Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews psychologist Dr Kentaro Fujita on the science of self-control, motivation, and procrastination

Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Kentaro Fujita, professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Dr. Kentaro Fujita, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University who specializes in self-control and motivation. They open with an extended discussion of the famous marshmallow experiment — examining both its findings and the controversy over whether it truly predicts life outcomes — and conclude that the most overlooked lesson from that research is that self-control can be taught and learned, not merely inherited.

The conversation then turns to the ego depletion debate: whether exerting self-control on one task depletes a shared mental resource for subsequent tasks. Dr. Fujita reviews the mixed evidence from multi-lab replication studies and notes that while the laboratory effect has proven difficult to replicate consistently, individual beliefs about whether willpower is depletable — as captured in Veronika Job's research — strongly predict whether people actually show depletion effects. This leads to a broader point that narratives about willpower matter enormously.

Dr. Fujita argues that willpower, narrowly defined as effortful suppression of impulse, is largely ineffective as a training target, and that a broader "self-control toolkit" of behavioral and psychological strategies is far more powerful. He presents his own research showing that connecting actions to higher-order "whys" — including family, meaning, and identity — significantly improves the ability to resist temptation, and that thinking about short-term losses from indulgence can be equally effective.

The discussion covers motivational orientation types (promotion vs. prevention mindsets) and the importance of matching the right type of motivation to the right kind of task, drawing on Dr. Fujita's research with Abigail Scholer and David Mayer. The Yerkes-Dodson inverted-U relationship between motivation level and performance is also discussed — too little motivation is insufficient, but too much can cause choking.

The conversation also covers the tension between abstinence and moderation as goal-pursuit strategies, the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in sustaining long-term effort, and the psychological power of shared reality, nostalgia, and psychological distancing in building self-control. Dr. Fujita closes by outlining future research directions, including understanding repeated patterns of behavior over time and how people pursue and integrate multiple goals simultaneously.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Marshmallow Experiment: What It Found and What It Really Means

Andrew Huberman: Dr Kentaro Fujita, welcome.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Thank you. Really excited to be here today.

Andrew Huberman: I'm super excited to talk to you. We hear so much about motivation, discipline, willpower, and tenacity, but we really haven't had a modern update on the psychology of these in a long while. Not just on this podcast, but I think most people have heard of the so-called marshmallow experiment, which hopefully you could explain to us. Tell us what it revealed, some of the criticisms, and maybe even some criticisms of the criticisms, because I think the marshmallow experiment — which everyone will learn about momentarily if they don't already know what it is — sort of stands as this symbol of whether willpower is somehow innate or whether it's something that can really be cultivated. So, what is the marshmallow experiment?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: The marshmallow test was actually a series of experiments conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s through the 1980s at Stanford. What happens in the classic paradigm is a child comes in and is seated in front of a plate with something they really want — generally speaking, a single marshmallow. The children were told that the experimenter was going to leave for a while, but if they could avoid eating the one marshmallow and it was still there when the experimenter came back, they could get two marshmallows. This is essentially a self-control problem because you have a smaller, sooner reward and you're trading that off against a larger, later reward. The key dependent variable was how long the child could wait.

Now, the dirty little secret about the marshmallow experiments is that no child waited the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was gone. But what you could do was start the timer as soon as the door closed and measure how long the children would wait. That was interpreted as the child's delay of gratification ability, or self-control.

There were a series of experiments that we can talk about — they used these experiments to learn a lot about the different tactics, tricks, and tools that kids could use to improve their delay of gratification. But that's not what everybody knows. What everybody knows is that many years later, researchers analyzed data looking at children's delay time and then examined to what extent it correlated with important life outcomes like academic achievement, career success, income, even incarceration and social relationships. What they found was shocking. The longer children could wait before eating the single marshmallow, the more likely they were to do well in school, make more money, have more friends, have better physical and mental health, and have lower rates of incarceration and problematic behavior. This got people really excited about self-control because it suggested it was a key skill for important life outcomes.

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

Dr Kentaro Fujita: It depends on the data set. Research has now shown that the marshmallow test waiting times depend on a lot of things. In the original experiments, the wait time was something like 15 minutes. Other experimenters have shortened that to 10 minutes, which is a little easier for children. Another really important thing is that the child has to trust the experimenter. If you don't trust the experimenter, why should you bother waiting? It's perfectly rational to just go ahead and grab the one marshmallow if you don't trust that the experimenter is actually going to bring you two.

There have been experiments in which the experimenter looks reliable or unreliable in front of the child — they forget something or they remember to do something. When experimenters are unreliable, children do not wait. They just grab the marshmallow. And it's been argued that that's actually a sensible, rational behavior. So the setup sounds really simple, but there's a lot of art behind it to make this experiment work the way it's supposed to.

Andrew Huberman: 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, "No electronic devices until after dinner and you've done your homework," and then the kids see their parent looking at their phone — does that reduce trust in the parent's advice?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I don't know if it reduces trust in the parent's advice specifically, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling. The most famous experiment brought in a blowup doll referred to as Bobo. Kids either watched a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo, and then were allowed to play with Bobo themselves. Those that watched the adult punch Bobo were more likely to punch Bobo themselves. This suggests that children are very observant of adult behavior. I don't know that it's been done specifically on self-control, but certainly in many other behaviors, children are remarkably observant of what adults do.

Criticisms of the Marshmallow Experiment — and Criticisms of Those Criticisms

Andrew Huberman: I won't hold you responsible for defending the marshmallow experiments, but they've received a lot of criticism over the years, as have many paradigm-shifting areas of psychology. I think it's important for everyone to know that the moment a theory is put forth — whether it's growth mindset or, for the developmental neurobiologist, the idea that all neurons in the cortex migrate radially — two to five years later, someone finds an exception and the whole thing seems to crumble, but then it comes back and the answer turns out to be "both." In terms of the marshmallow experiment, I've heard a lot of criticism: it wasn't as predictive as we thought, maybe the experimenters were biasing the data collection. What are the valid criticisms in your view, and what are the criticisms of the criticisms?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: As I mentioned, the marshmallow tests have to be set up right. Like a lot of other psychology experiments, I think the psychologists intuitively understood what it took to get it right, but were not very good at articulating those conditions for others to follow.

The most famous criticism — the one that got the most press recently — involved a very large data set of children's outcomes in which they completed the marshmallow test at four years old and then a bunch of different life outcomes were measured at adolescence. The researchers wanted to see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test findings, and in principle they should have. And they did — and they did not. If you looked at the simple correlation between delay time and outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior, the answer was yes, it seemed to replicate. But then the researchers controlled for things like socioeconomic status, which was one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies, because the children going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were conducted were mostly from well-to-do families. When the researchers controlled for 30 or 40 covariant variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting the outcomes it was supposed to. This paper got a lot of attention for basically saying the marshmallow tests are bunk.

Now, this has been controversial because the question is whether that statistical adjustment was appropriate and whether we're interpreting it correctly. Other researchers have come along — one of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team — who took the same data set and reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, much more conservative ones. Rather than throwing in 30 covariants, they put in theory-driven covariants, ones that made sense from what we already know about research. 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 the same data set, analyzed differently, produced the opposite conclusion. There's still a bit of a debate out there.

But I think the main point to take away is that the way you set up the marshmallow test is really important. You have to have trust. The argument about socioeconomic status is that kids who grow up in high-SES environments live in very stable, predictable circumstances — 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 saving now doesn't necessarily pay off later, they're not going to wait, and so it's not as indicative for them. All of these things have to be carefully controlled for, and they were part of the original experiments — just not 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, as a self-control researcher myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow tests is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. That's very nice for convincing people that self-control is important — if I'm applying for federal grant money, that's probably the first sentence I write. But there have been many other ways of testing this hypothesis, so we don't need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore.

The most important thing about the marshmallow test — the thing that gets completely overlooked — goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew: is it an innate talent or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments were the ones where Walter Mischel and his team were teaching children the strategies of self-control. And when children learned 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 give you an example. One of the things he taught children was: is it better to stare at the one marshmallow or to close your eyes and cover it up? Three-year-old children believe it's better to stare at it, because they think that's how they'll motivate themselves — if I can see what I want, I'm going to be able to wait. Five-year-olds learn that that's not going to work, and they learn to cover it up or close their eyes.

Interestingly, you can create a verbal test where you ask children what they think they should do in order to wait longer. Research shows that there are age-related differences. At three years old, they don't know anything, but at five years old, they've learned. And then later on, at 13 years old, those children who correctly understand the rules of self-control have less problematic behavior. Walter Mischel and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems, and those who understood the rules — the tricks that work and the tricks that don't — were less likely to have behavioral problems at that camp than those who did not.

So knowledge matters. Self-control can be learned. It can be taught. You can learn by trial and error. And I think that's really important because it suggests that rather than being something we're born with, we can get better. We can grow. We can improve over time. This is a really important lesson that often gets overlooked with these studies.

Andrew Huberman: I'm smiling as you describe the strategies these children take because I've seen some of the videos — they're adorable and in many ways they reflect the behavior of adults but in a much purer form. I recall one where a young boy is leaning into the marshmallow and kind of acting like he's going to eat it but pulling back, and then looking away. It seems like he's aware he wants to move, he's letting himself move, but then he's pulling back.

As somebody who's currently training a puppy, I can tell you that placing food or a treat in front of the puppy and getting that top-down inhibition — the suppression of impulse — trained up is so interesting. My bulldog mastiff puppy will intentionally look away from the food as a way to manage the temptation. If I say "look at me," that actually makes it easier for him. So it seems like all mammals come up with these strategies, and I have to assume they're pretty unique not just by age but by individual.

I remember one kid spinning around in his chair. It does seem like the impulse to do something obviously involves movement, and I'm curious whether there's any research looking at whether people who have an opportunity to actually move their body — as opposed to sitting rigidly and preventing movement — are more effective in suppressing impulsive behavior. In many cultures you have things like worry beads to 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 there's a revving of the engine that drives movement, and when we're trying to suppress any kind of behavior, being able to channel that movement elsewhere seems useful.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: What you're saying is really interesting. Let me caveat everything I'm about to say by noting it's all speculation — I personally don't know of research studies that look specifically at movement. But everything you're saying makes total sense to me because the Latin root for the word "motivation" is to move. Motivation is supposed to be the energy force behind all of our movements. It impels action. So to me it makes sense that if I'm trying to motivate a particular behavior, being able to act would essentially be channeling my energy towards doing something.

There are experiments where, to try to train self-control, they have people approach or avoid an object with a joystick. If you see something you're supposed to avoid, you pull the joystick back — creating psychological distance from the temptation. For things you're supposed to approach, like broccoli, you move the joystick forward. There's some research suggesting that this kind of automatic movement — you're not actually moving your body, but you're taking action associated with movement — can actually help improve people's self-control over time, helping develop evaluations such that the chocolate cake is bad but the broccoli is good. Having these movements towards the good stuff and away from the bad stuff does seem to improve self-control afterwards.

There's also some research suggesting that if you fidget, you might learn better than when you don't fidget. And there's research showing that if you take notes with pen and paper as opposed to a computer, you can learn better. I think these are nice illustrations of exactly what you're suggesting — there's a really interesting connection between movement and motivation, which I think is a truism, but these are interesting examples of it.

Does Doing Hard Things Make Other Hard Things Easier? The Depletion Debate

Andrew Huberman: One thing I've been grappling with for a number of years is this concept that doing hard things makes it easier to do other hard things. On the one hand, that seems obvious, because it's a process — learning to recognize what I call limbic friction, that feeling of not wanting to do something or being afraid to do something and having to push through. That process translates across things. I fully accept 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, "By 8:00 a.m. I did a lot of hard things, so anything else I confront during the day will 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 push through hard things later. Assuming all things being equal — sleep, food, etc. — is there a self-control resource center? Does something like that exist, and is there any evidence for it in your work or the work of others?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Two thoughts immediately come to mind. The idea that by doing lots of hard things you learn that you can do hard things — I think that's really interesting from a motivation perspective because you could argue that what's going on is some kind of self-efficacy component. When I've done hard things, my self-esteem goes up and my confidence to be able to do harder things increases. We do know that as self-efficacy goes up, your motivation goes up and your ability to perform also goes up. So self-efficacy is a really important thing.

The other thing you mentioned is the possibility of exhaustion. I find this really interesting because it's a highly controversial topic in social psychology. There was a big boom of experiments in the 2000s suggesting just what you're saying — that self-control is like a muscle, and if I use it for one type of task, I exhaust it for all others and have to wait for it to recharge before I can use it again. Much like any other muscle, if I keep using it over time, it should also get stronger. There was some evidence for both of those.

Unfortunately, those experiments have come under attack for whether or not they can replicate. There are some multi-lab experiments — where a whole bunch of labs get together to see if they can replicate something, which gets rid of experimental bias — that have tried to replicate this effect. What you do in the lab is have someone do one hard task that requires self-control and then a second one, and the prediction is that if you've done a hard thing first, you should be worse at the second one. One multi-lab experiment did not show that it worked; another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work was led by the people who conducted this research in the first place, which was seen as very damning — if they can't get the experiment to work, it doesn't exist. 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.

Andrew Huberman: Could you just clarify — when you say it doesn't happen, what specifically are you referring to?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Let's say we have you do a task where you have to write something down with your non-dominant hand. This requires a lot of effort and self-control. Then we ask you to do some other really difficult task that requires inhibition — for example, the Stroop task. You see words in different color fonts and you're supposed to identify the font color. But if you see the word "blue" in red ink, although the right response is "red," you automatically want to say "blue." This requires inhibition — stopping your automatic behavior.

Research suggests that if you did the non-dominant handwriting first and then did the Stroop task, your Stroop performance should get worse. In other words, you should have a harder time stopping yourself from just reading the word. That's what's known as the depletion effect — you got tired, so your self-control is worse until it recharges. One of the multi-lab experiments could not replicate this effect. Another, smaller multi-lab experiment not by the original authors was able to get the depletion effect. So there's mixed evidence and it's not clear whether depletion is really a thing.

Now, as a researcher myself, I'm in a really uncomfortable position where I actually think depletion is a real phenomenon because I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet I think the way we've studied it in the lab hasn't been very good — much like the Walter Mischel studies, I don't think the original authors were very good at explaining what exactly you need, what the implicit decisions are that make the experiment work. There have been some accusations of monkeying with the data, though I don't know about that. My own take is that 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 that willpower is depletable. And the more you believe it, the more you show these patterns. There's amazing work by Veronika Job — she has a little questionnaire that asks, if you engage in a strenuous task, do you feel recharged or do you feel more tired? People who say they feel recharged act recharged after doing a really hard task. But for people who say it's exhausting, 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.

Andrew Huberman: Well, I'm going to stamp the belief into my mind that doing hard things makes other hard things easier, because I do believe in the belief effects that you describe and that my colleague Alia Crum at Stanford has described for a number of different categories of thinking and behavior. I also happen to like exercise and the sorts of things that are supposedly building up willpower. So I'm going to tell myself this — but your point is taken, which is that our narratives about willpower matter a lot for whether doing hard things makes subsequent hard things harder or easier.

I'm curious about the specificity of these kinds of effects. For instance, if people do any number of hard things but they're told to pay attention to their internal process — can they feel their stress go up and then go down? Maybe they learn to do some long-exhale breathing to lower their autonomic tone. Can people learn a process that they can then apply across different scenarios?

Because I think one of the fascinating things about school, about exams, about sports, or at the extreme about screening for special operations — we've had many people from the SEAL team communities on this podcast — is this notion that maybe it doesn't matter so much whether it's cold water or exercise or matrix math. The point is that you have to get into that place of friction and then recognize something about where and how your mind and body go, and start to work with that.

I think that because that's getting into a deeper layer of willpower and tenacity, no one thing can really be said to be the best tool. For instance, you're a well-trained musician. Having been a failed musician myself, I can tell you that not hearing the notes come out of the instrument that one would want to hear is incredibly frustrating — every bit as frustrating as the inability to 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 it, and therefore translate it across everything from sport to instruments to school to parenting?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts. First, I'm not an expert in this area, but we do know that people have differential distress tolerance — how much unpleasantness they're willing to put themselves through — and there are individual differences. As far as I know, it probably can be trained, usually through exposure, but again, I'm not an expert in this area.

What I can speak to specifically with respect to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown very limited success. For example, if you do the Stroop task hundreds and hundreds of times, or you go home and practice doing everything with your non-dominant hand for a week and then come back — some experiments have suggested that these willpower exercises do in fact improve self-control, but others say they don't. On average, reviews of this literature have suggested that the effect is much smaller than you might hope despite all the work you put in, and it's very variable. Some people will see small gains, but many people will see no gains.

That's about willpower specifically. And this is where I have to get a little more detailed: I think there's a difference between willpower and self-control. Willpower is one of the ways that we improve and enhance our self-control abilities, but it's not the only one.

The other ones — I've already described some of them that Walter Mischel discovered with the delay of gratification paradigm. He wasn't studying willpower. He wasn't testing whether children could just gut it out and use their own brains to inhibit their behavior. Instead, he was looking at things like covering your eyes, covering the bowl, turning your head, imagining the marshmallows to be puffy white clouds, or imagining that there's a picture frame around it so it's not real, it's just a picture. All of these different behavioral and psychological strategies enhance self-control without leveraging willpower.

At this point you could ask: what is willpower? It's not actually clear in psychology what that means, but most people understand willpower to be the effortful inhibition or suppression of impulsive tendencies. There's a yummy piece of cake in front of me and I'm really tempted to eat it — willpower is the active fighting of that temptation, telling myself don't think about it, don't give in. I think this is the paradigmatic version of self-control in which you use your mental muscles to push down those ideas. Those trainings are the ones I was saying are not very effective.

But training some of the other strategies — like closing your eyes, or imagining a cockroach crawl across the cake, or asking yourself what your children would say if they saw you eating the chocolate cake after saying you wouldn't — those behavioral and psychological tools can be taught and can in fact improve your self-control. So whether self-control is something you can learn to get better at, the answer is yes. Whether willpower specifically is something you can get better at, there I am not so sure.

Hot Versus Cool Systems: Fighting Temptation with Fear, Love, and Meaning

Andrew Huberman: I have this kind of crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or aspirational behaviors — motivating yourself to do something hard over time — when we find ourselves at a friction point, we have to go a layer deeper into the limbic system and hypothalamus. We have to come up with contingencies that are much more visceral. Sugar is good — we have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary, fatty things. That's hardwired. So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit, right? We imagine a cockroach on the marshmallow. Or we don't want to get up and go to class because we're exhausted, but we have to think about the fear of showing up for an exam and not knowing anything — the nightmare everybody's had at least once.

So the control strategy seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgust, and so on. How well does the opposite work? How good is aspiration — love, desire — as a driver? And I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between fear and love, broadly speaking, as tools for navigating all sorts of circumstances.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is super profound — more profound than you might think. 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. They argue that these limbic systems, these hot systems, these more animalistic systems are what make the temptation so powerful. So by activating those systems, all we're doing is upregulating the temptation impulses. For years — and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model and 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.

What's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire — if this thing is pulling me, I'm going to find something that's going to push me away. The example would be: there's a piece of chocolate cake, and I imagine a cockroach crawling across it. There's not actually very much research on that. Most of the dominant models in self-control really talk about cooling your cognitions. You're told not to fight fire with fire, that you need to be in a calm and collected state.

The reason why I think what you're saying is true is that I have some other work looking at the other strategy — what you called finding love. In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys — the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing — they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation. So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if I only think about cake-related things, that could be really difficult. And even if I say, "I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet," that doesn't have much magic to it. It's kind of sterile. 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 want to look good for my children's wedding photos. My children are looking at me. I want to be a good example" — all these higher-order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter, not eating the cake — we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake. And we think it's because it's giving people meaning. It's infusing the moment with something that matters. These are higher-order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. It's fighting fire with fire — not with fear, but with love.

What you're highlighting with your original example is something a little bit different, which is fighting fire by taking the positive and turning it into a negative. My PhD student Paul Stillman and a colleague of his, Caitlyn Woolley, did some experiments in which they had people think about the short-term losses of indulging. So: what's the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake? They show that that kind of thinking serves much like what you were talking about with the vomit reflex — it pushes people away. They're in the short-term mindset, the short term is pulling them in, so they fight that with a short-term repellent. And they found that that's also very effective for self-control.

Your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say is the status quo in self-control research. But for that reason, I'm super excited, because my own work is starting to challenge that idea — as is Paul Stillman and Caitlyn Woolley's — that we might be able to use the limbic system, we might be able to use our hot reactions. We don't have to assume they're going to predispose us to indulgence. Instead, they might be what inspires us and gives us the motivation to do the right thing. And I think that is really exciting.

Andrew Huberman: Fascinating. And I'm so glad you're doing that work. We had David Goggins on this podcast — author of Can't Hurt Me, famed for doing hard things all day long. I knew David before he had a book, before he was public facing. I met him at a meeting and afterwards he said he was running to the airport, and I thought he meant rushing to the airport because that's what that means to me. He was literally running to the airport. We were 16 miles away from San Jose airport. He went in the back, changed, and ran to the airport with his luggage. So he's always been that way, at least as long as I've known him.

One of the reasons David is such a shining example of motivation is that he is very open about the fact that he listens to negative comments from social media in his headphones when he runs. He tells himself what a piece of garbage he is if he doesn't do this. He basically flagellates himself into doing these things. And any attempt to suggest a softer approach — he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him.

We could even talk about eating disorders, right? Anytime we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to eat cake, there's going to be a subset of people saying, "So what you're talking about is eating disorders" — switching the contingency so that avoiding food becomes rewarding. I love the idea that there's this other side where you could entice yourself with the positive outcome.

What I'm hearing you say is: if it's a short-term battle, think about the downside or upside right now. If it's a long-term battle, you want to think in terms of long-term outcomes, both bad and good. Is that right? Should we have all of those in our toolkit?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I completely agree with you, and I love the fact that you use the word toolkit. My colleague Ethan Kross and I wrote a paper in which we talked about the self-control toolkit. We argue that we have lots of different ways to enhance self-control, and 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 a given person in a given situation. So if your listeners are saying, "Wow, that totally would not work for me" — that's okay by me too. I don't think there's going to be one tool that works for everybody. The self-control toolbox approach explicitly embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people.

If you're the kind of person who's very reactant — someone who says, "No, I can do it" — then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you, because you're going to react to it and say, "No, I'm going to do it." But if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say and incorporate their perspectives, and they're saying bad things about you, that's probably going to have a demotivating effect. 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 others. For me, getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I have a litany of reasons why I don't want to do it today. Sometimes it's just putting on the workout clothes. The strategies I use for that — I usually tell myself, "What would my heroes do in this situation?" The "what would Jesus do" approach. I think it's a very effective strategy in those kinds of situations. You imagine someone you really admire, or you imagine someone who looks up to you, and you want to be that person. That helps me get going at the beginning of exercise. But when it comes toward the end, when I'm pumping out that last rep or the last minute of a really hard climb, those things don't work so well for me. At that point, I just want to grit my teeth and get it done. Willpower might be a better strategy there.

So I think we have to explore the entirety of the self-control toolbox and through trial and error find what works best for us. This is another reason why I'd like to stress that self-control is a skill that you tailor for yourself, and it's a lifelong journey. I'm not going to be able to say "do XYZ" and all of a sudden people are going to be amazing. Instead, they have to try and have to fail. And it's in the failure where you actually learn the most, because you say, "Oh, that's not for me, or at least that wasn't for me at this time."

The reason why I find this approach really exciting and also hopeful is that I think a lot of people, when they fail at self-control, just say, "I'm a terrible person. I'm never going to get this. I just have bad self-control, bad willpower." But the learning approach, the toolbox approach, just says, "Okay, that tool didn't work this time." Failure represents an opportunity for self-growth and exploration and discovery, which makes it a lot more positively toned as opposed to "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 as something that you grow and cultivate over time.

Motivation as a Warm-Up: Attractor States, Task Switching, and Disengagement

Andrew Huberman: Is motivation something that needs warming up? I've long chuckled at the fact that we understand you need to warm up before exercise — even if it's running, you jog a little before you sprint. Everyone understands this, but for some reason people assume that focus and doing hard things mentally or creatively should be like a step function where you just show up and you're focused. I like to think I've tried to spread the gospel that it's going to take a little bit of warming up. Your mind's going to flip to other things. You can drop into a groove, but that takes time. It takes reps. It takes the mind picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, "You know what, I just got to get this thing out of the room."

Focus isn't just a switch. Motivation isn't just a switch. And I don't think people really believe it, even though everyone has experienced it. We're not robots. So are there tools that people can use to either embed that knowledge or move into focused states more quickly or more effectively? And has anything been studied about transitions between tasks? Because we have dynamic lives — it's not just about the workout or just about the class. We have to move from one thing to the next, and these are very different brain circuits.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is really fascinating. I love this idea of attractor states. In my own work, we don't have that kind of model and we don't use the language of warming up, but we do know that there is a dynamic interplay between how you think about something and the motivation you're experiencing. If a workout is "oh, another hour of pain," we're not going to get super excited about it. But if instead you change your mindset about it — and this is the power of work that Alia Crum and folks who do growth mindsets think about — if you change the cognitive orientation you have towards it, a different set of motivations can get activated. If I say it's not an hour of pain but instead me becoming a better me, that set of cognitions activates a different set of motives that can then be applied to the task at hand. That's not quite warming up, but in some senses it is — it's finding the right set of thoughts to maximize the motivation you're experiencing at a given time.

Another interesting thing to think about is that sometimes it's not just about the amount of motivation, but the type. For example, many sports have an offense-oriented component and a defense-oriented component, and they probably require very different mindsets and motivational orientations. One of the most important orientations we know about in motivation science is an orientation towards nurturance and advancement — moving forward, gains — versus an orientation towards safety and security — preventing losses. There's been some research to support the idea that having the right kind of motivation for the right kind of task enhances performance. In offense, you want to be about advancement, promotion, gains. But when you're on defense, it very well might be about preventing losses. If you get that mixed up, you won't be as effective. Research suggests that when you get the match, you enhance performance, but if you get a mismatch, you're just not feeling right, not feeling fit.

Research that I've conducted with my colleagues Abigail Scholer and David Mayer has shown that people have some insight into this. They know there are certain tasks where it's better to be in a promotion mindset and certain tasks where it's better to be in a prevention mindset. And they also kind of know the thought processes they have to engage in to get there. This suggests that people have some insight into not just the amount of motivation but the right type of motivation to do well.

So part of what you're talking about with warming up might be that people are trying to cobble together the right set of thoughts to get the right motivational type — not just the right amount, but the right type — for the task at hand.

There may also be an additional complexity with the amount, because we know not enough motivation is not good, but we also know too much motivation is bad. The Yerkes-Dodson rule — the inverted U-shaped function — says you kind of want to be in the middle for ideal performance. You want to be amped up enough to do the task at hand, but if you have too much, you might choke because it means so much to you that you overthink things. So there might also be regulation not just to maximize motivation but to find the right type at the right level for the task at hand. You can imagine David Goggins going absolutely crazy at a children's soccer game — that would be bad. You need to scale back motivation, find that sweet spot.

I think there is a lot of this regulation that people do intuitively. Some people probably do it better than others. And I love this idea — I've never thought about it as warming up, but it might take a couple of moments to actually get all the ducks lined up in a row so that the system is operating functionally, both cognitively, motivationally, and biologically, to maximize performance.

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

Zooming out a little bit, I think that's also related to research on disengaging. I've been pursuing this goal for so long, and now it's done — it doesn't really make sense to keep going because I've already accomplished it, and it's time to move on to something else. There is some research suggesting that that disengagement process is very difficult. We actually don't understand it nearly as well as we understand persistence. Because of research on self-control and grit, we know a lot more about persistence than we know about disengagement.

We do know that disengagement is related to lots of positive outcomes when the person is unable to pursue a goal anymore. For example, if a woman always wanted to have children but is now past the biological age where she can, it's probably healthy to disengage from that desire. Similarly, if we age out of a sport or experience some kind of catastrophic injury, or some window of opportunity has closed — research suggests that for people who are more adept at disengagement, they experience better mental well-being outcomes and they're able to re-engage in a new set of goals much faster. But beyond that, we have to really understand more about the psychology of disengagement and how we know when to persist and when to disengage. It's a really important question, but we don't know very much about it, partly because our culture emphasizes persistence and grit more than disengagement.

Starting from a Place of Suck: Optimal States Versus Real Conditions

Andrew Huberman: It seems like what we're trying to do when we want to get motivated or when we're engaging self-control is to bring together state of mind, body, and concept. There's the thought piece — I'm a person who works out even if he doesn't want to, provided I'm not sick or injured. I believe in those caveats. I don't believe in the no-days-off thing. I take a day off every week. But I also believe in state of mind and body.

One thing that just isn't discussed enough among high performers — in athletics, in academics, in music — is that once you taste a really great workout, once you taste flow state, once you taste neuroplasticity — you grind it out, 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. As you ascend the staircase, there's this sense that that peak state is going to happen more and more often, and many people will assemble their entire lives trying to recreate those states.

I think one of the beautiful things about people like David Goggins — and we've also had Coleman Ruiz, DJ Shipley, Jocko Willink — is the way that they describe doing hard things. They were weaned in BUD/S and their other training from a place of suck. As Jocko, who's a good friend of mine, says: we start where it sucks. When your weapons are wet and you're cold and it's sandy, that's the starting line. So you completely recalibrate this notion of optimal performance.

I think that's something we don't really have an analog for in the rest of the world, certainly not in academia. It's like: get great sleep, maybe caffeinate just enough, be on the right place of that inverted U-shaped curve, not too stimulated, not under-stimulated. And while all of that's great, it's one of the reasons I don't like the notion of optimization, because ultimately optimization is about that moment. The idea that we're trying to attain a perfect state before we can do the real work is one of the more popular concepts about motivation. Is it possible that we can rewire our thinking so that we start from a place of suck? Because in terms of building real mental toughness — the ability to push into something when everything is pushing back — that seems to require crap conditions.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is really interesting because we do know from research that people are incredibly creative at coming up with justifications to not engage in self-control. I'm supposed to work out today, but my gym clothes don't match. I'm supposed to work out today, but it's too sunny. It's not sunny enough. It's raining too much. People are remarkably creative at coming up with reasons to justify indulging in their temptations.

What's really interesting about what you're suggesting is that there might be a bias — or at least we capitalize on a bias — that things have to be just right for me to do it. I think of this when I'm writing. A lot of us have this idea that "I don't feel like writing today, the conditions just aren't right, so I'll put it off till the muses hit me." And you learn over time that every day is going to be that not-so-perfect day. 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.

One of the things that's really interesting about what you're suggesting about optimization culture is that we're embracing it partly because optimization is an exciting idea, but also it's a great justification for not ever doing the really hard things, because the conditions aren't quite right. And people are incredibly creative at coming up with reasons why they shouldn't do the hard things. In the moment of choice, it seems perfectly reasonable. And that's one of the things that's really frustrating and challenging about self-control.

When self-control conflicts are far away from us — when I'm thinking about exercising more next year, but not today — it's really easy to say that's the right thing to do, that's what I really want. But when next year becomes today, all of a sudden my mindset is in a different place and that choice is really hard again. The clarity I once had is gone.

What's also frustrating is that as that moment passes and you're looking back at it sometime in the future, you have distance again and the clarity comes back and you're like, "Why didn't I do what I was supposed to do?" So one of the frustrating things about self-control is that it's distance dependent. The right thing to do is really clear when it's far away, but when it's close, it's hard to figure out what I should be doing.

Research that I've done suggests that this exists in part because our minds shift in how we think about the event. When the event is in the distant future, it's more abstract — I'm more likely to think about it in terms of desirability, why I'm doing it. But as that future becomes now, my mindset changes and I'm thinking much more about feasibility — how am I going to do it, much more concretely about what I have to do. And the problem is that a lot of these things that are hard have really positive whys but really negative hows. That's because they're hard. 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. Then time passes, it gets farther away from me, and I'm looking back thinking, "But that was something I really, really wanted to do" — because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how.

In order to try to overcome that, in my lab we've conducted experiments in which we have people think about their goals and why they're pursuing their goals, or how they're going to pursue those goals. We then give them a self-control conflict that's unrelated to those goals — so they're just thinking generally about why or generally about how. We've essentially warmed them up, and then we give them a self-control task. They have much better self-control when they've thought about whys than hows. We argue this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant rather than close. But that's the problem with hard things: when they're in the distant future, it seems like a really good idea and we can think about why we want to do it. When we actually have to do it, we don't think about why anymore. We think about how. And the how just sucks.

Andrew Huberman: I would also add — and feel free to disagree — that the rewards that come after challenges are the real rewards. I've been saying for a few years now that dopamine and other forms of chemical reinforcement that come without effort, while there are examples of those that can be healthy or innocuous, most of them are pretty detrimental. But there's nothing quite like rewards that follow intense, prolonged effort.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: 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. If I'm trying to lose weight and there's a piece of cake in front of me, usually it's one goal against another — lose weight versus eat the yummy cake — and those two goals are in conflict. One of the things I think is 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. Those are additional motivations that fuel the long-term goal.

I was mentioning before that it's really important to think about your whys — not just the one why, but all of them. I want to be healthier. I want to be a good example for my kids. I want to show that I can do this. I want to become the better me. All these different motivations — there's no reason why resolving a self-control dilemma should be a fair fight. Why should you give the temptation a fair one-on-one challenge? Instead, growth, self-discovery, confidence, self-esteem — all these other things can also be leveraged, and we can become much more powerful against the temptation because we find additional sources of motivation to push through the things we really don't want to do.

And ironically, it's a self-reinforcing upward cycle, because the more you do it, the more positivity you experience. Whereas you can also imagine the opposite: if you give up, you say "I'm not capable," and all those motivations start to collapse. You can just hear this negative self-talk and see it becoming a negative downward spiral. So I really find what you're saying interesting — not just the phenomenon, but really focusing on it and saying, "I'm doing the hard thing not just for the one goal, but because I want that dopamine rush. I want my system to learn how to take this on. I want to prove to myself that I can do it." It shouldn't be a fair fight. We should stack the deck in our favor.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. If the temptation is limbic, come in with more limbic as well as high-level concepts. Spread them out over time — what's the benefit now, what's the drawback now of making the wrong decision, and then extend that out to tomorrow, the next day. Spending a little bit of time on these things can mean a lot. And in the end, what we're saying is that a lot of time is really like a minute. It's not like you have to sit down and do a journaling exercise, although I think from your work it's clear that that can be beneficial.

I do also think it should get easier over time, because as you said we have these attractor states in our mind. The first time we try to pull these thoughts together, it's like herding sheep — you're trying to get all these ideas and motivations and thoughts and biological systems all lined up. But the more you do it, the mind likes to practice and be in the same places. Over time it should become faster and faster. So this idea of warming up — the warm-up might get easier and easier the more I do it.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Well, the concept of warming up came to me years ago when we would record neural activity in the brain of either awake animals or, in some cases, humans. If you look at a person doing a task — whether through functional imaging or electrodes or calcium imaging — you don't see the circuit just light up the moment they start the task. What you see is a lot of noise, what we call a lot of hash. But as they repeat the task over and over, the signal becomes very clear without any adjustments to the equipment. The signal-to-noise goes way up. And I was watching this and going, "Oh, this kind of explains a lot of my experience trying to study or to do things."

One piece of knowledge I'm really excited about: there's a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Peter Strick, who maps neural circuits. He discovered that the brain areas that control movement of the large musculature, when those become active, actually activate the release of adrenaline when we move. And the adrenaline then feeds back on those circuits. This is a reminder to anyone who 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 after five minutes of warming up, you're more motivated. It's not purely psychological.

Competitiveness, Achievement Motivation, and the Self-Control Toolbox

Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about the role of competitiveness. When I was a postdoc, I was in an area of science where a lot of tools were coming in, it was super competitive, and it was kind of first come, first served. I was in competition with really big labs. And that competition fueled me in a way I wasn't familiar with. I'm not an innately competitive person about most things — I won't be the guy who has to win at ping pong. But having an enemy was incredibly motivating. In the end, they got some and we got some and we ended up being more or less friends. But it brought out our best.

Do people tend to distribute along a normal distribution in terms of competitiveness, or is it a binary? And to what extent are people we call motivated just really, really competitive? Because a lot of endeavors in life are not competitive, but a lot of them are. How does competitiveness play into willpower and tenacity and self-control over time? And what happens when you remove the competitor?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I personally don't know of any direct work looking at competitiveness and self-control. The closest work in my sphere has to do with achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a lot like competitiveness — I think competitiveness often comes out of achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a recognition for doing really, really well on something, and it's usually really well relative to other people. You really want to be the person all the way at the top. If you're number two, you might get to that situation where now you're rivals and that fuels you to go higher and higher. We do know that achievement motivation is probably normally distributed — the desire for achievement and achievement recognition will be stronger in some people and weaker in others.

The thing to think about is that although achievement motivation may be promoted by our particular culture, when I think of motivation, I think of the myriad different motivations that might motivate behavior in just as productive a manner. For example, we know that belonging motivation is really important for humans. Humans as a social species survived because we were in groups. A human alone is not very powerful, but a human in large groups is very powerful. So we've evolved this motivation to be connected and socially intertwined with other people. And I'm sure you know folks that are super belonging-motivated and people who are not so motivated. The people who are really motivated to belong to a group will do amazing things in order to belong to the group.

There are many other motivations too — motivations for power, for control, for self-esteem, for competence. When I think of motivations, I try not to think of any one motivation, but sort of think about the aggregate motivation impelling us towards a particular behavior. We were talking before about not giving the temptation a fair one-on-one fight, but actually bringing to bear all the motivations that might help you overcome it. If you know what motivates you, you should use those and activate them strategically. If I'm someone who is competitive, then I might use achievement motivation to fuel my desire to do really hard things. But maybe I'm not that kind of person.

You see this all the time — on Peloton, the instructor will say, "If you don't want to see the leaderboard, get rid of it." For some other people, it's more about being on the bike with other people, and staying with the group — not being in front of the group, but staying with the group — is what fuels them to do things they didn't think they could do before. Again, taking the idea of a self-control toolbox really seriously: different strategies are going to work differently for different people. So I think it's really important to explore not just different strategies, but to explore yourself — to really say, "What really does motivate me?" And I'm not sure that we always know what really motivates us. A lot of times we discover what our motivations are by saying "I like this and I don't like this," but it's only through exposure. So go and explore and figure out what makes you tick, and then exploit and use those in your strategies.

Abstinence Versus Moderation: Choosing the Right Pattern for Your Goal

Andrew Huberman: One thing I've been playing with recently in my own life is striving for immense consistency in certain things — not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on peak performance, just showing up without fail. Every single night I have a particular practice before I go to sleep, and no matter what, I show up to it. It's really become an experiment in consistency. I think I'm about two years in now. And it's tapped into a different part of myself that I'm not so familiar with — not trying to get the best performance out, but just showing up.

Earlier we were talking about abstinence versus moderation. What do the data show? And when I hear abstinence, it sounds like people trying to avoid certain behaviors, but I think we could flip it the other way too — is it always the case that we have to show up to the thing at our best? Yesterday I was supposed to do a HIIT workout and things were getting really compressed. I thought, what would happen if I just did the eight rounds on the assault bike but didn't go all out — just did the first two semi-lazy? And I noticed by the third or fourth round, of course, my motivation started to increase. It was informative for me because it showed me where the barrier was. It wasn't necessarily about the effort — it was about the concept. So what's the deal with abstinence versus moderation?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I'll give a two-part answer. The first part is that generally speaking, psychology has tended to emphasize abstinence or consistency in self-control over the alternative, which is moderation. We have a lot of self-control theoretical models that stress the importance of patterns over isolated acts. Once you have a pattern of behavior in place, it carries a special hold over you that a non-pattern does not.

Let me give you an example. I have an Apple Watch and it tells me if I've closed my rings for the day. There was a point in time where that number was some huge number because I had managed to be consistent for a really long time — let's say it was 500. Just knowing that I had that unbroken streak of 500 in and of itself became motivating to me, above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts. These theoretical analyses have suggested that one of the things that helps us maintain self-control is the knowledge of the pattern. The pattern itself has strength over us in a way that doing something sporadically does not.

If you're able to tell yourself "I've done this every Sunday for the last X number of years," that has a special motivational power that perhaps even the same number of times done more sporadically does not have. Perhaps it's just because you have the habit. Perhaps the habit locks you into place. Others have argued that we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern.

But one of the things you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors. When I had the streak going, I was up in the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in, just because I wanted to keep the pattern — which was really stupid. So they can take a life of their own, which in some cases can be good, but the rigidity could also be bad.

This idea that there might be trade-offs associated with abstinence got my student and I really interested in whether there were other alternatives, and the most common alternative is some version of moderation. At its extreme, abstinence is never indulging in the temptation or always doing the goal-directed option. Moderation is generally doing the thing that's good for the goal but allowing yourself to have the occasional lapse.

Now I want to be clear: this is not the same thing as failing. Failing is where you're not talking about the pattern of behaviors — you make that decision in the moment and say, "Well, the cake looks really good, it's sunny out, it's beautiful, I deserve the cake," and you eat it. That's a justification in the moment. When we're talking moderation, it's more like: I have the goal in mind, and with the goal in mind, I understand that indulging once isn't going to kill that goal. It's a lot like saying eating chocolate cake once isn't going to make you fat, or eating a salad for lunch one day isn't going to allow you to lose weight. What matters is the sustained behavior over time. But you have choices about that pattern — you can either have it be completely consistent, or you can have cheat days.

We were really interested in some of the trade-offs. Abstinence, as I mentioned, leads to really rigid behaviors. But computationally, the choice is already pre-decided for you. It's Monday at 5:00 — that's your exercise time. You don't have a choice. If you're following an absolute strategy, the choice is made for you. It's really easy. In principle, if you can hold on to that, it makes much more rapid progress because you never take a step back. But there are some trade-offs, like the rigidity. It's Monday at 5:00 PM and it's your daughter's wedding, but you're getting the workout in. Why? That lack of flexibility is kind of crazy. And once the pattern is broken, it's all or nothing — it's gone. If you're abstinent and you have a lapse, the goal is done.

My point is that there are trade-offs between abstinence and moderation, and we're really interested in trying to understand why people choose one versus the other for what kinds of tasks and goals, with the idea that maybe sometimes we're picking the wrong pattern for the goal at hand.

For example, if I'm trying to be faithful to my spouse, abstinence is probably better than moderation, because if you have the one lapse, you are no longer a faithful spouse — sort of by definition, that goal is gone forever. On the other hand, for a student studying for an exam, they can watch a little Netflix or they can study. Normally those two goals aren't in conflict, but the night before an exam, now they are. In that kind of situation, a study break might be okay because taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying.

So we're interested in whether people pick certain kinds of strategies for certain kinds of conflicts, and also whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategies. If you're the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go. If you're the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better.

Another thing we're really interested in is why people pick the wrong one. One of the things we've been finding from our lab is that when you present people with targets — other people who have engaged in abstinence versus moderation — at least the participants we've asked generally say that the person who engaged in abstinence has better self-control than the person who engaged in moderation. This is interesting to us because actually moderation is more difficult. You could have said that the moderation person has more self-control than the abstinent person, because that's in principle the easier decision. But this suggests that there may be a bias where when people are saying "okay, I want to go on a diet, I want to exercise more," they might be defaulting to abstinence when in fact they might be better off doing some version of moderation.

Andrew Huberman: Fascinating. Two of the best pieces of advice I ever got for my academic career — but which turned out to be valuable for all sorts of long-term goal pursuits — came from my dad, who's a scientist, and from a neurologist at Berkeley, Bob Knight. My dad said, "Listen, you've got to be a long-distance runner in this game. There is a thing called burnout and you just have to figure out what you can do consistently." And Bob Knight said, "Find a nondestructive 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." He said his nondestructive reset was completely mindless activities, in particular fishing. He would go fishing, not think about science, not think about anything. And that was his reset.

As simple as that advice is, it was really valuable to me, because he was laying out a pattern. The week is a fundamental unit of work, and you have to figure out how to reset so you can continue to come back and be that long-distance runner. Otherwise, burnout is real — physical burnout, mental burnout — and what's not sustainable is not sustainable.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think one of the ideas we've been playing around with is this notion that there might be two modes of goal pursuit. One of them is the single goal — here's the most important thing in my life and I'm going to sacrifice everything for it. That's very effective for getting things done, and I think some of the most highly productive, highly successful people specialize in that mode. Our society is actually really good at advancing that idea. We say: you study when you're young, throw everything into it, if you want to be an athlete you have to do this and this and this, if you want to be a scientist you have to do this and this. We track people really quickly and then everything becomes about that singular goal.

But humans never pursue one goal at a time. The truth is we are pursuing multiple goals in our lives. I have a goal to work, but I also want to spend time with family and friends. I want to exercise. I want to indulge my artistic side. They're kind of what my friend Abby calls invisible goals — goals that we're pursuing but aren't necessarily aware that we're pursuing. As a result, we're not actually maximizing and giving them their fair due diligence for us to be the well-rounded humans that we want to be.

When we think about what is success, we go back into that single-goal mode. And I think that's one reason why people prefer abstinence over moderation — they're thinking about the one goal that is most important to them and they're going to subordinate all the other goals for that one. But there might be something really healthy and wholesome about understanding that you're actually pursuing multiple goals and then realizing that you have to divvy your effort among them. Doing so systematically might end up helping all the goals in a way that's better than just pursuing the one and sacrificing all the others. In other words, the gain from pursuing all of them might be more than the gain of pursuing just the one.

Certainly in the United States, we love to revere the examples of extreme performance — Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, amazing gymnasts, Yo-Yo Ma. But if you talk to them or people from the tier-one operations community, they'll tell you there was very little balance, certainly when they were ascending the ladder. And even to maintain high performance, very few people can do that over time and have a stable and healthy personal life.

These days there seems to be a theme of demonizing people for being too extreme. I find it very selfish on the part of the public to revere these people, glean all the rewards of the incredible performances and dynasties, and then say, "Oh, well, he was compulsively competitive." What do you want? Imbalance also brings extremes. You can get dogs that can do extreme things well beyond what their breed represents, but that dog is not going to be like other dogs. Its neural circuits are honed around these training things. And that's what happens when you take young kids and shape them around a certain behavior, academic or athletic.

So it's easier to look at those examples and say, "Oh yeah, I don't want to deal with that," and 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. Most of us probably don't want that or aren't willing to make those sacrifices, and I think we can be okay with that duality in our heads.

There may be goals for which you pursue in that single-minded way because they're so important to you, as long as you're aware of the trade-offs. You have to decide: this goal is worth sacrificing for, these other ones are not. My concern is that we often aren't aware of the trade-offs until retrospect. Those who have balanced their goals say, "I should have put more effort into the one. I didn't achieve all the things I wanted to." And you also see lots of stories of people saying, "I killed myself for this one goal. I did it, but I kind of wish I had this other thing." The more we can do it proactively as opposed to retrospectively, the closer we will be to where we want to be.

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation: The Real Engine of Sustained Effort

Andrew Huberman: I don't spend a lot of time on social media — I have an allocated set of time and a separate phone for it, which helps a lot with moderation. But I have this appreciation for these high-speed cup stackers. Do you know these people? They set out cups or objects and everyone's like, "Oh, it was sped up," and they'll run a clock in the background so you can see it wasn't artificially sped up. I'm like, this is so cool. And then I realized: how much time did they put into this?

I hope they're happy in their high-speed cup stacking. I don't know what they're sacrificing for that, but it's kind of amazing that in this day and age, because we can put everything on display, there's more and more incentive to become hyper-specialized in something for mere attention. I hope they're being rewarded handsomely in whatever way, psychologically or financially. But it's kind of interesting — I don't think this existed in the past. There might have been a traveling carnival 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. And it sort of gives the impression that one has to be hypertrophied in one skill or attribute or else you're not really living. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: You're making really interesting observations about the current state of our society and the impact it could potentially have on motivation. The interesting angle for me is whether the cup stackers are doing this for the attention or for themselves. Research suggests that they probably do it because they themselves love it.

It goes back to something you said earlier about doing hard things. Research suggests that when it comes to doing really hard things — especially sustaining that hard effort over time — you could do something hard maybe once when you're externally motivated, but sustaining it over time is really difficult if you are exclusively externally motivated. Research suggests that your performance and self-control is enhanced to the extent that you're intrinsically motivated — that you enjoy it for the task itself.

There's research that Ayelet Fishbach has done and Caitlyn Woolley as well, where they've shown that if you go to the gym and you only think about all the things you benefit long-term from the gym, your attendance is okay. But if they include intrinsic positivity or intrinsic rewards — like just listening to your favorite music while you're on the treadmill — that increases your likelihood of going regularly. The idea is that it's easier to sustain motivation over time, especially when things are hard, when you love what you do. If you can't find something to love, you might be able to do it short term, but over time you'll struggle to keep that motivation up, mostly because the rewards are not tracking with the difficulty of the task.

That's led me to have some thoughts about how you build self-control and how you teach self-control. I think the worst thing to do is the way we currently teach self-control a lot — in the classroom, where we make kids sit in their chairs really quietly and it's rule-imposed. This is what you're supposed to do. I'm not convinced 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 in, because that's where you will do the hard thing for a long time. You'll also be more willing to explore and find better ways of doing something because you love it so much. I used to practice martial arts, and I loved it. I would lose a competition or have a horrible practice or just couldn't do something. What kept me going wasn't some desire to be better — it was really just the intrinsic love of the thing itself, the intrinsic love of the process, that kept me in the game when things were the hardest.

So if I were to give advice to anyone about how best to cultivate self-control and the ability to do hard things, it would first be: make sure the thing that you are trying to do that's so hard is something that you love doing. Because if you don't love it, all of the external rewards are negative — they're all punishments — and that's not going to sustain you. Unless there's something about the process itself that you enjoy, and that sounds masochistic, but I think most people who do hard things enjoy something about the process. That's what keeps us going. That's what gives us the consistent motivation to pursue things over time.

Andrew Huberman: You've perfectly queued up this question I've had about people who have very low activation energy — which sounds like a bad thing, but it means they can just get into action right away — versus people for whom it takes a lot to get into motion. In being a scientist and in running a lab, I can't say that people fall into two bins on this, but there do seem to be people who, for whatever reason, just go. You give them a task, they might ask you why, but they just kind of do it and then they don't waste any effort — no friction. Other people, it's like this whole process.

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 academia is one of these funny careers where the higher you go up the ladder, the more low-level crap they give you to do in addition to everything else. I actually think that might not be such a bad thing.

I'll use one more anecdote. I worked in the Stanford sleep lab for a summer when I was in college, and there was a guy who co-ran the project looking for the gene for narcolepsy — which they eventually found. His name was Seiji Nishino, and he ran the lab. He's an MD and a PhD, extremely talented. They're hunting for this gene — it was a big deal — but he would come into the lab and do like the most rudimentary stuff with the technicians. I remember asking him what the deal was, and he said, "Oh, I just like to show people that I'll do this. And I just like doing it because it makes everything else easier." I thought, holy cow, this guy's running a giant program and he's in there doing the most rudimentary stuff, no complaint, no nothing. How do you get to be like that? What is that? Is it upbringing? Is it that some people just have analysis paralysis or think they're special? I haven't found the thing.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I don't either. I don't know that I have a good answer for you. I can give you a scientific perspective, but I can also give you a philosophical perspective that comes from my own Japanese background.

In Japanese culture, I've been really interested in this concept of ikigai, which means you're doing a mundane task but you are finding purpose in it. Your job might be to sweep the steps of a temple. You could ask, "Wow, that's as mundane and trivial a task as I could actually find." But the idea of ikigai is that if that is your purpose, if that's your piece of the pie — you're part of this giant system and this is the important cog that you fill — people actually find that it enhances well-being. They'll do it until they're 90 years old and they won't give it up because they find so much meaning in the simple task.

This infusion of simple tasks is also related to the notion of rituals. A lot of traditions have rituals that people engage in, and if you engage in them in a meaningful way, they have this power to connect us to everyone else who has ever done the ritual and anyone who might in the future. It sort of expands us to include more people. I'm really interested in this idea that we can draw sacredness from these mundane tasks.

My colleague Shira Gabriel studies what's known as collective effervescence — this idea of these magical experiences we have when we're in a crowd all doing the same thing. If we all go to a football game and we're all cheering at the same time, or go to a concert and we're all singing together, there's a kind of magic where we're doing something fairly mundane but it feels sacred and special to us. It's just infusing it with meaning.

Going back to your point, I wonder for some people doing the simple tasks might just be a way of connecting to the essence of the science itself or the essence of the task itself. When I was doing martial arts, you're supposed to tie your armor on in a certain way and bow in a certain way. In some senses it's like a stupid set of traditions, and you could just go through them in a perfunctory manner. But if you did them with meaning, it's not just the task itself — it carries this connection to people that came before us and the people that will come after us. Social belonging is one of the most powerful human motivations. If we can create these bonds through these simplistic rituals, that could potentially be really powerful.

Perhaps that PI you're talking about felt more connected to the lab by doing these mundane tasks. Perhaps it was a way of saying, "I'm still part of this science when I'm pushing paperwork at the higher levels of administration." Again, it's all purely speculation, but I think there is some basis in science.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I remember thinking back then what a badass he was. He and his coworker Emanuel Mignot eventually found the gene — it's in the orexin and hypocretin system, which has all these implications for hunger regulation and has implications for the treatment of obesity. They were making fundamental discoveries, and there he was. And to this day I still revere him in my mind. He's also, incidentally, the guy who taught me that getting morning and evening sunlight in my eyes would set my circadian rhythm, because he used to work heroic hours — 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.

Psychological Distance, Time Travel, and the Architecture of Self-Control

Andrew Huberman: As we've been talking today, I've had this thing in the back of my mind: there's something about our ability as humans to dynamically regulate our perception in time that is extremely valuable. It's especially salient when we think, "Okay, there's the cake. I want that. Okay, I'm not going to do that." You can do things in physical space — as these kids did with the marshmallow, you can turn around, put something in front of it, imagine a cockroach on it. But the powerful tools seem to be when we incorporate some exit from the moment into a future moment, or think back. David Goggins will tell you the fear of being that again — that overweight, struggling person — is also a motivator.

What we're talking about is mental time travel. And this is a pretty high-level thing that I'm assuming my dog can't do unless I give him a command. When we're talking about dynamic time perception, we know that's harder when we're under conditions of stress, and easier when we're more relaxed. Does any of the work you've looked at in self-control actively incorporate the notion of self-regulation — how calm or how anxious one is? Because we hear things like, "Some people don't eat when they get anxious, but a lot of people become anxious eaters," or for people in 12-step programs for alcohol, it's "never be angry, tired," etc.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is fundamental to understanding self-control. Self-control fails when we are not able to move in distance. I talked about how self-control is distance dependent — when it's far away, it's easy; when it's close, it's really difficult. 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 yourself — finding ways to activate the mindsets that I have when the thing is distant, so I'm thinking about it as if it was distant even though it's proximal. Or finding other ways to frame it as if it's distant.

As I said, in my lab we talk about knowing your whys as one way to extricate yourself psychologically from the situation you're currently in. When things are far away, we tend to think about them in terms of why. But when they're close, we tend to think about them in terms of how. So in my lab, we stress knowing your whys as one way to create that psychological distance.

You mentioned things like being drunk or angry or tired as things that predispose us to self-control failure. I don't know if it's necessarily that it's more difficult, or if it's just that they bias us in one direction. We know with alcohol it creates myopia. We know that when we're tired, we tend to think more myopically — more here and now — because we just want to rest. We don't want to think about the long term. Our mind sort of has an attractor state towards being very concrete and thinking about how, which again brings us actually proximal to the temptation. So it's not necessarily that it's harder in the sense of requiring more effort — it's just that the situation has put us in a place where it's a lot easier to think proximally than distally.

So what are some other ways to get more distance from a temptation? Other ways might include — and these come from my colleague Ethan Kross, who I know has been a guest on your show — referring to yourself in the third person as opposed to "me." I might say, "What does Ken want to do in this situation?" versus "What do I want to do?" Simply referring to myself as other people creates psychological distance in the space that gives me just enough to think of it as far rather than close.

I also mentioned the study by Angela Duckworth and Rachel Carlson at the University of Minnesota where they brought kids in and in one condition had them do a task that required self-control as they normally would. But in the experimental condition, they gave the children various costumes they could pick. 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?" A boy might say, "What would Batman do?" And they showed that thinking like Batman made them have better self-control.

The reason they emphasized was that Batman isn't the kid — so they created distance by emulating somebody else. Research has suggested that the simulation of someone else's mind actually activates 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 — literally turning my cognitive system into somebody else's.

So when you are tired and drunk and mad and everything else, one way — if you can't think about your whys and you're having trouble finding distance from the object in front of you — is to take on someone else's perspective, someone that you really admire.

The Power of Shared Reality, Self-Talk, and Externalizing Goals

Andrew Huberman: Incredible. I don't know if the following experiment exists, but maybe pieces of it exist in different experiments. I'm interested in the value of words spoken to self in one's mind, words spoken to self out loud but with no one around, writing things down, words spoken to other people, and pictures — as either weaker or stronger motivators. And I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between these. What is the most potent tool?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think different things will have better power over others for certain people. If you tend to be the kind of person who already has a lot of self-talk going on and the self-talk means something to you — if it's positive self-talk you literally feel better, if it's negative self-talk you feel worse — then strategically trying to change that self-talk could potentially have a really powerful effect on you. Some people talk about visualization. One distancing strategy I forgot to mention is taking a third-person perspective versus a first-person perspective on the thing 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 this is a distribution, some people are more pictorial and some more verbal — then perhaps visualizing yourself engaging in the behavior would be more effective.

Let me add one more thing. There is research suggesting that when you communicate something to somebody and they respond in a way that makes it seem like you are on the same wavelength, that creates an experience known as shared reality. People put a special premium in truth value to those interchanges than when you don't have that.

On a lot of college campuses today, you will see banners that say "You belong," trying to promote inclusion and make everyone feel at home. My own intuition is I'm not so sure how effective those are — I think they're a lot like the motivational posters that used to be in offices. However, if someone says, "Hey, you know what? I think you really belong. I'm really happy that you're here" — it's a very similar message, maybe even using the same words. But if it's conveyed in a way that makes you feel like they understand you and that you're on the same wavelength, that actually has a very powerful effect. There's some ongoing research in my lab suggesting that even though it's the same words, there's something about that exchange of "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.

Bringing this all back to self-control: if you had this conversation and you said, "I'm going to do this," and that other person says, "I know you're going to do this" — I bet that has a lot more power than you saying to somebody, "I'm going to do this," and they're like, "Uh-huh. Good luck." Because humans are a social species, there is a special power when we can create a sense of oneness with others that makes our thoughts become real. If by saying it or by writing it my thoughts are becoming real and have more power — those are much more likely to have an effect.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's incredible. I'm remembering a recent conversation where we were playing with the idea — it's the old riddle, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to witness it, did it make a sound? It's sort of like: if we have a thought or an experience and no one was there to hear it or witness it, did it really happen? We know it happened — we can be alone and have a thought — but there does seem to be a loop that closes and gets enhanced when something that we say or do is witnessed and registered.

I'm reminded of a brief story. I have a good friend, Ken Rideout — one of these incredible parents and husbands, comes from a really hard-scrabble background, and he's this incredible endurance runner. In his 50s he's crushing races. He was doing a race in the Gobi Desert, I think, and he was hurting one day. He ran up next to the guy who was leading the race, took out his earbud, and said in a kind of psychological warfare manner, "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 just crushed him that day. And he won, of course — typical Ken Rideout fashion. He's an amazing guy. He has a book out that's really worth reading.

Because of his trajectory — like David Goggins and these other guys — the fact that he wrote a book is interesting, right? There's something about externalizing these thoughts. I'm sure somewhere in his mind he didn't necessarily believe what he was saying — everybody gets tired, even Ken Rideout. But there's something about externalizing it, seeing that validated, that makes it more true to ourselves.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: And that's a kind of competitive example, but there are also beautiful examples of that where someone says, "I believe in you, 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 — that's a note to the person or people hearing somebody's goal or wish to tune in, because those are potent moments.

I'm always struck that the impact we have on our students — especially our graduate students — is not the things I think they're going to be. They always remember these side conversations where you acknowledge some small thing that was going on in their life. But for them, it was that moment of bringing to reality some of the thoughts they were having. Hearing me say them or verify some of these thoughts had an incredibly uplifting effect. As you said, it can also have an incredibly crushing effect. If someone is having insecurities and harping on those, and you acknowledge that those insecurities might have a truth to them, that could be incredibly damaging.

But I'm always amazed by how inspiring it can be when someone you really respect knows you have this goal and says, "I know you have this goal and I think you can do it." 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.

We know that writing thoughts down can be a very powerful thing for emotion regulation and motivation. I think part of that is the actual sharing part — the fact that now I've written it down, I'm looking at it as if it was not me. Now it's not me, it's words on the page, and that brings another level of power that it didn't have when they were just floating. So again, I think all of these strategies — self-talk, writing, talking to other people — can all be powerful in the right way for the right person, but they may also exist on a continuum of potential potency, both good and bad.

Andrew Huberman: What I'm about to ask gets into the realm of performance, but I could imagine it being used for any number of things. Music in particular — the music that we listen to at a particular stage of life is able to embody a lot without us having to script out complete sentences. It's a sort of time-space travel of its own. There are certain songs I'm sure for you too — I hear them and I teleport back. Is it possible to build these anchors? Have a song or something that you associate with a time of working through struggle, so that the process is captured in that, and then you can reapply it. Has anything been explored around this?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Not that I'm aware of. The best work I can link to this is work on nostalgia. Nostalgia is traditionally portrayed in most media as something really negative — a negative, bittersweet state. But research in psychology suggests that nostalgia actually has a very functional process. It serves a lot of different motivations. One of the things it does is help make me feel connected. A lot of times I might feel like I don't really know myself, I don't know who I am. Nostalgia is a way — as you used the word anchor — it allows you to time travel and anchor, and then more importantly see a sense of self-continuity. I can see how I was there then and I can see how I am now, and I feel a sense of connection, a sense of oneness. That can have a lot of positive benefits.

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 time-traveling function. And you used the word anchor, which I really like too. It reminds us who we are, where we've been, and who we've become. We know for humans that narrative, that sense of continuity, is also very important for existential reasons — that I belong here for a reason, that there's a purpose. And so motivationally, those can be very effective.

Now, I don't know if it reinstates the motivations that you had during the time, but I think it at least allows you to connect to the time where you had those motivations. They may have changed — they may be stronger, they may be weaker — but that sense of connection is really important for understanding what your motivations are in the first place, how they've evolved over time, and what they are now. To the extent they're the same, it might be able to reactivate them. But to the extent that they're different, it might actually cause deactivation — not in a bad way, but in a good way, reminding you: now what motivates you? What's changed? What do you care about now?

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation Revisited: The Stanford Drawing Studies

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to briefly return to the concepts of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. As I recall, there was a famous set of experiments also done at Stanford where they had kids who drew intrinsically — they just observed which kids drew — and then they started rewarding those kids for drawing. And then they observed that some of these kids drew less or gave up drawing, because the conclusion was that these kids now were doing it for the rewards as opposed to the activity itself. Did those results hold up over time?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Generally speaking, the results have held up over time. Although there are some situations in which they appear at odds with current practices and intuitions that we might have. The best example I can think of is being paid for your job. Being paid for your job is an extrinsic reward for something that you may or may not be intrinsically interested in. So the big question is: if you love your job and then I pay you to do the job that you love, does the love that you have for that job go down?

I don't think this is that perplexing if you understand what was actually going on in those Stanford studies. The children 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 said, "Surprise — you just played with the markers, but we're also going to give you a reward." And then the third condition had no reward. Where you saw intrinsic motivation go down is when the child knew before they got to play with the markers the second time that they were going to get the reward. 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. If I know I love this job and now you're paying me a lot of money to do this job that I love, is it possible that I will get confused and start to think, "Oh, I'm actually doing it because I'm getting paid"? Yes. And I think we can think of people who have had that experience. But you can also imagine that as adults, I know what I love and I'm not even paying attention to how much money I'm being paid even though I'm being paid. What matters here is the confusion — why am I doing what I'm doing? Depending on how I answer that, it 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 that adults who really know that they love the thing, and are really certain they love the thing, may be a little bit more resistant to that.

And as adults, we can also connect dots and expand our whys — say, "Well, I love doing this thing, I get paid for doing it, and those resources can help me provide for others who I also love." So it's sort of exponential.

I remember a salary discussion with my chairman at UCSD. He said two things. He said, "A, you can't make more money than me." Which seemed fair — he's running the department, I was a junior professor. And he said, "And never forget, you're going to make far less money than you deserve for most of your career, and then you're going to make far more money than you deserve at the end of your career." I remember thinking that's the worst argument I ever heard to somebody who can't afford housing. But in many ways he was probably right. Nobody goes into academic science to make money. You can look at anyone running a lab in academia and you can be sure that the amount of work they're doing reflects their love of discovery and doing science.

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. From my friends who are in that world, I think it can create a lot of dissonance, because they'll start taking tours and doing album deals simply for the finances and they get used to a certain lifestyle.

Which brings me back to this chop-wood-carry-water notion and the ikigai. Several of the people who I've observed have incredibly long, super successful creative careers — I've been fortunate enough to speak to some of them — and 100% of them will say that they still engage in a lot of mundane tasks throughout their day. Yes, they have a lot of hired help, 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 all their time would expand into doing their creative work, and they found that wasn't the case. They actually had lower motivation. There's really something to staying in the groove of what you were doing in the early to mid portions of your career when you were climbing the rungs. It's almost like a mental muscle.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Yeah. It just seems to me a little bit like staying connected to the process, to the way that I used to do things. I will say we have to be really careful though, because I think this relationship between external rewards and intrinsic motivation can be exploited. There's some research suggesting that when we know somebody loves the job, we don't feel the need to pay them as much because we know they'll do the job anyway. 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 different amounts of money when they're doing exactly the same task just because they have differences in motivation? In some respects, you're almost rewarding the person that you probably don't want doing the job, because they're just doing it for the money as opposed to really loving what they're doing.

A lot of employers would like to have employees who are intrinsically motivated because people who are intrinsically motivated will often do the extra step, do the hard work. But again, there's always this concern that they could be exploited, because we know they derive some value from the work itself and 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.

Japanese Culture, Ikigai, and Finding Beauty in Imperfection

Andrew Huberman: Are there any elements of Japanese culture that you wish you saw more of in the United States — for your students, for young people in general, but maybe adults as well? And vice versa? Because they are very different places culturally, and numerous times across our conversation we've touched into some of these really incredible concepts in Japanese culture. You're in a unique position to answer this.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I should say first and foremost, I'm Japanese American. I'm Nisei, so I was born here. I have never lived in Japan. So I think a lot of Japanese listeners might say, "Oh, he's not really Japanese." I'm definitely Japanese American. My connection to my culture mainly comes from food — because I like eating and cooking, mostly eating — and I also used to practice the Japanese martial art kendo, which is sword fighting.

I've never actually thought about this question before, so I'm going to have to think on the spot. One of the things I think is really interesting and important — and I don't know that we recognize enough — is the importance of breaks, opportunities to take your foot off the gas. I'm not so sure Japanese culture and society is actually good at that either. The stereotype is that they work all the time. So maybe they have just the same problems that we do. But from the outsider's perspective, at least the notion of mindfulness suggests that there are times where we need to not be so goal-directed and so driven, but instead just enjoy the moment. And it's not even "enjoy the moment" like I'm going to enjoy this chocolate cake — it's like just enjoying being here in this moment. I think that's an interesting idea that psychology is wrangling with.

The other notion that I think is interesting is wabi-sabi — that there's beauty in decay and non-perfection. I think that's an idea that can be foreign in the Western cultural space, where things have to be perfect. We get all this cosmetic surgery, we buy all these clothes, and if there's one wrinkle we have to change clothes. We're always optimizing, things have to be perfect. Whereas in Japanese culture, there's a beauty in the imperfection. In fact, you actually intentionally build in the imperfections to have beauty. And in the context of this conversation, embracing the suck and starting from a place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better — that might be an idea we could incorporate.

And we already talked about ikigai — this idea of finding connection and meaning and purpose in something really mundane or ritualistic or simple. I think that's also a really interesting idea that might explain some of the lack of happiness we're currently experiencing in our own culture, where we're constantly future-oriented and always looking for bigger things, as opposed to finding beauty in the simple things that we do. The most mundane tasks that we do might be the most important things that we do, but we just don't code it that way because our eyes are on the prize downstream.

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting to think about your answer in the context of the mundane, the chop-wood-carry-water type of thing, 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 concept. Like I'm going for this big trophy, degree, founding a company, building this thing. And even for people who have 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 completely destabilizing for all their ideas. They thought they could script it out according to their family album from the past. I don't wish those hardships on anyone, and yet they're kind of like the stuff that makes life great too, in a weird way.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Yeah. That brings us back to the idea of wabi-sabi — beauty in the imperfection and beauty in the decay. Like, wow, that's in some sense totally foreign. You're taking pictures and it has to be the perfect picture. You're saying this is the perfect family. We have these mental models of what the goal is and we only achieve it when we're there. It's interesting to think about giving some degrees of freedom in that and finding meaning in that. That's a really interesting idea.

Yeah, it's actually one place where social media has, in my opinion, shown a bit of humanity contrary to the stereotype. Sure, you'll see incredible feats of artistic or athletic achievement and they'll get tons of views and likes. But every once in a while someone will come along and very authentically confess a failure, or express a hardship they're going through, or a win that doesn't really fall within our normal notions of what a win is — and it's like an avalanche of interest in those. So I think there's a natural magnetism to these just human elements.

I appreciate you being willing to answer that question on the fly, because it's not within your PubMed profile. But I do believe that the people we are comes to the science we do, and numerous times throughout today's discussion I've detected these elements of who you are in this, and it's impossible to separate. So thank you for the consideration.

The Future of Self-Control Research: Patterns, Multiple Goals, and Alignment

Andrew Huberman: As a final question, I'm really curious what you want to do now. What is the experiment you're working on, or the dream set of experiments that you think can really move the needle forward in your own concept of this work? Where are you most excited right now?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: One thing is that we tend to think about self-control at the tactic level — what do I do to overcome this temptation? And I think largely overlooked is this idea of what do I want to do, again and again, because you don't get your goal from a single behavior. It's through repeated patterns of action. So to really come up with better ways to understand repeated patterns of action in the lab or in the field — I think that's a major challenge that the field has to take on and hasn't. I think one of the reasons we haven't studied it is because it's so hard. That's why we go back to these one-shot deals.

Another is — and we talked about this two-modes idea — am I pursuing the one goal or am I pursuing the many? In psychology we have spent a lot of time focusing on the pursuit of the one. And we haven't really done a good job of embracing the pursuit of the many. To the extent that we have, it's usually like two goals — work-life balance, for example. 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 are we pursuing them all the time? How are we juggling all these balls and keeping track of them? Are there goals that we have that we're not even aware of, that we're actually pursuing? I'm really interested in that.

And related to that is fitting goals into the broader constellation of all the things that we want — connecting goals to these big underlying values and motivations that we have. That link is not really well understood. We talked a little bit about getting our ducks in a row, seeing the whys of a particular goal, the broader motivations of what motivates them. How did that come to be? Did our system just know that these things were aligned and now retrospectively we're making the connections? Or does making the connections have an important impact?

Not just multiple goals, but also levels of goals and how they connect to more fundamental motives — and how we know whether a goal is right for us. I think that fundamentally requires understanding whether they resonate with these broader motives that we have. And as you mentioned, getting things aligned — that alignment idea — I don't know that we really understand how people do this. It's magical when we get it right and we do amazing things. How do we know it was the right thing to do? There's no textbook, there's no wiring diagram. 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.

Andrew Huberman: Awesome. I look forward to seeing what you and your colleagues discover next. I want to thank you so much for coming here today and sharing the work that you've been doing in your lab. When I discovered your web page and saw the things you had done previously, I was like, "I really, really want to sit down and talk to Kentaro," because I could 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 not one goal. Studying these things in isolation has served us well in the past in building a framework, but I think it's just terrific the way that you're throwing your arms around all of it. And as I mentioned before, it's clear — whether you intended it or not — that you bring a lot of humanity to this. There are answers, they vary, you need a dynamic toolbox, and yet there's evidence that certain things really work. I know I'm going to incorporate a number of things you shared today, and I know our listeners will as well. So thank you for doing the work you do. Please come back again and update us as things evolve. Once again, really appreciate you.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: Really honored to be here. Thank you.