Kelly McGonigal on The Willpower Instinct – Talks at Google (Full Transcript)

I’ve been giving a lot of talks this last month and a lot about New Year’s resolutions and I have to say this is the first place I’ve talked where there was apparently a healthy code resolution going on. Is that right? Did I see these signs right? So who’s still keeping their healthy code resolution? Anyone? Good, congratulations you’ve got some willpower.

Why don’t you tell me just to sort of get things rolling, tell me something that has challenged your willpower today? Anyone?

Audience: Getting up on time.

Kelly McGonigal: Getting up on time.

Audience: Washing the dishes.

Kelly McGonigal: Washing the dishes. Okay, so we’ve got two kinds of “I Will-Power” challenges. Something you have to make yourself do even though it’d be a little bit easier to just not do it. Something else? Yeah?

Audience: Doing yoga for back pain.

Kelly McGonigal: Doing yoga for back pain. Well, I’m glad to hear that. Were you at my talk two years ago about yoga for pain? That’s great. Another “I Will” challenge. Something else, yeah?

Audience: [Inaudible]

Kelly McGonigal: Yeah, so an example of “I Won’t” power. There’s all these links you could follow and you could just click and get lost down the link hole and you have to find the ability to resist that temptation. Maybe one or two more? Anything? Back row, any willpower challenges?

Lunch options for today. Have you had your lunch yet? Or you —

Audience: [Inaudible]

Kelly McGonigal: Great, so we make lots of decisions everyday about what to eat and what to do. Okay, well, these are all great examples of willpower challenges and I want to just start with a little definition, my definition of willpower or willpower challenge.

And I define a willpower challenge as something that is basically a competition between two parts of yourself. Neuroscientists are famous for saying that even though we have one brain we actually have two minds and we are completely different people depending on which mind is active or which systems of the brain are more active. So, a willpower challenge is anything where those two versions of yourself have competing goals. So, for example, there may be a part of you that really wants to eat a candy bar for your snack and then there’s a part of you that actually has some longer term goals, you’re thinking health, you’re thinking weight loss, you’re thinking bikini season, whatever, and maybe the banana seems like the better snack.

And, again, both of these choices you might be drawn to by different parts of your mind or two different versions of yourself and one of the things that has really influenced my work with willpower is thinking about it in terms of what’s going on in the brain. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit today — the fact that you could be the very same person but depending on your mindset, depending on your energy, depending on your stress levels, your brain is going to meet this willpower challenge in a different way and you’re going to end up making, one choice today and one choice tomorrow.

So, as mentioned, this book is based on a class that I teach at Stanford called The Science of Willpower, those are our actual students. I’m not sure what I said that was funny but those are actual Science of Willpower students. And I created this course because I was going around trying to teach people how to be more productive, how to improve their health and everywhere I went people said, “Oh, we know we’re supposed to do that stuff already, we just don’t want to do it.”

And there was this really interesting fundamental gap between what people wanted and what they thought they wanted. That is people we’re very identified, you could say, with this version of the self. People felt like deep down that they were the person who wanted the candy bar and this other person who wanted the banana, “Like, who is that? That’s not really me.” And I realized that people didn’t just need to know what is the right thing to do or the healthy thing to do or tips for stress management and productivity, they needed to feel like this person. And they needed to know how to be that person as the default rather than walking around always feeling like they had to resist this core self that only wants immediate gratification or never wants to do anything difficult. Okay, so that’s how the class came about.

So, I thought today, since this is a class based on science, that I would share with you five of my favorite experiments from the class and from the book and I chose experiments that I like because they use tiny interventions, really, really small interventions to shape people’s behavior and they have very large outcomes. I think this is the kind of thing many of us are looking for: one small change we can make, whether it’s to change in how we think or change in the way that we’re approaching the willpower challenge that can have huge payoffs down the road making it easier to do what it is we really deep down want even when it’s sometimes difficult, or part of us doesn’t want.

Okay, let’s start with the first experiment. How many of you guys sometimes feel like this guy? I know at least one of you only had 3 hours of sleep last night. So it turns out that when you’re this version of yourself, every willpower challenge is more difficult. And the first intervention that I want to tell you about is actually a sleep intervention. The main intervention was trying to help people sleep more or sleep better. And it was people who had a very serious willpower challenge, these are people who were recovering from an addiction to drugs. And they were in a substance abuse recovery program. And half of the people in the standard care were assigned to take a mindfulness meditation training that was designed to help them improve their sleep or sleep more.

So the first thing I want you to take a look at on this graph, this is minutes of sleep per night and you’re going to think this is insanely optimistic, I know, but everyone’s starting around 7 hours and we’re going to improve on 7 hours. That probably seems impossible dream.

Okay, so everyone in the group was starting around 7 hours and what the researchers found was that just doing a little bit of meditation every day, breath focus meditation, increased sleep time to just over 8 hours a day and the controlled group had a little bit of deterioration to slightly less than 7 hours of sleep a night. That’s not the interesting finding. I mean, it is nice to know that if you meditate for a few minutes a day you will sleep better and get more sleep. But what’s interesting is how that change in sleep time then made these recovering addicts impervious to relapse, they were stronger against relapse and this is a very high correlation, 0.70, the increase in sleep time predicted resistance to relapse with a correlation of 0.70. Getting one more hour of sleep a night suddenly made it a lot easier for these recovering addicts to resist the temptation of falling off the wagon.

And interestingly, the number, I never know, it’s going to bounce off the screen right? I should point at the screen? You guys are tech experts.

The number of minutes per day that people meditated also predicted resistance to relapse. So there were really two things going on in this intervention. There was getting more sleep and there was also something about the actual practice time and it wasn’t a lot, but it was something like 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day. And both of these things, sleep and meditation, were giving people more willpower for one of the biggest willpower challenges.

So I want us to think together a little bit about why those two small interventions, an hour more sleep or 10 minutes of meditation a day, might actually give us more willpower for any willpower challenge. What you’re looking at here is an image from an FMRI study of what happens to the brain when you are a little bit sleep deprived. And most studies use less than 6 hours of sleep a night as sleep deprived which may seem normal to you but for most of us that’s actually functioning far suboptimal.

What you’re looking at here is a composite of a lot of different people’s brains, some who are sleep deprived and some who are not. And we’re going to slice the brain, so imagine me standing this way and we’re going to have one of those meat slicers and we’re going to slice down the head and just start taking sections off and look down the middle. And so where you see these yellow spots, that’s the front of the brain, right about here or right about here, if that were my brain pointing that way. And yellow means that this area of the brain is under activated when you have less than 6 hours of sleep at night. This area of the brain is unable to do its job as efficiently and the red areas are areas that are more activated, sort of midbrain regions that are associated with basic impulses and instincts.

So when you’re getting less than 6 hours of sleep a night your brain is actually unable to recruit the systems of the brain that you need to be that better version of yourself. This area of the brain, I love this image because it’s like, here’s where the balance is weighed, “Do I want the weight loss or do I want the chocolate bar?” And this area of the brain right here is basically keeping track of your goals and it’s sort of hard job, its heavy lifting it needs to do is to remember long term goals, core values and when it is unable to do that, when it’s under fueled or when it’s under active, your brain thinks all it really wants, all you really want is the chocolate bar or to procrastinate or to follow that link through, or to not bother doing your yoga exercises. And so, in some key way, the ability to remember who you are and what your big goals are is dependent on the ability of this area of the brain to use energy well and sleep deprivation is one of the main things that can get in the way of that. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this small sleep intervention ended up helping people resist relapse to drug addiction because they now had brains that were better fueled to remember their goals to stay clean and sober.

And it’s not just sleep that impacts the physiology of your brain, how well your brain uses energy. There are a couple of other things that seem to really strengthen the ability of the brain’s frontal regions to do what they’re supposed to do, to help you control impulses and find your motivation.

And here are the four things from the research that seem to do it, to make your brain a kind of willpower machine. One is sleep, as I mentioned, and hopefully there’s going to be one thing on this list that you’re not currently doing that you’re willing to do, because you don’t have to do all four.

So getting a little bit more sleep really makes the prefrontal cortex better able to regulate those systems of the brain that direct you towards temptation and immediate gratification. And meditation also — and both meditation and physical exercise have been shown not only to make your brain more efficient at using these self control systems but they actually make these systems bigger and better connected to the regions that they are supposed to be controlling. And, again, it can be a very quick time course to see these benefits.

People who meditate maybe 10 minutes a day, after a couple months their brains look different. These regions are bigger and better connected. People who work out on a regular basis who used to be sedentary, again, studies show that in as little as a couple of months of regular workouts, their prefrontal cortices are bigger and denser and better connected. And so these are two things that you can do that actually train the physiology of your willpower.

And the last thing that the research suggests is what you eat has a very big influence on whether or not your brain is able to be this better version of yourself. There’s something about having big, big spikes in blood sugar levels and then big drops in blood sugar levels that really screws up how the brain uses energy and you need your brain to be like an energy efficient machine if you’re going to be walking around the world in that kind of better-you mindset rather than that kind of basic-impulse-you.

And so, research shows that shifting to eating a more plant based diet actually changes the way the brain functions and has a lot to do with what’s going on with your blood sugar levels. So these are all the things that we sometimes think of as requiring willpower, right? We think, “Okay, I have to sit down and force myself to meditate. I have to work out. I have to say no to the donut and eat something that has fiber in it for breakfast.” But we rarely think about the fact that actually not doing these things may be part of what makes it so difficult to begin and there’s kind of a curve where when we first start it feels like we’re using willpower but everything on this list that takes a little bit of willpower to begin with ends up giving you back far more willpower than they take and not just for these challenges.

It’s not just that exercising makes it easier to exercise, studies show that exercising makes it easier to eat right, to not spend too much money, to stop procrastinating, to pay better attention, all of these things have a kind of global training effect on what you could think of as your willpower muscle.

Was there a question upfront or a comment?

So the question is, why does it say low glycemic and plant based? There’s actually more evidence that a vegan diet does this better than a diet that is low glycemic and includes animal products but I’m not sure that that’s entirely realistic for everyone. So I think you can kind of pick which way you’re willing to go with that. Both low glycemic and plant based help. But if you look at just the physiology of it, there’s more evidence for the plant based diet.

Okay, so let me go on to the next experiment. So the first experiment was just get some more sleep. The second experiment, I want you to think about a recent setback you had or kind of a willpower failure. Maybe it was not eating the healthy thing at lunch, maybe it was not doing your exercise in the morning, maybe it was spending all morning long following links that had nothing to do with your project.

So I want you to think of a recent time when you had some kind of willpower failure. Does anyone need to borrow one of mine? You guys got one? Okay.

So my question for you is do you think that feeling bad about that, presumably feeling maybe a little bit of regret, a little bit of guilt about it, a little bit of self criticism about that, does that help us improve next time? Does that — can that be a real source of future willpower? Raise your hand if you think that feeling bad can actually be a real source of willpower to improve next time. Hands up.

And how many of you think that that feeling bad is actually going to be a further drain on willpower? Yeah, great. Maybe some of you have read that chapter in the book.

So I want to talk now about some of the research that tends to surprise people the most. When I first started teaching this class, this was the research people argued with, like literally I couldn’t get them to be quiet in the classroom because they were so convinced this couldn’t possibly be true.

This is a study looking at whether it’s better to let yourself off the hook for your mistakes in terms of preventing future willpower collapses. And so this particular study, that I’m going to talk about in a little more detail, brought in people who were trying to manage their weight and eat healthy. And they gave them an immediate willpower failure. They showed up for the study and they were forced to eat a donut. And they even had to choose the flavor of donut they were going to eat so they would feel really complicit in this willpower failure. And they had to drink a whole glass of water too, so they’d feel a little bit uncomfortably full.

Okay, so we had everyone, dieters here having now a willpower failure, they just ate this donut and the next part of the study is a taste test where they are given a lot of different types of candy and they’re said, “You know, we want you to evaluate all these candies so please just eat as much as you need to, as much as you want so that you can evaluate these candies.” And, of course, these candies were all pre-weighed so that experimenters could find out exactly how much candy the dieters ate after they had blown their diet with a donut. And in this particular study the researchers had a hypothesis. They thought that the guilt that dieters experience when they fall off their diet actually really undermines future self control.

And so they wanted to create an intervention that would basically get rid of the guilt and shame that people feel when they make a mistake. So in this study, half the dieters were randomly assigned to receive a special “letting themselves off the hook” message. So between the donut eating and the taste test, an experimenter came in and said something very simple, they said, “By the way we’ve realized now that some people in this experiment feel guilty after eating the donut.”  So there was an opportunity for people to recognize they might be feeling guilty.

Second part of the message, “We want you to remember that actually everyone indulges sometimes and we asked you to do it.” So there’s a kind of putting it in a broader perspective and the last part of the message was a simple plea, “Please don’t be too hard on yourself about it.”

Okay, so very simple. You might be feeling guilty, remember everyone does it, don’t be hard on yourself about it and then they went on to the taste test. And what the researchers found was that the women who had been given the self forgiveness message ate less than half as much candy as women who had not been told, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal” which is exactly the opposite of what most people think. Most people think you make a mistake, you have a willpower failure and you start saying nice things to yourself about it but this could only lead to disaster. It would lead to licensing even more indulgence and yet, that’s exactly the opposite of what was found in this study, and not just this study but in a lot of different studies now.

This is one of the, sort of, strongest pieces of theory we have in willpower research right now. That is, the harder you are on yourself when you have a willpower failure, the more likely you are to have the same failure again and the bigger it’s going to be when you do. For example, one study took a look at problem drinkers and had them keep track of how much they were drinking and how bad they felt the morning after.

What they found is the people who were the most self critical and felt the most ashamed or guilty about drinking the night before wanted to drink more immediately when they woke up, and also drank more that night and the next. There was something about the self critical nature — the shame and the guilt that was driving people back to the very thing they felt bad about. The same has been shown for addiction, including quitting smoking. You have that first relapse and the more you beat yourself up about it, the more you now need to be comforted with something, probably the very thing that you’re feeling bad about, because that’s probably why you do it in the first place.

The same has been shown for gambling, the more people feel guilty and self critical about losing money, they more likely they are to borrow money and try to win it back and end up losing more. And even for procrastination, so, you may not have any kind of addictions but even for procrastination, research shows that the harder someone is on themselves for putting something off, the longer they procrastinate the next time. And all this has to do with the basic fact that when we are feeling stressed out and guilty and ashamed, that is a state that puts us into the version of ourselves, the mindset that is much more susceptible to immediate gratification, temptation and anxiety.

It’s basically the biological opposite of what needs to be happening in your brain and body to remember your long term goals and to be that other version of yourself of what we would call the willpower version of yourself. And as soon as you start piling on the guilt and the shame, your brain switches into that other mode in which now everything’s going to be more tempting, including procrastinating or including smoking or drinking.

So I just wanted to give you a sense of what it would be like to give yourself a self compassion message. And as I said, this was a tiny intervention, this donut study. And this is basically all it was. And there are a number of programs now that are teaching people how to write these messages for themselves and literally have them scripted for the moment they fail, for the moment that they procrastinated and they’re late again, or for the moment they had that cigarette when they hadn’t smoked in a week and to be able to whip this message out as a way of not falling down that hole that we often fall into.

So the three steps of this message is, the first is mindfulness of what you’re thinking and feeling. Noticing that you’re feeling guilty or noticing that you’re feeling self doubt or self critical, maybe angry at yourself and to actually allow yourself to see those feelings, because a big reason that people go from feeling guilty to giving in again is that they just want to get rid of that feeling. It’s so kind of overwhelming and they want to distract themselves from it with something that is going to get them into further trouble.

And then the second step is this common humanity. One of the reasons that it is hard to find our motivation and our willpower is we start to feel like there’s something uniquely broken with us. There’s something about who we are that is wrong and weak, and that mindset makes it very difficult to tap back into your motivation or your strength.

And so this message of common humanity is basically saying to yourself, “You know what? This is part of the process of change, this is how things get done. Sometimes we procrastinate. Sometimes we fall off the wagon. Everyone is imperfect.” And to recognize that this is not saying anything about who you are, it’s saying something about the process and what matters is how you respond afterward, not the fact that it happened at all.

And then this last step is encouragement over criticism. And if you were to think about someone you were mentoring, some of you probably have mentees here or interns or you think about a child that you care about or a dear friend, what would you say to them when they had a setback? And to say that to yourself, it might be reminding yourself of your goal. It might be reminding yourself of the big picture rather than the sort of, the micro picture in which you feel like a failure. And to do that rather than the voices we often have in our head that are saying things like, “Why did you do that again? You’re so stupid. You’re never going to change.” And to actually start to talk to yourself a little bit in the second person as if you were a good friend.

And research shows that this particular approach, learning how to talk to yourself in this way is more effective, for example, at quitting smoking than nicotine replacement therapy. That’s how powerful being able to respond to setbacks with self-compassion can be.

I want you to take a look at these circles which go from being totally non-overlapping to extremely overlapping and you’re going to decide which of these sets of circles best represent how you feel about who you are today and who you’re going to be, let’s say, 30 years from now, 30 years in the future, or pick a time period that feels right to you.

Okay. So this is your current self and this is your future self, 30 years from now. This means who you are today is really very different than who you’re going to be 30 years from now. Some overlap but actually a lot of change is going to be happening between now, who knows, and then this last set of circles, this is like, you know what, who I am today is probably who I’m going to be in 30 years, same me.

Okay, so you’re going to pick for yourself. Take another few seconds and think where you are on this graph. Actually, let’s do a kind of rolling wave because I’m actually curious if there’s a trend being here at Google. So just put your hand up when you see your circle highlighted. Who’s over here? Who’s over here? Over here? Okay, over here? Oh you guys are normally distributed, this is great, who’s over here? Who’s over here? And who’s over here? Yeah, pretty good, pretty good. That was great.

Okay. So it turns out where you put yourself on this map has a lot to do with some very important willpower challenges related to health and money and even moral behavior. Don’t feel too bad if you’re at an extreme tail that is not associated with willpower because I’m going to show you some strategies for being able to get to the end that is associated with willpower if you need it.

Okay. So let me start with the first intervention, and this was an intervention that was done here at Stanford University. And this was using undergraduate students who are very young, and it was a virtual reality experiment where undergraduate students came into the laboratory and the researchers had carefully created 3D avatars of the student themselves. So if I came into the laboratory I would be meeting a 3D avatar of myself at retirement age. It was a really great setup in which they’ve got all their virtual reality equipment on, hearing and seeing, and it feels like you are sitting across the table from your future self and it’s set up with cameras in such a way so that if I move my left hand like this, it looks like my future self is also moving their hand. And if I talk, it looks like my future self is talking back.

And in the study, the college students were invited to interview their future selves, to say things like, “Hey future Kelly, what’s going on right now? What’s really important in your life right now?” And then they had to answer the question. And so they would see their — I would see future Kelly describing what’s important in my life at retirement age. And this went on for about an hour, getting to know their future selves.

And the reason that the researchers decided to do this intervention is because they discovered that most of us feel like our future self is a stranger. And all of you who are on that first half of the distribution, sort of you’re thinking about your future self and you don’t really know who that is, they could be really an improvement on this model or it could just be an older version of this model, we don’t know. But what researchers found is that the more you feel like your future self is a stranger, is different than you, the less likely you are to do things to protect that future self’s health and happiness. Because why would you bother saving money for some stranger when you could spend it today on someone you know and love?

So in this particular experiment after they had gotten to know their future self, there was some time elapsed because they didn’t want it to be totally obvious what was going on. There’s some time elapsed and they brought people back and had them divvy up $1,000 in a budgeting task. And they pretended like they were interested in how people made budgeting decisions.

But what they found is that the college students who had met and interacted with their future self ended up allotting more than twice as much money into a retirement account than college students who had not met their future self. College students who had not met their future selves were more likely to want to allot that money to their present expenses or just to some fun splurge. And this research has actually had a lot of impact in the world of retirement savings and banking. I just heard an economist recommend last week that we should be trying to Photoshop pictures of people’s future selves on every mortgage application or credit card application, so people would have to really think about the implications of this.

I mean, you can imagine an HR setting, right, where people are a new employee and they’re asked to make their retirement allocations, well, what if they had to interact with their future self first? New college students coming in to a first job, might make a very big difference in their retirement savings down the line.

Okay. So that was just one — that was the intervention, that was the experiment but I just want to point more broadly to some of the research, looking at that circle graph that I showed you. And it turns out that people who believe that there is more overlap, that they are more closely related to their future self have a lot more willpower for different types of willpower challenges.

So the first thing is they’re less likely to procrastinate in general and less likely to be late. One of my favorite findings from this research is that people who felt like they were less similar to their future self were also more likely to show up late for the experiment or skip it completely, to just blow it off. And that was a kind of interesting finding.

They also are more comfortable – sorry — are more likely to make ethical decisions at work. So people who think that their future self is more different, like a total stranger, they’re actually more likely to feel good about betraying a colleague at work if it helps them advance in their career. They’re more likely to keep money that they found even when they might have an inkling who that money belongs to. And that’s kind of an interesting finding because we could understand retirement, future self, but it seems like this ability to disconnect from the long term consequences of your choices actually primes you to be that more impulsive self even when it doesn’t really have anything to do with your own long term benefits.

And then also, looking at real world outcomes, not just an experiment, but you look at what circle people choose and how much money they have, their assets, their home, their debt, their wealth and people who feel closer to their future self actually have more assets, are more likely to own their home outright, more money in the bank, more retirement savings. So this is a real world finding, not just an experiment.

And they’re also more likely to do things that don’t have a payoff immediately, like flossing and exercising but that would be good to protect their future self.

So with that in mind, one of my favorite willpower boosting strategies that you can do, that doesn’t really take any willpower at all, is to get to know your future self. And, actually here maybe you can do 3D avatars, is that something like, a Google project somewhere? So most people can’t actually interact with their future self in that high tech a way but it seems like there are other ways that work as well. One is to write a letter from your future self to your present self and you can do this in a number of different ways.

One way is just write to your present self about who you are, what you’re doing, where you’re living, what you care about. Or you could even write a more closely defined letter that looks at some challenge you’re dealing with now. Maybe you’re struggling to quit some addiction or spend time with your family or just something that seems like it’s just not working the way you would like it to.

And you could write a letter from your future self thanking your present self for doing it and describing what it was you did and why it mattered. And research suggests that this kind of letter writing from your future self can actually give yourself more willpower. Yes?

Audience: Does this boomerang if you actually have low self esteem now, telling yourself that you’re going to be more like you are now in the future?

Kelly McGonigal: That is probably not the letter you should write. So just for the people who are watching this on the video, the question was, if you feel really bad about yourself now, could this have the opposite effect where you think, “Oh my God, I’m never going to change” and if you’re a loser now, you’re going to always be a loser so the letter might be like, “Dear loser, I’m still a loser. You’re still a loser. Life sucks.” That is not the letter.

Actually, so research suggests it is better to be optimistic in this letter than to be pessimistic. But at the same time — so the key thing about this finding is not so much whether you think you’re going to be exactly the same, but whether you understand that it’s going to be the same person having the future experience. And that, which actually comes to the second point here. And so that’s actually a different thing. It’s not like, are you still going to have all the same problems and all of the same neuroses or have you fixed them? It’s not that kind of same self, different self. It’s — do you understand that, like you know how real pain is right now if I were to come and punch you, how much that would hurt? Do you understand that 30 years from now it’s going to hurt if someone punches you? And that seems to be the thing that people actually have problems with.

When they think about their future selves they don’t have access to those emotions, they don’t understand that that future happiness is going to be as real and as important. So when you’re doing this kind of letter writing or doing this future self imagination, the actual critical part is getting to feel like that future self is real and that it is in some way you. That you are going to be the one having this experience. And it’s not so much whether you think you’re going to be the identical person still listening to the same music you listened to in 1983 or not like that.

Okay. So here’s the second future self exercise which kind of gets to that. And I call this going back to the future. And this is the exercise of just imagining yourself in the future. Studies show that just imagining yourself grocery shopping in the future, okay, not anything even relevant to your goals but just grocery shopping, then ends up helping people make better decisions in the present moment that’s going to lead to pay off in the future, because you can actually imagine it. And you can imagine what would be on the shelf and you know what it feels like to be pushing a shopping cart and there’s something about making the future real that gives us more willpower kind of independent of the content, what you’re thinking about.

But there’s also studies showing that you can imagine specific futures related to your willpower challenge and both good sort of future realities and negative future realities can be very motivating. So in one study they had people who wanted to improve their health, to imagine the consequences of not making a change, like really vividly, what’s that going to be like? What’s it going to feel like 10 years from now if you don’t make this change?

And they had another group thinking about the positive consequences of making the change, and what would that be like and how are you going to feel? And both of those sort of future thinking ended up increasing the good health behavior in the present. So you guys have seen Back to the Future Part II, right? You guys have seen Back to the Future Part II? You know he goes into the future and there’s like a really bad future and a really good future. Okay, at some point that reference is not going to work anymore.

Okay. So we got two more interventions and this next intervention I just want to take a poll. So we’re talking about visualizing things. If you had to guess which would be more helpful for finding your willpower, do you think it’s more helpful to imagine or visualize yourself failing or is it more helpful to visualize and imagine yourself succeeding? Raise your hand if you think imaging failure is going to be more helpful. Raise your hand if you think imagining success. You guys are such typical Americans.

Okay. That’s what everyone thinks. So, actually it turns out imagining failure is way more helpful than imagining success. Not that imagining success is always bad but imagining failure is better. So let me tell you about this one intervention and then some of the theory a little bit more broadly.

In this particular study, they took women from young adult to middle age, a little bit older adult, all of whom were not exercising at all and all of whom had the goal to exercise. And some of those women were randomly assigned to your typical, it’s good to exercise, here’s why you should exercise. Now think about your goal and imagine yourself doing it, very typical.

And the other half were randomly assigned to what they called an obstacle condition, where they had to imagine themselves failing. They had to ask themselves, “When are you going to not exercise? What is the obstacle going to be? When is it going to happen? What are you going to do if that happens?” And they had people write about that every single day. They had to write out, when are you going to not exercise? What are you going to say to yourself that allows you not to exercise? When’s it going to happen? How’s it going to happen and what are you going to do when you start to recognize that stuff happening?

And so the women were becoming kind of detectives of their own failure and every day they revised what they were writing based on what they noticed. “I didn’t exercise because I told myself I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later, now it’s time to go to sleep.”

Or, “I didn’t do it because I got so busy at work, and then I didn’t have my sneakers, so I didn’t do it.” And they became very clear about how they failed and they were able to predict future failures from that.

Here’s what the results were. It had an immediate effect of doubling the amount of time they were exercising. So the very first week they started to predict their failures in this way, they doubled to 102 minutes of exercise a week. And that’s getting pretty close to the amount of exercise that you need to have very serious health benefits, both mental health and physical health.

There was a much smaller improvement here in the group of women who were given the standard, “You want to exercise. Exercise is great, let’s do it!” And 16 weeks, or 4 months after that study, the women who had been predicting their failure had maintained and were exercising twice as much as the women who were in the basic “let’s exercise, here’s why it’s good”. This is the thing that always blows people’s minds.

There is a lot of studies showing that tracking your success leads people to slack off in the long run but nobody believes it. So you probably heard how important it is to keep track of your success, because we feel really good when we’re able to write down that we did something, right? You know you feel something really good and you’re like, “Yes! Check it off!”

Some people make to do lists just so they can check stuff off. And we know how good we feel when we’re able to write down and record our successes and we mistake that feeling good as motivation to do more. But a number of studies show that when people are reminded of their success and take note of their progress they then are much more likely to do something inconsistent with their goal. So if you are somebody — for example, there’s studies of dieters where people come in and the experimenter says, “By the way, we wanted to let you know how much progress you’ve made on losing weight. You’re this close to your goal, you’ve been doing great.” And on the way out of the lab, “Would you like a chocolate bar?” And women are much more likely to take the chocolate bar if they were reminded of their success.

The same study has been shown for procrastination. You have people that keep track and feel good about the progress that they’ve made on a task and they’re much more likely to choose not to work on it. And this is the goal switching hypothesis. The idea is that any willpower challenge is a competition between these two versions of yourself and they’re both you. And as soon as your mind realizes that one of you is satisfied because you made some progress, the other goal becomes primed in your brain and it becomes more appealing.

So I don’t want to say don’t keep track of your success because I think, what I really want to encourage you to do is both. But let me point to a couple other ideas along this line.

Okay. So about why pessimism can be so helpful because it’s profoundly un-American to be pessimistic when you have a goal. And I just want to encourage you to think about using pessimism as actually a source of willpower. So there’s this kind of finding floating around that people who are most optimistic about their ability to make a difficult change, give up sooner and are most likely to fail, and it tends to be because they are shocked by their setbacks.

So one of the ways that predicting failure can be helpful is that when it happens it’s not like some shock to your system where you can’t believe it happened, it must say something bad about who you are or about your likelihood of success in the future.

There’s also interesting studies, as I mentioned that optimism – well, this is both progress and optimism, but studies show that if you have people making optimistic predictions about what they’re going to do, they’re more likely to then not do it today.

So people who intend to exercise tomorrow are more likely to eat something unhealthy today and skip the gym. Even just having people think about what they’re going to do in their future makes people more likely to make a different choice today. So just knowing that you’re going to be just as tempted tomorrow, you’re going to be just as busy tomorrow, just as stressed out tomorrow turns out to be an important source of willpower today.

Okay. And then this, I just had to throw this in because I think this is one of the funniest findings in the willpower research. That 75% of corporations that are investigated by the SEC for fraud can be tracked back to initial optimism that then people were unwilling to let go of. They were so optimistic about profit, their profit projections, that when they met their first setback they didn’t know what to do and they started to fudge the numbers. And this is something that we all do with our own goals when we set very high ideals and then refuse to adjust our expectations based on reality.

This is something I run into a lot at Stanford. People say they want to make big change, or they have a big goal in mind and they aren’t the least bit interested in setting a small goal or a baby step, because how is that going to ever get me where I want? So let’s go big or go home. And then when they start to run into problems with that huge level of success, they kind of hang on to the ideal and yet end up doing nothing. So you can think of yourself as your own little corporation with goals, and if you find yourself hitting setbacks, one of the most important things you can do is adjust your expectations and take a really serious look at the process of how failure is working.

So here is an example from that exercise study, that’s a little broadened out. And this is basically the writing exercise those women were doing, that doubled the amount of time they were putting into their goal. And they were supposed to do this writing exercise every day.

The first is to identify your goal and what would be a really positive outcome of that? So you got to get your motivation on board, right? And then what are you going to do to take it? So you set some clearly defined steps and then you spend some time thinking about how is this not going to happen. When and where and why? Is there anything you can do in advance to prevent that failure? And when failure happens, what are you going to do about it? And you don’t have to actually make it 7 full steps like this but it’s a very basic exercise that you can do for any goal. I think of it as being like stress testing a goal.

You have a goal, you say you’re going to do something. Well, now put it to the test and find out how it’s going to break, how it’s going to fail.

Okay, last intervention. Let’s all do it together unless you have health problems and, I don’t want anyone to pass out or have a stroke. So if you are willing to take this challenge, we’re just going to hold our breath for 15 seconds. Who’s got a second hand? Great! You’re going to time us.

Okay, only if you want to do this. Take a deep breath in. Look at your second hand, go ahead and take a deep breath out, now exhale, exhale, exhale it out, stop breathing. Time us. Remember you can breathe anytime you want to if you need to. I just want you to notice how this feels. 3, 2, 1 breathe. Good, okay.

So holding your breath obviously that’s a little bit of a willpower challenge. Some of you maybe need to hold your breath for two minutes to feel it but I did not want anyone passing out.

So would you believe that this ability to hold your breath is one of the best predictors of people’s ability to succeed at difficult goals? It’s kind of interesting. Psychologists call this distress tolerance. The ability to stay put when things get uncomfortable. So I want to tell you now about a small intervention that teaches people how to sort of hold their breath but not exactly, how to basically ride out physical discomfort that gets in the way of making a difficult change. I’m going to tell you about two different studies that are basically using the same technique. So you can kind of pick your willpower challenge here.

The first I call the torture chamber and this was a study of smokers who wanted to quit but had been unable to. And the researches asked the smokers to abstain from smoking for 24 hours, sort of a first challenge and then to come into the laboratory with a fresh unopened pack of their favorite brand of cigarettes. So all the smokers show up, they’ve got their pack, they are desperate for a smoke, and they even like carbon monoxide tested them to make sure they hadn’t smoked, so they had all — they were ready for a cigarette. They all get, they seated at a long table and asked to put away all distractions except for a lighter or a match and their cigarettes.

So you’ve got a bunch of smokers, now they’re ready. And then the experimenter is about to begin the process of allowing them to smoke and she says, actually through a microphone like that, you hear this voice that says, “Take out your pack of cigarettes”

And everyone does, they’re all excited, “Woo hoo!”

“Stop!”

Okay. They have to wait 2 minutes now and they’re not allowed to do anything except look at their pack of cigarettes.

“Pull off the cellophane!”

“Okay, great, whew!”

“Stop!”

Two minutes they have to wait.

“Pack it” — Oh, there was pack, I don’t smoke so I forget some of these steps, they had to pack the pack, too and they got the cellophane open, okay.

“Take out a cigarette”

“Finally!”

“Stop!”

They have to wait 2 minutes and this goes on and every two minutes they’re writing down how intense their cravings are and how much they want to smoke but other than that they’re not allowed to do anything.

“Take a cigarette out”

“Stop!”

Two minutes.

“Look at the cigarette”

“Stop!”

Two minutes.

“Smell the cigarette.”

“Stop!”

Two minutes.

“Put the cigarette in your mouth”

“Stop!”

Two minutes.

“Take out a lighter, look at it.”

“Stop!”

Two minutes.

This went on for over an hour. Nobody was actually allowed to light the cigarette, okay.

So here’s what — I didn’t tell you what the actual intervention was yet. Half of them before this happened had been taught a technique called surfing the urge in which you learn to pay attention to the physical discomfort of wanting something, you give it your full attention and you trust that you can tolerate those physical sensations. And if you just wait with patience they will go away. That any craving, any emotion will eventually pass if you can just breathe and wait, wait it out. But you don’t have to act on every impulse or emotion.

So that’s the technique they were taught, they were surfing the urge. They were imagining those cravings as a wave that they were getting on, and they were just going to breathe, and they knew that would eventually end just like a wave.

Before I tell you the result of this study, let me just give you the food one. The food one is a little bit different.

They took people who have had problems with self control around food, especially sweets, gave them a clear container of Hershey’s Kisses, a transparent container and they had to carry that box of Hershey’s Kisses around with them for 48 hours and were not allowed to eat a single one. And they were all carefully marked, little pin scratch so that the researchers would know if they ate them and restocked it which would not be cool.

And they were taught the same technique about how to handle cravings. How to surf the urge, allow yourself to feel the craving and yet remember you don’t need to act on it and the craving will go away eventually.

Okay, so the results. In this study, the smokers who had been taught how to surf the urge in that one hour torture test, they ended up reducing their cigarette smoke by 40% in the very next week, even though the researchers had not asked them to. The controlled group did not reduce their cigarettes at all. And interestingly the people who would learn to surf the urge, there was now no longer a connection between psychological stress and smoking which is actually — that’s the main connection for a lot of people who are trying to quit, they’re stressed out, they’re anxious and so they need a cigarette. And in this particular group with this intervention, it cut that link between stress and giving in probably because they had a tool for dealing with difficult feelings and emotions.

In this study, the people who had trouble with self control around food, if they were taught to surf the urge, zero had a single Hershey’s Kiss over the entire 48 hours whereas those who had been given other strategies, including distraction, ended up much more likely to give in and also really stressed out about it. So these are just two different examples of how surfing the urge can give us a lot of willpower for the things where we need willpower.

A lot of times I hear people talk about how important it is to build good habits but the reality is sometimes you need strength to do something difficult, and there’s no habit in the world that’s going to make you not want a cigarette when you see it or want a donut when you see it, or maybe you want to avoid something because you’re anxious.

There’s a real impulse and a real feeling that you need to deal with. And this power of acceptance seems to be the best strategy for dealing with these difficult emotions, these difficult thoughts and these difficult cravings. And any attempt to kind of push them away or get rid of them backfires but being able to ride them out and imagine them as passing experiences that you don’t need to act on has been shown to help a lot of different willpower challenges, including the kind of anxiety that leads us to not do things we know we should do.

Intrusive thoughts, you know, that’s a real willpower challenge. Sometimes our mind goes places we don’t want it to go, to memories or to things we’re imagining, or to negative thoughts about ourselves and others. And research shows you can apply the same technique to a negative thought without having to act on it. It’s been shown to improve weight loss. This technique of learning how to accept your own cravings, tripled the long term one year weight loss success rate among people who were in a really standard weight loss program. It helped substance abuse and it even helps people with schizophrenia.

I mean, talk about a willpower challenge when you have voices in your own head that you cannot escape and you’re trying desperately to have some kind of normal life and relationship with the world when you’ve got these voices in your head that are telling you to do something or not to do something. And studies show that schizophrenics who learn to accept their own intrusive thoughts and hallucinations and delusions, like a craving, that’s not real and you don’t need to act on it but it’s going to be there and eventually it will pass, they actually end up being more likely to be out of the hospital, be de-hospitalized and function normally compared to people who have not been taught this technique.

Okay. So if you want to apply this technique to any willpower challenge yourself, here’s what that small intervention would look like for yourself. Here’s what people were taught in both of those studies. And the first is this mindfulness to allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling or think what you’re thinking, and to actually attend to the experience rather than immediately try to escape it.

So if you’re hungry, actually notice like, what does hunger feel like in my body? Or if you’re anxious, what does anxiety feel like in my body right now? And then to actually just breathe, breathe it out, use the breath as a source of stability. You know what you’re feeling, take a few breaths and then broaden your attention out and look for the first opportunity to recommit to your goal. That’s what they were taught in both the smoking study and in the Hershey’s Kiss study and it’s a technique that you can practice, it takes like 30 seconds and it can help with any sort of willpower challenge.

Okay. So just to wrap up, 5 willpower rules and I would just invite you to think if you heard anything today that might be relevant to your willpower challenge, to give yourself this short dose, this small dose intervention and see how it works because that’s actually the nature of the class and the nature of the book. It’s basically to become a willpower scientist yourself, to get some ideas from the research and then test it out. I mean, you’ve got a hypothesis you can see if it works or not, collect your own data.

So those five strategies — one is to train your willpower physiology by meditating, by sleeping, by exercising or by eating a diet that’s going to sustain your energy.

Forgive yourself the next time you have a willpower setback.

Make friends with your future self, kind of think about the future in a way that feels real.

Predict your failure even though it’s really nice to imagine success, really get interested in the process of how you fail.

And then, finally, think about surfing the urge when you are facing temptation.

And thank you, boy you guys, you waited it out, you showed a lot of willpower sticking around here.

 

Related Posts

• Transcript of Tough Luck: Accepting Life’s Unfairness Will Set You Free – Holly Matthews
• Transcript of How To Get Through Hard Times: Jason Redman
• Transcript of An Ethicist’s Guide to Living a Good Life – Ira Bedzow
• Transcript of Resilience: How to Emerge From Your Tragedies Stronger – Sydney Cummings
• Transcript of Confessions of An Accidental Killer: Gregg Ward