How to Shape Your Identity & Goals | Dr. Maya Shankar

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Dr Maya Shankar Dr Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who did her undergraduate training at Yale University her PhD thesis at Oxford as a road scholar and a post-doctoral fellowship also in cognitive science at Stanford University University Dr Shankar also served as a senior adviser to the White House and she founded and served as the chair of the White House Behavioral Science team Dr Shankar is also the host of her own podcast entitled a slight change of plans and indeed Dr Shankar herself is no stranger to having to make major changes to one's life plans as you'll learn today prior to all of those incredible accomplishments that Dr Shankar has achieved she was a student at the juliard Conservatory of Music preparing her life to become a professional concert violinist but as you'll also soon learn she then experienced a career devastating injury forcing herself to have to reframe everything about her life plans and her own identity and that's really what we talk about today we talk about identity not just Dr Shankar's prior and current identities but of course your identity we pose a number of questions geared toward getting you to ask who am I really do my goals align with who I am and what I want want Dr Shankar shares with us the research on identity goals motivation and plans as well as many practical tools to answer those key questions that guide us down either the correct or incorrect trajectories in life she shares with us for instance how to assess onp paper goals of the sort that you would see on a CV so which school which job which salary which spouse etc etc and how to relate those to the deeper feelings that relate to one's ability to continue continually pursue a given goal knowing that it's the right goal for us we also talk about the science of feelings what they can and cannot tell us and when they should or should not serve as a compass for guiding our everyday and longer term Decisions by the end of today's episode you will realize that Dr Shankar is essentially handing you a science supported road map for how to determine and assess your identity and goals and how one influences the other that is your identity influences your goals and how your goals influences your identity in becoming the person that you want to be before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available I've spoken before on this 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traveling because I don't have my eights Sleep mattress cover when I travel if you'd like to try eights sleep you can go to 8sleep.com huberman and you'll save up to $150 off their pod three cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr Maya Shankar welcome I'm so happy you're here thanks Andrew it's great to be here I have a lot of questions about identity about goals and motivation and about change in general but I'd like to start off with identity mhm and I'd like to divide it into two segments the first is how we form an identity and you know we'll get into your story in I hope uh a bit or more of detail but when we're younger we tend to ask questions about ourselves but also about the world around us we want to learn what our parents do for a living uh what the workers on the street are doing that for ETC how much of our early identity do you think is is formed by observation of what we are doing versus observation and labels of the people that are around us and closest to us yeah it's a great question um I think a lot of it is based on what we see around us and what we see uh is deemed successful and and Society Privileges and there's a concept called identity foreclosure where actually when you're young right it's not just that you're observing what your parents are doing or what your peer group is doing they impose their own structures on you and so what that can do is it can really limit your mindset in terms of what it is that you want to achieve and what it is that you're capable of achieving and so often times when people experience identity foreclosure they have to take a lot of active steps to overcome whatever biases or limitations they experienced as a young person um given what they were projected to do or believe right um so identity you know can be about what you do it can also be about what you believe in the world right and so a lot of those belief systems are also passed on you inherit belief systems from the people um that surround you when you're young and if there's one thing that I've learned it's that we we tend to put a huge premium on what it is that we do we tend to Define ourselves by what we do and you can see this in the questions we ask young children what do you want to be when you grow up right we never say who do you want to be when you grow up what kind of person do you want to be when you grow up we say what do you want to be and the conse quence of that kind of mindset is that we end up anchoring our identities very firmly to what it is that we do and I certainly you know talk you were alluding to my personal story right I started playing the violin when I was a little kid six years old became absolutely obsessed and for the large part of my childhood I was first and foremost a violinist I mean if I had met you I'd be like hey Andrew I'm a violinist and then the second up would be I'm Maya that's how tethered my identity was to to being a violinist and then fast forward to when I'm a teenager you know have these huge dreams of of going pro and and becoming you know yeah just like a hopefully a professional violinist for the rest of my life and then I tear a tendon into my hand my dreams end overnight and suddenly there's this profound loss of identity because what I hadn't realized is that in losing the violin sure I was losing the ability to play the instrument but I was actually losing a huge part of who I was and that was so destabilizing and so disorienting for me because when you define Yourself by the what then as soon as the what goes away you're like oh my gosh who the hell am I right what do I do what what value do I bring to the world and what I experienced at the time is known in uh cognitive science as identity paralysis um maybe you felt this way during various transitions in your life but basically who you are and what you're about is suddenly called into question and you end up feeling really stuck right you you don't see you don't have the courage to imagine what a future could look like and I certainly felt prey to Identity paralysis and it took me a long time to kind of figure out what my path would look like moving forward but I learned a really valuable lesson from that very formative experience I had with change about how it is that I should Define myself and for what it's worth I I don't think our desire as humans to have identities is going anywhere we're not going to be able to dispose of identities and we shouldn't because our self-identities bring us so much meaning and purpose in our lives right you're a podcaster I'm a podcaster you're a scientist I'm a scientist these things are actually really helpful and motivating so we don't want to do away with identities altogether but what we can be more particular about is what we anchor our identities to and I have learned in my adult life to Anchor my identity to why I do the things I do rather than what I do and found this to be a much more durable reliable relationship so to make this concrete let's think about the violin right um sure I loved playing I loved how music sounded uh I loved the way the violin felt um but when I Stripped Away all the superficial features of the violin what I really really loved and was so drawn to as a young child um was the emotional connection that I could form through my music so that might have been with my Orchestra mates my chamber musician friends um playing uh solo and and performing in front of an audience and and ideally we all feel something new that we haven't felt before I mean it's kind of an intoxicating feeling when you're little to have the ability to inspire new feelings in people right and I was so drawn to human connection and when I realized that human connection was at the heart of what it is that drives me as a person right like what lights me up every single day is a desire to connect with others to understand other people to understand their psychology to understand how their minds work then when the violin was taken away from me even in terms of narrative I tell myself about my life I could still find that same core underlying feuture elsewhere and I have been able to right I found it um as an academic as a cognitive scientist who studies the science of connection and and emotion um I've seen it I've seen that connection play out in the in the work that I did in public policy when I was at the White House obviously with my podcast a slight change of plans you you're forming these intimate connections with people every day and so even though it feels in my life like I've done such disperate things right there actually is a powerful through line um that connects all of them and that is my desire to connect emotionally and so what I would recommend to people who are listening especially in they're in the throws of change and they're feeling destabilized by that threat to Identity that loss of identity is to try to figure out what their through line is right like what are the underlying features of the things that you used to do that you absolutely loved and can you find the expression of that elsewhere I love that and I have so many questions uh the first one relates back to Childhood identities and how we often can project on to Children what they are likely to become um I see that as mostly benevolent you know you um You observe a child playing with trucks in the sandbox and and we say um oh you know they're going to become a contractor um we tend to project um roles that are fairly high up the within occupation hierarchy right we sort of like any parents you know you you wish for the the best possible life for your kids um but I can see the The Perils of doing that um if then the kid starts to think well that's what I'm bound to become because it it is restrictive I also am fascinated by the fact that when we are adolescence and means there's a tendency to ask questions about identity like who am I I mean I don't know many 40y olds that say who am I at you know at one's core one's Essence and we might change careers change relationships change geographies you know all sorts of things but there must be something going on in the brain in those Adolescent and teen years that forces this question of self of you know who am I and teenagers are notorious for trying on different uniforms different friend groups different behaviors as a way to sort that out sometimes in ways that support them and then sometimes in ways that act as pitfalls um so I'm curious about uh what's known about how we develop our own identity from the inside out as well as from the outside in yeah no it's that's really interesting and it's also something I'm very curious about I mean we know from Neuroscience research that there are significant changes that the brain undergos during puber and you know other periods of adolescence and and the primary change that we see is a desire for Independence and so one reason why we see teenagers grappling with this question of who I am is that they're actually breaking from these structures that they grew up around right the imposed structures right the identity foreclosure that they might have experienced and are starting to figure out for the first time or wanting to ask the question for the first time who do I want to be what do I want to do outside of the systems that I've grown up in and I think this is one of the primary reasons why we find that during teenage years um this this sort of question is asked more commonly um I think that one challenge that um we can we can face because you you you you said this one word that really caught my attention which was what's my Essence and you know one of the things I studied as a cognitive scientist is the psychology of what's called essentialism so our underlying belief that there are essential qualities to people that are immutable and there's lots of studies with you know young children and adults showing that we really believe that people do have these Essences right and unclear what that even means from a in a metaphysical sense I don't know what that would even mean um but I think the the challenge in believing that we have Essences is that it leads us to believe that there are these truly immutable States about ourselves that are that we're incapable of changing and I think this can give rise to feelings of Shame for example so what is Shame Shame is not the feeling oh I did something bad shame is the feeling I am bad right it's not that I lost at something I failed at something it's that I'm a loser I'm a failure and so the problem when we try to figure out the essence piece is that it doesn't give you the kind of malleable way of thinking that actually there might not be something that's so defining about you that you're incapable of changing as humans Maybe all we are collections of behaviors and thoughts right and there's nothing more to it than that and I find that way of thinking a bit more freeing when it comes to who we are because I think it allows for I think it allows us to cultivate more of a growth mindset I think it prevents us from engaging in these very harmful self-narratives that a lot of people tend to have about themselves I mean probably a lot of people listening to your podcast are self-critical I'm a very self-critical person we listen to this because we want to improve you know I'm a fan of your show because I want to be better and I want to to improve but that also is often accompanied by a lot of self berating and questioning of self right and so um yeah I think I've just tried to have a slightly more capacious understanding of of who I am and also recognizing that there might not really be these essential features that are that are immutable I don't know if you resonate with this notion of like the essence like the desire to feel that we have Essences yeah I I used the word essence without thinking um too carefully about exactly what I meant but I what I uh what I trying to say when I said Essence um is you know as a child uh I did certain things and I enjoyed some of them didn't enjoy others and I really disliked others um a a very famous neuroscientist who's at Caltech named Marcus Meister people literally refer to him as the great Marcus Meister once said and I totally subscribe to the fact that neural circuits in the brain uh basically divide our sensory experience along the dimensions of yum yuck and meth there's not a lot of in between yeah right because the circuits ultimately have to drive either forward movement toward more right um appetitive behaviors as in nerds speak or aversive you know leaning out I don't want that or just kind of a a neutral response so yum Yu and meh seems to be the um the trinary uh response and there is this component of childhood I think where we are foraging naturally using our senses de experiencing yum yucks and Mees and hearing yum yucks and Mees from our parents that's good that's bad that's whatever it's neutral but at some point I certainly have had the experience and I've observed others I think having the experience of feeling something that's on a different dimension entirely which is this notion of delight which is that it it sort of fills your body with a sense of so much yum that gives you energy to do so much more of it in a way that that is um almost on a different plane and and I'm not trying to be you know spiritual or metaphysical about it but it feels distinctly different and I don't know what it represents but I think that's that um that piece that perhaps even as a scientists I don't really need to assign a neural circuit to um so do you think what you're describing in part is the feeling of awe like when you talk about Delight do you think part of it is is a feeling of awe yeah like the first time I went to New York City as a six-year-old kid I remember thinking and I still feel every time I'm there I can't believe this place exists it's like a it's like a human tropical Reef like everywhere you look there's life so that was that was awe and Delight although I saw some things this was New York in the 70s and there were some things like Time Square in the 70s right if anyone seen that show the Deuces I it's like it looked like that it was especially as a young kid it was kind of aversive yeah um so it wasn't always odd and but the Delight of for me was in learning and certain animals and certain things for you as the violin and and I want to make sure that I and Awe by the way I mean it can be aversive right so awe isn't necessarily I think in the Western World we think of a inspiring experiences is having a positive emotional veilance but they can also have a negative emotional veilance so um the two criteria for satisfying an a inspiring experience um and a lot of this work comes from daker Kelner professor at UC Berkeley yeah is um one there should be some element of perceived vastness uh this is all ref this is all reference dependent so it's all based on your own frame of mind right um but there's this sense of like mystery and wonder at just how vast either the physical apparatus is right like Time Square it's this massive you know set of buildings and it kind of overwhelms your senses because of all the lights and sounds that are hitting uh your visual system and your auditory system um there's also conceptual vastness so we can feel awe when we um feel the Delight of a new scientific discovery right or in my case like for the first time reading a book about how the mind works I just remember marveling at this organ and just being completely in awe of how it works um and then the second criteria for an awe inspiring experience I which I think might have been met as well when you were in this when when you were in New York is what's called a need for accommodation so it's just a fancy way of saying that we have a certain mental model of the world and typically in the presence of all we need to assimilate this new information with our existing model because it challenges it in some way and um it makes us it actually leads us to have more open minds because we have to re we realize wait a second um I have this existing vision of like what the world is like and now I'm experiencing this new thing and I need to kind of make it work I need to integrate it with my existing understanding of the world and that's the mind-blowing part of it right um but I absolutely I mean I remember my childhood experience kind of mirroring your experience in New York was I was um I was 12 years old or maybe 11 years old I was at a Summer Music Camp it was late at night I had my disc man which is how we listen to things back in the day I had a CD in there um it was the Beethoven violin conero by a Sophie Mutter and I was I was like I was so young Andrew so I still don't know how to use words to describe how it is that I felt something that was so power powerful and so Transcendent but I remember listening to the first movement of this violent conero and it consumed me I mean I felt chills up and down my spine my heart would race along with the melody it felt otherworldly right and I think that was kind of what you were getting at before where it's like it's just just it's this altered state of mind and I what I've the language I've used since to code that experience is that it was an a inspiring experience because I think both things happened right I I was ALS I was I was impressed by the vastness of the experience it also sent me through time in this interesting way you know back to like the time time of Beethoven right so so vastness can exist along a temporal Horizon and then the need for accommodation which was you know I I didn't studied cognitive science at this point so I remember thinking I cannot believe a collection of musical notes arranged just so can make me feel this way and that if you were to tweak it just slightly just like take the E flat and move it down the down the stream a little bit emotional resonance completely gone from the passage and there was just something so simple and magical about that realization so anyway resonate with with this kind of delight and awe experience that you describe yeah I'm so glad you you describe it that way you know um this isn't discussion about my experience but for me I realize now that New York was awe inspiring um prior to that the only thing similar was discovering animal specialization something I'm still fascinated by the sensory systems of animals and how they experience the world and how humans experien the world and then ultimately it was well then I went into skateboarding and that whole landscape and then eventually into Neuroscience yeah the difference between the New York experience of awe and I do think that's what it was and biology animals and eventually Neuroscience yeah is that like your experience with music and realizing that the movement of a note could change something fundamentally when it came to learning about biology and Neuroscience I felt not just awe but a sense of delight in that I felt there was a place for me there yes and what what came out of what you just described really really um resonated in terms of this moving of a note because it took something from a passive experience I believe of that's this incredible thing over there like New York City was awe but I didn't see myself having any kind of um verb state within it that would change it or alter it in how it is or for me whereas with music for you or I think Neuroscience when I realized that you could do experiments you could actually do some sort of man population and through that hopefully unveil something fundamental about how the brain works I thought there's a place for me here yeah and so I think there's something about the uh the experience of something just from a raw sensory perspective music or animals or neuroscience and the examples we're using here but then realizing that there's a verb state of self like that I could enact something within it that could give me more of that whereas I think when as a young kid in New York City I I just didn't feel any way that I could plug into it except in a passive way I guess it's the difference between a kid who and this wouldn't have been me who sees a game of soccer football or baseball or watches the Olympics and goes that is amazing and the kid that says I'm gonna go do that in fact I could do that and I could maybe do that even better or even half as well and so um the Delight I think is in the possibility of of Engagement of and and I'm fascinated you know a friend of mine who's a trauma therapist he doesn't he's not a neuroscientist he always says you know nouns are just very slow verbs but verbs are far more exciting because they create this anticipatory activity anyway um I love I love before you move on from that I love that you said that because you're helping me realize something really important about how I saw my role as a violinist and in add you know I I'm never going to modify the notes on the page because obviously I'm gonna be faithful to what Beethoven wrote this is what made you a great musician and me a fa by the way I was a failed violinist they pulled me out of it because the neighbors dogs howled I I was in Suzuki method I was in Suzuki so terrible at it that they literally made me stop playing music just to just to protect the neighborhood that's adorable and I mean we'll talk about the science of quitting maybe later but that was a great choice for you um I I but what I'm realizing is that there was that element of defining self through the pursuit of the instrument and um I saw a place for myself exactly like you did where I thought I decide how this phrase unfolds I decide how much vibr I use I decide exactly what the angling of my bow is and the Cadence and the pacing and the emotion that I bring to the experience and when you see a place for yourself I that takes an all inspiring experience and then trans and actually there's a translation process where you become something bigger than what you thought you could be and actually it's so interesting you mention this Andrew because I've I've been chatting recently with a guy named Reginal Dwayne Betts and and he spent 9 years in prison uh and he's now a internationally renowned scholar so uh he committed a carjacking when he was 15 years old um and then went to an adult prison for nine years and as a 15year old as a as he just turned 16 by the time he got his sentence yeah it was totally wild and um he he actually talks about the fact that you know there was this underground library in the prison system and he didn't know what he could be in the prison what identity he could take on um when everyone seemed to be defined by what crime they had committed right it it felt like his imagination was so limited to to the and talk about identity paralysis right I mean like you're denied all your basic freedoms in this environment right so you really don't even have the ability to imagine what more you could be so one day he gets a book uh called the black poets and in in the book he read a poem by Ethridge Knight who had also spent time in prison had written this incredibly stirring poem about the criminal justice system and uh he goes by Dwayne but what Dwayne shared with me as he said I was ins I was all inspired by what I was reading but the most important thing that happened in reading that book and understanding the author's history is that it gave me something to be I saw a place for myself in this world and he be he wrote I mean he was so prolific he wrote like a thousand poems in the year after he stumbled upon this book and he ended up winning the MacArthur genius award he went to yel law school I mean he's just crushed it ever since um but I think he stumbled Upon A really important point which is all there's an fascinating science of awe and all the benefits it can confer to our well-being but it can also serve as an entry point to helping to Define our identities in new places and I just love that I think that's it's a wonderful way to think about it yeah when we see ourselves um entering the sphere of experience that um is kind is evoking awe I do think it's something about it converts to this thing Delight although I have to acknowledge that language is insufficient to describe a lot of what we're referring to right there's a that you know uh the even the most reductionist language of biology um can't grab the um higher order emotions and complexity not yet anyway we just don't have a language for it um I'd like to talk more about the violin um not just cuz I failed miserably at the violin but actually I figured out pretty early on I wasn't going to be a musician um I still have absolutely no ability to read music I can memorize lyrics very easily but and I love music um and I love classical music um as well as other forms of music but zero musical Talent you on the other hand um got quite good at violin um it was interesting for me to learn that the violin was a bit of a rebellious choice for you given your your family history and you and I do both share this um fairly unusual uh fact that both of our fathers are theoretical physicists so did you feel pressured to be a scientist or something else and being a musician um was that initially looked at as a you know a route to Poverty or or or a bad choice or were your parents a bit more cautious like oh okay that that's great but maybe make that a supplement to your other studies and Pursuits yeah so I'm the youngest of four kids and kind of stereotypically my three older siblings were total Math whizzes they were you know taking the SAT when they were when they were very young because they were so talented um but I think one antagonist to some of those cultural forces is that my mom when she had grown up in India had felt very stifled by her environment like as a young woman who is very capable and very smart I mean she majored in physics um she was mostly you know kept to the spaces of domestic chores occasional singing lessons um but mostly her job was like do your homework and then help with cooking right and cleaning and whatnot and so when she moved to this country with my dad in the 1970s um she was actually very excited she was 21 years old by the way so long story short she had met my dad 20 days prior to their getting married so it's an arranged meeting and um my dad is uh doing uh his postto at Harvard in physics at the Society of fellows and my mom just joins him after a winter break uh in the dorm and everyone's like hey man how was your break and there's like I went snowboarding and I went whatever to to Tahoe and my dad's like I got married and so this new couple arrives and my mom was so lonely in this country I mean this was before you could text your parents overseas or use a WhatsApp group so she can only handw write letters to her family back home and her her goal was you know what I'm going to create a little army around me in the form of children so she had four kids and she was absolutely intent on exposing us to as many extracurricular activities as she could so I have two older brothers and I have an older sister especially her girls she said you can do whatever you want I'm give you you know lay the land when you're young but when you find something that you're passionate about I really want to give you the opportunity to explore it so I think I really benefited from the fact that she had been denied that kind of exposure and the ability to pursue her her dreams artistic or otherwise and so she was really hellbent on making sure uh that we kids were able to I think they were I mean my older three siblings played musical instruments so like clarinet trumpet flute I think they were surprised by my Affinity for it because when I was six my mom brought down my grandmother's violin from the Attic So my grandmother had played Indian classical music so that's where you're sitting cross-legged on the floor and your violin's facing the ground it's a very different style of music um but as like a Parting Gift my grandmother given it to my mom and said hey bring this with you to the US so she opened the instrument that day and I just instantly fell in love with it and um I asked very quickly for a quarter siiz violin of my own and while my parents had to nudge me to do all sorts of things they really never had to push me to practice which felt extraordinary at the time like okay clearly the violin is something that Maya has intrinsic motivation for because how is it that we're not asking her to have to practice all the time um similar to you actually Andrew I never to this day I have a really hard time reading music so I never I was a terrible site reader I I couldn't if you put a piece of music in front of me I would not be able to tell you probably what it would sound like today I learned entirely by ear so I started with the Suzuki method which as you know is entirely by ear and then um I had an extremely very kind awesome but very inexperienced teacher I was his first student uh my mom went backstage at a Symphony concert in New Haven which is where I grew up and just asked the concert Master like hey will you teach my daughter and he's like sure never taught anyone before but I'll give this a go and so we just made things up along the way I mean he would play stuff and I would mimic it and I would let my emotions and my you know whatever innate musicality guide me and uh eventually I mean I think what that did actually it's really interesting from a skill buing perspective my technique absolutely suffered in the long term from not having a more structured approach but I was able to fall in love with this endeavor much more quickly than other kids who had drill sergeants that were forcing them to like practice their scales every day and practice a2s I mean that stuff is so boring right and when you're a little kid you just want to bang your head against the wall when you're put up against that when there's so much so many barriers to actually enjoying the the fun Parts which are actually playing the pieces so the one kind of funnest side about my musical journey is I got to jump straight to the fun stuff and I think that helped me cultivate a much more natural love of of the instrument as many of you know I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs of course I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day but often times I simply can't get enough servings but with ag1 I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need and it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress simply put I always feel better when I take ag1 I have more focus and energy and I sleep better and it also happens to taste great for all these reasons whenever I'm asked if you could take Just One supplement what would it be I answer ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer from now until August 12th 2023 ag1 is giving away 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again if you go to drink a1.com hubman you can claim the special offer of 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 the intrinsic motivation part is so key I've talked a few times before on the podcast about this I think now famous study that was done at um Bing Nursery School at Stanford where they observed what kids did during free time and then they rewarded them or didn't reward them and then they later remov the rewards and the essential takeaway is that uh receiving rewards for something that a child was initially intrinsically motivated to do undermine some of that intrinsic motivation so I have to wonder whether or not um the fact that your parents neither encourage nor discourage your violin playing might have allowed you to fully Express and and lean into your intrinsic motivation as opposed to uh for instance in my case um there is uh we are distantly related not closely related but there is a great violinist by the name of bronislav huberman who has a street named after him in Israel there's a famous picture of him and Einstein playing violin together and I was told about that early on and when I failed to play well after a couple of practices I was convinced that there was no way I was going to live up to it and I quit that's a high bar man it's a high bar it's a high bar I didn't have any such role models that I was trying to feel like in my family yeah it turns out I'm but exactly and so I think that there's actually more opportunity in um in kids leaning into or an adults probably leaning into the sensory experience of what they're doing and not putting that up against some Benchmark you know I worry about that today so much with social media and with video games where in a video game or on social media you can see something being done at the very highest level Often by someone quite young or early in their career to the point where it can be a little bit overwhelming and I think it then we start measuring ourselves against you know metrics that are not about the The Experience um that said um your parents whatever they did worked out well enough that you became very proficient right you succeeded in getting into juliard which is at least from my understanding is the most competitive um music prep is that how you refer to it um that one can possibly go to um and so at that point had your identity merged with the behavior and were you still enjoying yourself up until the point where you had this injury that we'll also talk about yeah I was still enjoying myself um around the time when I when I auditioned for juliard in particular because of exactly what you said which was everything was kind of beating my expectations and my parents expectations up until this point right which is that we didn't have any and so it all just felt like icing on the cake wow our kids found something that they really love um this is great right it can sometimes take you years decades to figure out what it is that you love what you're passionate about and I think we go through this renewal process often in our lives right I've had to have moments in life where I'm like what do I like again what do I love again and so it's not also a one-time experience um but there was It was kind of there was a thrilling aspect to my musical life when I was young which was again everything kind of felt just like bonus um so once once story I love sharing is about how I even got into juliard in the first place um my parents you know so my dad's a theoretical physic physicist as you mentioned my mom helps immigrants get green cards to study in this country neither of them had exposure to the classical music sphere right so they're like the opposite of tiger parents like even if they wanted to be tiger parents they wouldn't know how to be tiger parents in this domain because they lack the connections uh and like the wherewithal to figure out what it would mean to to to go pro and and to access the best teacher or whatever so my mom who is a very Fearless person by Nature she knew that at some point my passion for the violin was surpassing her ability to like connect me with the right resources and so one weekend we were in New York onping New York and I had my violin with me because I had another audition and we were just walking by juliard the building and my mom was just eager for me to see it from the outside because it's just really cool as a kid right it's like all your musical Idols went to this place I just wanted to see it and like imagine what it would have been like for Pearlman to go in and out and Midori to go in and out Yo-Yo Ma right like it's so exciting and as we're passing the entrance my mom looks at me and says um hey why don't we just go in I was like what are you talking about um she's like let's just go in let's what's the worst thing that can happen and I'm like um security guards and like a lot of other Terrible Things Mom right um but I had a youthful enthusiasm that like propelled me into the building that day she strikes up a conversation with a fellow student and her mom finds out that she's studying with like a top teacher at juliard uh ask if we can get an introduction within an hour I'm auditioning for this teacher on the spot right no idea that this was going to happen wild um yeah he tells me uh he has what I refer to as a like muted enthusiasm about my playing doesn't think I'm great but see something like he told me later he liked my personality my enthusiasm so I got the personality card coming out of that music audition great um and what he did is he said look I'm with you I don't think that you're ready you would not get into juli art if you auditioned today however I take Residence at a Summer music program in Colorado if you come there for five weeks we can do an intense boot camp where I try to skill you up and get you to learn like your first scale in your first atude which you will need to pass the juliard audition and also maybe hopefully get you to like read music a little bit better than you can right now and I went to that summer camp and I worked my butt off I mean you're also in this incredibly intensive environment where everyone your age is there and they're all practicing like their age equivalent right um and so I felt very inspired by that and I ended up getting into juliard in the fall and it was such a wonderful reminder that you know when opportunities are not served on a silver platter for you you just have to have this kind of imaginative courage and well my mom had that day right to figure out a path from point A to point B she really just like created a plate for me and said like okay like you're prepared for this thing we're going to get you in front of this teacher and that's a lesson I've used time and time again when I felt like there was something cool I could be doing the opportunity did not exist um so for example when I was in the White House the the job that I wanted which was uh to be a practitioner of Behavioral Science did not exist and so I sent cold emails and I pitched them on the idea of creating a new position for a Behavioral Science adviser and then I said hey by the way if you create this position could you like also consider hiring me to play that job even though I've had no public policy experience and I've been an academic uh for the entirety of my adult life and you know they said yes and so it's it's just it it was such an energizing lesson to learn as a young kid which is like you can do the cold call oftentimes there's few consequences you'll just get rejected I mean that's truly the worst thing that's going to happen but it's one thing to be told that it's another thing to have lived the experience out and to see how amazing uh the aftermath can be and that's the that's what I got to experience as young kids so amazing and um so let's all express some thanks to your mom for for barging in the door and to you because you also had the agency to to do the audition on the spot I think a lot of kids and adults would have thought you know I'm not ready I'm not going to do this but it it takes a um certain gumption to just do it right and and also to integrate the feedback and then I'm curious about this Camp yeah uh I went to a few camps uh of different types um crashed a few camps that's a different story turns out if you show up you know you can get by for a few days before they realize you're not one of the M oh yeah no there's a whole other set of stories there love it um but I'm curious you know you're you're among very driven um maybe even obsessive kids yeah um were they nice to one another um do you recall the kid that was the best oh yeah Rachel Lee there you go isn't this incredible God we remember these names total Prodigy I I bristle when people say like oh ma like Mayo was a young violin Prodigy I'm like no I wasn't and there's no false humility in my saying that I just actually saw what prodigies were like and I was not one of them I mean truly just talk about awe inspiring I'm like how is it that music comes so effortlessly to Rachel I feel like she I feel like she was born with a violin in her hands I mean that's how it felt whenever I watched her play and it's a double-edged sword on the one hand you're dri you're deriving inspiration from the incredible Talent you see around you on the other hand you feel demoralized so often because you're running up against whatever uh limitations exist when it comes to your natural talent and your work ethic like at the end of the day I was never the hardest working violinist my mom in insisted that we were well-rounded kids I played soccer all through Elementary School I auditioned for the school play uh really Rosy I did Art Classes like it was just really important to you know both my parents I think that we had just like relatively normal lives and I was studying alongside kids who had literally left half their families behind in their home country had moved with one parent to a studio apartment in Manhattan or in Colorado for this camp and were devoting their entire lives to this Pursuit and so I felt like um I was I was a super envest kid like I was always looking around being like I suck and they're great right we talked about like having a self-critical personality I think a lot I think a lot of kids feel that way we I think at that age and this sometimes extends into adulthood um we have this tendency to try and find benchmarks of where we are yeah you know and and sometimes that spell you know turns into into a hierarchical thing sometimes very lateralized but trying to figure out where you are in the landscape of things is it just seems like it's kind fundamental to the teenage experience Universe shrinks too right so like you're no longer getting access to what the average kid violinist sounds like I mean you're in the elite of the elite and so it's so intimidating and I often felt I felt like what happened is especially when I became a teenager so two things happen when I became a teenager the first is that my violin life just started to speed forward so um it's Pearlman invited me to be his private violin student you know consider the best violinist in the world it was uh an incredible experience I felt so overwhelmed even by the opportunity I'd also stumbled upon MTV and was like do I even want to do classical music like Britney Spears is doing much cooler things so that that was my version of like teenage rebellion was coming home from school and when I should have been practicing watching MTV um but the other thing that happened is I went through the natural te teen age process which is I became very self-conscious um I became more insecure I was trying to figure out who I was who I am and I think that was the period of my life my my high school years when I was the least happy as a violinist so I described to you earlier that incredibly awe inspiring experience of listening to the Beethoven violin conero and it feeling otherworldly and feeling like I could see a world beyond my own personal wants and needs and desires right it really made me feel small against the backdrop of This Magnificent world and I liked that feeling of smallness and when I was in my teenage years you know we're all in this highly narcissistic state of mind we're like consumed with ourselves and how we feel and I just I just felt like I gave some of my worst performances when I was a teenager and I often found to your point about um you know these pressure cooker environments My best performances were actually just to the public my worst performance es were when I was in my little Studio having to play for my peers like that just sapped all the joy out for me because I was yeah just like really tough on myself and I I lost that was a period of time where I lost touch with what it is that I loved about music and um of course there's an EB and flow I had magical experiences playing the violin when I was a high schooler but I just think if you were to do like the average of Joy like pre-12 and then post 12 the average Joy was much higher before I became teenager yeah there's there's so many things to extrapolate from that I I really feel that when we get into a mode of trying to um hit Milestones that are extrinsic that it really can undermine our our love of of what we're doing but that if we keep going and we can reframe what those external rewards are in in part by just realizing that they're so transient compared to the the Delight that we can experience what I mean is that I don't think of delight as something that that Wells up us and then and then dissipates I think of it as something that changes our nervous system in a way that gives us access to new abilities I really do I mean being a faculty member at Stanford you know you look to your left you look to your right and it's like I literally in the building I'm in I've got Nobel Prize winner below me like the people buy a MacArthur Award winners all over the place like everywhere you turn and these people do other things too so like you know oh and they're also D1 athletes and they've got five kids and all their kids seem to be doing great kind like who are these people and it becomes very important in that environment to um to just shrink your sphere it's like what's you know one foot in front of you and just keep going and not pay attention but it's hard to do not by way of comparison because I actually get excited about being IM immersed in a group of where everyone's doing well I do think being among all these other incredibly talented and driven um although you you carefully said and importantly said rather that you did not see yourself as talented it's very clear that you have a ton of grit and and hard work clearly went into it I think that word talent can be a little bit misleading so um we want to underscore the fact that you've worked incredibly hard um but I think that it's a tough thing you know it it's hard for us to develop much in isolation and it's also hard for us to um stay connected to the source ex and that's a word that I stole from a former guest on this podcast and and a good friend of mine who's um the great Rick Rubin one of the most successful music producer rock and roll music produc he talks about the source you know um so there are so many different um Trails we could go down here just one thing briefly is I I um again completely miserable uh at music but I once saw itak proman in the in the airport with his family I was with my father who's a huge classical music fan and we watched him and he said watch and it turns out he was getting onto our plane he sat in first class next to his I presume Stratovarius violin his violin got a first class seat he got a first class seat and his family sat across from him and my dad said his file in is so important that it gets its own first class SE I couldn't believe it um so great so in any in any event um I think just one thing to your to your point um one reflection I've had and this kind of goes back to this question of identity right which is when you are in these very competitive environments and again I'm sure a lot of people listening are in very competitive environments um you feel that so much can be taken away from you uh just in terms of mental well-being because you're always looking at the world through a comparative lens right right you're you're benchmarking yourself as you said like there's Benchmark and where do I fall on the Continuum of you know mediocre to grade I don't know and yesterday I I I did had a terrible performance so that's going to set me back etc etc um I have found that when I've anchored when I re-anchor myself to what you know what Rick Rubin referred to as the source and identify the characteristics um of music or other Pursuits that really energizes me feels like I'm actually insulated from a lot of the external noise and I bring a lot more clarity and focus to the work that I do every day so there's two things that I think Define me as a person um at least right now right I allow for that malleability uh one is that I'm a deeply curious person and the second is that I really relish getting better at things I love seeing progress internally and in my violin life um no one could take those two things away from me in my current life um as a cognitive scientist as a podcaster like you just can't take those from me like no one can take those that Joy from me and it feels protective in a really important way which is for example I mean I I pour I mean just like you I mean I see the the labor of love that you put into the H and Lab podcast it's extraordinary I put I put so much time and energy and thoughtfulness and love into making a slight change of plans but at the end of the day when you put the episode out into the world like you just don't get to control what the reaction is right your favorite episode might not be everyone else's favorite episode and that's just something you have to deal with right but what I found is that if I really relish the process of making the episode right it fed that Curiosity and I got better as an interviewer I got better as a thinker I got more clarity on a topic that I was curious about I mean it just it gives me a foundation that feels really sturdy do you know what I mean it's just yeah well those are intrinsic to you and they they are um I guess now we're using uh nomenclature but they're not what we would call domain specific like the Curiosity the the desire for Progress through effort and through U Focus um those are music uh they're not music irrelevant but they're music independent um and and that actually brings me to uh a very important component of your work and and your life Arc which is uh this notion of Rec creating and refining identity in new Endeavors so uh if I understand uh correctly and hopefully you'll embellish on this um you had the unfortunate perhaps un unfortunate all right um experience of playing the violin and then injuring your finger very badly to the point where it was at least for your music career career ending absolutely and that happened when you were how old I was 15 so given how much of your identity and and energy was uh put into violin that that must have been devastating uh and yet you've obviously um I don't want to say recreated yourself because I like the idea that this Essence within you um has many opportunities and forms and I like it as an example for everybody having some essence of many things that could give them Delight um and that it's something about the feelings associated with a given choice of occupation or hobby or behavior or perhaps relationship right relationships end sometimes by decision death or otherwise you know and people are devastated their identities are completely at least in their minds obliterated and then people have this amazing ability to recreate themselves and new circumstances so if you could take us back to the time when you were 15 you have this injury what was your initial mindset in the days and weeks after that yeah and then if you would could you link that up to some of the what I see as incredibly important work that you've done helping people understand not just who they are but how to identify the components of who they are that are that are truly indomitable that they that just cannot go away yeah like your drive for curiosity and hard work human connection y um yeah in the in the days and weeks and months and year after uh I felt terrible it was awful because um I don't I think in my case also so you just when you're a kid who's really like bubbly and energetic you just kind of move forward and you don't always think about how identity defining the thing you're doing is you just do it and so it's it was really interesting I think in losing the violin that's actually when it became so Salient to me how much the instrument had meant to me and and had to find who I was and so I I felt a dampening of some of my more organic traits like I was less curious for a long time could I I'm going to interrupt you on purpose I apologize but at the same time uh I'm not apologizing because there was something that you said in a prior discussion that just keeps ringing in my mind which is that your body and your nervous system actually grew up around the violin yes like that to me was just I I will never forget that statement I want to also thank you for it because that to me is perhaps the most profound way to describe uh an experience of identity is that your your nervous system and your body isn't growing up with something or alongside it but that much like a a relationship of of a human kind human humankind that your body is actually developing around this object it absolutely developed around the ergonomics of playing the violin so to this day my right shoulder is slightly elevated to my left uh relative to my left because of all the hours I spent doing this it makes strength training really annoying because I always had this slight imbalance and I have a light scoliosis in my spine as well also from this posture and um yeah it feels intimate in a way it's like wow the the shape of my body right like my architecture was defined by this instrument and so it's left an unden it's like a it's left this indelible you know it has it's love this like imprint on me that will never go away and um I think that a lot of us feel this this disorientation right so it it might not be that you lost the ability to do something you love it could be that you lost someone that you love right it could be that you um you lost your mojo or whatever right I mean there's so many types of loss and so many kinds of grief we all experience as human beings and I think in all those cases again it really feels like the rug has been pulled out from under you because this thing that gave you so much meaning and so much purpose so much energy in life no longer exists and so I think for for a while yeah I felt kind of like lost at sea and um I assumed I'll never find anything that I'm as passionate about and um I think what my dad did for me at that time so you know theoretical physicist so he's an academic and he said I think you should just read a lot just like read a bunch of stuff and um I was like okay I mean I'm supposed to be in China this summer touring with my classmates I am at home in Connecticut with my parents uh perusing their bookshelf so like slightly less cool summer situation but you know I had a lot of time on my hands because I wasn't I wasn't in Shanghai um so I started you know perusing the bookshelf and then I came across this pop science book called The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker and uh that was a turning point for me I mean I was I was headed to college maybe later that year uh I opened up this book and it detailed our marvelous ability to comprehend and produce language and up until this point in my life I had completely taken language abilities for granted just like something that I did and I just like kind of learned it along the way and when Pinker pulled the curtain back and revealed how sophisticated and complex the cognitive Machinery is that's operating behind the scenes that gives rise to language my mind was TR truly blown I was like wow i' I never thought about it it's not like we with three-year-olds not like we sit down with them we're like this is a jiren this is a past part whatever there's no they just learn because they have these kind of light switches in their brain that are you know activated on and off depending on what language they're learning and it was so fascinating to learn about language development about neural Linguistics um about syntax and semantics and and so I I just remember thinking language is fascinating cognition is fascinating and I'm also now wondering about all these other systems that are in place right so this is what's involved in language what's involved in um you know the complex math equations our dads do right like what's involved in um what what's the mental processing behind a new discovery or an Insight or an aha moment or falling in love or falling out of love I mean it just it just lit up my imagination and very similar to you Andrew I love that we have this connection you said when you learned about like neurobiology and Neuroscience you you saw that there was a place for yourself in there and I remember reading this book and because it was a pop science book and I love Pop science books because sometimes you know even if they don't fully do justice to the science they can take someone who's never had any exposure to the subject matter and it's it's thrilling to learn about the thing right I would never have gotten the same experience had I opened up an introduction to cognitive science textbook okay it would not have had the same impact on me so like shout out to pop science everywhere thank you for saying that and you know and here I'll just thank you because I think that many of my colleagues in academic science at Stanford and elsewhere feel that way but I think many don't they think of it as quote dumbing down of things but I'll tell you um rarely if ever does somebody just wander into a university classroom and hear a lecture on accident I mean maybe if your mom was at the at the helm they all would so mom's everywhere barge right in um but but I think it's um I actually I'll I'll go a step further and I I'll uh do this so that you don't have to and these are not your words these are mine I think that there's actually a pretty intense arrogance to the idea within the um established scientific community that pop science books while they might not be exhaustive provided they're accurate and they're making an attempt to educate and draw people in from all sectors yeah like Amen to that I just can't hear a counterargument in my head or elsewhere where that's not one of the best things that um people can do so um regardless of um you know people's motivations for picking them up in the first place I mean they brought a lot of people into the the Curiosity and Delight that is science or music or you know I think that we the more um positive benevolent you know safe sensory experiences that we can expose young people to the greater probability that we're going to flesh out those professions with the greatest number of diverse Minds we're going to have the best best ideas I mean it's really I I think that there's a ton of foresight in what what you're describing that you know picking up a book is now what you're also now a PhD and I mean in cognitive science and you did your postto at Stanford I mean you're a scientist um presumably because you went into the bookshelf and picked up that book 100% And I I think it was it was also role modeled for me because my dad despite being in a very very technical field spent a large part of his career actually working on the translation of complex subjects and trying to convey them to General audiences and I loved witnessing this because it's like if you can figure out a way to communicate about theoretical phys physics to a general audience I mean wow that's a masterful Pursuit right feeman Richard fean yeah Richard feeman exactly no one really knows what feeman did for his Nobel Prize work except physicists you know that most people you ask him what what was Fan's Nobel for and they're like I don't know I don't know he said something about birds aomy and how it's less interesting than you know quantum mechanics yeah and I and one of the reasons that I love hubman lab and I I just love the work you do is that you are taking uh Concepts that might have been inaccessible to the average person and you're making science accessible and I feel so much gratitude to every scientist out there every researcher out there who thinks that it's worth their time to be a practitioner of of their work um because ultimately I mean think about how many lives you're changing through this show by trying to break down some of these more complicated things into um into Concepts that people can you know understand and relate to and actually act on and um it also reminds me you know when part of my job when I was in when I was in the Obama Administration was translating insights from Behavioral Science from cognitive science into interventions that my government agency colleagues could Implement in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the you know Department of Defense Department of Education and that same translation process was part of that effort too and I I think it's really really hard to do well I respect it so much I respect pop science writers who do a good job so much um and it it yeah I think it's a wonderful service they don't have to spend their time writing these books they could just publish more research papers that are which is the currency that academic institutions care about and so I see it as just like a public good what they're doing yeah I do too and right back at you because you're doing it as well and so we were all better off for it so thank you I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you meet your health goals I'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test however with a lot of blood tests out there you get information back about blood lipids about hormones and so on but you don't know what to do with that information with inside tracker they have a person personalized platform that makes it very easy to understand your data that is to understand what those lipids what those hormone levels etc mean and behavioral supplement nutrition and other protocols to adjust those numbers to bring them into the ranges that are ideal for your immediate and long-term Health insid tracker's ultimate plan now includes measures of both apob and of insulin which are key indicators of cardiovascular health and energy regulation if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insidetracker docomo to get 20% off so I want to um go back to this injury to Summer at home to discovery of something new yeah was it at that point that you realize ah the feeling of excitement that I'm getting from learning about neurolinguistics and related topics is somehow similar to the excitement that I was feeling about the violin or maybe even superseded that excitement I mean at what point did were you able to make the pivot uh with confidence that you know this this is the new trajectory yeah and and an important um component of that that I'd like to understand is you also had to cut ties with the past something that's very hard to do I mean I grew up with a number of kids who became very successful teen athletes really and some of them once they ceased to keep up or they had an injury or or something their identity stayed attached to the Past in a way that did not allow them to move forward fortunately many of them um did find new identities in business or in other endeavors um some became quite successful but I've I've seen very often that when people achieve early success and then they hit a cliff that it's very hard for them to part with that former identity there one of the Perils of early success yeah yeah um I wouldn't say that it's superseded the excitement that I had with the violin I would say the quality of the excitement felt very different and that's actually important to convey because I think when someone loses the ability to have a passion they're seeking exactly the same sensory experience exactly the same high that they experienced the first time around and I think that's a really high bar and sometimes it's more of an apples and oranges type situation so with the violin there was a really deep sensory aspect to the experience I mean I I felt things right you're playing and then you're feeling things emotionally and it it all felt super visceral and that was where the passion emerged from it was just this like very visceral feeling of like this is so beautiful and awesome and I love it with the cognitive science stuff my my intellectual brain was delighted and it it it's just like a different expression of passion right I I think the big pressure test was not if I had held myself to the bar of do I love this as much as the violin there's no way that I would have been confident enough to pursue anything at that point so instead I I really think the question I asked myself at that time which was a service to me and in my more compromised Psychology was am I curious enough about this thing to ask more questions about it do I want to learn more and I found naturally three days later I went to the uh library and I got another book on the cognitive science of language and then I got a book on the science of decision making so I was there was curiosity and honestly that was all I needed that was The Little Seedling that I needed to see if it could go somewhere more um I took that as a very strong signal like I care to learn more about this and I don't care to learn about everything right and um I remember perusing the course book um of my of my undergrad institution and they had a cognitive science major which was awesome because not all School had one at the time it was a very new major it's interdisciplinary you approach questions of the Mind from multiple perspectives so um from the perspective of Neuroscience Linguistics philosophy psychology um computer science um and anthropology right so you're just like a bunch of different disciplines and but that was when I thought oo I can at least see if I can get into this major I remember it was like a selected M selective and so I freaked out of course and had super impostor syndrome was like I'm not going to get in to the program but thankfully I got in and I think that's yeah that's where I was able to connect like this Little Seedling of curiosity to um to the actual pursuit of the thing right and and that's a really important translation because there can often be a mismatch you're really passionate about something but you actually hate the process right like you hate the actual work that's involved and getting better at it and I was lucky in my undergrad because I fought my way my mom style barging into classes that like really would only accept you know seniors or or Juniors and I was like I'm a fresh lowly freshman but like accept me um and I was able to run experiments on adults and I was actually able to see what it would be like to be a researcher to ask novel questions and to get the Delight that you that you feel right when you're in a lab and you're actually testing out new hypotheses and so it was really important that I saw that I Not only was excited but that I could actually enjoy parts of the process of getting better I love your description of curiosity because it makes me think that in some way it has something to do with a deep motivation and desire to figure out what's next or what's around the corner without an emotional attachment to the outcome the curiosity is really just trying to figure out what's there as opposed to hoping that something specific is there and sometimes even the surprises are more exciting than our predictions um the I think the quote was initially from Dorothy Parker I think this is debated but I think it was um you know uh the cure for boredom is curiosity there is no cure for curiosity oh that's awesome I I hadn't heard that yeah I believe it was Dorothy Parker um sometimes misattributed to Agatha Christie but I think it was Dorothy Parker and what I love about it is that there's something about curiosity that when it's genuine it's self-amplifying it's an upward spiral because there is no end point right I mean that's one of the the the the things that you learn early in Sciences you know you learn you test hypothesis you get answers and you get more questions and you inform hypotheses and you do that until you die basically and it can be a little bit dark uh but when you think about it as a journey that it it's just so much fun along the way if you're just really interested in knowing what the answers are without getting to attach to the answers it just feels like it just even as I'm describing now it's like they just can just fill fill you up and it provides more energy for the next round and the next round and that really came through in your description of of cognitive science I also find it interesting that you couldn't read Sheep music at least not very well you were so deeply um immersed in an Endeavor violin playing that is not of verbal language and then you went into a field that's about in or initially you're you were sparked an interest in a field through an understanding of verbal language and earlier you said that that the thing that Bridges the violin and this what came next as a as a passion and pursuit was this desire for human connection uh at what point did you realize that and and here I just I do want to emphasize that while we're talking about your story I hope um I can only imagine that people are starting to think about you know what are the the intrinsic points of motivation for what they're doing and what they've done you know asking them the sorts of questions that um I hope everyone is asking like you know what what is it really that motivates me to love this and to see a place for myself in that um because those are ultimately I think the questions that that everyone should and can ask yeah I um it took me a really long time it's actually only been in the last few years that I've discovered this uh I discovered this as a result of creating a slight change of plan so I um my desire to create the show um came from a very personal place which is that I'm terrified of change so even though I've had these formative experiences with change I'm a creature of habit um I'm willing to change my habits for example I now take caffeine 90 minutes after I get uping for you very well even today okay I'm a good I'm a good disciple um well there should I like to think that I like to think that people afford themselves some flexibility if you got to run to the airport minutes 60 to 90 or the occasional you know you know within 30 minutes if you if you have to but nobody's perfect should student so I'm willing to update my habits but I'm a creature of habit and I there's a couple reasons why we as humans um are scared of change and I think one of them which is incredibly relatable is that um change is filled with a lot of uncertainty and we hate uncertainty we will go to irrational lengths to avoid uncertainty so one of my favorite studies coming out of uh cognitive Sciences is one involving electric shocks and what they found is that people are far more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock so we would rather be sure certain that a bad thing is going to happen than to have to deal with any feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity right that result I I I love that you brought up that result it still is bewildering to me because if you think about it 100% trial to trial shock you means you just you have to take on the okay bring it just just bring it on kind of mentality but if you did that for every trial and then half of the trials you don't get shocked you'd get the the we know there's a dopamine release from the lack of punishment um so the Strate the ideal strategy is the same and yet somehow people are averse to the uncertainty yeah we just we don't like uncertainty even though again the uncertainty is what drives that Jen Bean first right and and yet we we bristle certainly um at at that at that uncertainty and so I I definitely am like uh please status quo everyone would love the status quo even when the status quo has been suboptimal Andrew I've been fine with the status quo so part of it came from my desire to figure out okay how is it like a slight change of plans right it Mary's science and storytelling to help us figure out strategies for better managing change so I wanted to figure out how are people coming to terms with uncertainty and one of the things that I realized um I learned from my uh the guests on my show and also the scientists is there's this concept called cognitive closure and it is the need to arrive at Clear definitive answers to things okay it's basically the opposite of this open-ended curiosity that you just described which is with cognitive closure you have a need to you you aren't indifferent towards what the answers are you aren't indifferent towards what the questions are you care about everything you care about micromanaging every part of the Curious process from point A to point B and there's a lot of research showing that when we reduce our need for cognitive CL right when we become a little bit more open to the unbidden right like to mystery um more open to all inspiring experiences we can experience huge boosts in well-being uh and we can become a lot more resilient in the face of change so that's something that I'm working on which is like okay maybe I can reduce my need for for cognitive closure and the other thing um that I am starting to appreciate is one reason that we we kind of we get change wrong and we maybe fear it more than we should is that when we anticipate what a change will be like in the future we tend to imagine how our present day selves will respond to that future change right so it's almost like a magic mirror it's Maya in present day going through this mirror comes out the other side two years from now she's the one who's overcoming the challenges of a diagnosis or some other life change and what we forget is that the big changes in our lives can change Us in pretty profound ways right and when we recognize and I we all fall prey to this illusion so it's called the end of History illusion so this is worked by Dan Gilbert and basically what it says is we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past so you think back to your skateboard days right I think back to my high school days and I think oh my gosh of course I've changed like I would be embarrassed to listen to any interview I gave when I was when I was younger right like what were the thoughts I was even thinking so we will see absolutely we were totally different 10 years ago 20 years ago but when it comes to thinking about the future and projecting into the future we are absolutely convinced that who we are right now in this moment is the person that's here to stay yeah and that can lead us astray when it comes to thinking about how we will respond to change because we forget that there's actually a lot of wiggle room around who we become and to your point I mean I love the point you you you made about curiosity what that means means is we want to be curious not just about the things we do we want to be curious about ourselves one huge lesson that I've learned from the interviews that I've had on a slight change of plans is that I need to constantly be auditing myself through my change experience to figure out how I have changed because when we experience change it doesn't happen in a vacuum right so let's say I get a promotion or I enter into a relationship or I leave a relationship or some other again narrow slice of my life is altered we can think of that change as happening in a vacuum right as being confined to just the unique area of our life that that little that change exists in but of course we are incredibly complex creatures our psychology is incredibly complex we live in these remarkably complex ecosystems change in one area of our life will inevitably have spillover effects into all other parts of our lives in ways that are extremely hard to predict and so you know we've I think a lot of your listeners are familiar with the research showing we're we're really bad cognitive forecasters right we're bad at predicting what's going to make us happy what's going to make us sad how long we're going to be sad how long we're going to be happy well one of the reasons for that is that we forget that we are a dynamic entity that might change as well right that our preferences might change our choic sets might change we might change in these really profound ways that we don't realize and um I think there's an inspiring message coming out of this which is one like what we're capable of right now really might not be what we're capable of later um and what I found in my own experience is that you know when it comes to our it's interesting when it comes to our self-perception because we have a first-person perspective on who we are we tend to think that we have a very uh comprehensive like veridical understanding of who we are right like I have a pretty good grasp of who I Maya am and what I'm capable of and what I value and and what my identity is but the reality is that that understanding is based on the random set of data points that I've happened to collect over the course of my lifetime based on the random set of experiences and opportunities and failures and successes that I've happened to have right and and if I'm not mistaken um there's a salience to the negative experiences often for reasons that make sense according to nervous systems that want to keep us safe Etc but for instance you remember the name of this child product Rachel Lee my sister still talks about I won't say their names because we know that these people are still around fortunately um the names of some of the the uh girls in junior high school that were particularly popular and perhaps not Lindsay perhaps not kind to her right exactly perhap were they nice to me not super nice but it's okay yeah there's a lot of web searching nowadays for what these people are up to now anyway um not by me this is I anyway I have a sister we occasionally touch into this uh she's doing great fortunately so um yeah there's a there's a salience to the negative experiences but but I think what I'm hearing and I totally agree with is that you know we like to think that we have um completer at least adequate self- knowledge but that we likely don't and and so what are some of the ways that we can get um better data on ourselves in ways that can help us is that through um the application of mentorship is it asking people for an honest assessment of us um with of course the willingness to hear what they have to say um you know what are some of the that I love zeroc cost behavioral but um what are some of the zero cost behavioral sources that that people have around them in order to ask these what I think are really fundamental questions yeah so there's true there's two um information asymmetries let's say that we're trying to solve for right so two areas where we might not have full knowledge of who we are for one of two reasons so one is that um we have an incomplete understanding of who we are just based on the random set of experiences and the second is that going through this big change actually Alters Us in some way okay so if we're trying to solve for the I think the second problem is actually easier to solve for in that we often just don't even know to look inwards during a big change to see how we've changed because we think oh I'll just pay attention to how I'm performing at work because that was the new variable that was thrown into my life life and we forget to evaluate other parts of our lives like what impact has this had on my relationship what impact has this had on my overall well-being right am I different do I have a different set of preferences do I care about different things so in the second category become very inquisitive about who you are over a longer time frame and assume that it's not a static State when it comes to the first uh bucket which is how do we develop a more complete and Rich richer understanding of self um I think it's actually about surrounding yourself with a diverse set of people people that you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards I think this solves for a bunch of social ills which is that again we tend to live in our silos right and we're really averse to talking to people who have different points of view but I will tell you at times I've learned the most about myself I've learned the most about my weaknesses and sometimes my strengths from talking with someone that I vehemently disagree with and it's a really hard thing to do it's very painful but in terms of like edifying experiences go it's through those conversations that I almost see this like mirror reflected back on me right like wow I'm much more aware of how I'm coming across to that person because they disagree with me about something or they're not someone I would normally fraternize with and um it's just bred more self-awareness in me and so I would encourage people to actually seek out Connections in uncomfortable spaces because uh that will allow you to fill in at least some of the gaps now some of the gaps will truly only be revealed to you because of Life Experiences so I'm thinking in my own life so I I thought I grieved in a very particular kind of way and then during covid my husband and I experienced multiple pregnancy losses with our surrogate um and I found myself grieving in a way that was completely foreign to me I don't think talking anyone would have revealed to me that I was going to grieve In This Very in this way where you usually I would reach out to people and I would want to stay connected and I became so shut off and closed off and I didn't want to talk to anyone for days after the losses I was so disoriented there I learned oh actually um you can respond in a diverse set of ways to grief right like you don't have a singular experience with grief but I might have only learned that from the actual experience of confronting it that said I do think there's a lot of value in trying to fill in gaps in knowledge or a self-awareness through these more you know quotidian conversations you have with people I love love love what you said about deliberately placing oneself into environments where we receive critical feedback from people that we view as quite disparate from us at least in terms of our experience of them you know it's very uh it was the great Carl daero another uh incredibly accomplished neuroscientist um happens to be a colleague of mine at uh Stanford who he's a psychiatrist and he said you know we think we know how other people feel but we really have no idea how other people feel unless we ask them in fact most of the time we don't even really know how we feel you know we're not very good at gauging our own emotions so credit to to Carl for making that statement but with that said I think getting a sense of how other people see us and disagreement in particular um can be incredibly informative I just want to say one other point on this which is I think getting feedback from others almost gets a bad wrath these days in society because it's like you should only care about who you are inside who you know yourself to be and I'm like dude we are social creatures it absolutely matters how I come off to others I mean I think that should be a huge a huge part of my self-identity should be how I impact others and I I I think we should be Shameless about integrating that into our understanding of self if I feel like I'm an excellent person inside and I'm regularly wounding the people around me that matters that's relevant to how I see myself and so I do worry sometimes at the current the current cultural climate that we're pushing ourselves so much towards the space of like all that matters is authenticity and being yourself I mean first of all sometimes yourself isn't awesome you might want to actually optimize change some things about yourself to be better I think that's a good thing and then second you you it's okay to care what other people think usually they're great barometers of things that you might not be aware of in terms of the impact you're having so I just want to like be a lobbyist for caring what other people think just for a moment yeah I agree uh this is one of the reasons why I say at the end of every episode that I do read all the comments on YouTube um you know I think I was raised in an culture an academic culture where feedback on lectures you know student feedback was critical I mean it is important I believe to be a selective filter because um you know when in the old days we'll say there was an opportunity to map the statements to the grade that the student received you can no longer do this so you would often see that some of the worst you know some of the worst feedback was unar exactly and then you'd look at their grade and you'd say well okay this helps explain and yet um it was also important to understand where that could have represented some failing on my part yeah um and a classroom is but one environment I think the online environment is where this gets tricky because of the way that um we all differ in our capacity to receive critical feedback and sometimes the the harshness of one form of feedback sends people you know uh feeling you know back on their heels or feeling you know even ego or emotionally injured in ways that they actually feel traumatic and I think that's part of the problem is that we don't really have a um a a a way to gauge I mean we know inappropriate when we see it we know appropriate when we see it but all the stuff in between because it's on a Continuum really is um is where it gets tricky I I certainly think integrating the possibility that somebody might be right what is it that they they say in um certain forms of personal developments like you know if somebody's coming at you with an argument about you the best state of mind you could have is you might be right because that lets you hold your ground a bit it's it still maintains a boundary but you're not saying you're right and you're not saying you're wrong you're sort of on you're in a in a kind of a flat-footed stance where you could move either way and I like that this idea well they might be right and then you could say no or or yes but in any case I I just want to throw up both hands and and um and as many votes as I uh can as one individual to say yes I totally agree more um more direct feedback and disagreement is great yeah it's wonderful and I think in science you're used to people saying um harsh things about your work until they eventually say okay you can publish the paper that is true I grew up in the culture of skateboarding where like nothing's good enough and then occasionally something's good um and in the landscape of podcasting um I think the comment section is is a great way to uh get feedback and that's why I continue to encourage feedback it sounds like you do as well yeah I think you know I I try to just every Endeavor that I pursue I try to approach with a lot of humility and I think if I were to describe you know at work right I I lead this team and I I think if you were to ask people um what my defining trait is as a leader it's actually not like strong convictions it's actually a willingness to update her opinions on things her belief systems her strategy based on incoming information I really really pride myself on having a flexible mindset about stuff and not being stubborn this is true in my marriage right like my husband Jimmy and I really pride ourselves and like you know saying you know what based on what you just shared I'm changing my mind like you're right and I'm wrong right and if you can actually start to value that if you could start to see that as a a virtuous quality um I think historically right when we think about leadership we've thought about people who have Inc are incredibly Resolute in their convictions but that doesn't allow the space to again beige an update you know update your mindset when you get new information or you realize that you AED in some way in terms of the logic that you used or what have you and I've been extremely intentional in every sphere that I've worked in to have this very open mind and to be very open to critical feedback it does not mean that I take every piece of feedback okay obviously I have some criteria I use to decide whether it's meaningful feedback or it's not meaningful feedback right but the Locust of my pride is not in have being right or having the strong conviction it is actually in my willingness to have uh a more Dynamic State of Mind regarding lots of issues maybe that's maybe that's just what it means to be a scientist right like you have to be willing to update in the face of new information I am nodding for those that are listening I'm just nodding and thinking yes yes and and more yes because I think that um we all need more of that as individuals and if we can't get it from our work setting or group setting sometimes asking a friend can be extremely useful I have a friend he happens to be be a a professor at University back East I won't embarrass him by by uh disclosing where he's at but I recall as a a junior faculty member because he knows me well he's a few years behind me in our career trajectories but asking him for an honest assessment I asked for the most brutally honest assessment me that he could give and some of it stung some of it stung he was relating some ways in which I show up as a friend and I'm super present then I have this tendency I'm pretty introverted I'll disappear for long periods of time in college they called me Dart cuz I show up at parties I'd be there and then I would disappear for like two weeks and just be in my books say hi to people and just keep going you know sort of in and out of connection I I've worked hard to to change that over the years I um I think I have but who knows um in any event a a friend who knows us well that you insist on all right don't give me any compliments you know just give me the harsh stuff uh that can be very useful and that reminds me of some research um by Ethan cross so he looks at how we can tame our mental chatter and um if you don't have the friend available to you there is a really easy distancing technique that you can use when you're in the throws of a problem where you are trying to actively re reframe something or maybe see where your blind spots are and that's by thinking about your problem from a third person perspective versus a first-person perspective so you play the role of someone who's giving advice to a friend in your head but that friend is actually you and it actually promotes some degree of objectivity and like emotional distance from from that again that that fuzzy hazy set of feelings that you have around the emotion right you're trying to like get rid of that piece so that you can bring um a slightly more sober recommendation of the situation so that can be really helpful and then um the other thing to do is I think when we are when we're facing challenges when we're going through a hard time we do have an instinct to want to vent right in again in this era of vulnerability and whatnot we're told like yes share everything that's on your mind it can actually be counterproductive to vent and the reason for that is that when you're venting about a hard situation that you're going through or something that you're frustrated about with yourself um typically the person you've invited into the conversation they're a nice empathetic person they want to make you feel better and so what they what do they do they offer emotional balm in the situation they're like oh my God that does sound terrible you were so wronged I'm so sorry you went through that instead of playing the role of what Ethan calls like a cognitive adviser which is actively trying to challenge The Narrative you're telling about your situation actively trying to get you to um question whether the way you're portraying the situation is accurate and actually trying to get you to reframe aspects of the situation and so when we think about venting when it comes to again filling in those blind spots about ourselves you you might want to tell your friend at the outset like you you even said lay off the the nice stuff I just want to hear the hard stuff you want you want to tell your friend at the beginning look I'm having this challenge with my colleague at work where this guy the gy is giving me a really tough time I don't know what's going on I'm going to have here here's this here's the situation rather than trying to make me feel better about the situation I want you to actively find holes poke holes in the way that I'm thinking about this thing so that I can try and find some reframing strategies to see the situation from a different vantage point so these are all called distancing techniques right third person versus first person and actually there's some really interesting Neuroscience uh research showing that when we view our problems and our ourselves from a third person perspective um neural activity in areas associated with hostility and aggression actually decrease um and so that can be really helpful when it comes to you know resolving interpersonal conflict or trying to see where you might have been wrong I love these examples because especially the one where one does it on their own it truly doesn't require anything except you can be the introverted Andrew and still do this you don't even have to go to the party and then ghost everyone yeah well I don't yeah back then it would have been there were no cell phones but um or smartphones rather but it yeah it was a bit of go it was just I my my I can reset with small numbers of people that I'm close to but um you know I found at that time a need to to go into an isolated space to do what I need to do to reset myself and um but I realized there are certain forms of communication that are still required like I'm alive you know I still get this I still get this from my mother every once in a while she's like you know if you don't reach out and not only do I not know what's happening with you but I also don't know if you're okay and I'm thinking I'm a grown man of course I'm I'm fine and I and then I of course use the worst possible response that any son or child could give which is listen if something happened to me like someone like the police would contact you the the hospital contct which is not reassuring so kids everywhere call your parents po I know I know just call her a bit more come on well you know still working on it I'm just um it is a work in progress um venting it I'm so glad that you brought this up you know I think that there are these buzzwords now you know authenticity um you know I do think that there are certain forms of communication that that can be um injurious to people and yet I think having some internal buffers to to that all that incoming stuff I mean it is important I mean you can't be online and I think everyone is pretty much online these days um without having some policies for oneself and how you're going to deal with this stuff how am I going to be a selective filter I I think knowing the ends of the Continuum like you know this is clearly um benevolent kind discourse this is clearly bad I'm going to block this or get rid of it but then within that middle range having some rules and policies for how to filter it um either by time of day that you look at it or getting input um but considering the you know it might be true it might not be true right what people are saying and like you said you know you were talking about memory and how we tend to overweight negative um experiences and I did find myself like um so I gave this speech and it was posted and I I I was looking at the comments and I literally like anytime my brain coded a comment as positive I just skipped right past it I was I was literally just searching for the negative stuff as as if it's as if the positive is generic and the negative is is somehow genuine yes and I had to make it a mental I had to make a mental note hey it's okay to marinate in the the the messages that are saying that this really helped them in some way and they really enjoyed the thing and again for critical people I think it takes an extra step to remind yourself to also read the good stuff um and to allow that stuff to count too well we did an episode on gratitude and one of the um big surprises that came to me in researching for that episode was that um the best evidence for gratitude having positive effects on neuros circuitry neurochemistry comes from when we receive gratitude as opposed to give gratitude this is what's often lost in the discussion about gratitude so all the more incentive to give gratitude and and to be aware of when it's coming your way and internalize it um there is a small category of people out there I think hopefully small that um so bask in positive feedback that it amplifies their narcissism but it's clear that you are not one of those people so Z zero minus one risk of of that happening um I want to talk a little bit about goals as it relates to motivation um because you've done you've done a lot of um important uh work and and what I consider is organization of this like what would otherwise be a pretty complex space you know what is more important to most people than being motivated and focused and excited hopefully on on Endeavors that they enjoy and that Inspire to light but tell us about what can not just initiate but what can sustain motivation uh because we've talked about the dopamine system on this podcast many times before but that's a pretty reductionist way to look at it and you have a different perspective that I I've really benefited from learning a bit about yeah so when it comes to goals I mean it's first important to recognize that there's two parts of a goal okay so there's the way that we Define the goal and then there's the way that we pursue the goal and I think we tend to overlook the first category how we Define the goal because often times our goals seem like they should be so obvious to us right I want to lose weight I want to avoid sleeping late so that I get a good night's sleep I want to build muscle mass right like these are things that just seem like they should just be intuitive right but what research and Behavioral Science shows is that not all goal frames are made equal in fact really small tweaks to the way that we frame our goals can have an outsized impact on whether or not we're successful at reaching that goal um so one such framing is whether you frame your goals in terms of an approach orientation or an avoidance orientation so let me talk about what this means so an approach Orient a would be I want to eat healthier foods right avoidance would be I want to avoid unhealthy Foods okay so in the context of say your social life approach would be I want to be in a relationship I want to enter a relationship avoidance would be I want to avoid feeling loneliness okay I want to avoid feeling uh isolated now the reason why these two frames are important to consider is that they can have a different impact on our motivational States and they can also have a different impact on the emotional response that we have to success and failure in these domains so what we tend to find is that when you frame something in an approach orientation way um when you succeed that success is met with feelings of Pride and accomplishment we find that it leads to a boost in motivation boost endurance it B boosts perseverance okay when you frame something in terms of avoidance success is met with feelings of calm and relief so kind of like a oh wipe the forehead like thank goodness I avoided that calamitous outcome or thank goodness I avoided doing that really bad thing back to neutral yeah exactly and so it is fine to frame goals in terms of avoidance and actually sometimes it's just personality dependent like some people are more driven by fear or they need a lot more urgency to drive them but it is important to know that the approach orientation is on average more motivating and so you might want to think of reframing your goal in terms of approach versus avoidant the other advantage to approach is that when you frame something as avoidant right I want to avoid doing X I want to avoid doing y it's really hard to measure success right it's like are you really tracking every time you're tempted by the chocolate chip cookie and you don't actually eat it that's really hard to measure right and we do better when we can measure success and failure right it's much easier to track the number of times you approach a salad right you approach something that's healthy and so anyway so it's really interesting to see how again this really subtle shift and we see this across this the the board in Behavioral Science can have such a big impact on on behavior and um on this framing thing I'll just share one little anecdote from my time working in government so we were trying to motivate veterans to sign up for a um employment and educational assistance program so this is after their years of service and this is a really important benefit that the government offers for free because the transition from military to civilian life can be very fraught with a lot of uh psychological and physical obst obstacles and so I remember the Department of Veterans Affairs they had almost no money to to fund a marketing program around this they said Maya and team we've got one email that we're going to send to vets and like have at it but that's all we're working with and my teammates and I ended up changing just one word in this email message instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service and that one word change LED to a 9% increase in access to the benefit and it's um it's based in a psychological uh principle called the endowment effect which says that we value things more when we own them or in this CA case have earned them and so I shared this example only to say like that is such a small change right um but we we just know that again these small little tweaks in the way that we talk to ourselves the way that we frame our goals can have a really big impact on our behavior I'm fascinated by that result uh some people hearing it might think okay 9% is that really that great but we're talking about a one-word change and I'm um and the scale of the federal government right so% big organizations hard hard to hard to uh argue that things uh change quickly in big organizations a discussion for another time um but eligible versus earned I mean again I come back to this possibility that there's something about words like earned that invoke a verb state within us that makes us more action oriented um similar to being able to see ourselves in some landscape that can evoke Delight or awe as opposed to just seeing the landscape that evokes Delight or awe um yeah I'm really hung up on this because I think um one of the major challenges it seems for Behavioral change is that most people do wait for the the stick as opposed to feeling into the carrot so to speak um I mean all you have to do is look at the enormous number of people who are struggling with health rated um issues for which there's now a lot of active debate is it genetically determined or Etc and setting all that aside it's just very clear that there are a number of Behavioral things sunlight sleep exercise social connection nutrition um among among them that there's no pill for there's no injection for there is absolutely no replacement for so getting people to change their behavior is hard yes telling people that they're capable sometimes helps but doesn't seem sufficient so what what are some more of these uh verb states that people um you think can internalize that give them access to that real sense of possibility and get them changing their behavior yeah and behavior change is very hard I sometimes bristle at some of the like hacks that I see online because I'm like I don't think there's a lot of evidence that supports that this works so um you know what I'm sharing today is actually backed by you know really high quality research um one of my friends and um uh mentors iel at fishbach has done a lot of this work at the University of Chicago on goal setting and motivation um a couple other things for people to consider and by the way I love this space because I'm obsessed with goals right right so I love getting better at things and I'm I am using all of these insights in my own life so it is truly a delight to get to share them okay sidebar um important sidebar I would argue because you live you live this stuff right you don't just research it you live it yes it's it's totally me search or whatever they call it um so uh who sets the goal matters so a lot of us work with coaches trainers mentors bosses that's great it's really really helpful for people in our lives to bring structure to our goals to push us along to motivate us but when other people are setting our goals setting our targets for us it undermines a really valuable source of motivation which is being in the driver's seat we love steering in our lives we love feeling agency we love recruiting our own agency when it comes to achieving our goals and so and and and you know we talked about how people will go to irrational lengths to avoid uh feeling uncertainty people also go to a rational length to preserve their agency and control over a situation so there's some really interesting research that's come out just in the last few years showing that humans prefer to use their judgment over an algorithm that they know performs better than their judgment but did not involve them okay and they're much more satisfied with the outcomes when it when it's them that's in the driver's seat right and so um what this means I think in everyday context is not to do away with like trainers and coaches and what not every trainer and Coach who's listening don't hate me okay you're you're sticking around but what they can do is they can build some something of a choice set into your day-to-day programming right so let's say that at work you have a certain skill that you're trying to build ask for a set of options to choose from own the targets more you will see a boost in motivation let's say you're working out with a trainer they're like it's leg day okay I'm gonna own some of my targets right are we going to go heavy hard on deadlifts are we going to go hard on squats whatever it is and so build some agency uh into the experience because nothing supplants that kind of intrinsic drive and the feeling that you own the success or the failure um that again I I think to your earlier Point what we're really trying to do with some of these behavioral insights is capitalize on our Natural State as humans right like what drives us and it turns out we really love being in control well why don't we monopolize on that when it comes to uh our goal Pursuit right so we're trying to figure out those areas of psychology that we can leverage it's fantastic the word agency is so key here I think and it explains that earlier result the shock experiment people having agency over 100 their response to 100% of the time you know at least it's it's giving them some sense of control and mitigating it whereas when it when it's random 50/50 yeah uh rather when it's random 50% of the trials then um even though the outcome is better on the whole it's a it's perceived somehow as a reduction in agency um there's something fundamental there for sure when I started my laboratory and it there was um an additional pressure to publish papers this is before getting tenure I used to ask students in post talks when that the paper would be ready and then finally uh I stopped asking and just said why don't you tell me when the deadline is yes and not a single one failed or rather I should put it in the positive light every single time they succeeded in beating their estimate um because they were in control of that end point so it was um at times uh challenging for me you know but they they set a date and then if and also by the way if they need to extend that date outward we did that was their choice they said they needed more time you know that the rule in science that I think applies a lot of places is I always like the phrase um as fast as I carefully can because you don't want to rush Absol but um but that sense of agent I like to think translated to um more joy for them it certainly uh there was a lot of productivity from them and if and they're might be listening to this and so they can put in the comments whether or not I'm telling the truth here they're all most of them are professors now so that's well that probably means they succeeded they definitely succeeded the question is whether or not I had anything to do with it my advisers always said you know the best thing you could do is support your students in postdocs and then just get out of their way yeah because the really good ones are are you can't control them you're just you're just trying to not screw things up there's a lot of intrinsic motivation there um curious about the difference between loan Pursuits and group Pursuits because I know you understand a lot about groups and I want to make sure that we talk about um group think although that has such a negative connotation but the way that we tend to um kind of uh revert to the mean when it comes to our thinking and our opinions and certainly our um explanations of who's right and who's wrong when we are in a collection of like minded people this could also be you know phrased as what are the dangers of being among like-minded people um and and then we'll relate that back to motivation but what are the dangers of being among like-minded people yeah I mean well in the context of goals and motivation it can be very very helpful to be in the context of like-minded people and the reason for that is we often don't see failure up close when it comes to people pursuing their goals but if we are in the presence of people whose values we share who have a similar commitment to doing something and we see up close that they sometimes have those days where they fail or we have the vulnerability to show when we failed that can actually increase our resolve that the goals that we're trying to achieve are actually possible okay I think the danger of being in the the likeminded spaces is around how it limits your your frame of mind right so when it comes to the ideas that you have when it comes to the convictions you have around your points of view it can be very dangerous to only be in the in the Echo chamber and again because I want to give people strategies to challenge their way of thinking without them having to socialize for all the introverts out there I have a lot of compassion I have I have introverted Tendencies so I get it um one helpful thought experiment you can use when you feel like maybe you're spending a little bit too much time around people who are just reinforcing whatever viewpoints you have is to ask how your belief system and your your ideas and your opinions of things might have been different had you been born during a different time period and in a different family or cultural landscape and what happens when it comes to our viewpoints is that they become so Tethered to our identities that we feel like if we were to jettison a certain belief or value we would be jettisoning ourselves and that feels way too threatening it's way too destabilizing to engage in that but the minute you imagine what it would have been like to be to have been born in a different family with a different religious belief system with a different value system all of a sudden you transport your same self right I'm still Maya into this new environment and you start to see how nonprecious some of your beliefs are right maybe they don't have the sacred quality that you thought that they did and so you might be more open to changing your mind more open and receptive to challenging your own points of view if you engage in that that thought experiment I recall you discussing a description of people watching a game of sport that involved bad calls yeah yeah controversial referee calls controversial referee calls um yeah if you could share with us a little bit about that result because I find it really interesting especially the part where um the experimenters can swap the identities of the teams in in theory and then um well basically what people come to realize is that our perception of the outside world is strongly informed by the group that we see ourselves in and often to our own detriment absolutely yeah so this is a study from the 1950s and to your point you know we tend to think okay we're human beings we're really enlightened we're making decisions and we're uh engaging in judgments of things Based on data and evidence and facts and you know surely my visual system wouldn't lie to me so whatever I perceive is going to be true and veritical vertical representation of the world and like not true okay a lot of our um beliefs and these are these are strong beliefs I mean again they're they're what we believe to be fact about the world is informed by our group membership so in this study um loyal uh fans of two opposing football teams watch these controversial uh plays right so where the referee made a call and they weren't quite certain if it was like in or out let's say and um depending on your loyalty to the team to whatever sports team right whichever side you were on you much more likely to favor calls that were made on your teams um in in your in your team's favor and you know when you ask people coming out of a study like this it's not like yep I knew I was bu like I knew that I was basing my judgment of these referee calls based on my affiliation and my love of of Team X or team y um you wouldn't think that you think you were an Arbiter of Truth in this situation you're just recalling what your visual system saw and I think that shows how powerful these social forces are how powerful our group affiliations are because it can truly change the way that you see stuff right of course it can then transform the way that you think about stuff um and so that to me is a powerful reminder that when we are in disagreement with someone else um and we just try to bombard them with facts right I mean you're a scientist right so if you're hearing someone say something and you're like oh that's not that's not accurate that's not true your your instinct probably say but have you heard about the 2017 study the peer-review journal article that from pubv that d right and but when you recognize that actually a large part of our belief system uh emerges from the groups that we identify with it I think there's there's an inspiring lesson that comes from this so we shouldn't be too disheartened by the fact that this is true but it helps round out our understanding of why it is that people believe the things they do and as a result we have more resources at hand to try to understand how we can change their minds right so one of the guys that I interviewed on my podcast um his name is Daryl Davis he's a black jazz musician and um he was confronted by a member of the Klux Clan at one of his performances and it led talk about a slight change of plans I mean he just went on a totally different life path and ended up um convincing dozens of people to leave white supremacy groups including the klex clan and um you know when it when it comes to Daryl and his approach well one he recruited people's agency so he never implied to them oh I'm trying to change your mind um he inspired he always says like I didn't convince them Maya they convinced themselves to change their mind so he recruited their agency um but he also tried his absolute hardest to not question their fundamental and underlying Humanity right so he tried to understand like why are you part of this group this vile vitriolic group and some people would share well you know it's a family tradition thing my father was in the clan my grandfather's in the clan look none of this excuses being in a hate group okay but at least gave Daryl an understanding of some of the the factors that were pushing them towards the group so that he might offer that sense of community that's sense of belonging somewhere else maybe outside of a hate group right but if he thought that he was actually just fighting over facts over whether African-Americans should be treated um equal to everyone else then he would have lost that that um argument because he wasn't even fighting with the right currency right what was relevant so um what was so I mean this is my it was the first episode of a slight change of plans we ever released and continues to be my favorite because what was so thrilling about this interview is that the strategies Daryl used to convince people to change their minds again of these deeply entrenched horrific views were totally corroborated by the science of how we change people's minds so he did he used a lot of really effective strategies just intuitively like he's just a mastermind behavioral scientist just by virtue of who he is um but he he showed genuine curiosity uh for why it is they believed what they did which is again extremely hard and I would not have had the equinity to show genuine curiosity for why someone is in the Klux Clan but he showed that curi it he increased um the his question to statement ratio so it's really important to ask people a lot of questions um and then and then he would ask people um a really important question which is well what in theory could change your mind like what evidence would I have to give you in order to change your mind about X Y or Z and the reason that I love asking that question is that it presupposes that someone ought to be willing to change their mind in the face of new information so this hearkens back to the conversation we were having earlier about the importance of having a malleable state of mind and being willing to update in the face of new info now if the person in response says literally nothing will change my mind okay well then you know it's not worth your time to have the disagreement with them but if they give you a little bit and say well maybe I would change my mind on vaccines if you were to tell me X Y or Z maybe I would change my Minds on my mind on immigration reform if you were to tell me you know this or that now you have an in right but you do need to get them into the State of Mind where they think yeah I guess in theory I could change my mind about this thing that I feel absolutely Resolute about I've never worked in public policy um but I feel very strongly that where I see failures uh and mass of you know Public Health policy or educational policy almost always there seems to be a failure of even interest in understanding what motivates the other side's position and this is where I just this actually gets me um frustrated to the point of motivated where it's like people are saying you're wrong you're wrong know this know that to the point of it's almost maddening and far more seldom uh do we see people saying you know okay I'm going to third person myself or I'm going to put myself in the other person's shoes and say you know why might they feel that way why would this person be listening to this individual as opposed to this public health uh individual and look you know without taking any stance on this because it's a much bigger conversation than we want to have right now I could look at Public Health officials that just completely failed to understand the other side's position and vice versa and that to me just says it's a communication failure um and I'll I'll take this out of the um covid pandemic um discussion as it's normally had and say that you know one thing that we know for sure is that in the 2020 to really 2022 but still 2023 uh landscape there were so many mental health concerns right everybody right regardless of where people were on the vaccine debate Mass debate lockdown debate regardless of any of that everyone's stress level was elevated absolutely and there were very very few um top down from at the level of governments discussions about how to maintain circadian rhythm and sleep Health how to maintain Health in general in that landscape and that for for me was just really shocking it was also one of the reasons why we launched the podcast frankly is that I really feel that the tools were needed by everybody and should be zero cost to everybody but what was clear is there was so much pointing of fingers and name calling and and violence even that no one was saying like why would people feel this way why would people trust these sources as opposed to these sources and we can only conclude if we're good scientists that um the the landscape was ineffective right it was just ineffective and it continues I mean if you go if you have the um the desire to take a reduction in dopamine by going on Twitter and following this back and forth that continues today it's it's pretty ugly still none of it seems really solution oriented there are a few people out there who are trying to make it solution oriented but um not really and so I I don't want to um you know go into the the dark aspects here but but it does seem like um this willingness to take a look at why others might feel the opposite of how we feel is a very rare quality and this gentleman Daryl what was his last Daryl Davis I think I've I've seen a number of things with him it's I mean he's obviously extraordinary um but we call him that because people like him are exceedingly rare so what can we do to cultivate that kind of mindset because I'm not pointing fingers here I mean I think we all have this default tendency to gather evidence the way that we gather evidence draw conclusions and then stand our ground and I think it's detrimental to to everyone so you're making me reflect on probably the greatest gift that being a cognitive scientist has given me in my life um obviously it's fed my curiosity it's been a delight to study things and learn things but the greatest gift it has given me is empathy towards people it is the greatest driver of human empathy to learn how our minds work and I don't know if there's a substitute for that partly that's why I started a slight change of plans we have story episodes where you hear from people like Daryl but I interview scientists from all over the world about their areas of expertise and I genuinely believe that the more we learn about how the mind works the more we learn from my field of cognitive science about how we make decisions how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world how we come to be the people that we are the more we can Bridge these empathy gaps and it's been profound for me I mean I feel so lucky to have been steeped in this literature for decades now but my hope is to invite people into the conversation because the more you learn about why people are the way they are the more empathy you can extend and the more not even saying you got it you need to extend an olive branch I'm not saying that you need to compromise your own belief system but at least you see that there might be an entry point a reason to have a discussion with this person who believes things that are completely different from you and I we talked about gratitude a bit in this conversation I feel immense gratitude that I have a posture of empathy as I move around in this world because I regular I mean I have I have strong beliefs on things I care a lot I care about reducing human suffering and then I meet someone who I think is pro a policy that promotes human suffering and of course the visceral human instinct is like to hell with you in your Viewpoint this is horrible this is intolerable but because I have this cognitive science hat on it allows me to walk around with a slightly different Viewpoint and I really feel that I'm a better person as a result of that and I and I've heard from listeners of a slight change of plans when they listen to these science episodes whether it's the science of loneliness the science of empathy the science of meditation like where're I try to bring this empathetic spin to to understanding again neuroscience and psychology they have found that they are kinder to others and so that's that's probably the best feedback that I've ever received on the show is like people are like I'm a nicer person to other people now especially the ones I don't agree with and Pres presumably to themselves as well I mean I know you've brought up the topic of empathy as a way to prevent burnout right that um and here we're not just talking about Job burnout we're talking about the burnout that is inherent to like any longterm Pursuit that's challenging raising kids uh being in a family what is the great romoss quote you know think you're enlightened go spend a week with your parents you know that like that's you know like no matter how enlightened you are it's like you know like that's always myself that I love my parents I love my parents but when you know you it's just a completely different frame shift so but also kind to oneself I mean I think there's starting to be some good neuroscience at the mechanistic level of of empathy um clearly it empathy is not the default state for most people it's something that we need to cultivate as a practice and that we can cultivate as a practice along the lines of empathy but also returning to a topic that we opened today's discussion with um you know we build these narratives about ourselves starting in adolescence maybe even earlier yeah and through our teen years and we have various experiences but I'm curious how we can continue to build narratives about ourselves and the role of narrative you know the the I statements the I am statements um and whether or not you uh and we should all spend some time you know doing this I mean these days you know people exercise because we know it's good for us I hope people get sunlight because they know it's great for them um that people perhaps have a meditation practice or a therapy practice or a journaling practice but how is it that we can continue to evolve our narratives about self in a way that promotes some or all of the things that we've been talking about today yeah so empathy is really interesting because I think um we have a lot of misconceptions about it and we have misconceptions about how empathetic we actually are I would argue people are more empathetic than they think and let me tell you why so this comes from research by my my friend Jam Zaki at Stanford um there's three distinct types of empathy a lot of people don't know about so the first kind is emotional empathy and this is the one that feels very intuitive to most of us so it's this visceral reaction I have you tell me that you've had a really hard time my eyes start to well up I I can truly feel your pain and um I just feel what you feel okay and that typically is the is what people think of when they think of empathy period they Overlook two other types of empathy the second type is called cognitive empathy this is the ability to accurately diagnose what it is that's causing you distress in this moment and what it is that I could offer up to you to try to help ameliorate some of your suffering the Third Kind is called empathic concern or it's known as compassion as well which is the actual desire to help you the desire to help another person and what's so interesting about these three types of empathy is that they don't correlate within people you can be really high in the emotional empathy scale right you can have tears streaming down your face as you hear about your friend's divorce but you might be really bad at diagnosing what it is that's causing them distress you might be really bad at actually offering up um a solution to their problem or you might lack the will right like if you're a sociopathic you might just not have the will to help someone right and um what's so interesting is that I think in our society and this this relates back to identity and and and the labels we give ourselves I think our society puts a huge premium on emotional empathy and we discount people who don't have that visceral response and we just immediately say oh they're not empathetic and this happens from the time that we're really little by the way like the kid who's crying on the playground comforting their friend right they're like wow that that kid's got a ton of empathy my older kid doesn't seem to really care about people but they might excel in cognitive empathy they might Excel when it comes to Compass empathic concern so one of the things was talking about with J on a slight change of plans is you know maybe we ought to think about empathy languages in the same way we think about love languages people have different ways of expressing their empathy and we ought to Value them equally and um that's been wonderful because I think even in the past like I would have had a really hard situation and I go to one of my friends and they just seem like a little bit more stoic and I'm like do you even give a like why do you not care as much as I want you to care it turns out they're fantastic at wanting to help me and understanding what's wrong with me and um I love the idea of giving a little more love to those second two buckets because I think it'll allow us to better recruit more empathy from others and also to see ourselves differently to maybe for those people out there who are like I'm not a very empathetic person you might actually be more empathetic than you think uh the second thing I wanted to share is about burnout right so you talked a little about about burnout people who rate really high on the emotional empathy scale tend to experience burnout at higher rates so you can imagine healthcare workers First Responders essentially what you're doing when you feel emotional empathy is you're you're you're carrying the burden of the other person's pain so you can easily imagine how that can deplete you and I think the Instinct that we have when we're empathetic is to say you know what I'm just going to shut myself off I had that experience in 2020 I was like there's too much bad stuff happening around me like I prefer to just not feel things thank you very much and so I tried to close myself off from natural emotional reactions I would have to things but what J um research shows is that you don't actually have to if you cultivate cognitive empathy and empathic concern those can actually be protective against burnout so you don't have to do away with empathy altogether you just have to shift gears and be more selective about the kind of empathy that you're investing in so I Love This research again it just like opens your mind up to this whole world of empathy that you might have thought of is more like the singular concept and allows there to be a little bit more grace space I love the idea that they're different categories of empathy it will also arm me with a response if ever hypothetically someone says I don't feel like you're really feeling what I'm feeling and therefore you're not empathic to my experience I I I what where I rate on these scales isn't important but um this Noti of cognitive empathy I think is really important and probably one that most people haven't heard of I certainly haven't heard of it um but I like to think that it really does exist and that it's at least and you might have it in Spades I don't know you'd have to ask the people close to me but um but that it is at least as important as the emotional empathy before we conclude there is something that um I unfortunately um pushed us past too quickly that I want to return to because I think it's something that um so many people care about and live with each day which is this issue of challenges with ongoing motivation and forgive me for for um a bit of an anachronism here I'm sort jumping back to this because I realized that I I pulled us off to another topic but you've talked about the middle problem before and it's and it's too important to um to not return to so um tell us about the middle problem and how we can overcome the middle problem and and before I do that do you mind if I give just a couple short strategies around goal setting I just want to make sure I round out that section Not only would I not mind I I I would be delighted I just want to make sure again I share share share the wisdom that's helped me so much in my personal life pleas okay so uh and I'll I'll try to be fast so the first is please take your time yeah um but people have these goals to reach right I got to get them got them out running um so the first is to make sure that you are so we've already talked about approach versus avoidant goals right we've talked about how who sets the goal matters and how if it's you it's better right if you have some ownership over your targets the third thing is to make sure that you're setting goals when you're in the same psychological and physiological State as the one you'll be in when you're actually pursuing the goal um because we tend to have what are known as this is again I at fishbox we tend to have empathy gaps between our present day selves and our future selves and that empathy Gap can lead us to be very compassionate towards 4 pm on Sunday watching TV Maya right and 6:00 AM Maya who I hope is going to be at the gym like you know killing herself with a really high intensity interval set or whatnot and so if if it is 4M on Sunday probably not the best time for you to say I'm going to go to the gym every day 6:00 a.m. if you actually are at the gym at 6:00 a.m. and you are feeling viscerally the physiological pain the psychological pain of having gotten up really early to do the workout then it's reasonable for you to set that goal but it's kind of the opposite of like they say like don't go to the supermarket hungry right actually in this situation you want to be in exactly the same physiological and psychological State you'll be in when you're in goal Pursuit it'll make it much more likely that you set reasonable goals and you actually reach them the second thing um that you might want to think about is so don't I don't know about you Andrew but I feel like I'm a goal purist by Nature so when I set a goal the minute I like fall off even slightly the goal is gone for me okay and I'm like H I messed up like let's start from the beginning let's start from scratch I need a new goal like I've already I've already messed up and it doesn't matter so I feel like unless I I I achieve perfection in achieving my goals I get very frustrated and I just fall off the wagon completely so one thing that researchers have shown is that it's really helpful to build in what's called an emergency Reserve into your goal setting or slack is another way of putting it so let's say I have a goal I want to go to the gym every single day this month it's really important and helpful to give yourself and you're not going soft on yourself I promise to give yourself for example three get out of jail free cards three days where for whatever reason it's okay that you didn't go to the gym you got sick maybe you have kids who got sick you're just not feeling motivated it doesn't really matter what the reason is you didn't go to the gym but the important thing is that you're still on track to achieving your goal even if you missed those three days because you built them into the system okay the final thing I'll say about um setting the goal is to try to capitalize on a phenomenon known as the Fresh Start effect so this is worked by my friend Katie Milkman she's a professor at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania so what she's found is that in our lives we have these big milestone moments where we break from the past and we're entering a new future okay this this might be moving across the country it could be getting a new job it could be getting married it could be whatever okay but it feels like a big change and that's a wonderful moment to try to introduce a new set of patterns into your life in part because again um you have a break in identity but two it's really easy to introduce new habits when a lot of your environmental circumstances are different so I take a new job all of a sudden I have a new route to work probably a good idea to not introduce a pastry stop every time I go to work because I no longer am passing by that Bakery every morning um so you want to capitalize on Fresh Starts of that kind there's also uh more arbitrary Fresh Starts that exist for all of us and this is in the form of the first day of the year so of course New Year's resolutions the first day of spring even the first day of the week can be very motivating because we all like clean slates we like wiping away the past we like embarking on a new future um that's that's clean of failure and stumbling and whatnot and so that could be a really powerful motivator I love these suggestions uh because I do think that we like a clean start there's something to that uh who knows why but I think it's it's a a universal trait um and perhaps shortening the time domain over which we think about our goals and success and failure could help like if you just say you know the clean start is this afternoon because this morning wasn't you know didn't go so well yeah you don't have to surrender the whole week just cuz you messed up on a bunch morning that's right I'm sensing the perfectionist in you and I know that there's it's a Continuum you know some people don't um I don't want to say suffer from perfectionism because I think it's a it's a great attribute in in certain domains and um can be challenging in others but uh I love the idea of um having a little bit of Grace um with one's goals and also what you said earlier of making the carrot compelling you know and not so much focusing on just the stick making the carrot more compelling um so much there what about the middle problem yes because I do think that people uh do tend to go go hard out the gate as it were and then people drop off yeah so yeah all the stuff we talked about so far has been around defining the goal and now we need to think about how we sustain our motivation to pursue the goal and this can be super hard um again Behavior change is incredibly incredibly hard to sustain um so the middle problem so the middle problem refers to the fact that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of goal Pursuit we tend to have a boost in motivation at the beginning of the pursuit we all feel this viscerally right I've decided I'm going to do inter fasting or I'm going to make sure I look at you know the Sun every morning the first moment that I get up or what whatever the goal is and that first day you are so motivated to get it done right in fact the first few days the first few weeks um and then you experience a a boost in motivation a higher amount of motivation towards the end of the goal um so we experience at the end of a goal what's known as the goal gradient effect so we tend to experience monotonic increases in motivation the closer we are to the finish line so we might even see in marathon runners right they're like okay I only have this remaining part to go I can expand all my energy now to try to get over the finish line there's a lull though in motivation in the middle of goal Pursuit and that's something that we want to get ahead of we want to solve for now obviously ly we cannot eliminate midds mathematically impossible to eliminate middles so what do we do well we do something that you already alluded to which is actually we shorten the time duration of our goals so rather than setting an annual goal right let's say that it's the new year you're inspired to try to make 2023 the best year ever but what the problem with that is when you set an annual goal now your middle is months long so you're going to experience that decrease in motivation for a healthy chunk of the year which is not ideal if you set a weekly goal by contrast all of a sudden your Middle's a lot shorter right all of a sudden you're dealing with like a few days maybe a day or two and so you want to be mindful of of the duration uh of the goal another thing that can help um keep motivation high is to do uh what my friend Katie Milkman calls Temptation bundling so this has number one been the my go-to strategy for having done every unpleasant activity in my life that I've had to do okay folding laundry doing the dishes I actually really like working out like you do so I don't need as much motivation but sometimes I still need the for high-intensity days I do need the motivation to do like the the hard cardio so to get on to get on um into working out in that way um so what is Temptation bundling you're pairing an unpleasant activity like folding laundry doing dishes taking out the trash with an immediately rewarding enjoyable activity that can be listening to your favorite podcasts which are of course the huberman lab and a slight change of plans obviously uh it could be listening to your favorite pop music but the really critical piece of the Temptation bundling is that you have to forego the Indulgence of enjoying that rewarding activity in all other spaces of your life so for example um for me I feel like a good pop song I have like 25 really good listens and then it kind of becomes old hat so just like you know the excitement of the song wears wears off a bit so there have been times where I'll be like cooking with my husband and he's like hey why don't we play uh you know you love Casey musr why don't we play that album and I'm like no no no no that's an album I can only listen to when I'm like lifting weights maintain the potency you have to maintain the potency right you don't allow yourself to get the joy edification of the hubman lab when you're not taking a walk and getting exposure to that morning sunlight and you know it's such a simple strategy when you think about it but I have found myself looking forward to really annoying tasks that I have to get done because I know I'm going to get get the enjoyment of something really fun that accompanies it fantastic is it important that the thing that one enjoys be done simultaneously yeah so folding laundry while watching the Netflix thing or um listening to a particular piece of music yeah you want them to coexist because then again you get that immediately or most of the time the things that we lament doing have really positive long-term outcomes right if I'm you know in the habit of keeping my house clean there's long-term benefits if I'm the habit of exercising or eating healthfully there's long-term benefits but I don't often feel the rewards in real time so what you're trying to do is give yourself that Rush of joy and excitement that accompanies the immediately rewarding activity so that in your mind even just like neurally the two things are coexisting I love it because it has such firm grounding in the neurobiology of reward and aversion and how to overcome aversion um there's deep Neuroscience around this but I've never heard it presented that way so yeah um thank you for those incredibly clear and actionable uh tools for motivation because so many people struggle with that yeah and I hear that all the time and I think you know you talked about aversion and actually this is really important so when we think about returning to our goals which is often the hard thing so you do it on a Monday and you have that same goal on a Tuesday and then on a Wednesday on a Thursday and by Thursday you're kind of like oh my God it was so hard the first few days do I really want to go back and do that do the same workout on a Thursday um what's really helpful here to avoid some of that aversion is to be mindful of the um the way in which our minds process memories so when we reflect back on how much we enjoyed or didn't enjoy an experience we don't give equal weight to every moment each moment doesn't get uniform weight instead we tend to um give more weight to What's called the peak of the experience so the experience that was most emotionally intense the part of the experience that was the most emotionally intense and the end of the experience so this is a this is work done by um Nobel Laur at Conan uh d Conan and and his collaborator OS tersi so the peak end rule is what this is called so you put a lot of weight on again that really emotionally intense moment of the experience and the end now researchers have studied this in the context of lots of unpleasant activities so in some studies people are are forced to plunge you know submerge their hands in like ice cold water or they looked at colonoscopies for example and how unpleasant those are and uh what they found is that this is so interesting so okay I'm nerding out a little bit because I just like think that this field is so cool okay so just nerding out isn't just tolerated it is encouraged on this podcast I'm having a moment with cognitive science um but this is such cool research because what these researchers did it's so clever if you elongate the unpleasant experience by a couple minutes let's say so the hands in freezing cold ice water or the colonoscopy but you make those last few minutes of the unpleasant experience slightly less un Pleasant then the end of the experience would otherwise have been right had you just ended the colonoscopy procedure as planned had you just taken um the hands right out of the ice bucket by for example increasing the temperature of the water by a degree or use your imaginations whatever the equ how you make it colonos be less there there are mechanisms by which the pain can be less Physicians everywhere know them but we but we are we are oblivious to them anyway you guys could do the mental work of figuring out what the on Google on Google um what they find is that people look back on the experience more favorably they have a more positive impression of the experience now again this is what's so miraculous about this finding the overall duration of the unpleasant experience has been extended there are more minutes of overall suffering right but the last few minutes are less bad than they would have been otherwise and so people are they they VI The Experience more favor in the case of the colonoscopies they were actually more likely to return for followup visits for for their annual checkups um and so what does this mean in daily life well what it can mean is let's say you're like literally killing yourself at the gym okay you have the hardest workout that you've ever had tack on a few minutes to the end of the workout that are still unpleasant so you're still coding coding them as being part of the unpleasant workingout experience but are a little bit less intense and less painful than the workout and would have been otherwise you might be more likely to return and actually do the the hard workout can we also say if somebody really enjoys their training that the opposite would be effective as well that perhaps if they really want to push it hard at the end because that's the Sensation that they particularly enjoy that that could serve presumably the memory systems and the reward systems of the brain such that they are more likely to return to the workout again absolutely you raised a fantastic point which is when we talk about enjoyment in these contexts it is all subjective so I actually kind of love the feeling like I'm going to die because my heart is is erasing so I mean for whatever reason I'm just wired to love exercise right and um I love a hard strength training workout right and so for me what enjoyment might look like at the end is like really really really intense right that might be what brings me back but in other domains absolutely not like the colonoscopy situation I do not want that to be an unpleasant experience and so there are lots of other domains in life where if you just tack on a few of the few minutes onto something that's really tedious or really hard or really painful it can make you more likely to commit to it later but it's an excellent point in all of these studies it you have to consider who the person is and what their natural psychology is like and for everyone listening you want to tailor these recommendations to who you are as a person well there are certain life demands that I find incredibly aversive so I'm going to use this approach for those I'm also going to use them in the context of things I really enjoy because um if one has the opportunity I believe to further rein en Force the things that bring us joy why why wouldn't we absolutely U fantastic recommendations so I could ask you a thousand more questions and my hope is that you'll come back so that I can ask those thousand plus more questions I have to say it is exceedingly rare that I talk to somebody either on the podcast or elsewhere frankly in my life that has such a incredibly wide breadth of knowledge and yet has so much depth of knowledge as well it's clear that your many experiences through music and cognitive science podcasting and by the way we're going to um provide links to your podcast in the show note caption so that people can hear more from you and as they should and also your work in policy I mean you've put yourself in a lot of different domains and I think that itself is inspiring and um whether or not it's by way of curiosity human connection uh or both presumably it's both and many other things as well um I know I speak on behalf of many many people I just say you know thank you so much for doing the work that you do for continuing along these Pursuits I'm excited to hear where it might evolve in the future still um and frankly just for being you because it's clear that uh Your Enthusiasm your curiosity and your generosity with useful information is is immense so thank you ever so much well that's it's so gracious and kind of you to say Andrew and um these these conversations like the one we just had I mean there it's why I do the work it's so much fun and so interesting and you've given me so much food for thought it really was a conversation not an interview and that's such a gift and so I just feel gratitude that I can share um you know my body of work and and all the insights I've learned along the way with with your listeners and I really hope it's helpful to them it certainly is and it's been an honor to have you here so let's do it again yes let's do it again thanks so much thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion about identity and goals and motivation with Dr Maya Shankar if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube 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content of the hubman Lab podcast again it's hubman lab on all social media platforms thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Maya Shankar and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]