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, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University who specializes in the science of self-control and motivation. The conversation opens with a detailed examination of the famous marshmallow experiment — its original findings, its contested replications, and what is most often overlooked: that children can be taught self-control strategies, meaning self-control is a learnable skill rather than an innate trait. Dr. Fujita argues that willpower — the effortful suppression of impulse — is only one tool in a much larger self-control toolkit, and that relying on it exclusively is both ineffective and unnecessary. He presents research showing that connecting behavior to higher-order "whys" (family, identity, meaning) is more powerful than cold rational reasoning, and that psychological distance — thinking abstractly about goals rather than concretely — is a key mechanism underlying self-control success. The discussion also covers intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, abstinence versus moderation as goal-pursuit strategies, the role of social validation in making intentions feel real, and the underexplored psychology of pursuing multiple goals simultaneously.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Marshmallow Experiment: What It Actually Showed
Andrew Huberman: We hear so much about motivation, discipline, willpower, and tenacity, but we really haven't had a modern update on the psychology of these in a long while. Most people have heard of the so-called marshmallow experiment, which hopefully you could explain to us — tell us what it revealed, some of the criticisms, and maybe even some criticisms of the criticisms. 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. 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.
The dirty little secret about the marshmallow experiments is that no child waited the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was gone. But what you could do is start the timer as soon as the door closed and look at 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 used these paradigms to learn a lot about the different tactics, tricks, and tools that kids could use to improve their delay of gratification. But that's not what everybody knows. What everybody knows is that many years later, researchers analyzed data looking at children's delay time — how long they waited before eating the one marshmallow — and then examined to what extent it 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 have lower incarceration rates. This generated a lot of excitement 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 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 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 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 homework, and then the kids see their parent looking at their phone — does that reduce trust in the parent's advice?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: I don't know if it reduces trust in the parent's advice specifically, but there is a lot of research on what's known as social modeling. The most famous experiment brought in a blowup doll referred to as Bobo, and kids either watched a video of an adult punching Bobo or being nice to Bobo, and then were allowed to play with Bobo themselves. 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: The marshmallow experiments have 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 finds an exception and the whole thing seems to crumble, but then it comes back and the answer is both. In terms of the marshmallow experiment, I've heard that it wasn't as predictive as we thought, and that experimenters may have been biasing data collection. What are the valid criticisms in your view, and what are the criticisms of the criticisms?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: As I mentioned, the marshmallow tests have to be set up right. Like a lot of other psychology experiments, I think the psychologists intuitively understood what it took to get it right, but were not very good at articulating those conditions for others to follow in a kind of recipe book.
The most famous criticism — the one that got the most press recently — involved a very large data set of children's outcomes in which they completed the marshmallow test at four years old and then a bunch of different life outcomes were measured at adolescence. The researchers wanted to see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test findings, and in principle they should have. 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. 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 covariant variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting the outcomes it was supposed to. This paper got a lot of attention for basically saying the marshmallow tests are bunk.
Now, this has been controversial because the question is whether that statistical adjustment was appropriate and whether we're interpreting it correctly. Other researchers have come along — one of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team — who took the same data set and reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, much more conservative ones. Rather than throwing in 30 covariants, they put in theory-driven covariants, ones that made sense from what we already know about research. When they did that, they still found that delay of gratification predicted reports of problematic behavior, which suggests a very clean replication of the original marshmallow test. So there's still a bit of a debate, but I think the main point is that the way you set up the marshmallow test is really important.
The argument about socioeconomic status is that kids who grow up in high-SES environments live in very stable, predictable circumstances. So when you wait, you are more likely to get the larger later reward. But if you come from a lower-SES family where rewards come and go and saving now doesn't necessarily pay off later, they're not going to wait — and so it's not as indicative for them. All of these things have to be carefully controlled for, and they were part of the original experiments, just not well articulated.
To the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger later reward, there does seem to be some predictive ability of this test. But 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. There have been many other ways of testing that hypothesis, so we don't need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore.
The most important thing about the marshmallow test — which gets completely overlooked — goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew: is it an innate talent or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments were the ones where Walter Mischel and his team were teaching children the strategies of self-control. And when children learned them, their delay ability got better. That is a really important lesson because it suggests that self-control isn't something innate. Instead, it's something that we learn over time.
One of the things he taught children was whether it's better to stare at the one marshmallow or to close your eyes and cover it up. Three-year-old children believe it's better to stare at it because they think that's how they'll motivate themselves — if I can see what I want, I'm going to be able to wait. Five-year-olds learn that that's not going to work, and they learn to cover it up or close their eyes.
Interestingly, you can create a verbal test where you ask children what they think they should do in order to wait longer. Research shows 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, at 13 years old, those children who correctly understand the rules of self-control have less problematic behavior. Walter Mischel and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems, and those who understood the 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 we're born with, we can get better. We can grow. We can improve over time.
Willpower as a Muscle: The Depletion Debate
Andrew Huberman: I've been grappling for a number of years with 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 it. That process translates across things. I fully accept that getting up in the morning, getting outside, getting sunlight, maybe taking a cold shower, getting a workout in can deliver people to a state of mind where they say, by 8:00 a.m. I did a lot of hard things, so anything else I confront during the day will be much easier. But 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 come to mind immediately. The idea that by doing lots of hard things you learn that you can do hard things — I think that's really interesting from a motivation perspective because you could argue that what's going on is some kind of self-efficacy component. When I've done hard things, my self-esteem goes up and my confidence to be able to do harder things increases. We do know that as self-efficacy goes up, your motivation and your ability to perform also go up. So self-efficacy is definitely 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 suggesting 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 before I can use it again. Much like any other muscle, if I keep using it over time, it should also get stronger. There was some evidence for both of those claims.
Unfortunately, those experiments have come under attack for whether or not they can replicate. There are some multilab experiments — where a whole bunch of labs get together to see if they can replicate something, which gets rid of experimental bias — that have tried to replicate this effect. What you do in the lab is have someone do one hard task that requires self-control and then do a second one, and the prediction is that if you've done a hard thing first, you should be worse at the second one. One multilab experiment did not show that it worked, and another one showed it did. The one that showed it didn't work was led by the people who conducted this research in the first place, which was seen as very damning — if they can't get this experiment to work, then it doesn't exist. The consensus in the field is that it doesn't actually happen, or at least we can't get it to work in the lab.
Andrew Huberman: Could you clarify — when you say it doesn't happen, what specifically are you referring to?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: Let's say we have you do a task where you have to write something down with your non-dominant hand. This requires a lot of effort and self-control. Then we ask you to do some other really difficult task that requires inhibition — for example, the Stroop task, where you see words in different color fonts and you're supposed to identify the font color. If you see the word "blue" in red ink, the right response is "red" because it's written in red ink, but you automatically read the word "blue." This requires inhibition — stopping yourself from just reading the word. Research suggests that if you did the non-dominant handwriting first and then did the Stroop task, your Stroop task performance should become worse. You should have a harder time stopping yourself from just reading the word. That's what's known as the depletion effect — because I got tired, my self-control is worse until it recharges.
One of these multilab experiments tried something like this using different tasks and could not replicate the depletion effect. Another multilab 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 a really uncomfortable position where I actually think depletion is a real phenomenon because I experience it all the time in my own life. Yet I think the way we have studied it in the lab hasn't been very good. Much like the Walter Mischel studies, I don't think the original authors were very good at explaining what exactly you need — what implicit decisions they were making to set up the experiment so it works. 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 whether, if you engage in a strenuous task, you feel recharged or more tired. Those people who say they feel recharged act recharged after doing a really hard task — hard people doing hard things. But for people who say they think 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: I'm going to stamp the belief into my mind that doing hard things makes other hard things easier, because I do believe in the belief effects that you describe and that my colleague Alia Crum at Stanford has described for a number of different categories of thinking and behavior. I also happen to like exercise and the sorts of things that are supposedly building up willpower. 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. 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 learning to do some long-exhale breathing to lower their autonomic tone — can people learn a process that they can then apply across different scenarios? Because one of the fascinating things to me about school, exams, sports, or at the extreme about screening for special operations — we've had many people from the SEAL team communities on this podcast — is this notion that maybe it doesn't matter so much whether it's cold water or exercise or matrix math. The point is that you have to get into that place of friction and then recognize something about where and how your mind and body go, and start to work with that. Can people learn to recognize that state, push through it, and therefore translate it across everything from sport to instruments to school to parenting?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: 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 there.
What I can speak to specifically with respect to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown very limited success. For example, if you do the Stroop task hundreds and hundreds of times, or you go home and practice doing everything with your non-dominant hand — these willpower exercises, you do them for a week and come back. Some experiments have suggested they do in fact improve self-control. Others say they don't. On average, reviews of this literature have suggested the effect is much smaller than you might hope despite all the work you put in, and it's very variable. Some people will see small gains, but many people will see no gains.
I think there's an important difference between willpower and self-control. Willpower is one of the ways we improve and enhance our self-control abilities, but it's not the only one. Walter Mischel 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 a picture frame around it so it's not real, it's just a picture. All of these different behavioral and psychological strategies enhance self-control without leveraging willpower.
At this point you could ask what willpower actually is. It's not entirely clear in psychology, but most people understand willpower to be the effortful inhibition or suppression of impulsive tendencies. There's a yummy piece of cake in front of me and I'm really tempted to eat it — willpower is the active fighting of that temptation. Telling myself don't think about it, don't give in. I think this is the paradigmatic version of self-control in which you use your mental muscles to push down those ideas. Those trainings are the ones I was saying are not very effective. But training some of the other strategies — closing your eyes, imagining a cockroach crawl across the cake, 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 Versus Cool Cognition: Fighting Fire with Fire
Andrew Huberman: I have this very crude idea that when we find ourselves at a friction point — we don't want to do something we should, or we're having a hard time resisting something we shouldn't — we have to go a layer deeper into the limbic system and hypothalamus. Like we have to come up with contingencies that are much more visceral. Sugar is good, we have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary things. 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, but we have to think about the fear of showing up for an exam and not knowing the material — the nightmare everybody's had at least once. The control strategy seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgust, and so on. How well does the opposite work? How good is aspiration — love, desire — as a driver? And have experiments been done to differentiate between fear and love as motivators?
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 — 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. So by activating those systems, all we're doing is upregulating the temptation impulses. For years — and this is part of Walter Mischel's fundamental model and many others — they talked about making your cognitions cooler. In other words, shutting down the emotional system and thinking very coolly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice.
What's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire — if this thing is pulling me, I'm going to find something that's going to push me away. The example would be imagining a cockroach crawling across the chocolate cake. There's not actually very much research on that. Most of the dominant models in self-control really talk about cooling your cognitions.
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. If I say, "Oh, 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. 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 rather than the long-term gains. What's the sugar crash you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake? They show that that kind of thinking serves much like what you were talking about with the vomit reflex — it pushes people away. They're in the short-term mindset, the short term is pulling them in, so they fight that with a short-term repellent. And they found that that's also very effective for self-control.
Your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say is the status quo in self-control research. But for that reason, I'm super excited, because my own work is starting to challenge that idea — as is Paul Stillman and Caitlyn Woolley's — that we might be able to use the limbic system, we might be able to use our hot reactions. We don't have to assume they're going to predispose us to indulgence. Instead, they might be what inspires us and gives us the motivation to do the right thing.
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. 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. He's always been that way.
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 basically flagellates himself into doing these things. Any attempt to suggest a softer approach — he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him.
We could even talk about eating disorders — anytime we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to eat cake, there's going to be a subset of people saying you're talking about eating disorders, switching the contingency so that avoiding becomes the reward. 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 upside right now. If it's a long-term battle, think in terms of long-term outcomes, both bad and good. Should we have all of those in our toolkit?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: I completely agree with you, and I love the fact that you use the word toolkit. My colleague Ethan Kross and I wrote a paper in which we talked about the self-control toolkit. We argue we have lots of different ways to enhance self-control, and we speculate that certain tools might work better for certain people at certain times. We don't currently have a very good framework for predicting what would be the right strategy for 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. I don't think there's going to be one tool that works for everybody. The self-control toolbox approach explicitly embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people.
If you're the kind of person who's very reactant — someone who says, "No, I can do it" — then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you, because you're going to react to it and say, "No, I'm going to do it." But if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say and incorporate their perspectives, and they're saying bad things about you, that's probably going to have a demotivating effect. The strategy that works so well for one individual may not work for another.
It may also be that certain self-control strategies work for certain contexts and not others. For me, getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I have a litany of reasons why I don't want to do this today. Sometimes it's just putting on the workout clothes. The strategy I use for that is usually telling myself, what would my heroes do in this situation? The "what would Jesus do" approach — 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, these things don't work so well for me. At that point, I just want to grit my teeth and get it done. So willpower might be a better strategy then.
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 want to stress that self-control is a skill that you tailor for yourself, and it's a lifelong journey. I'm not going to be able to say do XYZ and all of a sudden people are going to be amazing. Instead, they have to try and have to fail. And it's in the failure where you actually learn the most, because you say, "Oh, that's not for me, or at least that wasn't for me at this time."
The reason why I find this approach really exciting and also hopeful is that I think a lot of people, when they fail at self-control, just say, "I'm a terrible person. I'm never going to get this. I just have bad self-control, bad willpower." But 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 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 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 show up to the work and you're just 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 models say 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 then 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. Motivation isn't just a switch. Are there tools that people can use to move into focused states more quickly or more effectively, as well as to move out of motivated states? Has anything been studied about transitions between tasks?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: I love this idea of attractor states. In my own work, we don't have that kind of model and we don't use the language of warming up, but we do know that there is a dynamic interplay between how you think about something and the motivation you're experiencing. If a workout is "oh, another hour of pain," we're not going to get super excited about it. But if instead you change your mindset about it — and again, 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 is that sometimes it's not just about the amount of motivation, but the type. 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 of 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. But when you're on defense, it very well might be about preventing losses. If you get that mixed up, you won't be as effective.
Research 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 soccer game — that would be bad. You need to scale back motivation and find that sweet spot.
I love this idea of warming up. I've never thought about it that way before, but it might take a couple of moments to actually get all the ducks lined up in a row so that the system is operating functionally — cognitively, motivationally, biologically — at all levels to maximize performance.
You also mentioned 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 there's a kind of cognitive inertia. You're still operating under the old set and it takes some time to switch into the new one.
Zooming out a little, 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. There is some research suggesting that the disengagement process is very difficult, and we actually don't understand it nearly as well as we understand persistence. We know a lot more about persistence than we know about disengagement, and it's an area of research that is really important.
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 are able to re-engage in a new set of goals much faster. But beyond that, we have to 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 and the Why Versus How Problem
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 bring together state of mind and body and concept. One thing that isn't discussed enough among high performers is that once you taste a really great workout, once you taste flow state, once you taste neuroplasticity — you grind it out, you learn something, and you now have mastery of something — there's this temptation to need to be in that perfect state in order to feel like you can do it at all. And many people will assemble their entire lives trying to recreate those states. I think one of the beautiful things about people like David Goggins, and also Coleman Ruiz and other tier-one operators, is the way they describe doing hard things from a place of suck. As Jocko Willink, 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. 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 not sunny enough. It's raining too much. People are remarkably creative at coming up with reasons to justify indulging in their temptations.
What's really interesting about what you're suggesting is that 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 until 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. And that's one of the things that's really frustrating and challenging about self-control.
When self-control conflicts are far away from us — when I'm thinking about exercising more next year, but not today — it's really easy to say that's the right thing to do, that's what I really want. But when next year becomes today, all of a sudden my mindset's in a different place and that choice is really hard again. The clarity that I once had is gone. What's also frustrating is that as that moment passes and you're looking back at it sometime in the future, you have distance again and the clarity comes back and you're like, why didn't I do what I was supposed to do? It's so clear to me that that was the thing I really wanted to do.
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, and 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. And 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. And so just at the point where I have to do the hard thing is when I'm thinking about why it's so hard the most. Then time passes, it gets farther away from me, and I'm looking back thinking, but that was something I really, really wanted to do — because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how.
In order to try to overcome that, in my lab we've conducted experiments in which we have people think about their goals and why they're pursuing their goals, or how they're going to pursue those goals. We then give them a self-control conflict that's unrelated to those goals — so they're just thinking generally about why or generally about how. We've essentially warmed them up, and then we give them a self-control task. They have much better self-control when they've thought about whys than hows. We argue this is because we're simulating the mindset of when the thing was distant rather than close. But that's the problem with hard things. When they're in the distant future, it seems like a really good idea and we can think about why we want to do it. When we actually have to do it, we don't think about why anymore — we think about how. And the how just sucks.
Andrew Huberman: I would also add that the rewards that come after challenges are the real rewards. I've been saying for a few years now that dopamine and other forms of chemical reinforcement that come without effort — while there are examples of those that can be healthy or innocuous — most of them are pretty detrimental. But there's nothing quite like rewards that follow intense, prolonged effort.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: It's really interesting that you mention this because I think when we think about self-control, we tend to think about it as a binary. If I'm trying to lose weight and there's a piece of cake in front of me, usually it's one goal against another — I have to choose. And that makes the decision 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. Those are additional motivations that fuel the long-term goal.
I was mentioning before that it's really important to think about your whys — not just the one why, but all of them. I want to be healthier. I want to be a good example for my kids. I want to show that I can do this. I want to become the better me. All these different motivations. There's no reason why resolving a self-control dilemma should be a fair fight. Why should you give the temptation a fair one-on-one challenge? Instead, growth, self-discovery, confidence, self-esteem — all these other things can also be leveraged, and we can become much more powerful against the temptation because we find additional sources of motivation to push through the things we really don't want to do.
And ironically, it's an upward cycle — the more you do it right, the more positivity you experience, and 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 really focusing on it and saying I'm doing the hard thing not just for the one goal, but because I want that dopamine rush, I want my system to learn how to take this on, 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 lined up. But the more you do it, the mind likes to practice and be in the same places. Over time it should become faster and faster. So this idea of warming up might get easier and easier the more I do it.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: And the warm-up might get easier and easier and easier the more you do it. I love this idea.
Competitiveness, Achievement Motivation, and the Self-Control Toolbox
Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about the role of competitiveness. When I was a postdoc, I was in an area of science where a lot of tools were coming in. It was super competitive and kind of a first-come-first-served situation. There was some creative work involved, but we all knew what the tools were and we were all going after them, and I was in competition with really big labs. That competition fueled me in a way I wasn't familiar with. I'm not an innately competitive person about most things — I won't be the guy who has to win at ping pong. But having an enemy was incredibly motivating. Do people tend to distribute along a normal distribution in terms of competitiveness? And to what extent are people we call motivated just really, really competitive? Because a lot of endeavors in life are not competitive, but a lot of them are. How does competitiveness play into willpower and tenacity and self-control over time?
Dr Kentaro Fujita: 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 often comes out of achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is a recognition for doing really, really well on something, and it's usually really well relative to other people. Achievement motivation, 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.
Although achievement motivation may be promoted by our particular culture, when I think of motivation, I think of the myriad of 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. People who are really motivated to belong to a group will do amazing things in order to belong to the group. If they get rejected from that group, they will bend heaven and earth to get back in.
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. I was talking before about not giving the temptation a fair one-on-one fight, but actually bringing to bear all the motivations that might help you overcome it. If you know what motivates you, you should use those and activate them strategically when you need them.
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 says 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, that 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 we always 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 Versus Moderation
Andrew Huberman: One thing I've been playing with recently in my own life is striving for immense consistency in certain things — not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on peak performance, just without fail showing up. Every single night I have a particular practice before I go to sleep, and no matter what, I show up to it. I'm like two years and some change into it now. It's tapped into a different part of myself — not trying to get the best performance out, but just showing up. Earlier we were talking about abstinence versus moderation. What do the data show? And I think we could flip it both ways — is it always the case that we have to show up at our best, or can we show up at less than our best and still make progress?
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.
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 Sunday for the last X number of years, that has a special motivational power.
Perhaps it's just because you have the habit. Perhaps the habit locks you into place. Others have argued that we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern. But one of the things you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors. When I had the streak going, I was up in the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in just because I wanted to keep the pattern, which was really stupid. So they can take a life of their own, which in some cases can be good, but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad.
This idea that there might be trade-offs associated with abstinence got my student and me 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. I want to be clear here — this is not the same thing as failing, because failing is when you're not talking about the pattern of behaviors. You make that decision in the moment and say, well, the cake looks really good, 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.
You think about the trade-offs. Abstinence leads to really rigid behaviors, but computationally, the choice is already pre-decided for you. It's Monday at 5:00, that's your exercise time, you don't have a choice. It's computationally simple. 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 trade-offs, like the rigidity. It's Monday 5:00 PM, it's your daughter's wedding, but you're getting the workout in. 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 is that there are trade-offs between abstinence and moderation, and we're really interested in trying to understand why people choose one versus the other for what kinds of tasks and goals. For example, if I'm trying to be faithful to my spouse, abstinence is probably better than moderation, because if you have the one lapse, you are no longer a faithful spouse — sort of by definition, that goal is gone forever. On the other hand, for a student studying for an exam, they can watch a little Netflix or they can study. Normally those two goals aren't in conflict, but the night before an exam, now they are. In that kind of situation, a study break might be okay because taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying.
We're also interested in whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategies. If you're the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go. If you're the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better.
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 — participants 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. 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.
Andrew Huberman: 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, when I asked him what's the key to this whole thing, he said, "Find a nondestructive way to reset yourself each week and figure out what you can invest five or six days per week, and update that every five years or as your personal life changes." What you can do as a graduate student is different than when you're a postdoc and when you have a family. His nondestructive reset was completely mindless activities, in particular fishing. He would go fishing, not think about science, not think about anything. And that was his reset. As simple as that advice is, it was really valuable to me — 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.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: I think one of the ideas we've been playing around with is this notion that there might be two modes of goal pursuit. One of them is the single goal — here's the most important thing in my life and I'm going to sacrifice everything for it. That's very effective for getting things done, and I think some of the most highly productive, highly successful people specialize in that mode. Our society is actually really good at advancing that idea. We raise our kids to be that way — if you want to be an athlete, you have to do this, this, this, this. If you want to be a scientist, you have to do 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. They're kind of what my friend Abby calls invisible goals — goals that we're pursuing but aren't necessarily aware that we're pursuing them. As a result, we're not actually 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 all the other goals, sacrifice all the other goals for that one. But there might be something really healthy and wholesome about understanding that you're actually pursuing multiple goals and then realizing that you have to divvy your effort among them. Doing so systematically might end up helping all the goals in a way that's better than just pursuing the one and sacrificing all the others. 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.
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 dynasties and achievements, and then say, "Oh, well, he was compulsively competitive." What do you want? Imbalance also brings extremes. You can get dogs that can do extreme things well beyond what their breed represents, but that dog is not going to be like other dogs. Its neural circuits are honed around these training things. And that's what happens when you take young kids and shape them around a certain behavior, academic or athletic. So it's easier to look at those examples and say, "Oh, yeah, I don't want to deal with that," and demonize them. I think we should celebrate those people if that's what they genuinely wanted, and we should pay attention to the fact that they became asymmetric in their wiring literally. 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.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: You have to decide: this goal is worth sacrificing for, these other ones are not. And as long as we're aware of the trade-offs, I think that's good. My concern is that I think 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.
Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation
Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. There was this famous set of experiments also done at Stanford where kids who drew intrinsically — who just loved drawing — were then rewarded for drawing, and the conclusion was that some of these kids drew less or gave up drawing because they were now 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. 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 in one condition they were told, "Now I want you to play with these markers and if you play with them I will give you a reward." A second condition said, "Surprise — you just played with the markers but we're going to also 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.
I will say what I just said is very controversial and I'm sure psychologists who are listening are going to be 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 that adults who really know they love the thing and are really certain they love the thing may be a little bit more resistant to that.
And as adults, we can also connect dots and expand our whys — say, well, I love doing this thing, I get paid for doing it, and those resources can help me provide for others who I also love. So it's sort of exponential.
I remember a salary discussion with my chairman at UCSD. During a salary negotiation, he said two things. He said, "A, you can't make more money than me," which seemed fair. And he said, "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 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 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 idea. Several of the people who I've observed have incredibly long, super successful creative careers — and I've been fortunate enough to speak to some of them — 100% of them will say that they still engage in a lot of mundane tasks throughout their day. They have a lot of hired help and things like that, but they're still picking up after their kids, still edging the lawn, still doing these things. Because when they didn't, they thought all their time would expand into doing their creative work, and they found that wasn't the case. They actually had lower motivation. There's really something to staying in the groove of what you were doing in the early to mid portions of your career when you were climbing the rungs. It's almost like a mental muscle.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: It just seems to me a little bit like staying connected to the process, to the way that you 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 than the person who's intrinsically motivated. But it begs a lot of questions about fairness. Should you really be paying two people different amounts of money when they're doing exactly the same task just because they have differences in motivation? In some respects, you're almost rewarding the person you probably don't want doing the job — because they're just doing it for the money as opposed to really loving what they're doing.
A lot of employers would like to have employees who are intrinsically motivated because people who are intrinsically motivated will often do the extra step, do the hard work. But 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.
Mundane Tasks, Ikigai, and Finding Meaning in the Simple
Andrew Huberman: Are there any elements of Japanese culture that you wish you saw more of in the United States, in the context of your work? Because numerous times across our conversation we've touched into some of these really incredible concepts in Japanese culture. You're in a unique position to answer this.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: I should say first and foremost, I'm Japanese American. I'm Nisei, so I was born here. I have never lived in Japan. So I think a lot of Japanese listeners might say, "Oh, he's not really Japanese." I'm definitely Japanese American. My connection to my culture mainly comes from food — because I like eating and cooking, mostly eating. And I also used to practice the Japanese martial art kendo, which is sword fighting.
I've never actually thought about this question, 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. Not enjoy the moment like I'm going to enjoy this chocolate cake — just enjoying being here in this moment.
The other notion that I think is interesting is wabi-sabi — that there's beauty in decay and non-perfection. I think that's an idea that can be foreign in the Western cultural space, where if there's one wrinkle we have to change clothes, or we're always optimizing, things have to be perfect. 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 we just had, embracing the suck and starting from the place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better might be an idea worth incorporating.
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 with this concept. I've seen a lot of people crushed under the pressure of a really big family concept. 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, we can embrace what is not perfect. 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.
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 achievement get tons of views and likes, but every once in a while someone will come along and very authentically confess a failure, or express a hardship they're going through, or a win that doesn't really fall within our normal notions of what a win is — and it's like an avalanche of interest in those. So I think there's a natural magnetism to these just human elements.
I appreciate you being willing to answer that question on the fly, because it's not within your PubMed profile, but I do believe that the people we are comes to the science we do. Numerous times throughout today's discussion, I've detected these elements of who you are in this, and it's impossible to separate.
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, 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 thing is that we tend to think about self-control at the tactic level — what do I do to overcome this temptation? And I think largely overlooked is this idea of what do I want to do again, 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. 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 the two-modes idea — am I pursuing the one goal or am I pursuing the many? In psychology we have spent a lot of time focusing on the pursuit of the one. And we haven't really done a good job of embracing the pursuit of the many. To the extent that we have, it's usually like two goals — work-life balance, for example. But as I mentioned before, we have more than two goals at any given time. How do we integrate all of these goals? How are we pursuing them all the time? How are we juggling all these balls and keeping track of them? Are there goals that we have that we're not even aware of that we're actually pursuing? I'm really interested in that.
And related to that is fitting goals into the broader constellation of all the things that we want — connecting goals to these big underlying values and motivations that we have. That link is not really well understood. We talked a little bit about getting our ducks in a row, seeing the whys of a particular goal, the broader motivations of what motivates them. How did that come to be? Did our system just know that these things were aligned and now retrospectively we're making the connections, or does making the connections have an important impact? Not just multiple goals, but also levels of goals and how they connect to more fundamental motives. How we know whether a goal is right for us fundamentally requires understanding whether it resonates with these broader motives that we have. And getting things aligned — that alignment idea — I don't know that we really understand how people do this. It's magical when we get it right and we do amazing things. How do we know it was the right thing to do? There's no textbook, there's no wiring diagram. So what are the cues, what are the signals, how do we discover what we really want? Those kinds of things, I think, are the future of our science.
Andrew Huberman: Awesome. I look forward to seeing what you and your colleagues discover next. I want to thank you so much for coming here today and sharing the work that you've been doing in your lab. When I discovered your work, I was like, I 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 and in building a framework, but I think it's just terrific the way that you're throwing your arms around all of it. And as I mentioned before, it's clear whether you intended it or not that you bring a lot of humanity to this. There are answers, they vary, you need a dynamic toolbox, and yet there's evidence that certain things really work. I know I'm going to incorporate a number of things you shared today, and I know our listeners will as well. Thank you for doing the work you do. Please come back again and update us as things evolve.
Dr Kentaro Fujita: Really honored to be here. Thank you.