Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation.
So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if you said, oh, I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet, that doesn't have much magic to it.
But if instead I'm saying things like, I need to do this for my family, I want to look good for my children's wedding photos, or my children are looking at me, or I want to be a good example, or all these other kinds of reasons that you might, these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthier, being fitter, or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that increases the odds that people will avoid the cake.
And we think it's because it's giving people meaning. These are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kentaro Fujita, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and an expert in the science of self-control and motivation.
If you're somebody who has ever struggled with procrastination, sticking to a goal, or coming up with the goals for your life, today's episode is for you.
We start off today's discussion talking about the famous two marshmallow experiment, the one where they placed kids in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they delayed gratification for that marshmallow, meaning they didn't eat it, they would then get two marshmallows.
Those experiments received a lot of attention in that they were supposed to predict whether people would be successful later in life. We talk about the criticism of those experiments, but also how some of those conclusions were valid, and more importantly, how people of any age, including you, can build mental resilience and your ability to experience deferred gratification toward your goals.
We also talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. These are topics that are very misunderstood out there, but Dr. Fujita clarifies that when we receive rewards for something we are naturally inclined to do, meaning that we love, it does not reduce our motivation to do that thing. And this is an important point.
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Chapter 2: What are the criticisms of the marshmallow experiment?
I mean, or neuroscience. You know, I think it's important for everyone to know that the moment that there's sort of a theory put forth, like growth mindset, or for the developmental neurobiologists, the idea that all neurons in the cortex migrate radially, like... Two, five years later, someone's going to find an exception to that.
And then the whole thing seems to crumble, but then it sort of comes back where the answer is both. In terms of the marshmallow experiment, I've heard a lot of criticism. It wasn't as predictive as we thought. Maybe the experimenters were sort of biasing the data collection. What are the valid criticisms in your view? And what are the criticisms of the criticisms in your view?
So as I mentioned, the marshmallows experiments or marshmallow tests, they have to be set up right. And like a lot of other psychology experiments, I think the psychologists kind of intuitively understood what it took to get it right, but were not very good at articulating those for others to follow in kind of a recipe book.
The most famous criticism or the one that got the most press recently is that there was a very large data set of children outcomes in which they completed the marshmallow test at four years old. and then a bunch of different life outcomes at adolescence. And so they basically wanted to see whether they could replicate the marshmallow test. And in principle, they should have.
And they did and they did not. So if you looked at the simple correlation between did delay time predict outcomes like academic achievement and problematic behavior, the answer was yes, it seemed to replicate.
But then the researchers controlled for things like social economic status, which was one of the criticisms of the original Stanford studies, because Stanford children, or at least the children that were going to the Stanford University daycare where these experiments were being conducted, were not your average American family, mostly well-to-do. And this matters.
And so when the researchers, they had like 30 or 40 other covariate variables that they were controlling for. When they control for all these other variables, children's delay of gratification was no longer predicting these outcomes it was supposed to. And so this paper got a lot of attention for basically saying, look, the marshmallow tests are bunk.
Now, this has been controversial because the question is, was that statistical adjustment appropriate? And are we interpreting that statistical adjustment correctly? There have been other experimenters, other researchers who have come along. One of them is named Yuko Munakata and her team. They took the same data set.
And they reanalyzed it with a different set of assumptions, a lot more conservative. So rather than throwing in 30 covariates, they put in theory-driven covariates, ones that made sense from what we know already about research as opposed to like throwing in the kitchen sink.
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Chapter 3: How do intrinsic and extrinsic motivations differ?
So there's still a bit of a debate out there. But I think the main point to take away here, again, is that the way that you set up the marshmallow test is really important. You have to have trust. And the argument about socioeconomic status is that Kids who grow up in high SES environments, they're very stable, they're very predictable.
So when you wait, you are more likely to get the larger later reward. But if you come from a lower SES family where rewards come and go and people, and you know, just because you save now doesn't mean it's gonna pay off later. they're not going to wait. And so it's not as indicative for them.
So all of these things have to be carefully controlled for, and they were part of the original experiments. Again, not really well articulated to the extent that you can create a situation where people do trust that they will get the larger later reward. there does seem to be some predictive ability of this test.
Now, let me just say as a self-control researcher myself, I think people are missing the boat. What is most interesting about the marshmallow test is not whether or not they can predict outcomes later. That's very nice. to convince people that self-control is important.
If I'm applying for federal grant money, for example, that's probably the first sentence that I write, that self-control predicts life outcomes. There have been many, many other ways of testing this hypothesis, so I don't think we need to rely on the marshmallow test to make that point anymore.
The most important thing about the marshmallow test that gets completely overlooked goes back to something you said earlier, Andrew. Is it an innate talent or is it something that we learn? The most important experiments, Walter Mischel and his team were teaching children the strategies of self-control. And when children learned them, their delayability got better.
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Chapter 4: What practical steps can improve self-control?
That is a really, really important lesson because it suggests that self-control isn't something innate. Instead, it's something that we learn over time. Let me just give you an example. So one of the things that he taught children was, is it better to stare at the one marshmallow or close your eyes? Cover it up or close your eyes?
Three-year-old children believe that it's better to stare at it because they think that's how I'm going to motivate myself. Like if I can see what I want, I'm going to be able to wait. I can see the one. I can imagine the second. I can wait longer. Five-year-olds learn that that's not going to work, and they learn to cover it up or close their eyes.
Interestingly, basically you can create a written test or a verbal test where you can ask children, what do you think you should do in order to wait longer? And research shows that children who, well, let me be more careful. Research shows that there are age-related differences. So at three-year-old, they don't know anything, but at five-year-old, they've learned.
And then later on at 13 years old, those children who correctly understand the quote-unquote rules of self-control have less problematic behavior.
So Walter Mischel and his team went to a summer camp for children with behavioral problems, and those that understood the rules, the tricks that work and the tricks that don't work, were less likely to have behavioral problems at that camp than those who did not. Knowledge matters. Self-control can be learned. It can be taught. You can learn by trial and error.
And I think that's really important because it suggests that rather than being something that we're born with, we can get better. We can grow. We can improve over time. And I think this is a really important lesson that often gets overlooked with these studies.
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Chapter 5: How can understanding personal motivation improve self-control?
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.
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Chapter 6: What strategies can help maintain self-control in challenging situations?
just striving for immense consistency in certain things, not trying to fail, but not focusing so much on, on peak performance, but just without fail every single night, I have a particular practice before I go to sleep. And just no matter what I show up to it, if I fall asleep, I get out of bed. There are times I'm like, I'm not like fully focused on this right now. I'm not
I'm having trouble fully focusing on this, but for me, it's really become an experiment in consistency. I think I'm like two years and some change now into it. And so it's tapped into this different part of myself that I'm not so familiar with, which is like not... trying to get the best performance out, right? But that's great when it happens, but it's different.
And earlier we were talking, before we went on mic, we were talking about abstinence versus moderation. And I'm curious what the data show. And when I hear abstinence, obviously it sounds like people trying to avoid certain behaviors, but I think we could flip it the other way too. You know, is it,
Chapter 7: How does the concept of ikigai relate to motivation and fulfillment?
You know, is it always the case that, you know, we have to show up to the thing or, you know, at our best or like yesterday I was supposed to do a HIIT workout and I confess, look, happens to me too, folks. I was like, I was due for a high intensity interval training workout and I was like, things were getting really compressed.
I thought, what would happen if I just did the eight rounds of this on the assault bike? But I didn't go all out. And I'm going to just do the first two, not lazy, but semi-lazy. And I noticed by the third or the fourth, of course, my motivation started to increase. And I was like, oh, this is really cool. It was informative for me because it showed me where the barrier was.
It wasn't necessarily about the effort. It was about the concept. So what's the deal with abstinence versus moderation? When can we tap into this as a useful tool?
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. Let's say it was 500.
I had 500 and I wanted that to keep going. And just knowing that I had that unbroken streak of 500 in and of itself became motivating to me above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts, right?
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Chapter 8: What role does mindfulness play in enhancing self-control?
So these theoretical analyses have suggested that one of the things that helps us maintain self-control is the knowledge of the pattern. The pattern itself has strength over us in a way that doing something once, every once in a while, sporadically does not.
So if you're able to tell yourself, I do this, I've done this every week for, you know, this every Sunday for every week for the last X number of years, that has a special motivational power that perhaps even the same number of things, in the same number of times you've done the activity, if you've done it more sporadically, it doesn't have that power.
Perhaps it could be just because you have the habit, perhaps the habit locks you into place. And it's possible that we have like psychological and cognitive things that help us in place. Others have argued that we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern. Whereas again, the sporadic doesn't have that sort of orderly system, right?
But one of the things that you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors. So when I had the streak going, I was up at the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in just because I wanted to keep the pattern, which was really stupid.
So they can take a life of their own, which in some cases could be good, but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad. So it was this idea that there might be trade-offs associated with abstinence, like drawbacks of abstinence that got my student Feng Lei and I really interested in if there were other alternatives. And the most common alternative is some version of moderation.
So at its extreme, abstinence is doing like never indulging in the temptation or always doing the goal-directed option. And moderation is... generally doing the thing that's good for the goal, but allowing yourself to have the occasional lapse. Now, I want to be clear here, this is not the same thing as failing, because failing or justifying something post hoc,
You're not talking about the pattern of behaviors. You make that decision in the moment and say, well, you know, the cake looks really good. It's sunny out. It's beautiful. I deserve the cake. And you eat it. That's sort of like a justification in the moment. When we're talking moderation, it's more kind of like I have the goal in mind.
And with the goal in mind, I understand that indulging once isn't going to kill that goal, right? So it's not that I don't have the goal in mind and I just want the temptation. I have the goal in mind. I'm integrating it with the indulgence and saying this one instance isn't going to destroy my goal. It's a lot like saying, you know, eating chocolate cake once isn't going to make you fat.
Or eating a salad for lunch one day isn't going to allow you to lose weight. What matters is the sustained behavior over time. But you have choices about that pattern. You can either have it be completely consistent one thing, or you can have cheat days. And so we were really interested in some of the trade-offs. You think about some of the trade-offs.
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