Dr. Kentaro Fujita

But what's also really frustrating about self-control is as that moment passes and you're looking back at it sometime in the future, right?

So now the data start has come and gone and now you're looking back on it, you have distance again and the clarity comes back and you're like, why didn't I do what I was supposed to do?

So again, one of the frustrating things about self-control is that it's distance dependent.

The right thing to do is really clear when it's far away, but when it's close, it's hard to figure out what I should be doing.

And research that I've done suggests that this exists in part because our minds shift in how we think about the event.

When the event is in the distant future, it's more abstract.

It's distant future or it's happening to somebody else or it's hypothetical.

When it's far away from me, it's not imminent.

I'm more likely to think about it in terms of desirability, why I'm doing it, right?

It's going to be much more abstract.

But when that future becomes now, my mindset changes and I'm thinking now much more about feasibility, how am I going to do it, and much more concretely about what I have to do.

The problem is a lot of these things that are hard, the whys are really positive, but the hows are really negative because they're hard.

Just at the point where I have to do the hard thing is when I'm thinking about why it's so hard the most.

And then that's why I say I want to do it.

And then again time passes, distance passes, it gets farther away from me and I'm looking back and I'd be like, but that was something I really, really want to do because now I'm thinking about it in terms of why again instead of how.

So, in order to try to overcome that, in my lab we've conducted experiments in which we have people think about

We bring them in and we have them think about their goals and why they're pursuing their goals or how they're going to pursue those goals.

We then give them a self-control conflict that's unrelated to those goals.

So they're just thinking generally about why or generally about how.

So this is, again, the frame of mind that we generally have when things are far away or the generally frame of mind when they're close.