Dr. Kentaro Fujita

It's infusing the moment, as you say, fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love.

Like these are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out.

What you're highlighting is, with your original example, something a little bit different than that, which is fighting fire by taking the positive and turning it into a negative.

And my PhD student, Paul Stillman, and a colleague of his, Caitlin Woolley, they did some experiments in which they had people think about, it's usually when you think about self-control, you think about the short-term or long-term gains.

They instead had people think about the short-term losses of indulging.

So what are some of the things – like think about the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake, right?

And they showed that that kind of served much like you were talking about, the vomit response.

It pushes people away far enough.

They're in the short-term mindset.

They're thinking about short-term things.

The short-term is pulling them in, so they fight that with a short-term repellent.

And they found that that's also very effective for self-control.

So your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say the status quo in self-control research.

But for that reason, I'm super excited because my own work is starting to challenge that idea, as is Paul Stillman and Caitlin Woolies, that we might be able to use the limbic system.

We might be able to use our hot reactions.

We don't have to assume that they're going to be bad or they're going to –

predispose us to indulgence and make us susceptible to indulgence.

But instead, they might be what inspires us and gives us the motivation to do the right thing.

And I think that is really exciting.

I completely agree with you.