Emily Falk

Vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips or balsamic glazed turnips or nutritious green beans or sizzling Szechuan green beans.

And the dish itself is exactly the same.

But when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer term health benefit.

And so what I mean when I say that we can work with our value system is like building on what we talked about before, where people tend to prioritize the immediate or psychologically close or vivid consequences of our choices.

We can focus on what is gratifying, what is rewarding, what is immediately useful about the thing that we want to do.

Exactly.

How do we how do we collaborate with ourselves in order to make the choices that feel good now and feel good later?

So if we think about an exercise example, you know, maybe we try to do something that we think is going to make us as fit as possible.

And we choose something that isn't ultimately that fun or enjoyable and where we have to exercise a lot of willpower to make ourselves do it.

And that's probably not sustainable.

Whereas when we make choices that are really fun and joyful, like maybe I really love to dance.

So going dancing for me doesn't feel like a workout specifically.

It feels like something I would want to do for my mental well-being, even absent the physical benefits.

Or going for a run with my neighbor is a great chance to catch up with her and hear about how her week is going.

So focusing on those kinds of things can make it immediately rewarding as opposed to just focusing on some longer term goal about getting healthier, when in reality, it also has those benefits as well.

I was listening to a podcast called How to Save a Planet where Kendra Pierre-Lewis made this very delightful episode about biking.

And it reminded me that biking doesn't have to be this like sweaty, stressful thing where you're taking your life in your hands, weaving in and out of traffic.

Like the people that Kendra...

What did you do?

Well, I got my bike out of the basement and I biked down my street on a beautiful fall afternoon.