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 goal pursuit

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

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Kentaro Fujita, an expert in the science of self-control and motivation, covering the psychology of willpower, procrastination, and goal pursuit. Fujita revisits the famous marshmallow experiments, arguing that their most important and overlooked finding is that self-control strategies can be taught and learned — not that delay of gratification predicts life outcomes. He challenges the dominant model in self-control research, which holds that people should "cool" their emotions to resist temptation, presenting evidence that activating higher-order emotional motivations — love, meaning, purpose — can be equally or more effective. Fujita also introduces the concept of a self-control "toolkit," arguing that no single strategy works for everyone and that failure represents an opportunity for learning rather than evidence of a fixed character flaw. The conversation covers abstinence versus moderation as goal-pursuit strategies, the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, psychological distancing techniques, and the underexplored science of disengaging from goals.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

The Marshmallow Experiment: What It Actually Found

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, 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 criticism. The marshmallow experiment 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 some kind of thing that 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 with 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 otherwise 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 learn to use to improve their delay of gratification. But that's not what everybody knows. What everybody knows about these experiments is that many years later, they analyzed data in which they looked at children's delay time — how long they waited before they indulged in the one marshmallow — and then saw to what extent it was correlated with important life outcomes like academic achievement, career success, income, even things like 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 also have lower incarceration and problematic behavior reports. 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, there were something like 15 minutes. Other experimenters have shortened that time to 10 minutes, which is a little easier for children. Another really important thing about the marshmallow test is that the child has to trust the experimenter. If you don't trust the experimenter, why should you bother waiting? It's perfectly rational to just go ahead and grab the one marshmallow if you don't trust 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 go and grab the marshmallow. And it's been argued that that's actually a sensible, rational behavior. So the setup here sounds really simple, but there's a lot of art behind this to make the 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, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling. The most famous experiment of this brought in a blowup doll — a clown 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. If you are acting in a certain way, children are learning that that's the appropriate way to behave. 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 Experiments

Andrew Huberman: I won't hold you responsible for defending or holding up the marshmallow experiments, but they've received a lot of criticism over the years, as have many paradigm-shifting areas of psychology. I think it's important for everyone to know that the moment there's a theory put forth — like growth mindset, or for the developmental neurobiologist, the idea that all neurons in the cortex migrate radially — two to five years later, someone's going to find an exception to that and then the whole thing seems to crumble, but then it comes back where the answer is both. In terms of the marshmallow experiment, I've heard a lot of criticism. It wasn't as predictive as we thought. Maybe the experimenters were 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 requirements for others to follow in a kind of recipe book.

The most famous criticism — the one that got the most press recently — is that there was 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. 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 not your average American family — mostly well-to-do. When the researchers controlled for 30 or 40 other covariate 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. There have been other researchers who have come along — one of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team. They took the same data set and reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative. Rather than throwing in 30 covariates, they put in theory-driven covariates — ones that made sense from what we already know about research, as opposed to throwing in the kitchen sink. 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 that failure to replicate got a lot of attention, but it may not have been the final answer, because these experimenters came along, looked at exactly the same data set, and came to the opposite conclusion. There's still a bit of a debate out there.

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 environments. 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.

Self-Control as a Learnable Skill

Andrew Huberman: Let me just say as a self-control researcher myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow tests is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. That's very nice to convince people that self-control is important — if I'm applying for federal grant money, that's probably the first sentence I write. There have been many other ways of testing this hypothesis, so I don't think we need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: The most important thing about the marshmallow test that gets completely overlooked goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew — is it an innate talent or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments were those 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 whether it's better to stare at the one marshmallow or close your eyes and cover it up. Three-year-old children believe that 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 written or 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 that understood the rules — the tricks that work and the tricks that don't work — were less likely to have behavioral problems at that camp than those who did not.

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

Movement, Motivation, and the Depletion Debate

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 but not letting himself do it, and then he looks 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 getting that top-down inhibition trained up is so interesting. My bulldog mastiff puppy will intentionally look away from the food as a way to manage the temptation. And I think all mammals — probably all creatures that have this top-down inhibition — come up with these strategies.

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 saying 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 will 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're supposed to eat, you move the joystick forward. There's some research to suggest that this kind of automatic movement — you're not actually moving, but you're taking action that's associated with movement — can actually help improve people's self-control over time and help 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 where 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.

Andrew Huberman: One thing I've been grappling with for a number of years now 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. But as much as I believe that getting up in the morning, getting outside, getting sunlight, maybe taking a cold shower, getting a workout in can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, "By 8:00 a.m. I did a lot of hard things, anything else I confront during the day is going to be much easier" — 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. Is there a self-control resource center? And is there any evidence for that 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 and therefore do other 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, and I find this really interesting because it's a highly controversial topic in social psychology. There was a big boom of experiments in the 2000s that suggested just what you're saying — that self-control is kind of like a muscle, and if I use it for one type of task, I exhaust it for all others and have to wait for it to recharge. Much like any other muscle, if I keep using it over time, it should 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, getting rid of experimental bias — that have tried to replicate this effect. One multi-lab experiment did not show that it worked, and another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work was led by people who conducted this research in the first place, which was seen as very damning. 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 for clarity's sake, describe what specifically you're referring to when you say it doesn't happen?

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 — like the Stroop task. In 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" because it's written in red ink, you automatically read the word "blue." This requires inhibition — stopping your behavior. Research suggests that if you did the non-dominant handwriting first and then did the Stroop task, your Stroop task performance should become 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 tried something like this using different tasks and could not replicate the depletion effect. Another multi-lab experiment — smaller in scale and not by the original authors — was able to get the depletion effect. So there's mixed evidence and it's not clear whether depletion really is a thing.

Now, as a researcher myself, I'm in this really uncomfortable position where I actually think depletion is a real phenomenon because I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet I think the way that we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good, because much like the Walter Mischel studies, I don't think the original authors were very good at explaining what exactly you need — the implicit decisions they were making to set up the experiment that makes it work. There have been some accusations of monkeying with the data; I don't know about that. But 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? Those 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 I happen to like the sorts of things that are supposedly building up willpower. So I'm going to tell myself this. But your point is taken — 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, which we know slows heart rate. 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 and other special operations 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. 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 which I'm going to try to get out in a systematic and organized way. 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 with respect specifically to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown very limited success. 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 some gains, but they'll be small, and many people will see no gains.

That's about willpower specifically. And this is the point 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 that children were using enhance self-control without leveraging willpower.

At this point, you could ask what willpower actually is — and 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 or inhibition 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 telling you are not very effective. But training some of the other strategies — like closing your eyes, imagining a cockroach crawling 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 strategies can be taught and can in fact improve your self-control.

Hot Cognition, Fear, Love, and the Self-Control Toolkit

Andrew Huberman: I have this kind of crude idea that when it comes to suppression of behavior or aspirational behaviors — motivating 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 grosser than the high-level ones. Sugar is good — we have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary things, fatty things. That's hardwired. So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit. We don't want to get up and go to class because we're exhausted, and fatigue shuts down our forebrain, so the circuits are impaired and our hypothalamus is driving us to go back to sleep. But we have to think about the fear of showing up to an exam and not knowing anything — the nightmare everybody's had at least once. The control strategy seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgust, etc. How well does the opposite work? How good is aspiration for good stuff? Because those are also powerful drivers of human behavior. I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between sort of fear and love, if you will, to allow us to navigate all sorts of circumstances.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think what you're saying is something 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 the things that make the temptation so powerful. And 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.

I think what's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire — 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 love, fighting fire with fire — not with fear, but with love. These are higher-order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out.

What you're highlighting with your original example is something a little bit different — 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. What's the sugar crash you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake? They show that that kind of thinking serves much like the vomit reflex you were talking about — 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. 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. 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 if I can avoid it, that's 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 that if it's a short-term battle, think about the downside or the upside right now. If it's a long-term battle, you want to think in terms of long-term outcomes, 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 Cross and I wrote a paper in which we talked about the self-control toolkit. We argue we have lots of different ways to enhance self-control. We speculate that certain tools might work better for certain people at certain times. We don't currently have a very good framework for predicting what would be the right strategy for this kind of person in this kind of situation. So if your listeners are saying, "Wow, that totally would not work for me" — that's okay by me too. I don't think there's going to be one tool that's going to work for everybody. The self-control toolbox approach explicitly embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people.

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, well then 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 this 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 that 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.

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 would like to stress to your listeners 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 instead, 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, "Wow, I really screwed up. I'm a terrible person. My goal is forever gone." And I think that's a really important implication of understanding self-control not as an innate skill, but as something that you grow and cultivate over time.

Motivation, Warming Up, and Regulatory Fit

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've got to jog a little bit 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 to the work 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. The interesting research on brain states suggests there's sort of an attractor model where your brain state is like a ball bearing on a flat surface that's moving around, and over time it becomes more and more concave and eventually you drop into a groove. But that takes time. It takes reps. It takes the mind picking up your phone again for the third time and then going, "You know what, I just got to get this thing out of the room." Focus isn't just a switch. Motivation isn't just a switch.

Are there tools that people can use to either embed that knowledge or to move into focused states more quickly or more effectively? And are there tools for moving out of motivated states? Has anything been studied about transitions between tasks as something useful? 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 that 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 and folks who do growth mindsets think about — a different set of motivations can get activated. If I say it's not an hour of pain but instead me becoming the 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 a warm-up — 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 of motivation. 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 don't want to play not to lose, you want to play to win. That's particularly true of offense — you want to be about advancement, promotion, gains. But when you're on defense, it might very well be about preventing losses. If you get that mixed up, you won't be as effective.

Research 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. 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.

There may also be an additional complexity with the amount, because we know not enough motivation is not good, but too much motivation is also bad — the Yerkes-Dodson rule, the U-shaped function. 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 and the right level for the task at hand. You can imagine David Goggins going absolutely crazy at a children's daycare 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 of warming up — 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 switch into the new one. Sort of like 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 I've gotten it, it's done, it doesn't really make sense to keep going because you've already accomplished it — it's time to move on to something else. There is some research suggesting that that disengagement process is very difficult, and 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.

Psychological Distance, Time Perception, and the "Why" Mindset

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 we're trying to bring together state of mind and body and concept. One of the things 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 and you learn something and you now have mastery of something — there's this temptation to need to be in that perfect state in order to feel like you can do it at all. 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 also Coleman Ruiz and other tier-one operators — DJ Shiffley, 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. And 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. 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?

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 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 you can just — and I don't know that anyone's actually studied this — 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 the optimization culture may be that we're embracing this partly because optimization is an exciting idea, but also it's a great justification for not ever doing the really hard things because the conditions aren't quite right. And 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. 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's in a different place and that choice is really hard again. The clarity that I once had is gone.

What's also frustrating about self-control 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 you 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. When it's far away from me, it's not imminent. I'm more likely to think about it in terms of desirability — why I'm doing it. But as that future becomes now, my mindset changes and I'm thinking much more about feasibility — how am I going to do it, and much more concretely about what I have to do. The problem is that a lot of these things that are hard, the whys are really positive, but the hows are really negative — 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 at it like, "But that was something I really, really wanted to do," because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how.

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 — the frame of mind we generally have when things are far away, or the frame of mind we generally have when they're close. 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 that this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant rather than when it was close. But that's the problem with hard things — when they're in the distant future, it seems like a really good idea 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 going on and on 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 a binary — I have this goal to lose weight, I also have this goal to eat the yummy cake, and those two goals are in conflict and I have to choose one of them. That makes the decision actually kind of hard because it's one against one.

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 — additional motivations that fuel the long-term goal. I was mentioning before that it's really important to think about your whys in plural. It's not just the one why — I want to lose weight — but 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 — when 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, you're highlighting that 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 that we really don't want to do.

And ironically, it's an upward cycle — the more you do it right, the more positivity you experience, so it's a virtuous cycle. Whereas you can also imagine the opposite: if you give up, you say, "I'm not capable," and all those motivations start to collapse. I'm not going to become that person, I'm not going to grow, I am the person I was worried I was. 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 to really focus on it and say, "I'm doing the hard thing not just for the one goal, but because I want that dopamine rush. I want my system to learn how to take this on and I want to prove to myself that I can do it." 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 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. The first time you do that, it might take more work. 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. This idea of warming 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 — you could use functional imaging, or electrodes, or calcium imaging monitoring the activity of lots and lots of neurons — you don't see that the person does this perception exercise and all of a sudden the circuit that's involved lights up. What you see is there's a lot of noise, what we call a lot of hash. But as they repeat the task over and over, the signal becomes very very clear, and you haven't made any adjustments to the equipment. The signal-to-noise goes way 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."

There's a guy down 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, they actually activate the release of adrenaline when we move. And the adrenaline then feeds back on those circuits. This is a reminder to anyone that doesn't feel like working out — the warm-up serves to increase these chemicals that then bring more signal to noise in the neural circuits that control movement. So it makes sense why 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 confronted with being in an area of science where a lot of tools were coming in. It was super competitive and kind of a first-come, first-served situation. I was in competition with really big labs, and that competition fueled me in a way that I wasn't familiar with. I don't consider myself an innately competitive person about most things — I won't be the guy who has to win at ping pong. But having an enemy was incredibly motivating. And in the end, they got some and we got some and we ended up being more or less friends. It brought out our best.

Do people tend to distribute along a normal distribution or a binary distribution in terms of competitiveness? And to what extent are people who are very competitive — like Michael Jordan, who was apparently competitive about everything — just better at motivation? 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 think what you're saying is really interesting. I personally don't know of any direct work looking at competitiveness and self-control. The closest work that I can think of in my sphere has to do with achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a lot like competitiveness — I think competitiveness actually often comes out of achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a recognition for doing really really well on something, and it's usually really 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 those when you need 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 really explore yourself and say, "What really does motivate me?" I'm not sure that we always do know what really motivates us. I think a lot of times we kind of 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. The constellation of tools that works for me may not work for other people.

Abstinence vs. Moderation in Goal Pursuit

Andrew Huberman: One thing I've been playing with a little bit recently in my own life is just striving for immense consistency in certain things — not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on peak performance, but just without fail, every single night, I have a particular practice before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. There are times I'm not fully focused on this, but for me it's really become an experiment in consistency. I think I'm like two years and some change now into it. And it's tapped into this different part of myself that I'm not so familiar with — not trying to get the best performance out, but that's great when it happens.

Earlier we were talking about abstinence versus moderation. What do the data show? And when I hear abstinence, obviously it sounds like people trying to avoid certain behaviors, but I think we could flip it the other way too. Is it always the case that we have to show up to the thing at our best? Yesterday I was supposed to do a HIIT workout and I was like, 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, not lazy, but semi-lazy. And I noticed by the third or fourth, 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 have 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 which stress the importance of patterns over isolated acts. Once you have a pattern of behavior in place, it carries a special hold over you that a non-pattern does not.

Let me give you an example. I have an Apple Watch and it tells me if I've closed my ring 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 week 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 could be 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, whereas the sporadic doesn't have that orderly system. 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 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 of these behaviors could also be bad.

So 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 here — this is not the same thing as failing, because failing is just justifying something post-hoc. 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 just mentioned, leads to really rigid behaviors. But computationally, the choice is already pre-decided for you. You sit down, it's Monday 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 with this, like the rigidity. It's Monday 5:00 PM. 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 none — it's gone. If you're abstinent and you have a lapse, the goal is done.

My point here is that there are some trade-offs between abstinence and moderation, and we are really interested in trying to understand why people choose one versus the other for what kinds of tasks 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're in conflict. 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 kind of interested in whether people pick certain kinds of strategies for certain kinds of conflicts, and also whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategies. If I'm the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go. If I'm the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better.

Another thing 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 person who's abstinent, because that's in principle the easier decision. But this suggests to us that there may be a bias — 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.

Long-Distance Running, Multiple Goals, and the Single-Goal Trap

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. He 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 then a neurologist at Berkeley who was also in the psychology department, Bob Knight, one time I asked him what's the key to this whole thing, and he said, "Find a non-destructive way to reset yourself each week and figure out what you can invest five or six days per week, and update that every five years or as your personal life changes." What you can do as a graduate student is different than when you're a postdoc and when you have a family. I said, "What's your non-destructive thing?" and he said, "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 that 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. And again, that's very effective for getting things done. 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 — you study when you're young, throw everything into it, that's not important, put your effort into this. We're a very goal-directed society. We're raising our kids to be that way — if you want to be an athlete, you have to do this, this, this. If you want to be a scientist, you have to do this, this, this. So we kind of track them 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 and watch out for my health. I want to indulge my artistic side. These are 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 mind. And I think that's 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 and sacrifice all the other goals they have for that one goal. But there might be something really healthy and wholesome about understanding that you're actually pursuing multiple goals and then realizing that you have to divvy your effort among them. 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 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, all these people. 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. Some can, many can't.

These days there seems to be a kind of 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 the dynasties, and then be like, "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. And most of us probably don't want that or aren't willing to make those sacrifices. And I think we can be okay with that duality in our heads.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: 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. So it's sort of like: do I want to be a specialist or a generalist? You can't be both. So balancing your time and effort between those two modes is really important. You have to decide, "Okay, this goal is worth sacrificing for; these other ones are not." As long as we're aware of the trade-offs, I think that's good. My concern is that we often aren't aware of the trade-offs — we're only aware of them in retrospect after we've made the decision. Those who have balanced their goals more 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." So the more we can do it proactively as opposed to retrospectively, the closer we will be to where we want to be. As a scientist, I'm a little frustrated that science hasn't quite caught up to these insights that we're talking about.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about the role of competitiveness in terms of people who have very low activation energy — meaning 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, there do seem to be people who, if there are a bunch of lab tasks that are really boring — acid washing cover slips, aliquoting antibodies — just go, "Okay," and do it and seem to get energy from it. It's really interesting. And then there are other people for whom it's this whole process. I'm kind of pointing the mirror at myself now because certain things I'm very plug-and-chug about, and other things I'm like, "Really? I have to do this and that?" What is that? Is it upbringing? Is it that some people just have analysis paralysis or think they're special?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I don't know that I have a good answer for you. I can give you a sort of 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 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. So 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 at SUNY Buffalo studies what's known as collective effervescence — this idea of these magical experiences that 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 sort of a magicness 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 you're supposed to bow in a certain way. In some senses it's like, "Well, that's 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: I remember thinking back then what a badass he was. The guy — 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 — he'd sleep like four or five hours a night. 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. Incredible.

Mental Time Travel, Psychological Distance, and Self-Regulation

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, you can put something in front of it, you could 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 we could think back — David Goggins will tell you the fear of being that again is also a motivator. Linking the present to the past and to a future concept — 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.

When we're talking about dynamic time perception, we know that's harder when we're under conditions of stress. When we're more relaxed, it's easier to do. 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 that some people don't eat when they get anxious, but a lot of people become anxious eaters. For people in 12-step programs for alcohol, it's like, "Never be angry, tired," etc., for these very reasons.

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. 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 you have when the thing is distant, so you're thinking about it as if it was distant even though it's proximal. In my lab, we talk about knowing your whys as one way to extricate yourself psychologically from the situation you're currently in.

You mentioned things like being drunk or being angry or being tired as things that predispose us to self-control failure. I don't know if it's necessarily that it's difficult, or if it's just that they bias us in one direction. Strong emotional states — with alcohol, we know it creates myopia. 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 has a tractor state towards being very concrete and thinking about how, which again brings us actually proximal to the temptation. So I'm not sure that it's necessarily harder in the sense that it's that much 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.

What are some other ways to get more distance from a temptation? Other ways might include — and these come from my colleague Ethan Cross, who I know has been a guest on your show — referring to yourself in the third person as opposed to "me." 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 would create psychological distance that gives me just enough to think of it as far as opposed to close.

I also mentioned the "what would Jesus do" approach. Angela Duckworth and Rachel Carlson at the University of Minnesota 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 the costume they wanted to wear the most. 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. 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 and Social Validation

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, pictures, etc., as either weaker or stronger motivators. And I think all of us are familiar with those motivational posters that used to be in offices — "Inspiration: when the moment meets the opportunity," and then it'd be like a sunrise or something. What is the value of telling oneself, "Andrew, you got this," or telling someone else, "I'm going to do this"? Surely these experiments have been done. What is the most potent tool?

Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think they can all have their place, but 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 perhaps strategically trying to change that self-talk could potentially have a really powerful effect on you.

Some people talk about visualization. One distancing strategy is to take a third-person perspective versus a first-person perspective on the thing that you're looking at. This doesn't work for me at all because I'm not a particularly visual thinker — I think in words. So for me, words are more effective than pictures. But if you're a much more pictorial person — and we know that this is a distribution, some people are more pictorial and some people are more verbal — then perhaps visualizing yourself engaging in the behavior would be more effective.

Let me add one more thing. There is research that suggests that when you communicate something to somebody and 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. 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. 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 guys are 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. So bringing this all back to self-control — if you had this conversation and you said, "I'm gonna 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 someone was 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 sort of 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, his name is Ken Rideout. He 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 turned to him and said, in 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 he 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.

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. I guess 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 it's 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, and hearing me say them or verify some of those thoughts had an incredibly uplifting effect. As you said, it can also have an incredibly crushing effect. If I'm having insecurities and I'm harping on those, acknowledging that those insecurities might have a truth to them could be incredibly damaging. But I'm always amazed by how inspiring it can be when someone you really respect 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 as well for emotion regulation and motivation. I think part of that is just the actual sharing part — the fact that now that I've written it down, I'm looking at it as if it was not me. So 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're just floating. So again, I think all of these strategies — self-talk, writing, talking to other people — they can all be powerful in the right way for the right person, but they may also exist on a continuum of potential potency, both good and bad.

Nostalgia, Music, and Motivational Anchors

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 hear 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, where 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 that I can link to this is work done on nostalgia. Nostalgia traditionally is 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. For example, 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 — and 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 distance-traveling function, a time-traveling function. It reminds us who we are, where we've been, and who we've become. And we know for humans that that narrative, that sense of continuity, is also very important for existential reasons — that I belong here for a reason, that there's a purpose. 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, but to the extent that they're different, it actually might cause deactivation — not in a bad way, but in a good way, reminding you, "Okay, now what motivates you? What's changed? What do you care about now?"

Revisiting Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to just briefly return to the concepts of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. As I recall, there was this famous set of experiments also done at Stanford where they had kids draw — kids who drew intrinsically, just because they loved it. 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? And you could imagine that with adults, if I'm really clear why I'm doing what I'm doing, that confusion might be less likely to happen than if I'm not as clear about what I really love.

Now, I will say what I just said is very controversial and I'm sure the psychologists who are listening to this are going to be all up in arms. I think there are multiple theories about how intrinsic motivation works, and I'm drawing from the attributional approach. What matters here is the conclusions one draws from one's actions — why am I doing this? 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 again with adults — those 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, get paid for doing it, and those resources can help me provide for others who I also love." So it's sort of exponential.

I remember a salary discussion with my chairman — not at Stanford, but when I was down at UCSD. I'll never forget during a salary negotiation, he said two things. He said, "A, you can't make more money than me" — which seemed fair, he's running the department and 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, for instance. 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. These people will say that they still engage in a lot of mundane tasks throughout their day. Yeah, they have a lot of hired help and things like that, but they're still picking up after their kids. Some of them are still edging the lawn. They're still doing these things because when they didn't, they thought that all their time would expand into doing their creative work, and they found that wasn't the case. They actually had lower motivation. There's really something to staying in the groove of what you were doing in the early to maybe 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. 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. 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. 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 the person who really loves 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 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 Wabi-Sabi

Andrew Huberman: Are there any elements of Japanese culture that you wish you saw more of in the United States — for your students and for young people in general, but maybe adults as well — and vice versa? In the context of your work, because they are very different places culturally. Numerous times across our conversation we've touched into some of these really incredible concepts in Japan and 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, 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 this concept of 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 if we think about our landscaping or the way that we dress, it has 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 striving for optimization, 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 the place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better might be an idea that 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 that 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 thinking — 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. When we think about external things — getting a degree, founding a company, building something — but even for people who have a really big family concept, it's beautiful. 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 the stuff that makes life great too, in a weird way.

Dr Kentaro Fujita: 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 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.

Yeah, it's actually one place where social media has, in my opinion, shown a bit of humanity contrary to the stereotype. You'll see incredible feats of artistic or athletic performance 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.

The Future of Self-Control Research

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

Dr Kentaro Fujita: One 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, because you don't get your goal from a single behavior. It's through repeated patterns of action. To really come up with better ways to understand repeated patterns of action in the lab or in the field, I think, is a major challenge that the field has to take on and hasn't. And I think one of the reasons we haven't studied it is because it's so hard. That's why we go back to these one-shot deals. I think that's one of the most important things to think about.

Another is — and again we talked about this two-modes idea — am I pursuing the one goal or am I pursuing the many? 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, how people navigate those. But as I mentioned before, we have more than two goals at any given time. So how do we integrate all of these goals? How do we pursue them all the time? How are we juggling all these balls and keeping track of them? 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 then 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. 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. We do amazing things. How do we know it was the right thing to do? There's no textbook, there's no wiring. 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 can tell that not only is the work embedded in something that we all grapple with and that's extremely important to life advancement — no matter how ambitious or non-ambitious somebody is — but it's also clear that you're bringing in a real understanding of just how dynamic our lives are. It's 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. Considering that yes, 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.