that certain things really work. So I know I'm going to incorporate a number of things that you shared today, and I know our, our listeners will as well. And so thank you for doing the work you do. Please come back again and update us as things evolve. And, um, once again, really appreciate you.

    4. KFDr. Kentaro Fujita2:25:12

       Really honored to be here. Thank you.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:25:14

       Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. To learn more about

27. 2:25:19 – 2:27:48

    Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:25:19

       his work, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms, so that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kentaro Fujita. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:27:49