Dr. Kentaro Fujita

And you see this all the time.

I do Peloton, and you see the Peloton instructor say, like, if you don't want to see the leaderboard, get rid of it.

For some other people, it's more about being on the bike with other people and staying with the group, not being in front of the group, but staying with the group is what fuels them to do things that they didn't think they could do before.

Again, just taking the idea of the self-control toolbox really seriously, different strategies are going to work differently for different people.

And so I think it's really important to explore.

not just explore different strategies, but to really explore yourself, to really say, like, what really does motivate you?

I'm not sure that we always do know what really motivates us.

I think a lot of times we kind of discover what our motivations are by saying, oh, I like this and I don't like this, but it's only through exposure.

So to go and explore and figure out what makes you tick

and then to exploit and use those in your strategies.

And again, the constellation of tools that works for me may not work for other people.

I'm going to have a two-part answer, so it might be a little bit long-winded.

I hope you remember both parts.

So the first part is that generally speaking, psychology has tended to emphasize abstinence or consistency in self-control over the alternative, which is moderation.

So we have a lot of self-control theoretical models which stress the importance of patterns over isolated acts.

Once you have a pattern of behavior in place, it carries a special...

hold over you that a non-pattern does not.

So let me give you an example.

So I have an Apple Watch and it tells me if I've closed my ring for the day.

And there was a point in time where that number was some huge number because I had managed to be consistent for a really long time.