Maya Shankar

speaker

1,518 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 5 Jul

Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.

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The mindbodygreen Podcast · 633: The psychology of uncertainty, growth & hope | Maya Shankar, Ph.D. · 18 Jan 2026 podcast

I mean, this book was such a journey for me, Jason, because I was writing it and interviewing people repeatedly over many years.

So I was witnessing their evolution.

And then simultaneous to that, I was undergoing my own evolution, right?

Going through this whole challenge around parenthood.

And so it was this very transformative process for me.

I think the techniques that have been most useful to me have been, well, it's one thing to generate new possible selves.

It's another thing to actually realize those selves.

And in the book, I outline a bunch of motivational strategies that people can use to actually achieve their goals.

And I basically leverage these techniques each and every day, because if you're trying to be a better version of yourself, if you're trying to change certain habits of mind or to become new versions of you that you just never thought possible, you have to have the mental discipline to actually put in the work.

And I learned a lot from talking to folks through the book, but then also

just from the field of cognitive science and being a cognitive scientist that have helped me actually put those dreams and desires into practice.

This is a pretty easy one to implement and I have used it religiously.

So it's called temptation bundling.

And temptation bundling simply means pairing the hard thing you're trying to do.

So maybe it's go for more runs or do a tough writing session with an immediately rewarding activity.

But importantly, you have to deny yourself access to the immediately rewarding activity in every other context so that it becomes uniquely paired with the hard activity.

So what happens in the mind is that you start unconsciously pairing these two things together so that you look forward to doing the hard thing.

So I'll give you a very, apparently I'm a kid, but when it came to writing my book, I would put a bowl of candy on my desk.

No joke.

I was only allowed to eat from the candy bowl when I was in a deep writing session and I could never have candy outside of that space.

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