The Willpower Instinct | Kelly McGonigal | Talks at Google

Presenter: I'm delighted to welcome Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of a new book, "The Willpower Instinct," to the Googleplex. So in life we ​​sometimes struggle with choices and achieving goals and often believe that sheer force of will will get us there. But much of what we believe and know about

willpower

could actually be wrong, or that's what Kelly discovered while working with students at Stanford University, where he teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine and at the Stanford Center for Compassion. So he created a course called Science of Willpower at the Stanford School of Continuing Studies and it became one of the most popular courses at the school and became a highly successful blog on Psychology Today and now a book that you can get. at the end of this talk.

And Kelly said that if she has her way, it will soon be an action figure and also an action movie. Kelly McGonigal: Willpower! Host: Today Kelly will talk about how we can achieve the variety of goals that she often struggles to achieve. It can be a healthier lifestyle, it can be a life of greater productivity, or sometimes it can be something as simple as having waited 6 months to finally, finally, finally clean out your closet. So please help me welcome Kelly McGonigal. Kelly McGonigal: Thank you. Hello. I've been giving a lot of

talks

this last month and a lot about New Year's resolutions and I have to say that this is the first place I've spoken where there appears to be healthy code resolution.

Alright? Did I see these signs correctly? So who is still maintaining the healthy resolution of their code? Someone? Well, congratulations, you have some

willpower

. Um, why don't you tell me to get things going? Tell me something that challenged your willpower today, anyone. audience member: Get up on time. Kelly McGonigal: Get up on time. audience member: Wash the dishes. Kelly McGonigal: Wash the dishes. Okay, so we have two types of “I, Willpower” challenges. Something you have to force yourself to do although it would be a little easier to just not do it. Anything else? Yeah? audience member: Doing yoga for back pain.

Kelly McGonigal: Doing yoga for back pain, well, I'm glad to hear that. Are we at my talk from two years ago about yoga for pain? Brilliant. Another "I'll do it" challenge. Something else, yes? audience member: Kelly McGonigal: Yeah, it's an example of the power of "I won't." There are all these links that you can follow and you can just click and get lost in the link hole and you have to find the ability to resist that temptation. Maybe one or two more? Kelly McGonigal? Anything? Back row, any willpower challenges? Kelly McGonigal: Lunch options for today. And had lunch? audience member: Kelly McGonigal: So audience member: Kelly McGonigal: Great, we make a lot of decisions every day about what to eat and what to do.

Well, these are all great examples of willpower challenges and I just want to 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 although we have only one brain, we actually have two minds and are completely different people depending on which mind is active or which brain systems are most active. So a willpower challenge is anything where those two versions of yourself have opposite goals. So, for example, there may be a part of you that really wants to snack on a chocolate bar and then there's a part of you that actually has longer-term goals: you're thinking about health, you're thinking about loss of health. weight. , you're thinking about bikini season, whatever, and maybe banana seems like the best snack.

And again, you may be drawn to both options 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 what is happening in the world. brain. And today we're going to talk a little bit about that, the fact that you could be the same person but depending on your mindset, your energy, your stress levels, your brain will face this willpower challenge in a different way and you'll end up making, you know, one choice today and another tomorrow.

So, as mentioned, this book is based on a class I teach at Stanford called "The Science of Willpower." Those are our real students. I'm not sure what I said was funny, but those are real students of the Science of Willpower. 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 were like, "Oh, we know we're supposed to do that already, we're just we do not do it". I don't want to do it." And there was a really interesting fundamental gap between what people wanted and what they thought they wanted.

But because people were very identified, you could say, with this version of the self. People felt that deep down They were the person who wanted the chocolate bar and this other person who wanted the banana, “Who is that? That's not really me." I realized that people not only needed to know what's right or what's healthy or tips for stress management or productivity, but they needed to feel like this person. And they needed to know how to be that person by default instead of walking around always feeling like they had to resist this core self that just wants immediate gratification or never wants to do anything difficult.

Well, that's how the class came about. What's with my clicker There? come on, okay, cool. So today I thought, since this is a science-based class, 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 small, very, interventions. very small interventions to shape people's behavior and they have very important results. I think this is the type of thing that many of us are looking for, a small change that we can make, whether it is a change in our thinking or a change in the way we approach the willpower challenge that can have huge benefits in the future.

The path makes it easier to do what we really want deep down, even when sometimes it's hard or a part of us doesn't want to. Well, let's start with the first experiment. How many of you sometimes feel like this guy? I know at least one of you only got 3 hours of sleep last night. It turns out that when you are this version of yourself, every willpower challenge is harder. And the first intervention I want to talk to you about is actually a sleep intervention. The main intervention attempted to help people sleep more or better. And it was that people had a very serious challenge in their willpower, they are people who are recovering from a drug addiction.

And they were in a substance abuse recovery program. And half of the people in standard care were assigned mindfulness meditation training designed to help them improve their sleep or get more sleep. So the first thing I want you to look at on this graph is the minutes of sleep per night and you'll think that's incredibly optimistic, I know, but we're all starting at around 7 hours and we're going to get better. 7 hours. It probably seems like a pipe dream. Okay, so everyone in the group started around 7 hours and what the researchers found was that simply doing a little bit of meditation every day, breathing focused meditation, increased sleep time to just over 8 hours a day and the control group got a little more than 7 hours of sleep. a bit of deterioration to just under 7 hours of sleep a night.

That's not the interesting finding. I mean, it's good to know that if you meditate a few minutes a day you will sleep better and you will sleep longer. So what's interesting is that the change in sleep time made these recovering addicts resistant to relapse, they were stronger against relapse and this is a very high correlation, 0.70; increased sleep time predicted resistance to relapse with a correlation of 0.70. Sleeping an extra hour a night suddenly made it much easier for these recovering addicts to resist the temptation to fall off the wagon. And interestingly enough, the number, I never know where, will bounce off the screen, right?

Should I point it at the screen? Kelly McGonigal: You guys are tech experts. The number of minutes per day people meditated also predicted resistance to relapse. So, two things really happened in this intervention: sleeping more and there was also something about actual practice time and it wasn't a lot, it was something like 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day. And both sleeping and meditating were giving people more willpower for one of the biggest willpower challenges. So I want us to think a little together about why those two small interventions, an extra hour of sleep or 10 minutes of meditation a day, could actually give us more willpower for any willpower challenge.

What you're seeing here is a snapshot from an FMRI study on what happens to the brain when you're a little sleep deprived. And most studies use less than 6 hours of sleep per night as sleep deprivation, which may seem normal to you, but for most of us that's actually not working optimally. What you're seeing here is a combination of the brains of many different people, some who are sleep-deprived and some who aren't. And we're going to cut out the brain, so imagine me standing like this and we'll have one of those meat slicers and we'll cut the head off and we'll start removing sections and we'll look down the middle.

So where you see these yellow dots, it's the front of the brain, right here or right here, if it were my brain pointing in that direction. And yellow means that this area of ​​the brain is under-activated when you sleep less than 6 hours a night. This area of ​​the brain cannot do its job as efficiently and the red areas are more activated areas, sort of midbrain regions that are associated with basic impulses and

instinct

s. So when you sleep less than 6 hours a night, your brain is actually unable to recruit the brain systems you need to be that better version of yourself.

This area of ​​the brain, I love this image because it's like, this is where you weigh the scale: "Do I want to lose weight or do I want the candy bar?" And this area of ​​the brain here basically keeps track of your goals and it's hard work, the hard work it has to do is remember long-term goals, core values ​​and when you can't do it, when you're low. When you're full of fuel or when it's underactive, your brain thinks all it really wants is the candy bar, or procrastinating, or following that link, or not bothering to do your yoga exercises.

And so, in some key ways, the ability to remember who you are and what your big goals are depends on the ability of this area of ​​the brain to use energy well, and lack of sleep is one of the main things that can get in the way of that. path. way of that. And I think that's one of the reasons why this small sleep intervention ended up helping people resist relapse into drug addiction because they now have brains that are better fueled to remember their goals of staying clean and sober. And it's not just sleep that affects brain physiology, but also the way the brain uses energy.

There are a couple of other things that seem to really strengthen the ability of the frontal regions of the brain to do what they're supposed to do, to help you control impulses and find your motivation. Here are the four things from research that seem to make your brain into a kind of willpower machine. One is sleep, as I mentioned, and hopefully there's 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 more sleep makes the prefrontal cortex better able to regulate those brain systems that direct you toward temptation and immediate gratification.

And also meditation, and both meditation and physical exercise have been shown to not only make the brain more efficient in using these self-control systems, but they also make these systems larger and better connected to the regions they are supposed to control. And again, it can be very quick to see these benefits. People who meditate maybe 10 minutes a day, after a couple of months, their brains look different, these regions are larger and better connected. People who exercise regularly and who used to be sedentary, again, studies show that in just a couple of months of regular training, their prefrontal cortices are larger, moredense and better connected.

These are two things you can do to train the physiology of your willpower. The latest thing research suggests is that what you eat has a huge influence on whether or not your brain is capable of being this better version of yourself. There's something about having big spikes in blood sugar levels and then big drops in blood sugar levels that really screws up the way the brain uses energy and you need your brain to be like an energy efficient machine if you're going to walk through the world. world with that “better you” type of mentality instead of that “basic drive” of you.

So research shows that switching to a more plant-based diet actually changes the way the brain works and has a lot to do with what happens to blood sugar levels. So these are things that we sometimes consider to require willpower, right? We think, "Okay, I have to sit down and force myself to meditate. I have to exercise. I have to say no to the donut and eat something with fiber for breakfast." But we rarely think about the fact that not doing these things may be part of what makes it so hard to get started and there's kind of a curveball. where when we start it seems like we're using willpower, but everything on this list that requires a little bit of willpower to start ends up giving you back a lot more willpower than they need and not just for these challenges.

That is not all. Exercising makes it easier to exercise, studies show that exercising makes it easier to eat well, not spend too much money, stop procrastinating, pay better attention, all of these things have a kind of overall training effect on you. what you might think. like your willpower muscle. Was there an initial question or comment? Kelly McGonigal: So the question was why does it say low glycemic and plant-based? There is actually more evidence that a vegan diet does this better than a non-vegan diet. It's low glycemic and includes animal products, but I'm not sure that's completely realistic for everyone, so I think you can choose which way you're willing to do it.

Helps both low glycemic and plant-based. But if we look just at their physiology, there is more evidence in favor of a plant-based diet. Okay, let me move on to the next experiment. So the first experiment was to simply sleep a little more. In the second experiment, I want you to think about a recent setback you had or some sort of lack of willpower. Maybe it was not eating something healthy for lunch, maybe it was not exercising in the morning, maybe it was spending the entire morning following links that had nothing to do with your project. So I want you to think about a time recently when you had some kind of lack of willpower.

Kelly McGonigal: Does anyone need to borrow one of mine? Kelly McGonigal: Do you have one? Okay, so my question to you is: do you think that feeling bad about it, presumably feeling a little bit of regret about it, a little bit of guilt about it, a little bit of self-criticism about it, that helps us do better next time? ? Could 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 do better next time. Hands up. And how many of you think that feeling bad will actually mean an additional loss of willpower?

Yes cool. Maybe some of you have read that chapter of the book. That's why 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 that people argued with, like they literally couldn't get people to stay quiet in the classroom because they were so convinced that this couldn't be true. This is a study that looks at whether it is better to free yourself from your mistakes in terms of preventing future willpower collapses. So this particular study, which I'm going to talk about in a little more detail, brought together people who were trying to control their weight and eat healthy.

And they gave them an immediate lack of willpower. They showed up to the study and were forced to eat a donut. And they even had to choose the flavor of the donut they were going to eat to feel complicit in that failure of will. And they also had to drink a whole glass of water to feel a little uncomfortable and full. Well, we have all the dieters here and now they have a glitch in their willpower, they just ate this donut and the next part of the study is a taste test where they are given many different types of sweets and they are given says, "You know, we want you to evaluate all these sweets, so please eat as much as you need, as much as you want so that you can evaluate these sweets." And of course, all of these sweets were pre-weighed so that the experimenters could find out exactly how many sweets the dieters ate after they ruined their diet with a donut.

And in this particular study the researchers had a hypothesis. They thought that the guilt dieters experience when they quit their diet actually undermines future self-control. That's why they wanted to create an intervention that would basically eliminate the guilt and shame that people feel when they make a mistake. So in this study, half of the dieters were randomly assigned to receive a special "get off the hook" message. Then, between eating the donut and the taste test, an experimenter came in and said something very simple: "By the way, we've now realized that some people in this experiment feel guilty after eating the donut." So there was an opportunity for people to acknowledge that they might feel guilty.

Second part of the message: "We want you to remember that in reality everyone indulges sometimes and we ask you to do so." So there's kind of putting it into a broader perspective and the last part of the message was a simple plea: "Please don't be too hard on yourself about this." Well, very simple. You may feel guilty, remember everyone does it, don't be hard on yourself and then they moved on to the taste test. And what the researchers found is that 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.

Contrary to what most people think, most people think that you make a mistake, you have a lack of willpower and you start saying nice things to yourself about it that this It could only lead to disaster. This would lead to even more lenient licensing, and yet that is the exact opposite of what was found in this study and not just in this study but in many different studies now. This is one of the strongest theories 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 will be when you have it.

For example, one study looked at problem drinkers and asked them to keep track of how much they drank and how bad they felt the next morning. What they found is that people who were more self-critical and felt more 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-deprecating nature, shame and guilt that made people go back to what they felt bad about. The same has been shown with addiction, including smoking cessation. You know, you have that first relapse and the more you beat yourself up about it, the more you need to be comforted with something, probably what you feel bad about. because that's probably why you're doing it in the first place.

The same has been shown with gambling: the more people feel guilty and self-critical about losing money, the more likely they are to borrow money and try to get it back and end up losing more. And even in the case of procrastination, you may not have any addictions at all, but even in the case of procrastination, researchers show that the harder someone tries to put something off, the longer they put things off the next time. And this all has to do with the basic fact that when we feel stressed, guilty and ashamed, that is a state that puts us in the version of ourselves, the mindset that is much more susceptible to immediate gratification, temptation and the anxiety.

It's basically the biological opposite of what needs to happen in your brain and body to remember your long-term goals and be that other version of yourself. What we would call the willpower version of yourself. And as soon as you start accumulating guilt and shame, your brain switches to that other mode where everything will now be more tempting, including procrastinating, smoking or drinking. So I just wanted to give you an idea of ​​what it would be like to give you a self-compassionate message. Again, I said, this was a small intervention, this donut study. And this is basically all it was.

And now there are a number of programs that are teaching people how to write these messages for themselves and literally have a script for the time when they fail, for the time when they procrastinate and are late again, for that moment in which they had that cigarette when they had not smoked for a week and to be able to get this message out as a way of not falling into that hole that we often fall into. So, the three steps of this message are: the first is mindfulness of what you are thinking and feeling. Noticing that you feel guilty or noticing that you have doubts or self-criticism, maybe angry at yourself and allowing yourself to see those feelings because a big reason people go from feeling guilty to giving in again is they just want to get rid of that feeling, it's so overwhelming. and they want to distract themselves from it with something that will get them into more trouble.

And then the second step is this common humanity. One of the reasons why it is difficult to find our motivation and our willpower is that we begin to feel that something is broken in us. There is something about who we are that is wrong and weak and that mentality makes it very difficult to tap into our motivation or strength again. 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 are done. Sometimes we procrastinate. Sometimes we get off track. We are all imperfect." And recognize that this says nothing about who you are, but about the process and what matters is how you respond afterwards, not the fact that it happened.

And then this last step is encouragement over criticism. And if you thought about someone you were mentoring, you know, 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 tell them when they had a series? back? And telling yourself that, it might be reminding yourself of your goal, it might be reminding yourself of the big picture instead of the kind of micro picture where you feel like a failure. And do that instead of the voices we often have in our heads that say things like, "Why did you do that again?

You're so stupid. You're never going to change." And start talking to yourself a little in the second person as if you were a good friend. And research shows that this particular approach, learning to talk to yourself this way, is more effective, for example, in quitting smoking than nicotine replacement therapy. That's how powerful it can be to be able to respond to setbacks with compassion. I want you to take a look at these circles that range from completely non-overlapping to extremely overlapping and decide which of these sets of circles best represents how you feel about who you are today and who you are going to be.

Say, 30 years from now, 30 years in the future, or choose a time period that feels right to you. Okay, so this is your current self and this is your future self in 30 years. This means that who you are today is actually very different from who you will be in 30 years. Some overlap, but there's actually going to be a lot of changes happening between now, who knows, then this last set of circles is like, you know what? What I am today is probably what I will be in 30 years, the same me. . Well, then you will choose yourself. Take a few more seconds and think about where you are on this graph.

Actually, let's kind of make a wave because I'm curious if there's a trend here on Google. Simply raise your hand when you see your circle highlighted. Who is around here? Who is around here? Here? Okay, this way? Oh, you guys are normally distributed, this is great, who's here? Kelly McGonigal: Who's here? And who is here? Yes, pretty good, pretty good. That was great. Well, it turns out that where you fall on this map has a lot to do with some very important willpower challenges related to health, money, and even moral behavior. Don't feel too bad if you are in an extreme queue that is not associated with willpower because I will show you somestrategies to be able to reach the end that is associated with willpower if you need it.

Well, let me start with the first intervention and this was an intervention that was done here at Stanford University and it used college students who are very young and it was a virtual reality experiment where the college students went into the lab and the researchers Avatars Carefully created 3D of the students themselves. So if I walked into the lab, I would encounter a 3D avatar of myself at retirement age. It was a really cool setup where you had all your VR equipment on, listening and watching, and you feel like you're sitting in front of your future self and it's set up with cameras in such a way that if I move with my left hand like that , it seems like my future self is also waving his hand and if I speak, it seems like my future self is responding.

And in the study, college students were invited to interview themselves about 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. Then you would see her future, you would see Kelly describing what is important in my life at retirement age. And this continued for about an hour, getting to know her future self. And the reason 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 in the first half of the distribution, you are thinking about your future self and you don't really know who it is, it could actually be an improvement on this model or it could just be an older version of this model, we don't know. But what researchers discovered is that the more you feel like your future self is a stranger, different from 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 a stranger when today you could spend it on someone you know and love?

Kelly McGonigal: So in this particular experiment, after you met your future self, a while passed because they didn't want it to be totally obvious what was going on, a while passed and they brought people back. and asked them to share $1,000 on a budget task. And they pretended to be interested in how people made budget decisions. But what they found is that college students who had met and interacted with their future selves ended up allocating more than twice as much money to a retirement account as college students who had not met their future selves. College students who hadn't known their future were more likely to want to put that money toward their current expenses or just some fun splurge.

And this research has actually had a huge impact on the world of banking and retirement savings. I just heard an economist recommend last week that we should try Photoshopping images of people's future into every mortgage or credit card application. Kelly McGonigal: So people would really have to think about the implications of this. I mean, you can imagine an HR environment, right, where people are new employees and they're asked to do their retirement assignments, well, what if they had to interact with their future self first? New college students landing their first job could make a big difference in their future retirement savings.

Well, that was just one, that was the intervention, that was the experiment, but I just want to point out more broadly some of the research, looking at that pie chart that I showed you, and it turns out that the people who believe that there is there is more overlap. , who are more closely related to their future self and have much more willpower for different types of willpower challenges. Oops! I didn't mean to do that. The first thing is that they are generally less likely to procrastinate and be late. One of my favorite findings from this research is that people who had done it, who felt less similar to their future selves, were also more likely to arrive late to the experiment or skip it altogether, just letting it go.

That was an interesting find. They also feel more comfortable, sorry, and more likely to make ethical decisions at work. So people who think of their future self as more different, like a complete stranger, are actually more likely to feel okay about betraying a colleague at work if it helps them advance their career. They are more likely to keep the money they found even when they can have an idea of ​​who that money belongs to and that's an interesting finding because we could understand retirement, you know, the future self, but it seems that this ability to disconnect from the consequences The long-term impact of your choices actually sets you up to be more impulsive even when it actually has nothing to do with your own long-term benefits.

Then, also, looking at real-world results is not just an experiment, but looking at what circle people choose and how much money they have, their assets, their home, their debts, their wealth, and the people they feel closest to. your future self actually have. more active, more likely to own their own home, more money in the bank, more savings for retirement. So this is a real-world finding, not just an experiment. And they're also more likely to do things that don't have an immediate benefit, like flossing and exercising, but would be good for protecting their future selves. So, with that in mind, one of my favorite willpower-increasing strategies that you can do that doesn't really require any willpower is knowing your future self.

And there you are, you guys, in fact, maybe you can make 3D avatars, is that something, is that a Google project somewhere? audience member: We can't tell you. Kelly McGonigal: I can't tell you. Kelly McGonigal: So most people can't interact with their future selves in that high-tech way, but it seems like there are other ways that work too. One is to write a letter from your future self to your present self and you can do this in several different ways. One way is to simply write to your current self about who you are, what you are doing, where you live, what matters to you.

Or you could write a more detailed letter that discusses a challenge you're facing now. Maybe you're struggling to kick an addiction or spend time with your family or just something that doesn't seem to work out the way you'd like. And you could write a letter from your future self thanking your present self for doing it and describing what you did and why it was important. And research suggests that these types of letters written by your future self can actually give you more willpower. Yeah? male audience member: Is this boomerang if you really have low self-esteem and now you tell yourself that in the future you will be more like you are now?

Kelly McGonigal: That's probably not the letter you should be writing Kelly McGonigal: So, just for the people who are watching this on the video, the question was: if you feel really bad about yourself right now, could this have the opposite effect? You think, "My God, I'm never going to change," and if you're a loser now you'll always be a loser, so the card could say, "Dear loser, I'm still a loser. You're still a loser. Kelly McGonigal: That one It's not the card. In fact, research suggests that it is better to be optimistic in this card than to be pessimistic.

But at the same time, the key to this finding is not so much whether you think you are going to be exactly the same, but whether you understand that it will be the same. It's the same person who will have the future experience. And that, which actually gets to the second point here, is actually a different thing. It's not like, are you still going to have the same problems and the same neuroses or have you solved them? different kind of self, but do you understand that, like you know how real the pain is right now, if it came and hit you, how much would it hurt?

Do you understand that in 30 years it will hurt if someone hits you? That seems to be what? that people really have problems. When they think about their future selves, they don't have access to those emotions, they don't understand that that future happiness will be so real and important. So when you write these types of letters or imagine your future self, the real critical part is coming to feel that that future self is real and that it is you in some way. That you will be the one who has this experience. And it's not so much about whether you think you're going to be the same person and still listen to the same music that you listened to in 1983 or not.

Well, here's the second future self-exercise that gets to that. And I call this going back to the future. And this is the exercise of simply imagining yourself in the future. Studies show that just imagining yourself buying groceries in the future, okay, it's not at all relevant to your goals, but simply shopping, ends up helping people make better decisions in the present moment that will pay off in the future because you can actually imagine it. You can imagine what would be on the shelf and you know what it feels like to be pushing a shopping cart and there is something about making the future real that gives us more willpower, regardless of the content, than what you are thinking.

But there are also studies that show that you can imagine specific futures related to your willpower challenge, and both good and negative future realities can be very motivating. So in one study, they had people who wanted to improve their health imagine the consequences of not making a change, and asked them vividly: What will that be like? How will you feel ten 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 that would be like and how you would feel. And both types of future thinking ended up increasing good health behavior in the present.

So you guys have seen Back to the Future Two, right? Have you seen Back to the Future 2? You know he goes into the future and there's a really bad future and a really good future, okay, at some point that reference won't work anymore. Kelly McGonigal: Well, here we have two more interventions and in the next intervention I just want to do a survey. So we're talking about visualizing things, if you had to guess which would be most helpful in finding your willpower, do you think it's more helpful to imagine yourself or visualize yourself failing or it's more helpful to visualize yourself and imagine yourself succeeding?

Raise your hand if you think the glitch in the images will be more helpful. Raise your hand if you think you can imagine success. You are typical Americans. Kelly McGonigal: Well, that's what everyone thinks. So it actually turns out that imagining failure is much more useful than imagining success. It's not that imagining success is always bad, but imagining failure is better. Let me tell you about this intervention and then some of the theory a little more broadly. In this particular study, they took women from young adults to middle-aged adults, a little bit older, all of whom were not doing any exercise and all of whom had a goal to exercise and some of those women were randomly assigned to their typical is good 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 what they called an obstacle condition in which they had to imagine themselves failing. They had to ask themselves, "When will they stop exercising? What will be the obstacle? When will it happen? What will they do if that happens?" And they had people writing about it every day. They had to write, when are you not going to exercise? What are you going to tell yourself that allows you to not exercise? When will it happen? How is it going to happen and what are you going to do when you start to recognize that things are happening?

So women were becoming a kind of detectives of their own failure and every day they revised what they wrote 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 was so busy at work that I didn't have my sneakers, so I didn't do it." And they were very clear about how they failed and were able to predict future failures from that. These were the results, it had an immediate effect by doubling the amount of time they exercised.

So the first week they started predicting their failures this way, they doubled to 102 minutes of exercise per week and that's pretty close to the amount of exercise you need to get very serious health benefits, both mental and physical. . There was much less 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, that is, 4 months after that study, the women who had been predicting their failure had maintained and were doing twice as much exercise as the women who were in the basic 'let's exercise, here's why it's good'.

This is what always surprises people. There are many studies that show that tracking success leads people to slack off.long-term pace, but no one believes it. You've probably heard how important it is to track your success because we feel great when we can write that we did something, right? You know you feel something really good and you say, "Yes! Check it out!" Kelly McGonigal: Some people make to-do lists just so they can check things off. And we know how good we feel when we can write down and record our successes and confuse that feeling of well-being with a motivation to do more.

But several studies show that when people are reminded of their success and take note of their progress, they are much more likely to do something inconsistent with their goal. So if you're someone, for example, there are 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 in losing weight. You're this close to your goal, you've been doing very well. And when leaving the laboratory: "Do you want a chocolate bar?" And women are much more likely to reach for the chocolate bar if they are reminded of their success.

The same studies have shown for procrastination. There are people who track and feel good about the progress they have made on a task and are much more likely to choose not to work on it. And this is the objective change hypothesis. The idea is that any willpower challenge is a competition between these two versions of yourself and they are both you. And as soon as your mind realizes that one of you is satisfied because he made some progress, the other goal prepares in your brain and becomes more attractive. So I don't want to say don't track your success because I think what I really want to encourage you to do is both.

But let me point out a couple more thoughts along these lines. Ok, so why can pessimism be so useful? Because it is deeply un-American to be a pessimist when you have a goal, and I just want to encourage you to think about using pessimism as a source of willpower. So there's this kind of discovery floating around that people who are more optimistic about their ability to make a difficult change give up sooner and are more likely to fail and it tends to be because they're shocked by their setbacks. So one of the ways that predicting failure can be useful is that when it happens it's not like a shock to your system that you can't believe it happened, it must say something bad about who you are or your chances of success in the future. . future.

There are also interesting studies, like I mentioned that optimism, well, this is both progress and optimism, but studies show that if there are people who make optimistic predictions about what they are going to do, they are more likely not to do it today. . Therefore, people who intend to exercise tomorrow are more likely to eat something unhealthy today and skip the gym. Even the simple fact that people think about what they will do in the future makes it more likely that they will make a different decision today. So the simple fact of knowing that tomorrow you will be just as tempted, that tomorrow you will be just as busy and stressed tomorrow turns out to be an important source of willpower today.

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

This is something I come across a lot at Stanford, people say they want to make a big change or they have a big goal in mind and they're not the least bit interested in setting a small goal or a small step because how does it go? to be that? take me where I want? So let's go big or go home. And then when they start having trouble with that enormous level of success, they cling to the ideal and still end up doing nothing. So you can think of yourself as your own little corporation with goals, and if you run into setbacks, one of the most important things you can do is adjust your expectations and take a very hard look at the process of how failures work.

So here it is, um, here's an example from that exercise study that's blown up a little bit and this is basically the writing exercise that those women were doing that doubled the amount of time they were spending on 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 it? So you must have your motivation on board, right? So what are you going to do to take it? So you lay out some clearly defined steps and then spend some time thinking about how this isn't going to happen.

When and where and why? Is there anything I can do in advance to avoid that failure? And when failure happens, what are you going to do about it? You don't actually need to do 7 full steps like this, but it is a very basic exercise that you can do for any goal. I think it's like testing a goal. You have a goal, you say you are going to do something, well now put it to the test and find out how it will break, how it will fail. Well, last intervention. Let's all do it together unless you have health problems and, you know, I don't want anyone to pass out or have a stroke.

So if you're up for this challenge, we'll just hold our breath for 15 seconds. Whose second hand do you have? Excellent! You will time us. Okay, only if you want to do this. Inhale deeply. Look at your second hand, go ahead and exhale deeply, now exhale, exhale, exhale and stop breathing. Look at our time. Remember that you can breathe whenever you want if necessary. I just want you to notice how this feels. 3, 2, 1 breathe. Well, okay, holding your breath is obviously a bit of a willpower challenge. Some of you may need to hold your breath for two minutes to feel it, but I didn't want anyone to pass 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 something interesting. Psychologists call this discomfort tolerance. The ability to stay still when things get uncomfortable. So I want to tell you now about a small intervention that teaches people how to hold their breath, but not exactly, how to basically overcome the physical discomfort that gets in the way of making a difficult change. I will tell you about two different studies that basically use the same technique. Then you can choose your willpower challenge here.

The first I call the torture chamber and it is the study of smokers who wanted to quit smoking but had not been able to. And the researchers asked smokers to abstain from smoking for 24 hours, a sort of first challenge, and then enter the lab with a new, unopened pack of their favorite brand of cigarettes. Then all the smokers showed up, they had their pack, they were desperate to smoke, and they even gave them carbon monoxide tests to make sure they hadn't smoked, so they had it all, they were ready to smoke. They all get it, sit at a long table and are asked to put aside all distractions except a lighter or a match and their cigarettes.

Kelly McGonigal: So you have a group of smokers who are now ready. And then the experimenter is about to start the process of allowing them to smoke and she says, actually through a microphone like that, you hear a voice saying, "Take out your pack of cigarettes." And everyone does it, everyone is excited. , "Wow!" "Arrest!" Good Kelly McGonigal: Now you have to wait 2 minutes and you're not allowed to do anything except look at your pack of cigarettes. Kelly McGonigal: "Take the cellophane off!" "Okay, great, phew!" "Arrest!" They have to wait two minutes. "Pack it" Oh, there was a package, I don't smoke so I forget some of these steps, they had to pack the package too and they opened the cellophane, okay? "Take out a cigarette" "Finally!" "Arrest!" They have to wait 2 minutes and this continues and every two minutes they write down how intense their cravings are and how much they want to smoke, but other than that they are not allowed to do anything. "Take out a cigarette" "Stop!" Two minutes. "Look at the cigarette" "Stop!" Two minutes. "Smell the cigarette." "Arrest!" Two minutes.

Kelly McGonigal: "Put the cigarette in your mouth" "Stop!" Two minutes. "Take out a lighter, look at it." "Arrest!" Two minutes. Kelly McGonigal: This went on for over an hour. Kelly McGonigal: Actually, no one was allowed to light up, okay? So this is what, I didn't tell them what the actual intervention was yet, half of them before this happened had been taught a technique called impulse surfing where you learn to pay attention to the physical discomfort of wanting something. , you give it. all your attention and trust that you can tolerate those physical sensations and if you just wait patiently they will disappear.

That any longing, any emotion will eventually pass if you can just breathe and wait, wait. But it is not necessary to act on every impulse or emotion. So that's the technique that they were taught, they were surfing momentum, they were imagining those cravings as a wave that they rode on and they were just going to breathe and they knew that eventually it would end as a wave. Before I tell you the result of this study, let me give you the result of the food. The food is a little different. They took people who had had self-control problems with food, especially candy, they gave them a clear container of Hershey's Kisses, a clear container, and they had to carry that box of Hershey's Kisses with them for 48 hours and they weren't allowed to eat. just one and they were all carefully marked, with little scratches so the researchers would know if they were eaten and replenished, which wouldn't be great.

Kelly McGonigal: And they were taught the same technique on how to manage cravings. How to navigate the urge, allow yourself to feel the craving and still remember that you don't need to act on it and the craving will eventually go away. Okay, so the results. In this study, smokers who had been taught how to control impulses in that one-hour torture test ended up reducing their cigarette smoke by 40 percent over the following week even though the researchers had not told them to. order. The control group did not reduce their cigarette consumption at all, and interestingly, people learned to overcome the urge;

Now there was no longer a connection between psychological stress and smoking, which is actually the main connection for most people trying to quit smoking. , they are stressed, anxious and that is why they need a cigarette. And in this particular group with this intervention, that link between stress and giving in was severed probably because they had a tool to deal with difficult feelings and emotions. In this study, people who had problems with self-control around food, if they were taught impulse control, received a single Hershey's kiss for the entire 48 hours, while those who had been given other strategies, including distraction, ended up much more likely to give in and also be very stressed about it.

These are just two different examples of how navigating impulse can give us a lot of willpower for the things we need willpower for. You know, I often hear people talk about how important it is to develop good habits, but the reality is that sometimes you need strength to do something difficult and there is no habit in the world that will make you not want a cigarette when you see or want a donut when you see it or maybe you want to avoid something because you're anxious. There is a real urge 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 push them away or get rid of them backfires, but being able to cope with them and imagine them as passing experiences that don't need to be acted upon has been shown to help with many different willpower challenges, including the type of anxiety that It leads us to not do things we know we should do. Intrusive thoughts, you know, are a real challenge to willpower. Sometimes our mind goes to places we don't want it to go, to memories or things we're imagining or to negative thoughts about ourselves and others, and research shows that the same technique can be applied to a negative thought without having to act on it. consequence. .

It has been shown to improve weight loss; In fact, this technique of learning to accept your own cravings tripled the long-term weight loss success rate in one year among people who were on a really standard weight loss program. Helped thesubstance abuse and even helps people with schizophrenia. I mean, talk about a willpower challenge when you have voices in your own head that you can't escape and you're desperately trying to have some kind of normal life and relationship with the world when you have these voices in your head that are telling you. that you do something or that you don't do something.

And studies show that schizophrenics who learn to accept their own intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and delusions as a craving, which isn't real and don't need to be acted upon, but will be there and will eventually pass, actually end up being more likely to leave the hospital, be dehospitalized, and function normally compared to people who have not been taught this technique. Well, if you want to apply this technique to any willpower challenge, here's what that little intervention would look like for you. This is what people were taught in both studies and the first is this mindfulness to allow yourself to feel what you're feeling or think what you're thinking and really pay attention to the experience instead of trying to immediately escape from it.

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

Well, to finish, 5 rules of willpower and I simply invite you to think if you heard anything today that may be relevant to your willpower challenge, to give yourself this short dose, this small dose intervention and see how it works because that's really the nature of the class and the nature of the book. It's basically about becoming a willpower scientist yourself, getting some ideas from research and then trying them out. I mean, you have a hypothesis that you can see if it works or not, collect your own data. So those five strategies, one is to train the physiology of your willpower by meditating, sleeping, exercising or eating a diet that sustains your energy.

Forgive yourself the next time you have a setback in your willpower. Make friends with your future self, think about the future in a way that seems real. Predict your failure, although it is very pleasant to imagine success. Get really interested in the process of how you fail. And then, finally, think about facing the impulse when you are faced with temptation. And thank you guys, you waited, you showed a lot of willpower by staying around.