How To Live Freely In A Goal-Obsessed World - Anne-Laure Le Cunff

What's the problem with people obsessing over finding their purpose in your opinion? It makes them miserable. When we try to find our purpose, we feel like if we haven't found it yet, something is wrong with our life. Our life doesn't have meaning. We also spend a lot of time comparing our life to the life of others. We wonder, why is it that this person seems like she knows where she's going? Why is this person um so excited about what they're doing? Why do they have a passion? Why is it that I don't have my purpose? I don't have my passion. And because of that, we become so obsessed with figuring out what is my purpose that we end up not giving ourselves the time and uh the possibility to explore and maybe figuring out in the end what that is. What is a better way to look at creating a direction in life then? A better way to figuring out your purpose is just to experiment. It's uh thinking like a scientist. When a scientist wants to learn something new, they don't start with a specific outcome in mind. What they do is that they start with a research question, a hypothesis. They wonder, hey, what might happen if I tried this? If you do that, if you keep on asking questions, if you keep on trying new things, if you keep on making mistakes, learning from them, and iterating, this is how you figure out your purpose. How good do you think we are at predicting what it is that we like? This seems sort of in the discussion around having a purpose that there is a inherent sort of self- knowing. I know what's best for me. I am the master of this universe. And you know, I didn't know, but now that I do have a bit of a grasp on a purpose, everything else can go and [ __ ] itself. There's a lot of research showing that we are absolutely terrible at predicting what we'll like in the future. We change a lot and uh we think that we're going to be a lot more similar to who we are today than what we actually end up being like in the future. We also think that whatever we like in the future will follow a nice progression, a logical progression, like a nice narrative based on who we are today and what our life looks like today. But we change quite a lot. And a lot of the things we like are based on our experiences, the people we hang out with, the work we do, the failures we experience, and the growth that we have as well. There are lots of things that you might hate today because they're hard that you will enjoy in the future because you've mastered them. And this is something that's really, really hard to predict. So deciding what you want to pursue based on what you think you will enjoy is not necessarily a great way to go about it. Yeah, it seems like I don't know a lot of people are probably living somebody else's dream. I don't know whether they're following their own, but this they're probably following something that they think is their own, but very well might not be theirs and very well might be somebody else's. Yeah. What you're talking about actually has a name in psychology research. It's called a cognitive script. And uh this is based on really interesting research coming from the late 70s where researchers asks people okay if I put you in this this specific situation how do you behave how do you act and what they found is that most people if you put them in a similar situation will behave in a very similar way and that's okay for a lot of everyday situations. So let's say you go to the restaurant and you know that you're supposed to, you know, go there and wait for a member of staff coming and telling you this is your table. If you go to the doctor, you know, you wait in the waiting room and then you go in the doctor's office. That's okay, right? This is how we don't overthink every single decision. But the problem is that we follow these scripts not only in everyday situations, but also to make way more important decisions in our lives. And that includes the dreams that we pursue, the careers that we follow, the way we manage our relationships, the topics we decide to study at university. And uh those cognitive scripts are kind of the invisible threads that actually determine a lot of the decisions that we're making in life. What's the mechanism of how these things work? Is it that we outsource learning to the example of people around us and then try to imitate that? Is this mimemetic stuff? How does this work? There are different types of cognitive scripts. Some of them are based on so I I call them the the SQL types of scripts and uh this is based on the fallacy that whatever you do today needs to make sense based on what you did in the past. So we feel like our life needs to have this nice narrative that is legible and that makes sense. So this is the script that we follow when for example after university will only apply for jobs that align with whatever we studied. This is also why you've probably seen a lot of people rewrite their CVs before they apply for jobs. So we can have this nice narrative where they can say it all makes sense. And because of that, when we follow the script, we don't open ourselves to doing things that don't make sense on paper. It needs to make sense. So that's one one script and that's one mechanism. Another one which I call the crowd-pleaser script is similar to what you were talking about a bit of a mimemetic desire and that social pressure. It's the script we follow when we make decisions based on what we think is going to please the people around us. So, we only go for the most impressive projects. We want people to say, "Wow, you're working at this company. You're working on this project. You're so cool." And this is how we make our decisions. And here we might not go for the project that's a bit weird, a bit different, uh, or that might fail because we're following the crowd-pleaser script. So, that's the second mechanism. And the third mechanism, I think this is the most insidious one. It's linked to what you were asking earlier about purpose. It's the the Hollywood one, the epic script, the one that says follow your passion. The script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big. It needs to be impressive. And anything less than that is failure. And this script is really the one where we want to be part of a tribe and we want to feel like we matter. We want to feel like if we're gone tomorrow, people will notice. There will be a hole where we are. And because of that, we want to take space. We want to be noticed. And again, we're making decisions here not necessarily based on what would be fulfilling to us, but based on what we think other people are going to perceive as impressive. All three of those have a sense that somebody else or something else is sort of puppeting our desires. That we're at the mercy of our past, you know, that we need to make this cohesive narrative that ties together very nicely. Uh that we're at the mercy of the opinions of others, what they're going to say about us. uh that we need to do something which is part of the course or would look impressive uh or something which has like cosmic impressiveness, you know, not even to a person. It's just this vague sense of legacy uh and and contribution, but not specific contribution. Um, so yeah, it feels to me like all three of those are tied together by outsourcing what it is that you think to something or someone else. Yeah, exactly. And uh this is this is because it gives us a sense of control, a sense of certainty. Following a script makes us feel like we have a sense of direction. And even if that sense of direction we we get from the outside, still that feels a little bit more comfortable than admitting to yourself that you have no idea what you want. That what you like today might be completely different from what you will like tomorrow and that you're a bit lost. That's scary. That's scary to admit that to yourself. And so that's why we follow these scripts and that's why we externalize our decision making in this way. What is the issue that humans have with uncertainty? What what's our cognitive relationship to the uncertain? Our brain is designed to reduce uncertainty as much as possible. So if you think about our ancestral past, the more certainty you had, the more likely you were to survive. If you didn't know what was that weird noise in the bushes over there or where the resource res resources were or who was your enemy in the tribe, you were very likely to die. So you needed to feel like you knew. You needed to feel like you had enough information to survive. And because of that and our brains haven't changed that much, right? In the past few thousands of years, we were still very very scared of uncertainty because we associate uncertainty with death. A lot of the risks that we were facing in nature in our ancestral path, those existential risks of death don't exist anymore. And still we're reacting, we're responding exactly in the same way when it comes to uncertainty. And so it does take an effort and it does take really trying to elevate yourself above those natural automatic instincts in order for you to not just respond to that uncertainty on autopilot. To try and fill the gap, there's a uh I I wrote something last week which I think I know might might be interesting to you. So, somebody asked on uh Instagram, they asked ChatGpt for a genuinely novel insight that most people don't understand. And ChatGpt said, "Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears." And then I build a little bit a little bit on it and I said, "If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear, worry, and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing that you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy which is way worse than anything that could happen in reality. However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans hate not knowing what the future will hold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. This is this is amazing. You know, there's actually research that aligns exactly with what you wrote and that shows that people would rather choose self-inflicted pain in an experiment rather than the uncertainty of not knowing when the pain will happen, including the possibility that there might be zero pain. Right. So, they would rather press the button and say, "Hit me now." Yeah. Rather than waiting and not knowing. It's the same reason that Uber is successful. You know, Uber's great because you can order a car from anywhere from your pocket and there's safety and reliable drivers and such. But the real reason that Uber is good is that it reduced down the uncertainty of not knowing when the car was going to arrive. You know, it's 10 minutes away, 7 minutes away, 4 minutes away, 1 minute away, right? I need to go outside. That was what it was good for as opposed to permanently having to look out of the window to work out how long whether the taxi was there. And you see the frustration people get when the time keeps on changing. When it tells you it's going to be here in three minutes, now it's 5 minutes. Now it's back to two minutes. Right? You prefer when it's telling you 10 minutes and it doesn't change. So we'd rather have a negative outcome that is certain and where we know what's coming rather than this outcome that keeps on changing. There was a great behavioral science intervention done at Heathrow. So, there was an issue with the wait times for people getting connections in terminal 5. It sounds oddly specific if you've never been to Heathrow, but so many people that fly through Heathrow have been through Terminal 5, so they know exactly the pain. And classic engineering, logistics, operations mindset. They said, "Well, let's spend a hundred million pounds on faster scanners and more conveyor belts and we'll retrain the staff and we'll fit them in a different sort of shape and we'll be able to speed things up." And a friend's company was actually the one that said, "Well, hang on. Before you do that, just let's see if we can not spend quite so much money other than our consult consultancy fee." Um, and they fixed the entire thing just by putting signs up. So they put signs up down the queue that said 30 minutes from this point, 45 minutes from this point. And all of the signs were about 5 minutes longer than the amount of time that the actual wait was. So someone got there and they said, "Wow, I mean, you know, it's been 25 minutes, but they said it was going to be 30." Like that's so great. Like we beat it by 5 minutes. like what an amazing and it reduced down uncertainty and it actually played with this sort of uh I guess surprise a pleasant surprise of I thought it was going to be 45 minutes. Oh, it was actually 38 minutes. Um yeah, I just thought that was a a lovely little intervention. This is genius. This is absolutely genius. I love that. And and I love how it is actually not trying to fix the cognitive bias that we have here, but actually use it, which is the simplest approach and the most cost effective here too. What are some other ways that we can use that cognitive bias uh in a a positive manner sort of day-to-day life? I think the first step is doing a little bit of work when it comes to knowing yourself and and just self-discovery in general because we talk a lot about cognitive biases as if they applied equally to everybody. But again, depending on your experiences, depending on the amount of selfwork that you've done, depending on whatever challenges that you've faced in the past, it is very likely that you have cognitive biases are a bit stronger or not as strong. And so I think just having this honest conversation with yourself and knowing which ones you have and then playing with these. So for example, in my case, I know that if I'm very anxious about something, I'm going to procrastinate a lot. So if I have a big keynote, a big presentation I need to give, I know I'm going to uh actually, you know, procrastinate last minute to present this. And so every time I have something really big coming up, I book a meeting two weeks before with a coach that I'm paying to review my content and because I don't want to show up emptyhanded to this and I I also know I hate disappointing people and so I know I will show up with something and so for me this is creating a pre- deadline to the deadline and I will usually prepare for that meeting 1 hour before. That's how bad my procrastination is. But that's one hour before this meeting, but that's two weeks before the actual presentation. And you know what? I think since I've implemented this, I'm a lot more, you know, I'm I'm much happier than when I was trying to fix that bias that I have. And now I've accepted that this is how I respond to anxiety. and a little bit to, you know, similar to what your friends did at Heathrow. I just created a system where it ends up happening. It ends up working and I don't have to change everything and I don't even have to change myself too much when it comes to that specific bias. I've been thinking about this to do with uh partner choice and how people choose different relationships. You know, we like to think of ourselves as totally selforrable, that there is no skill or characteristic or trait that I can't gain or rid myself of or whatever. And you know, for the super agentic personal growth people out there, that actually might be true. But you have the choice between dating somebody who compensates for your flaws or somebody that you need to fix your flaws for. And it just seems like getting into a relationship with somebody who actually addresses your flaws as opposed to you having to go through the very long and arduous process of fixing them or getting rid of them is kind of what you're doing there. It's like look, I could just white knuckle my way through not procrastinating or I can use my fear of social judgment and this sort of sense that I need to show up for people that I've paid and that are going to expect work from me. I can just use that to my advantage. I don't need to fix my flaw. I can find someone that compensates it on my behalf. Yeah. And uh actually now that you're mentioning relationships, I think you can even take it one step further where the outcome is even better in the end. I think my presentations now that I have the coach are actually better than when I was working on them on my own. And same with relationships. I I find that the relationships around me that work the best are not even necessarily the ones where the other person compensates for whatever biases that you have or weaknesses that you have, but where both people actually are more than the sum of each of the both of them and where they elevate each other. There's something that happens. is almost an alchemy that happens between the two where whatever is the weakness of one of them becomes a superpower when they're together. And this is kind of what you want to you want to find where it's actually even better doing being together than trying to fix whatever issue that you might have. It's not even compensating for somebody's shortcomings. It's turning your shortcomings into a strength. You know, exactly. Um, you are a person who is very sensitive and emotionally in tune and your last relationship was you with somebody who didn't really like that or they didn't really respect that or it made them feel uncomfortable or you were made to feel shame for being that sensitive. And then your next relationship isn't just with somebody who is able to soothe your sensitivity, but someone who's actively attracted to the fact that you're so sensitive. And this has now turned from something that was kind of a bit of an ick or an obstacle or an issue that needed to be worked around and something that you maybe felt shame about beyond something that was acceptable and now to something which is actually a green flag or an attractor or something that's a a real positive part of the the relationship. Yeah. And that also frees up attention, energy, uh, and whatever kind of focus that you want to dedicate to the parts of yourself you actually want to improve. Cuz there are always going to be parts of yourself you want to improve, where you want to grow, where you want to explore. But having a partner who not only accepts but loves and celebrates those parts of you that maybe not everybody would like and knowing that you don't need to change those and you can focus on whatever really matters to you. This is also a superpower when you think about it. There are so many people who are wasting so much time and energy trying to fix things that they maybe don't need to fix because they're in the wrong type of relationship. And uh you see that you see that in so many successful researchers, successful entrepreneurs. They have a partner who has their back and who supports them and loves them the way they are and they can focus on improving whatever they actually want to improve. Talk to me about the usefulness of liinal spaces. Let me first define what a liinal space is just in case people have haven't heard the term because I actually discovered the term fairly recently a few years ago while I was working on my book. The word liinal means in between. It's the same uh it comes from lemon Latin and it's uh the same word that you find in sub liinal under the threshold. So it's the in between. It's the doorstep of change. It's the transitional space. And uh liinal spaces uh are those spaces of very high uncertainty where you're not back there anymore, but you you haven't made it to the other side yet. So I'm just going to give you a couple of very concrete examples. So um let's say that you are engaged but not married yet. Or you have graduated university but you haven't started your first job yet. Maybe you have accepted an offer for a new job but you haven't started that job yet and you're in this in between. You're you're not quite sure what's going to happen next and it's a space of uncertainty. Our automatic response when we find ourselves in those liinal spaces is to try and get out of them as quickly as possible. We've talked about how much our brains hate uncertainty. And this is why we want to get out of those liinal spaces as quickly as possible. But if we allow ourselves to stay in those liinal spaces to actually see them for what they are, spaces of opportunity, spaces where there a lot of self-discovery can happen, a lot of growth, then you can learn a lot about yourself, about the kind of work that you might want to do, about the kind of directions that you might want to explore. And it will still be uncomfortable. The uncertainty will still be there, but it will also be very fulfilling. Given that we are in a time where people are more anxious than ever before, it seems difficult for people to want to purposefully put themselves into a situation which causes even more uncertainty, even more of a threat response in their mind. What's the solution to working around that? Well, liinal spaces are inevitable. So, you can either when you find yourself in one, embrace it and make the most out of it, or you can fear them and experience anxiety. You don't necessarily need to seek and create liinal spaces for yourself, although a lot of people do that, but they tend to be uh a little bit more comfortable with risk. If you're not someone who's very comfortable with risk, you don't have to seek liinal spaces. But you have to know that you will find yourself in those spaces at some point in your life. And several times over the course of your life. Whenever you change jobs, whenever you change relationships, whenever you lose someone, whenever you meet a new person, whenever there's something new and there's a change and a transition in your life, there is a new liinal space. And so the only thing you can do here is really practicing and training yourself to first recognize them and say, "Okay, liinal space, uncertainty, discomfort here. I know what's going on here, but also let's take a deep breath. What can we learn here? What can we explore? Is there anything I can discover here about myself? Is there any way I can grow while crossing this liinal space?" M what are some liinal spaces that people find themselves in that they might not realize? What are some examples of those? So this it's it's interesting like at a if you look at the research around liinal spaces um researchers consider that any space of transition is a liinal space. And so we talked about airports. They consider that airports are a liinal space because you're not at home. You're not at your destination yet. Your sense of identity is kind of blurry. Nobody really knows who you are. You are, right? You just have this number on your plane ticket. And then when when you're on a plane, um you're kind of disconnected again in this in between. Same here. You can decide that you want to get out of this liinal space as quickly as possible. And some people have this mindset. They want to go from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Other people actually really enjoy that liinal space. They love that they have this little space of of in between where things are kind of in transition and where they can maybe open a book that they've been meaning to to read or journal or listen to a podcast they haven't had time to listen to or just do nothing. Close your eyes, do nothing and let your mind wander, which is also an activity that's really good when you find yourself in a liinal space. So really think about any type of liinal space. Um, another one which to me I find a little bit extreme and not that helpful but talk to your researcher in that space and they will tell you this is a liinal space a corridor just a corridor. So when you find yourself in between meetings for example walking from one room to another again some people they just go from one meeting to another whereas you see other people take those two minutes that they have walking from one room to another to mentally prepare themselves for the next meeting or make a couple of mental notes and really use that space. Um so yeah liinal spaces are literally everywhere. Yeah. Talk to me about compensatory control theory. So compensatory control theory is a psychological theory that shows that whenever we feel like we're losing control, we try to overexert control to feel like we know what we're doing and to know where we're going. And so whenever we find ourselves in a space where there's a lot of uncertainty, we might cling to the first decision, the first solution that seems the most obvious and that seems to have very clear steps. This is also when a lot of people try to control a lot of their behaviors and start having rigid behavioral patterns. So they will maybe have a more rigid routine, more rigid way of managing their time, their energy, their tasks and uh yeah, you basically turn into a little soldier because you feel like that's going to give you the courage that you need to go through whatever moment of uncertainty you're facing right now. So there is a a degree of unpredictability about the world around us and we try in an attempt to get some order from the chaos. We overcompensate and we try to apply more effort more sort of deliberate routine in the areas that we do have that control over. Exactly. And very often that leads to negative effects on your mental health because a lot of those strict regiments that we create for ourselves when we're trying to compensate for a lack of control are not sustainable because they're not coming from uh you know a place of of wanting to grow or fulfillment, right? They're again coming from this place of wanting to be in control. And this is very rarely something that people can keep up with for a very long time. When uh their little system breaks down, a lot of people respond with self-lame and self- judgment. And so that creates this vicious cycle where then they then try to be even more in control to prove to themselves that they can be in control. It seems like we're always unconsciously seeking structure in one form or another. Is there a a neuroscience explanation for why people have an addiction to productivity even when it hurts us? So, it's not necessarily a neuroscience explanation. It's more of a psychological one, but it really comes back to the fact that we are social animals. And again, if you go back to our evolutionary past, being rejected from the tribe also meant death. And so in order to not be rejected from the tribe, you had to prove that you were useful, that you were not dead weight, that whatever resources you needed, you also contributed back to society. So there is already a natural tendency to prove your worth to the people around you. That's the kind of that's already embedded as part of our human nature. And then you have today's societies where we have actually created metrics to measure that. We have metrics of success. We have KPIs, OKRs, leaderboards. We have social media. We have so many ways now to publicly measure how successful a person is and how good of a contributor they are to society. And so that exacerbates that anxiety, that natural anxiety that we have already of saying, "Hey, I I matter. I'm a good contributor. I'm productive." Yeah. That um public productivity or sort of conspicuous effort uh a lot of the time I think causes people to I mean it's the same reason why there's some I'm sure you probably know this. I think it's organizational psychology. If you have a meeting that's got more than four people in it and everybody agrees on the outcome, the chance of one person objecting to the outcome, even if they don't fully believe it, goes up. It's like, oh, well, you I I certainly think that we could do with having another look at the It's like, dude, everyone was happy with this. But there's just this sense of if you think a little bit deeper, even if your first instinct is this thing's fine, that sounds like being thoughtful. It looks a lot like doing the work and contributing, but it could just be an unnecessary obstacle that you've decided to throw in front of everyone. Oh, absolutely. There are so many incentives in today's society to look like you're contributing without actually contributing. And I actually saw that when I was working at Google at the very beginning of my career that a lot of engineers that were better at showing the the work that they done they've done even if it wasn't a big thing who spend 20% of their time building typing code and then 80% of their time telling people that they've done the thing were promoted a lot faster than the engineers that were doing the reverse where they spending 80% of their time actually fixing the product and making it better. Yeah, there's an interesting blend, I guess, whenever you're in a team. You need to spend enough time contributing so that people don't think you're a freeloader, but you also need to spend enough time reputation managing so that people actually see that you did the work. And if you can work a little bit and then multiply it by doing more reputation management, then why not? Yeah. No, exactly. And uh I would recommend that anyone who's doing good work is actually also taking the time and making the effort to let other people know about their good work because nobody's going to know what you've contributed if you're not telling them. Nobody's following you and paying attention. You need to let them know. But it can become a problem at a larger scale when the that ratio is out of whack and when people are spending more time actually talking about their work than actually doing work. Yeah. On the sort of compensatory control, reduction of uncertainty, uh this need for experimentation and exploration. Does that mean that it's sort of inevitable for people to run out of steam after they've pursued something for a long enough time, even if it was something that once was superbly aligned and missiondriven and highly motivating? Is it it's just going to happen that there's a life cycle to your desire to do that thing? It really depends on how much self-complexity you have in your life. Uh so self-complexity is basically the number of identities that you have and so you know you could be for example an entrepreneur and a father and a writer and a marathon runner. So you have those four identities. Uh what's great about having a high self-complexity, so you have several of those identities, is that when one of these identities is not something that is working really well right now for whatever reason, and those reasons could be external, I don't know, maybe you hurt yourself and you can't run. Uh or or it could be internal. Maybe you lost interest in in one of your hobbies or maybe you keep on fighting with your spouse or whatever it is. Then you have your other identities where you can still thrive and and explore. What's really nice to you is that when you do this, you can actually pause some of those identities that you have and not put as much energy into them and come back to them whenever your level of curiosity and excitement uh and all of that is replenished and you actually want to start again. Uh, a lot of people burn out of their ideas or or get bored or or decide to stop fully because it's the only one thing that they're pursuing. They put all of their eggs in the same basket. And so, at some point, when they feel like they don't want to do that thing anymore, they just move on to the next thing. And so, for these people, not being interested in a current idea anymore means that you have to move on to a new one versus actually, you know what? I'm taking a break from this. I might come back to it later. And so the people who have this high level of self-complexity, you could see them actually still pursuing a hobby that they started in their 20s and now they're in their 60s. And if you ask them, have you been doing this consistently every week for your entire life? They'll tell you, no, absolutely not. Actually, I had five years when I didn't do any woodworking or whatever. I was more interested in something else. But then I came back to it. So self-complexity allows people when they begin to run out of steam or they get a little bit bored with something because there are other places that they can be kept busy uh take a sense of purpose, pleasure, belonging from as opposed to completely having to exit the position because there's only one position. that position is able to stay open and they can do some other stuff and then go back to it as opposed to people whose entire identity is wrapped up in one thing. I suppose there's an interesting there's an interesting tension going on there between wanting a routine because you know that iterating and consistency and habits are where most progress comes from. uh and boredom because by doing a small number of things more consistently you are speeding up the pace at which you're going to get sick of doing them. Uh it feels like there's a a little tension going on there. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I I think the idea here is not necessarily to start new things and abandon them every two weeks, right? Uh it self-complexity is based on different senses of identities. And so if you want to have those identities, you need to inhabit them for long enough that you actually develop an identity here. So it's really not about having a thousand things going on at the same time and barely paying attention to them. Uh it's more about maybe having four or five different kind of routines going on, but also allowing yourself if at some point you feel like your heart is not in it right now to pause this and come back to it later. It's uh it's really the idea of almost like instead of being mono passion and and then when that passion is gone, you feel like that's the end. This relationship is over. I'm moving on to the next one of having a more of a you know being poly passionate where you feel like okay that's like I'm more interested in someone else right now something else and I I'll come back to this relationship later on. What about time anxiety? Talk to me about that. So time anxiety is the fear that you're not making the most of your time and uh it's uh it's based on um it's based on a very quantitative definition of time. So there's something I find really interesting is that in English there's just one word time and uh in French my native language is the same just and a lot of languages only have one word for time but in ancient Greek they had two words for time Kronos and Chyros Kronos is our definition of time quantitative where it's the time of of seconds and minutes and weeks and months and uh there's really this feeling that you have this limited amount of time and you need to fill it with as much stuff as possible and that living a full life is filling all of these boxes with as much stuff as you can. Um I don't know if you've seen you're familiar with uh Tim Urban's your life in weeks visual, right? It's gone viral so many times now that I think most people can see it. And it's really showing your life as this series of identical boxes which a lot of people report gives them anxiety to look at and and seeing this that could fit on the little post-it note with all of these little boxes and feel like oh I'm already halfway and and those are the boxes that I have left. This is time anxiety. The ancient Greeks had another word again for time which is chyros which is a more quantitative definition of time and it's the idea that time is elastic that it's not a series of identical boxes but that some moments can stretch forever where some moments can go really fast and um and an example I can I can give you I think we've all experienced is when you're chatting with a friend and uh all of a sudden you look at your phone or your watch and you see the time and you feel like what happened where has the time gone and that's a chyros moment that experiencing chyros where you can't you don't know was it 5 minutes was it 2 hours you have no idea and this is because we experience this this depth of time and when you focus on chyros you have a lot less time anxiety because you're not so obsessed with doing as much as you can with your life you're instead really trying to optimize for having really deep experiences is what does focusing on Chyros mean from a tactical perspective? So, it's really about being intentional with how you spend your time, not based on the quantity of work that you want to produce, not based on your productivity, but based on the depth of the experience. And so to give you a few examples, focusing on Chyros is knowing that maybe right now the most the best way to spend your time is actually to read a bedtime story to your kid instead of finishing that presentation. Maybe the best way to spend your time right now is taking a nap or reading a book or going outside and stretch or taking a walk. Maybe the best time to spend your work your your time right now is actually to get into hyperfocused mode and finish that piece of work or that essay that you're working on and that you really want to get done. And so really focusing on each moment, the depth of the experience and uh really which I'm very aware is hard to measure um but your your sense of aliveness, how alive does this moment feel for you. The more robotic you feel, the more you're in Kronos time. The more organic and alive every moment feels in terms of the decisions that you're making and the way you're spending your energy and your attention, the more you're in Chyros time. Um I think a lot of people feel a sense of shame when they let go of busyiness and sort of driving forward uh maybe toward their purpose, maybe towards some sort of undefined, undetermined sense of progress. But uh yeah, there's a lot of a lot of discomfort and shame around that. We live in a Kronos society and so even though we know that for our mental health and well-being the the more we we spend we live in Chyros time the better it is for us it is the reality that our entire society is designed around the rules of Kronos. So we all use our calendars to know where we should be at what time. This is how we're having this conversation right now because we say let's meet at this time and have this conversation. We all have deadlines. If you're working at any kind of company, you have projects with a project plan and you have deliverables. And in addition to this, there is this Kronos timeline that we have all created for ourselves that says that you are supposed to have achieved certain things by a certain age. So, you're supposed to have children by this age. You're supposed to have bought your first house by this age, to have found a partner by this age. You're supposed to have saved x amount of money by this age, right? So, it's really no wonder that people have this time anxiety that you just described where this pressure and this sense of of shame if they're not ticking all of the boxes in the right order at the right speed. I think this is completely normal. And so again, in an ideal world, we would all be in chairos time. But instead, what I really recommend is just trying to carve out a little bit of Chairos time in your life. It doesn't have to be all the time because again, not always possible, but what would it look like if on the Sunday you took a couple of hours and you said, "That's my Chyros moment." Just listening to yourself. what what do I actually want to do right now? If I forget about success, productivity, if I forget about the timeline, what do I want to do in this moment? And just practicing doing this even though it will feel a bit uncomfortable at the beginning. What would be your advice for someone who's very burned out, struggling with passion, and doesn't even know what to sort of start experimenting with? Where would they begin? It always always starts with observation. And uh I I see a lot of people suffering even more when they're in that situation when they feel stuck because they're a little bit like people drowning and moving a lot and trying to get back to the surface. They're they're just trying everything. They feel like they need to find a solution right now. And what you're describing here, being a bit lost, not knowing where you're going and feeling a little bit burned out, that is actually a liinal space that we've talked about. So this is exactly this is an example where you can practice instead of trying to get to the other side as quickly as possible, instead of trying to find a solution as quickly as possible, really staying in that space and observing. So just like an anthropologist that's going to go and study a new culture, you can observe your own life without any kind of judgment. You're just observing this life which you can pretend you know nothing about. And you can ask questions like why do I care about this? Why do I spend my time like this? Why do I spend my energy and my attention like this? What am I curious about? What am I excited about? What gives me energy? what drains my energy? And you can take little notes. You can do that for just 24 hours. And really remember that you're not trying to find a solution here. You're just observing the current situation. And it's only when you've started observing the current situation that you can start noticing little patterns, little things that you might want to experiment with. And so things that you've been doing maybe on autopilot for years, routines that you have that have become deeply ingrained, ways of thinking that seemed obvious before you started actually observing them. Those can be the seeds of tiny experiments where you can say, "Okay, wait a minute. It doesn't necessarily have to be this way. So what could be different? What could I try here?" From a brain science perspective, what does novelty and experimentation do? What what's the effect that it has on the brain? It basically gives you not that I want to say there's no good or bad kind of dopamine but a more positive type of activation of the dopamineergic system uh in the sense that it gives you this sense of reward through novel experiences and uh what's you know what's really addictive with social media a lot of modern experiences is the the variable reward schedule. So the idea that you don't know what you're going to get next. When you scroll on social media, you don't know is it going to be interesting or not. I'm not sure. I keep on scrolling. When you experiment, you're actually creating that kind of variable reward schedule for your life. You try something and you're not quite sure whether this is going to work or not. And especially if you keep your experiments tiny, you're not taking a really big risk here, right? you're just trying something new for a short period of time, seeing whether that's going to work or not. If it works, it's great. And if it doesn't, you can tweak something and go for another iteration. And so, in a way, it's it's really a way to almost cook your brain on personal growth where you want to know what's going to happen next. You want to try and you have this novelty seeking, but that is targeted at self-discovery. H okay. So given that you've done an awful lot of these different experiments, which one in your opinion has had the most surprising impact or which one could you have not predicted the most? Um probably my YouTube experiment. I um so a few years ago, I don't know why, but a lot of my friends decided to start YouTube channels and they were all super excited about it. Everybody was saying, "You need to do you need to create a YouTube channel. You need to be on YouTube." And uh up to this point, just kind of doing what other people around me were doing when it came to creating content online and those kind of things. It kind of works, right? It's just people say, "Start a newsletter." I experimented with that, liked it and I kept on going. Um, had a blog and all of that. I created a Twitter account, etc. And so I felt like, okay, my friends like it, let's experiment with this. And so I did a tiny experiment where I said until the end of the year, I'm going to record myself and post a video on YouTube every week. And uh, in terms of external results, it was okay. People liked it. Uh the the growth was okay to the point where if I had only looked at that, I probably should have kept going, but what was surprising to me is that I absolutely hated recording those videos. Really hated it. Uh to the point where any time I had to sit down in front of the camera one day, if I knew on a Thursday that in the afternoon I was supposed to sit down and record myself, my level of procrastination on everything else was through the roof. I was not able to work on anything else. I kept on thinking, oh, I have to record this thing tonight. And um that was that was surprising to me in the sense that up to this point there hadn't really been anything on the internet I felt uncomfortable doing. I had been sharing all of my thoughts, learning in public. I'm I'm I grew up with the internet, you know. I've always been really comfortable with it. And that one thing somehow is not my thing. And so I I learned I you know again just discovered that about myself. And the great thing about this experiment is that some people might say oh it's a failed experiment. She didn't continue with her YouTube channel. But to me it's a success because now I know I'm not wondering anymore. When I see my friends who have very successful YouTube channels I'm not looking at them and feeling like oh should I do that? I know that I shouldn't because I don't like it. Yeah. I suppose that's the unseen benefit of something not working is that you know that you don't need to try it anymore. Yeah, exactly. I've literally been there, done that, not for me. And again, it really frees up a lot of your mental energy to focus on the things that actually matter and that you actually enjoy working on. What is the science of what actually makes a habit stick in the brain then? Well, you you need to do it enough times first. Uh there contrary to what a lot of people are saying, it doesn't take 21 days. We actually don't know how long it takes. It varies a lot across people and it varies a lot depending on what habit you're trying to build and where you're starting from. But we know it does take quite a few repetitions in order to build a habit. So that's one thing. Second, enjoying it does make it a lot easier. We form habits a lot quicker if we actually like what we're doing. Uh and a third, a sense of progress, uh in the sense that if there's a habit that's a little bit difficult to build at the beginning, feeling like every time you do it, you get a little bit better and it's a little bit easier is going to make it a lot stickier because again, you want to see where you're going to go. So if you're trying to build a walking habit, for example, you want to go for a walk every day, just noticing that every day you can walk for a few more minutes, so it's a little bit easier to get started. That's also going to help you build habits faster. What about uh I mean it's I'm in Austin, Texas. It is the home of the cold plunge. Uh what's the physiology behind why cold works so well? So, I actually don't know. I haven't read anything about that. And I've tried the cold plunge once in my entire life. Okay. And yeah. Um, and uh I can I can see just from personal experience like I I could tell why people got addicted to it. It felt actually it felt really really good. But yeah, I don't know. I haven't read any of the research about that. Uh I see. I could have been that might be the next one. Uh, I know you looked at, uh, posture and how posture is sort of related to mental health and and the way that our bodies respond. I thought power poses had been completely debunked in a replication crisis, but I don't know, maybe all of that's actually been double debunked. No, no, no. It's been debunked. So I actually it's interesting because this is an example I give all the time about my blog uh where I actually I wrote an article about power posing and then read an a research paper then someone replied and said hey that has been debunked I hadn't seen it so I posted then another newsletter saying that's been debunked and I left the previous one and and linked to the new one saying hey I'm sorry basically uh and this is something that I really like about learning learning in public is that you can actually make mistakes and then say I was wrong and that's okay. Um, so yeah, I did write about it and then I wrote about the paper where it's been debunked and I don't think it's been double debunked. It's it's fully properly debunked. Right. Okay. So what should we do with our posture? Does it matter at all? Well, I mean it does matter for your back. It does. So So yeah, good posture is important. uh and uh you know I if if it makes you feel more confident, there's no problem with that. But there's no difference between that and in between feeling like you want to wear a nice shirt or you want to feel like you have a nice mustache or a nice haircut or whatever it is that makes you feel confident. But you don't need like a psychology study to tell you that whatever you do to make you feel confident can can help. Right? I have been hopping on for a while about the challenges of caffeine early in the morning. Uh especially with cortisol response and the way that cortisol and adrenaline sort of contribute to each other. Uh that also kind of got replication crisis but it seems like might actually be true. So what have you learned about the sort of cortisol response on a morning and uh the way that caffeine interacts with that? Yeah, this is still debated. Uh so yeah, you're right that there is a bit of a replication crisis around it. Um but there are enough other challenges around uh using caffeine early in the morning that it actually might be worth it for anyone who's wondering, oh, can I can I get back to drinking a lot of coffee as soon as I wake up? Uh I think a good incentive to wait for more research is that drinking a lot of coffee has also been linked with higher anxiety with trouble sleeping in the evening. There's there are a lot of other issues that are less debated in general that have to do with consumption of caffeine in general, not necessarily in the morning, but consumption of caffeine in general that I think are enough of an incentive to wait until there's more research. If you're one of the people who has managed to stop drinking coffee in the morning, I'm more I'm not one of these people. And I I know about the the research and I still drink coffee first thing in the morning. It's a bit like the doctors that are smoking cigarettes, you know? It's just like um so do as the research maybe says, but I'm not too sure, but not as I do. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. What about uh dopamine loops on a morning? It seems it's strange. Morning times are really weird for me. Evening times, too, but morning times especially. Um, I've woken up either to classic music, like classical stuff, uh, or talking NPR style radio for probably the best part of a decade because I found that if I woke up to music and it was even the most marginally memorable song, my brain was like super permeable first thing in the morning. I don't know what it is about it, but for some reason, you know, oh, I guess it's just Miley Cyrus party in the USA for the rest of my Tuesday afternoon because, you know, I woke up and the radio station decided to play Miley Cyrus this morning. So, yeah. What's happening with with dopamine in the morning with the state of the brain when we first wake up? Yeah. Uh what you're talking about, by the way, has less to do with dopamine and more to do with the fact that you're still half asleep and uh and when we're we're we're asleep, we're still processing a lot of information, but in a very open way, we're the you know, we're we're not consciously processing information. And so whatever comes in and whatever we're we're dreaming or thinking about, our brain takes at face value basically. And so those first couple of minutes, anything that you hear or that you listen is going to be integrated as part of your memories. Um, so so actually Yeah. So good good intuition to to go with something you'd rather put in your brain rather than meas. Okay. What about dopamine loops? What else is happening in the morning? So dopamine loops. So in the in the morning, the the problem that a lot of people have experienced is that whatever source of dopamine that you're getting in the in the morning is then going to be something that you're going to keep on seeking over and over again throughout the day. Uh and so this is why I think a lot of people know that, but it doesn't mean they're using that information and acting on it. Uh we all know that opening your your phone and scrolling through social media first thing is the in the morning is one of the the worst things that you can do. And if you manage to delay doing that as much as possible and wait until you're fully awake and that your prefrontal cortex is fully active a little bit later in the morning. This is when you have then more willpower and so you're more likely to be able later in the day to open social media, have a quick look, do whatever called whatever stories of your friends that you want to check and then close it. If first thing in the morning, well, again, you're in that very vulnerable state, you start scrolling on social media, you're going to make your brain crave that same source of dopamine for the rest of the day. It's going to be a lot harder for you to to control yourself and to control those cravings. Can you think about an adaptive reason for why that mechanism exists? Why would it be that the first thing that gives us dopamine in the morning would be the thing that we try and chase for the rest of the day? I I not denying that that's a a pattern that happens. I can certainly see it in some areas of my own life, but I cannot work out why we have that. This is fully fully hypothetical, but to me a potential evolutionary explanation to this is that in the past and if you even look at at tribes nowadays with this is where they do most of the evolutionary research, you have days dedicated to certain tasks. So there is a day where people go hunting or gathering. There is a day that is for resting. that is a day that is for like batch cooking or or mending their clothes or whatever it is. And so I wonder if in a society where we used to have, you know, each day had a purpose where you knew that's what you had to do that day, there wasn't more value in being primed in a way with whatever it is where where you supposed to get your dopamine from today. And uh so if you started your day focusing on, you know, talking about hunting and and whatever and then you were ready and primed, then you could go and do that for the rest of the day and you would get really excited. Whereas today we're doing a thousand different things throughout the day. And so that mechanism doesn't really work as well. And also the source of dopamine that we get early in the morning might not necessarily be the one we we want to be craving for the rest of the day. And it's hypernormal. It's at a dose way higher than we would have ever got previously. Yeah, that's very interesting. I like look, this is the home of bro science. So, you are among friends here. If you want to speculate and pontificate about different potential reasons for why this theory might exist. What about at the other end of the day then on a nighttime um how can we trick our brain into better sleep? So again, I think a lot of people know that already. Blue light, avoiding being on the screen, having an evening routine. I think the the one thing really to keep in mind, which is going to sound so obvious when I say it, but somehow people ignore it, is that by the end of the day, you're tired. You're tired. You don't have enough energy to make good decisions anymore. So, anything you can do earlier in the day to facilitate good decision making in the evening is going to help you sleep better. So, you know, maybe don't have a TV in your bedroom if you can avoid doing that. Maybe have your phone charger outside of the bedroom as well. Um, maybe this, you know, I'm saying I'm just thinking about screens because I see so many people who literally watch TV while having dinner and then they go to the bedroom and they watch more TV while in bed. Get rid of the the screens, but as I'm saying this and I know not many people are actually going to do it. Uh it's definitely one of those things where again because your energy stores are so depleted in the evening, it's actually really really hard to make good decisions. So envir environmental design, anything you can do to design your environment where even if you have one brain cell that's still working in the evening, you're still going to make the right decision. This is really the best investment you can make. Yeah, it's uh you know the the two ends of the day seem to be the areas that people make a ton of bad decisions. Um it you know look everybody [ __ ] up and we are in a world that's designed to capture your attention but you do have these two windows that are weirdly absorbent uh or kind of influential. And you know, if you were going to spend your time on screens being stimulated by dopamine, you know, bundling that into the middle of the day is if if that was a, you know, a decision you can move around the proportion of how all of this different stuff happens. Uh, but yeah, I like the idea of making easy decisions better. I think putting the phone charger outside of your bedroom is a very easy solution for this. And for anybody that uses their phone for their alarm, radio alarm clocks have been around for a hundred years. So I think the that excuse I'm not convinced quite works. Uh yeah, I it's it's a very strange thing to think about how much what we consider of as ingrained thought patterns or a part of our nature is actually some weird reflection of a habit or an activity or an action that we keep on doing to ourselves and before we know it we're kind of being puppeted internally by a thing that we did externally. No. Absolutely. And there's uh also I think you know we need to have a little bit of a self-compassion also when it comes to these things because a lot of the being on our our screen scrolling through social media watching TV in the evening for a lot of us this is a numbing mechanism a coping mechanism to deal with stress and anxiety. Uh a lot of people come back from work tired and stressed and the only way they can disconnect that they know of because again they it's so easy, right? You just turn the TV on or you go and you scroll through social media. And so I think also giving ourselves a little bit of of grace and knowing that this is what's going on is important. And so as you said, maybe start implementing easy small changes. It doesn't have to be perfect. Uh so charger outside of the room and also putting a timer on in terms of how long you stay on social media in the evening after or maybe saying no scrolling while I'm eating. I'm going to eat and I'm not going to look at any screen when I do that. There are small changes that you can do and if it's not perfect, it's okay. I love it. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. So, people can find my book, Tiny Experiments, anywhere books are sold. I talk about a lot of the topics that we discuss together in it. And, uh, I have a newsletter at nestlabs.com, which I send every Thursday. Heck yeah. I appreciate you very much. Thank you for the day. Thank you. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on. [Music]