Modern Wisdom - #957 - Anne-Laure Le Cunff - How To Live Freely In A Goal-Obsessed World

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

Anne‑Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, founder, and an author. We live by unconscious mental scripts. Most of the time, we don’t even realize it, until we wake up and see the life we’re living isn’t what we truly want. So how do we unlearn what no longer serves us and rewire our mind to align with who we really are? Expect to learn what the problem is when people obsess over finding their purpose, how to know if you’re following your own dreams or someone else’s, the tactics you can learn to begin unlearning cultural scripts, how to get more comfortable with uncertainty, how to deal with the shame of letting go of busyness and driving toward your purpose, why posture is so overlooked in mental health, how to improve a destructive mindset, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the problem with people obsessing over finding their purpose, in your opinion? It makes them miserable. When we try to find our purpose, we feel like if you haven't found it yet, something is wrong with our life. Our life doesn't have meaning. We also spend a lot of time comparing our life to the life of others. We wonder, why is it that this person seems like she knows where she's going? Why is this person so excited she knows where she's going?

Why is this person so excited about what they're doing? Why do they have a passion? Why is it that I don't have my purpose? I don't have my passion. And because of that, we become so obsessed with figuring out what is my purpose that we end up not giving ourselves the time and the possibility to explore and maybe figuring out in the end what that is. What is a better way to look at creating a direction in life then?

A better way to figuring out your purpose is just to experiment. It's thinking like a scientist. When a scientist wants to learn something new, they don't start with a specific outcome in mind. What they do is that they start with a research question, a hypothesis. They wonder, hey, what might happen if I tried this?

If you do that, if you keep on asking questions, if you keep on trying new things, if you keep on making mistakes, learning from them and iterating, this is how you figure out your purpose. How good do you think we are predicting what it is that we like? This seems sort of in the discussion around having a purpose that there is a inherent sort of self-knowing. I know what's best for me. that there is a inherent sort of self-knowing.

I know what's best for me. I am the master of this universe and, you know, I didn't know, but now that I do have a bit of a grasp on a purpose, everything else can go and fuck itself. There's a lot of research showing that we are absolutely terrible at predicting what we'll like in the future. We change a lot and we think that we're going to be a lot more similar to who we are today than what we actually end up being like in the future. We also think that whatever we like in the future will follow a nice progression, a logical progression, like a nice narrative based on who we are

today and what our life looks like today. But we change quite a lot. And a lot of the things we like are based on our experiences, the people we hang out with, the work we do, the failures we experience, and the growth that we have as well. There are lots of things that you might hate today because they're hard, that you will enjoy in the future because you've mastered them. And this is something that's really, really hard to predict. So deciding what you want to pursue based on what you think you will enjoy

is not necessarily a great way to go about it. Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, a lot of people are probably living somebody else's dream. I don't know whether they're following their own, but they're probably following something that they think is their own, but very well might not be theirs and very well might be somebody else's. Yeah, what you're talking about actually has a name in psychology research. It's called a cognitive script. And this is based on really interesting research coming from the late seventies

where researchers asked people, okay, if I put you in this specific situation, how do you behave? How do you act? And what they found is that most people, if you put them in a similar situation, will behave in a very similar way. And that's okay for a lot of everyday situations. So let's say you go to the restaurant and you know that you're supposed to go there and wait for a member of staff coming and telling you, this is your table. If you go to the doctor, you know you wait in the waiting room and then you go in the doctor's office.

That's okay, right? This is how we don't overthink every single decision. But the problem is that we follow these scripts, not only in everyday situations, but also to make way more important decisions in our lives. And that includes the dreams that we pursue, the careers that we follow, the careers that we follow, the way we manage our relationships,

the topics we decide to study at university. And those cognitive scripts are kind of the invisible threads that actually determine a lot of the decisions that we're making in life. What's the mechanism of how these things work? Is it that we outsource learning to the example of people around us and then try to imitate that? Is this mimetic stuff?

How does this work? There are different types of cognitive scripts. Some of them are based on, so I call them the sequel types of scripts. And this is based on the fallacy that whatever you do today needs to make sense based on what you did in the past. So we feel like our life needs to have this nice narrative that is legible and that makes sense.

So this is the scripts that we follow when, for example, after university, we'll only apply for jobs that align with whatever we studied. This is also why you've probably seen a lot of people rewrite their CVs before they apply for jobs, so we can have this nice narrative where they can say it all makes sense. And because of that, when we follow the script, we don't open ourselves to doing things that don't make sense on paper. It needs to make sense. So that's one script and that's one mechanism. Another one, which I call the crowd pleaser script,

is similar to what you were talking about, a bit of the mimetic desire and that social pressure. It's the script we follow when we make decisions based on what we think is going to please the people around us. So we only go for the most impressive projects. We want people to say, wow, you're working at this company, you're working on this project, you're so cool. And this is how we make our decisions.

And here we might not go for the project that's a bit weird, a bit different, or that might fail because we're following the crowd pleaser script. So that's the second mechanism. And the third mechanism, I think this is the most insidious one. It's linked to what we're asking earlier about the purpose. It's the Hollywood one, the epic script. The one that says, follow your passion,

the script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big, It needs to be impressive. And anything less than that is failure. And this script is really the one where we want to be part of a tribe and we want to feel like we matter. We want to feel like if we're gone tomorrow, people will notice. There will be a hole where we are. And because of that, we want to take space.

We want to be noticed. And again, we're making decisions here not necessarily based on what would be fulfilling to us, but based on what we think other people are going to perceive as impressive. All three of those have a sense that somebody else or something else is sort of puppeting our desires, that we're at the mercy of our past, that we need to make this cohesive narrative that ties together very nicely, that we're at the mercy of the opinions of others, what they're going to say about us, that we need to do something which is path the course or would look impressive or something which has like cosmic

impressiveness, you know, not even to a person. It's just this vague sense of legacy and contribution, but not specific contribution. and contribution, but not specific contribution. So yeah, it feels to me like all three of those are tied together by outsourcing what it is that you think to something or someone else. Yeah, exactly. And this is because it gives us a sense of control, a sense of certainty. Following a script makes us feel like we have a sense of direction.

And even if that sense of direction we get from the outside, still, that feels a little bit more comfortable than admitting to yourself that you have no idea what you want, that what you like today might be completely different from what you will like tomorrow, and that you're a bit lost. That's scary. That's scary to admit that to yourself.

And so that's why we follow these scripts and that's why we externalize our decision-making in this way. What is the issue that humans have with uncertainty? What's our cognitive relationship to the uncertain? Our brain is designed to reduce uncertainty as much as possible. So if you think about our ancestral past, the more certainty you had, the more likely you were to survive. If you didn't know what was that word noise in the bushes over there,

or where the resources were, or who was your enemy in the tribe, you were very likely to die. So you needed to feel like you knew, you needed to feel like you had enough information to survive. And because of that, our brains haven't changed that much, right, in the past few thousands of years. We're still very, very scared of uncertainty because we associate uncertainty with death.

A lot of the risks that we were facing in nature in our ancestral path, those existential risks of death, don't exist anymore. And still, we're reacting, we're responding exactly in the same way when it comes to uncertainty. And so it does take an effort and it does take really trying to elevate yourself above those natural automatic instincts in order for you to not just respond to that uncertainty on autopilot.

To try and fill the gap. There's a, uh, I wrote something last week, which I think might be interesting to you. So somebody asked on Instagram, they asked ChatGPT for a genuinely novel insight that most people don't understand. And ChatGPT said, humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears.

And then I built a little bit on it. And I said, if you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear, worry, and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing that you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, to fear, worry and rumination, your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing that you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than anything that could happen in reality.

However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans hate not knowing what the future will hold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. This is amazing. You know, there's actually research that aligns exactly with what you wrote, and that shows that people would rather choose self-inflicted pain in an experiment, rather than the uncertainty of not knowing when the pain will happen, including the possibility that there might be zero pain, right? So they would rather press the button and say, hit me now, rather than waiting and not knowing.

It's the same reason that Uber is successful. You know, Uber's great because you can order a car from anywhere from your pocket and there's safety and reliable drivers and such. But the real reason that Uber is good is that it reduced down the uncertainty of not knowing when the car was going to arrive. You know, it's 10 minutes away, seven minutes away, four minutes away, one minute away, right, I need to go outside. That was what it was good for, as opposed to permanently having to look out of the window to work out how long, whether the taxi was there.

And you see the frustration people get when the time keeps on changing, when it tells you it's going to be here in three minutes, now it's five minutes, now it's back to two minutes, right? You prefer when it's telling you 10 minutes and it doesn't change. So we'd rather have a negative outcome that is certain and where we know what's coming rather than this outcome that keeps on changing. There was a great behavioral science intervention done at Heathrow.

So there was an issue with the wait times for people getting connections in Terminal 5. It sounds oddly specific if you've never been to Heathrow, but so many people that fly through Heathrow have been through Terminal 5, so they know exactly the pain. And classic engineering, logistics, operations mindset. They said, well, let's spend a hundred million pounds on faster scanners and more conveyor belts and we'll retrain the staff and we'll fit them in a different sort of shape and we'll be able to speed things up. And a friend's company was actually the one that said, well, hang on before you do that. Just let's see if we can not spend quite so much money other than our

consultancy consultancy fee. Um, and they fixed the entire thing just by putting signs up. So they put signs up down the queue that said 30 minutes from this point, 45 minutes from this point, and all of the signs were about five minutes longer than the amount of time that the actual wait was. So someone got there and they said, well, I mean, you know, it's been 25 minutes, but they said it was going to be 30. Like, that's so great.

Like we beat it by five minutes. Like what an amazing, and it reduced down uncertainty and it actually played with this sort of, I guess, surprise, a pleasant surprise of I thought it was going to be 45 minutes. Oh, it was actually 38 minutes. Um, yeah, I just thought that was a lovely little intervention. This is genius. This is absolutely genius. I love that.

And I love how it is actually not trying to fix the cognitive bias that we have here, but actually use it. Which is the simplest approach and the most cost effective here too. What are some other ways that we can use that cognitive bias in a positive manner, sort of day-to-day life. I think the first step is doing a little bit of work when it comes to knowing yourself and just self-discovery in general, because we talk a lot about cognitive biases as if they applied equally to everybody, but again, depending on your experiences, depending on the amount of self-work that you've done, depending on whatever challenges that you've faced in the past, it is very likely that you have cognitive biases that are a bit stronger or not as strong. And so I think just having this honest conversation with yourself and knowing which ones you have

and then playing with these. So for example, in my case, I know that if I'm very anxious about something, I'm going to procrastinate a lot. So if I have a big keynote, a big presentation I need to give, I know I'm going to actually procrastinate last minute to present this. And so every time I have something really big coming up, I book a meeting two weeks before with a coach that I'm paying to review my content. And because I don't want to show up empty handed to this.

And I also know I hate disappointing people. And so I know I will show up with something. And so for me, this is creating a pre deadline to the deadline. And I will usually prepare for that meeting one hour before. That's how bad my procrastination is, but that's one hour before this meeting, but that's two weeks before the actual presentation. And you know what? I think since I've implemented this, I'm a lot more, you know, I'm much happier

than when I was trying to fix that bias that I have. And now I've accepted that this is how I respond to anxiety. And a little bit to, you know, similar to what your friends did at Heathrow. I just created a system where it ends up happening. It ends up breaking and I don't have to change everything. And I don't even have to change myself too much when it comes to that specific bias. A quick aside, grooming isn't just about looking good. It's about feeling good and the right tools make all the difference.

That's where Manscaped's Beard and Balls bundle comes in. It comes with their Beard Hedger Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra and all the essentials that you need to keep looking sharp from head to toe. The Beard Hedger is your precision trimmer featuring 20 adjustable lengths so you can dial in the perfect style, whether it's light stubble or a full Burt Reynolds stash like I'm rocking here. And for downstairs, the Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra has a cutting edge ceramic blade,

to reduce grooming accidents, 75 minute battery, waterproof technology and an LED light. So you could use it as a flashlight if you needed to scare off an intruder, perhaps. Right now you can get 20% off and free shipping on the Be and balls bundle by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 20 at checkout.

That's manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 20 at checkout. I've been thinking about this to do with partner choice and how people choose different relationships. and how people choose different relationships. You know, we like to think of ourselves as totally self-authorable, that there is no skill or characteristic or trait that I can't gain or rid myself of or whatever. And you know, for the super agentic personal growth people out there, that actually might be true, but you have the choice between dating somebody who compensates for your flaws or somebody that you need to fix your flaws for.

And it just seems like getting into a relationship with somebody who actually addresses your flaws, as opposed to you having to go through the very long and arduous process of fixing them or getting rid of them is kind of what you're doing there. It's like, look, I could just white knuckle my way through not procrastinating, or I can use my fear of social judgment and this sort of sense that I need to show up for people that I've paid and that are going to expect work from me. I can just use that to my advantage. I don't need to fix my floor.

I can find someone that compensates it on my behalf. Yeah. And actually now you're mentioning relationships. I think you can even take it one step further where the outcome is even better in the end. I think my presentations, now that I have the coach, are actually better than when I was working on them on my own. And same with relationships. I think my presentations, now that I have the coach, are actually better than when I was working on them on my own. And same with relationships. I find that the relationships around me that work the best

are not even necessarily the ones where the other person compensates for whatever biases that you have or weaknesses that you have, but where both people actually are more than the sum of the both of them and where they elevate each other. There's something that happens, there's almost an alchemy that happens between the two, where whatever is the weakness of one of them becomes a superpower when they're together. And this is kind of what you want to find, where it's actually even better being together

than trying to fix whatever issue that you might have. It's not even compensating for somebody's shortcomings. It's turning your shortcomings into a strength. You know, you are a person who is very sensitive and emotionally in tune. And your last relationship was you with somebody who didn't really like that, or they didn't really respect that, or it made them feel uncomfortable, or you were made to feel shame for being that sensitive.

And then your next relationship isn't just with somebody who is able to soothe your sensitivity, but someone who's actively attracted to the fact that you're so sensitive. And this has now turned from something that was kind of a bit of an ick or an obstacle or an issue that needed to be worked around and something that you maybe felt shame about beyond something that was acceptable and now to something which is actually a green flag or an attractor or something that's a real

positive part of the relationship. Yeah. And that also frees up attention, energy, and whatever kind of focus that you want to dedicate to the parts of yourself you actually want to improve. Because there are always going to be parts of yourself you want to improve, where you want to grow, where you want to explore. But having a partner who not only accepts, but loves and celebrates those parts of you that maybe not everybody would like, and knowing that you don't need to change those and you can focus on whatever really matters to you. This is also a superpower when you think about it. There are so many people who are wasting so much time and energy trying to fix things that they maybe don't need to fix,

because they're in the wrong type of relationship. And you see that, you see that in so many successful researchers, successful entrepreneurs, they have a partner who has their back and who supports them and loves them the way they are, and they can focus on improving whatever they actually want to improve. Talk to me about the usefulness of liminal spaces. Let me first define what a liminal space is, just in case people haven't heard the term, because I actually discovered the term fairly recently a few years ago while I was working on my book.

The word liminal means in between. It's the same, it comes from limen, Latin, and it's the same word that you find in subliminal under the threshold. So it's the in-between, it's the doorstep of change, it's the transitional space. And liminal spaces are those spaces of very high uncertainty where you're not back there anymore, but you haven't made it to the other side yet. So I'm just going to give you a couple of very concrete examples. So let's say that you are engaged but not married yet, or you have graduated university but you haven't started your first job yet. Maybe you have accepted an offer for a new job, but you haven't started that job yet.

And you're in this in-between. You're not quite sure what's going to happen next, and it's a space of uncertainty. Our automatic response when we find ourselves in those liminal spaces is to try and get out of them as quickly as possible. We've talked about how much our brains hate uncertainty, and this is why we want to get out of those liminal spaces as quickly as possible. But if we allow ourselves to stay in those liminal spaces, to actually see them for what they are, spaces of opportunity,

spaces where a lot of self-discovery can happen, a lot of growth, then you can learn a lot about yourself, about the kind of work that you might want to do, about the kind of directions that you might want to explore. And it will still be uncomfortable. The uncertainty will still be there, but it will also be very fulfilling. Given that we're in a time where people are more anxious than ever before, it seems difficult for people to want to purposefully put themselves into a situation which causes even more uncertainty, even more of a threat response in their mind. What's the solution to working around that? response in their mind, what's the solution to working around that?

Well, liminal spaces are inevitable. So you can either, when you find yourself in one, embrace it and make the most out of it. Or you can fear them and experience anxiety. You don't necessarily need to seek and create liminal spaces for yourself, although a lot of people do that, but they tend to be a little bit more comfortable with risk. If you're not someone who's very comfortable with risk, you don't have to seek liminal spaces, but you have to know that you will find yourself in those spaces at some point in your life and several times over the course of your life. Whenever you change jobs, whenever you change relationships, whenever you lose someone,

whenever you meet a new person, whenever there's something new and there's a change and a transition in your life, there is a new liminal space. And so the only thing you can do here is really practicing and training yourself to first recognize them and say, oof, okay, liminal space, uncertainty, discomfort. Here, I know what's going on here, but also let's take a deep breath. What can we learn here? What can we explore? Is there anything I can discover here about myself? Is there any way I can grow while crossing this liminal space?

What are some liminal spaces that people find themselves in that they might not realize? What are some examples of those? So it's interesting. Like if you look at the research around liminal spaces, researchers consider that any space of transition is a liminal space. And so we talked about airports. They consider that airports are a liminal space because you're not at home, you're not at your destination yet. Your sense of identity is kind of blurry. Nobody really knows who you are, right?

You just have this number on your plane ticket. And then when you're on a plane, you're kind of disconnected again in this in-between. Same here. You can decide that you want to get out of this liminal space as quickly as possible. And some people have this mindset. They want to go from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Other people actually really enjoy that liminal space. They love that they have this little space of in between where things are kind of in transition and where they can maybe open a book that they've been meaning to read or journal or listen to a podcast they haven't had time to listen to or just do nothing. Close your eyes, do nothing and let your mind wander which is also an activity that's really good

when you find yourself in the liminal space. So really think about any type of liminal space. Another one, which to me, I find a little bit extreme and not that helpful, but talk to your researcher in that space and they will tell you this is a liminal space, a corridor, just a corridor. So when you find yourself in between meetings, for example, walking from one room to another,

again, some people, they just go from one meeting to another. Whereas you see other people take those two minutes that they have, walking from one room to another, to mentally prepare themselves for the next meeting. Or make a couple of mental notes and really use that space. So yeah, liminal spaces are literally everywhere. Yeah. Talk to me about compensatory control theory.

So compensatory control theory is a psychological theory that shows that whenever we feel like we're losing control, we try to over exert control, to feel like we know what we're doing and to know where we're going. And so whenever we find ourselves in a space where there's a lot of uncertainty, we might cling to the first decision, the first solution that seems the most obvious, and that seems to have very clear steps. This is also when a lot of people try to control a lot of their behaviors

and start having rigid behavioral patterns. So they will maybe have a more rigid routine, more rigid way of managing their time, their energy, their tasks. And yeah, you basically turn into a little soldier because you feel like that's going to give you the courage that you need to go through whatever moment of uncertainty you're facing right now. So there is a degree of unpredictability about the world around us. And we try in an attempt to get some order from the chaos, we overcompensate and we try to apply more effort, more sort of deliberate routine in the areas that we do have that control over. Exactly.

And very often that leads to negative effects on your mental health, because a lot of those strict regimens that we create for ourselves when we're trying to compensate for a lack of control are not sustainable, because they're not coming from a place of wanting to grow or fulfillment, right? They're again, coming from this place of wanting to be in control. And this is very rarely something that people can keep up with for a very long time.

When their little system breaks down, a lot of people respond with self blame and self judgment. And so that creates this vicious cycle where then they then try to be even more in control to prove to themselves that they can be in control. It seems like we're always unconsciously seeking structure in one form or another. Is there a neuroscience explanation for why people have an addiction to productivity even when it hurts us? So it's not necessarily a neuroscience explanation. It's more of a psychological one, but it really comes back to the fact that we are social animals. And again, if you go back to our evolutionary past, being rejected

from the tribe also meant death. And so in order to not be rejected from the tribe, you had to prove that you were useful, that you were not dead weight, that whatever resources you needed, you also contributed back to society. So there is already a natural tendency to prove your worth to the people around you.

That's the kind of, that's already embedded as part of our human nature. And then you have today's societies where we have actually created metrics to measure that. We have metrics of success. We have KPIs, OKRs, leaderboards. We have social media. We have so many ways now to publicly measure how successful a person is and how good of a contributor they are to society. And so that exacerbates that anxiety, that natural anxiety that we have already of saying,

hey, I matter. I'm a good contributor. I'm productive. Yeah. That public productivity, sort of conspicuous effort, a lot of the time, I think causes people to, I mean, it's the same reason why there's some, I'm sure you probably know this. I think it's organizational psychology.

If you have a meeting that's got more than four people in it and everybody agrees on the outcome, the chance of one person objecting to the outcome, even if they don't fully believe it, it goes up. It's like, oh, well, you know, I certainly think that we could do with having another look at the thing. It's like, dude, everyone was happy with this, but there's just this sense of, if you think a little bit deeper, even if your first instinct is this thing's fine, that sounds like being

thoughtful. It looks a lot like doing the work and contributing, but it could just be an unnecessary obstacle that you've decided to throw in front of everyone. Oh, absolutely. There are so many incentives in today's society to look like you're contributing without actually contributing. And I actually saw that when I was working at Google at the very beginning of my career,

that a lot of engineers that were better at showing the work that they've done, even if it wasn't a big thing, who spent 20% of their time building, typing code, and then 80% of their time telling people that they've done the thing, were promoted a lot faster than the engineers that were doing the reverse, where they were spending 80% of their time actually fixing the product and making it better. Yeah, there's an interesting blend. I guess, whenever you're in a team, you need to spend enough time contributing so that people don't think you're a freeloader, but you also need to spend

enough time reputation managing so that people actually see that you did the work and if you can work a little bit and then multiply it by doing more reputation management, then why not? Yeah, no, exactly. And I would recommend that anyone who's doing good work is actually also taking the time and making the effort to let other people know about their good work. Because nobody's going to know what you've contributed if you're not telling them.

Nobody's following you and paying attention. You need to let them know. But it can become a problem at a larger scale when that ratio is out of whack and when people are spending more time actually talking about their work than actually doing work. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. Gymshark makes the best gym wear on the planet. Their hybrid shorts in Onyx Grey and Navy are a complete game changer.

They're the best men's training shorts in the world. They've got a crest hoodie, which is what I'm flying in anytime I'm traveling in their Geo seamless t-shirts or what I train in pretty much every single day. All of these are unbelievably lightweight, they're sweat wicking and easy to wash and dry and the fit and quality of the fabric is phenomenal. It's a one-stop shop for all of the gym kit that you need and that's why it's kind of pretty much all I wear. And if you're still on the fence they offer 30-day free returns so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it you can just send it back. Plus they ship

internationally. Right now you can get 10% off everything from Gymshark site-wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 a checkout. That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 a checkout. Yeah, on the sort of compensatory control reduction of uncertainty, this need for experimentation and exploration. Does that mean that it's sort of inevitable for people to run out of steam after they've pursued something for a long enough time, even if it was something that once was superbly aligned and mission driven and highly

motivating, is it, it's just going to happen that there's a life cycle to your desire to do that thing? It really depends on how much self complexity you have in your life. So self complexity is basically the number of identities that you have. And so, you know, you could be, for example, an entrepreneur and a father and a writer and a marathon runner. So you have those four identities. What's great about having high self-complexity,

so you have several of those identities, is that when one of these identities is not something that is working really well right now for whatever reason, and those reasons could be external, so I don't know, maybe you hurt yourself and you can't run. Or it could be internal. Maybe you lost interest in one of your hobbies, or maybe you keep on fighting with your spouse or whatever it is. Then you have your other identities where you can still thrive and explore. What's really nice too is that when you do this,

you can actually pause some of those identities that you have and not put as much energy into them and come back to them whenever your level of curiosity and excitement and all of that is replenished and you actually want to start again. A lot of people burn out of their ideas or get bored or decide to stop fully because it's the only one thing that they're pursuing. They put all of their eggs in the same basket. And so at some point when they feel like they don't want to do that thing anymore,

they just move on to the next thing. And so for these people, not being interested in a current idea anymore means that you have to move on to a new one versus actually, you know what, I'm taking a break from this, I might come back to it later. And so the people who have this high level of self complexity, you could see them actually still pursuing a hobby that they started in their 20s and now they're in their 60s. And if you ask them, have you been doing this consistently every week for your entire life? They'll tell you, no, absolutely not actually. I had five years when I didn't do any woodworking or whatever.

I was more interested in something else, but then I came back to it. So self-complexity allows people when they begin to run out of steam or they get a little bit bored with something, because there are other places that they can be kept busy, take a sense of purpose, pleasure, belonging from, as opposed to completely having to exit the position because there's only one position, that position is able to stay open and they can do some other stuff and then go back to it as opposed to people whose entire identity is wrapped up in one thing. I suppose there's an interesting tension going on there between wanting a routine, because

you know that iterating and consistency and habits are where most progress comes from. And boredom, because by doing a small number of things more consistently, you are speeding up the pace at which you're going to get sick of doing them. It feels like there's a little tension going on there. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think the idea here is not necessarily to start new things and abandon them every two weeks, right? Self-complexity is based on different senses of identities. And so if you want to have those identities, you need to inhabit them for long enough that

you actually develop an identity here. So it's really not about having a thousand things going on at the same time and barely paying attention to them. It's more about maybe having four or five different kind of routines going on, but also allowing yourself if at some point you feel like your heart is not in it right now to pause this and come back to it later. It's really the idea of almost like, instead of being mono passion,

and then when that passion is gone, you feel like that's the end. This relationship is over. I'm moving on to the next one of having a more of a, you know, being poly passionate where you feel like, okay, that's like, I'm more interested in someone else right now, something else, and I'll come back to this relationship later on.

What about time anxiety? Talk to me about that. So time anxiety is the fear that you're not making the most of your time. And it's based on the very quantitative definition of time. So there's something I find really interesting is that in English, there's just one word, time. And in French, my native language is the same, just tongue, and a lot of languages

only have one word for time. But in ancient Greek, they had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is our definition of time, quantitative, where it's the time of seconds and minutes and weeks and month, and there's really this feeling that you have this limited amount of time, and you need to fill it with as much stuff as possible. And that living a full life is filling all of these boxes with as much stuff as you can. I don't know if you've seen, you're familiar with Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks visual, right?

It's gone viral so many times now that I think most people can see it. And it's really showing your life as the series of identical boxes, which a lot of people report gives them anxiety to look at. And seeing this that could fit on the little post-it note with all of these little boxes and feeling like, oh, I'm already halfway and those are the boxes that I have left. This is time anxiety. The ancient Greeks had another word again for time, which is kairos, which is a more quantitative definition of time.

And it's the idea that time is elastic, that it's not a series of identical boxes, but that some moments can stretch forever, where some moments can go really fast. And an example I can give you, I think we've all experiences when you're chatting with a friend and all of a sudden you look at your phone

or your watch and you see the time and you feel like, what happened? Where has the time gone? And that's a Kairos moment that experiencing Kairos where you don't know, was it five minutes? Was it two hours? You have no idea. And this is because we experienced this depth of time.

And when you focus on Kairos, you have a lot less time anxiety because you're not so obsessed with doing as much as you can with your life. You're instead really trying to optimize for having really deep experiences. You're instead really trying to optimize for having really deep experiences. What does focusing on Kairos mean from a tactical perspective? So it's really about being intentional with how you spend your time, not based on the quantity of work that you want to produce, not based on your productivity, but based on the depth of the experience. And so to give you a few examples,

focusing on Kairos is knowing that maybe right now, the best way to spend your time is actually to read a bedtime story to your kid instead of finishing that presentation. Maybe the best way to spend your time right now is taking a nap or reading a book or going outside and stretch or taking a walk. Maybe the best time to spend your time right now is actually to get into hyper-focused mode

and finish that piece of work or that essay that you're working on and that you really wanna get done. And so really focusing on each moment, the depth of the experience, and really which I'm very aware is hard to measure, but your sense of aliveness, how alive does this moment feel for you?

The more robotic you feel, the more you're in chronos time. The more organic and alive every moment feels in terms of the decisions that you're making and the way you're spending your energy and your attention, the more you're in kairos time. I think a lot of people feel a sense of shame when they let go of busyness and sort of driving forward, maybe toward their purpose, maybe towards some sort of undefined, undetermined sense of progress. But yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of discomfort and shame around that. We live in a Kronos society.

around that? We live in a Chronos society. And so even though we know that for our mental health and wellbeing, the more we spend, we live in Kairos time, the better it is for us. It is the reality that our entire society is designed around the rules of Chronos. So we all use our calendars to know where we should be, at what time. This is how we're having this conversation right now, because we say, let's meet at this time

and have this conversation. We all have deadlines. If you're working at any kind of company, you have projects with a project plan and you have deliverables. And in addition to this, there is this Kronos timeline that we have all created for ourselves

that says that you are supposed to have achieved certain things by a certain age. So you're supposed to have children by this age. You're supposed to have bought your first house by this age, to have found a partner by this age. You're supposed to have saved X amount of money by this age, right? So it's really no wonder that people have this time anxiety that you just described where this pressure

and this sense of shame, if they're not ticking all of the boxes in the right order at the right speed. I think this is completely normal. And so again, in an ideal world, we would all be in Kairos time, but instead what I really recommend is just trying to carve out a little bit of Kairos time in your life.

It doesn't have to be all the time because again, not always possible. But what would it look like if on a Sunday, you took a couple of hours and you said, that's my Kairos moment, just listening to yourself. What do I actually want to do right now? If I forget about success, productivity, if I forget about the timeline, what do I want to do in this moment and just practicing doing this, even though it will feel a little bit uncomfortable at the beginning. What would be your advice for someone who's very burned out, struggling with

passion and doesn't even know what to sort of start experimenting with, where would they begin? It always, always starts with observation. And I see a lot of people suffering even more when they're in that situation, when they feel stuck, because they're a little bit like people drowning and moving a lot and trying to get back to the surface. They're just trying everything. They feel like they need to find a solution right now. And what you're describing here, being a bit lost, not knowing where you're going, and feeling a little bit burned out, that

is actually a liminal space that we've talked about. So this is exactly, this is an knowing where you're going, and feeling a little bit burned out, that is actually a liminal space that we've talked about. So this is exactly, this is an example where you can practice instead of trying to get to the other side as quickly as possible, instead of trying to find a solution as quickly as possible, really staying in that space and observing. So just like an anthropologist that's going to go and study a new culture, you can observe your own life without any kind of judgment. You're just observing this life,

which you can pretend you know nothing about. And you can ask questions like, why do I care about this? Why do I spend my time like this? Why do I spend my energy and my attention like this? What am I curious about? What am I excited about? What gives me energy? What drains my energy?

And you can take little notes. You can do that for just 24 hours. And really remember that you're not trying to find a solution here. You're just observing the current situation. And it's only when you've started observing the current situation that you can start noticing little patterns, little things that you might want to experiment with. And so things that you've been doing maybe on autopilot for years,

routines that you have that have become deeply ingrained, ways of thinking that seemed obvious before you started actually observing them. Those can be the seeds of tiny experiments where you can say, okay, wait a minute. It doesn't necessarily have to be this way. So what could be different? What could I try here? From a brain science perspective, what does novelty and experimentation do? What's the effect that it has on the brain?

It basically gives you, not that I want to say there's no good or bad kind of dopamine, but a more positive type of activation of the dopaminergic system. In the sense that it gives you this sense of reward through novel experiences. It gives you this sense of reward through novel experiences. And what's really addictive with social media, a lot of modern experiences is the variable reward schedule. So the idea that you don't know what you're going to get next. When you scroll on social media,

you don't know is it going to be interesting or not. I'm not sure, I keep on scrolling. When you experiment, you're actually creating that kind of variable reward schedule for your life. You try something and you're not quite sure whether this is going to work or not. And especially if you keep your experiments tiny, you're not taking a really big risk here, right? You're just trying something new for a short period of time, seeing whether that's going to work or not. If it works, it's great.

And if it doesn't, you can tweak something and go for another iteration. And so in a way it's, it's really a way to almost cook your brain on personal growth where you want to know what's going to happen next. You want to try and you have this novelty seeking, but that is targeted at self-discovery. In other news, you might've heard me say that hold luggage is a Psi-op meant to keep you poor and late. And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into

design and organization and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap, it actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomadic's done with their new method check-in luggage. It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and hold more. It's got best in class materials, 360 degrees silent glide wheels, patent pending micro welding technology and integrated TSA locks. Basically you can pack for between one and two weeks of clothes. It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space and it's lighter.

So no more panic attacks every time that you wear your bag. And that new carry-on can hold up to 20% more than other carry-ons, which means you can fit nearly a week's worth of clothing without checking a bag. And they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. Plus there's a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month. If you don't like it, we'll give you your money back right now. You get a 20% discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom.

That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Hmm. Okay. So given that you've done an awful lot of these different experiments, which one, in your opinion, has had the most surprising impact or which one could you have not predicted the most? Probably my YouTube experiment. I, um, so a few years ago, I don't know why, but a lot of my friends decided to start YouTube

channels and they were all super excited about it. Everybody was saying, you need to create a YouTube channel, you need to be on YouTube. And up to this point, just kind of doing what other people around me were doing when it came to creating content online and those kind of things. It kind of worked, right? It's just people said, start a newsletter. I experimented with that, liked it, and I kept on going. I had a blog and all of that. I created a Twitter account, et cetera. And so I felt like, okay, my friends like it. Let's experiment with this. And so I did a tiny experiment where I said,

until the end of the year, I'm going to record myself and post a video on YouTube every week. And in terms of external results, it was okay. People liked it. The growth was okay to the point where if I had only looked at that, I probably should have kept going. But what was surprising to me is that I absolutely hated recording those videos.

Really hated it. To the point where anytime I had to sit down in front of the camera one day, if I knew on a Thursday that in the afternoon I was supposed to sit down and record myself, my level of procrastination on everything else was through the roof. I was not able to work on anything else. I kept on thinking, oh, I have to record this thing tonight. And, that was, that was surprising to me in the sense that up to this point, there hadn't really been anything on the internet I felt uncomfortable doing.

I had been sharing all of my thoughts, learning in public. I grew up with the internet, you know. I've always been really comfortable with it. And that one thing somehow is not my thing. And so I learned, I, you know, again, just discovered that about myself. And the great thing about this experiment is that some people might say,

oh, it's a failed experiment. She didn't continue with her YouTube channel. But to me, it's a success because now I know, I'm not wandering anymore. When I see my friends who have very successful YouTube channels, I'm not looking at them and feeling like, oh, should I do that? I know that I shouldn't because I don't like it. Hmm. Yeah, I suppose that's the unseen benefit of something not working, is that you know that you don't need to try it anymore.

Yeah, exactly. I've literally been there, done that, not for me. And again, it really frees up a lot of your mental energy to focus on the things that actually matter and that you actually enjoy working on. What is the science of what actually makes a habit stick in the brain then? Well, you need to do it enough times first. Uh, there, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, it doesn't take 21 days.

We actually don't know how long it takes. It varies a lot across people and it varies a lot depending on what habits you're trying to build and where you're starting from. But we know it does take quite a few repetitions in order to build a habit. So that's one thing. Second, enjoying it does make it a lot easier.

We form habits a lot quicker if we actually like what we're doing. And a third, a sense of progress in the sense that if there's a habit that's a little bit difficult to build at the beginning, feeling like every time you do it, you get a little bit better and it's a little bit easier is going to make it a lot stickier.

Because again, you wanna see where you're going to go. So if you're trying to build a walking habits, for example, you want to go for a walk every day, just noticing that every day you can walk for a few more minutes. So it's a little bit easier to get started. That's also going to help you build habits faster. What about, I mean, it's I'm in Austin, Texas. It is the home of the cold plunge. Uh, what's the physiology behind why cold works so well?

So I actually don't know. I haven't read anything about that. And I've tried the cold plunge once in my entire life. Okay. And yeah. Um, and, uh, I can, I can see just from personal experience, I could tell why people got addicted to it. It felt actually, it felt really, really good.

But yeah, I don't know. I haven't read any of the research about that. I see. That could have been, that might be the next one. I know you looked at posture and how posture is sort of related to mental health and the way that our bodies respond. I thought power poses had been completely debunked in a replication crisis, but I didn't know maybe all of that's actually been double debunked.

No, no, no, it's been debunked. So I actually, it's interesting because this is an example I give all the time about my blog where I actually, I wrote an article about power posing and then read a research paper. Then someone replied and said, hey, that has been debunked. I hadn't seen it. So I posted then another newsletter saying that's been debunked. And I left the previous one and linked to the new one saying,

Hey, I'm sorry, basically. And this is something that I really like about learning in public is that you can actually make mistakes and then say I was wrong and that's okay. So yeah, I did write about it. And then I wrote about the paper where it's been debunked. And I don't think it's been double debunked. It's fully properly debunked. Right.

Okay. So what should we do with our posture? Does it matter at all? Well, I mean, it does matter for your back. So yeah, good posture is important. And, you know, if it makes you feel more confident, there's no problem with that. But there's no difference between that and in between feeling like you want to wear a nice shirt, or you want to feel like you have a nice mustache or a nice haircut or whatever it is that makes you feel confident. But you don't need like a psychologist study to tell you that whatever you do to make you feel confident can help.

Right. I have been harping on for a while about the challenges of caffeine early in the morning, especially with cortisol response and the way that cortisol and adrenaline sort of contribute to each other. That also kind of got replication crisis, but it seems like might actually be true. So what have you learned about the sort of cortisol response on a morning and the way that caffeine interacts with that? Yeah, this is still debated.

So yeah, you're right that there is a bit of a replication crisis around it, but there are enough other challenges around using caffeine early in the morning that it actually might be worth it for anyone who's wondering, oh, can I get back to drinking a lot of coffee as soon as I wake up? I think a good incentive to wait for more research is that drinking a lot of coffee has also been linked with higher anxiety, with trouble sleeping in the evening. There are a lot of other issues that are less debated in general that have to do with consumption of caffeine in general, not necessarily in the morning, but consumption of caffeine in general, that I think

are enough of an incentive to wait until there's more research. If you're one of the people who has managed to stop drinking coffee in the morning, I'm not one of these people. And I know about the research that I still drink coffee first thing in the morning. It's a bit like the doctors that are smoking cigarettes, you know, it's just like, um, so. Do as the research maybe says, but I'm not too sure, but not as I do. Yeah. Yes. Exactly.

What about dopamine loops on a morning? It seems, it's strange. Morning times are really weird for me. Evening times too, but morning times, especially, um, I've woken up either to morning times especially, I've woken up either to classic music, like classical stuff, or talking NPR style radio for probably the best part of a decade because I found that if I woke up to music and it was even the most marginally memorable song. My brain was like super permeable first thing in the morning. I don't know what it is about it, but for some reason, you know, oh, I guess it's just Miley Cyrus party in the USA for the rest of my Tuesday afternoon.

Because, you know, I woke up and the radio station decided to play Miley Cyrus this morning. So yeah, what's happening with, with dopamine in the morning with the state of the brain when we first wake up? Yeah, what you're talking about, by the way, has less to do with dopamine and more to do with the fact that you're still half asleep. And when we're asleep, we're still processing a lot of information, but in a very open way. We're not consciously processing information. And so whatever comes in and whatever we're dreaming or thinking about, our brain takes that face value basically.

And so those first couple of minutes, anything that you hear or that you listen is going to be integrated as part of your memories. Um, so, so actually, yeah. So good, good intuition to, to go with something you'd rather put in your brain rather than myelocyrus. Okay.

What about dopamine loops? What else is happening in the morning? So dopamine loops. So in the, in the morning, the problem that a lot of people have experienced is that whatever source of dopamine that you're getting in the, in the morning is then going to be something that you're going to keep on seeking over and over again throughout the day. And so this is why I think a lot of people know that, but it doesn't mean they're using that information and acting on it. But we all know that opening your phone and scrolling through social media,

first thing in the morning is one of the worst things that you can do. And if you manage to delay doing that as much as possible and wait until you're fully awake and that your prefrontal cortex is fully active a little bit later in the morning. This is when you have then more willpower. And so you're more likely to be able later in the day to open social media, have a quick look, do whatever's called, whatever stories of your friends

that you wanna check and then close it. If first thing in the morning, well, again, you're in that very vulnerable state, you start scrolling on social media, you're going to make your brain crave that same source of dopamine for the rest of the day. It's going to be a lot harder for you to control yourself and to control those cravings.

Can you think about an adaptive reason for why that mechanism exists? Why would it be that the first thing that gives us dopamine in the morning would be the thing that we try and chase for the rest of the day? I'm not denying that that's a pattern that happens. I can certainly see it in some areas of my own life, but I cannot work out why we have that. This is fully, fully hypothetical, but I cannot work out why we have that.

This is fully, fully hypothetical, but to me, a potential evolutionary explanation to this is that in the past, and if you even look at tribes nowadays with this is where they do most of the evolutionary research, you have days dedicated to certain tasks. So there is a day where people go hunting or gathering. There is a day that is for resting. That is a day that is for like batch cooking or mending their clothes or whatever it is. And so I wonder if in a society where we used to have, you know,

each day had a purpose where you used to have, you know, each day had a purpose where you knew that's what you had to do that day, there wasn't more value in being primed in a way with whatever it is, where are you supposed to get your dopamine from today? And so if you started your day focusing on, you know, talking about hunting and whatever, and then you were ready and primed and you could go and do that for the rest of the day and you would get really excited. Whereas today we're doing a thousand different things throughout the day, and so that mechanism doesn't really work as well. And also the source of dopamine that we get early in the morning might not necessarily

be the one we want to be craving for the rest of the day. And it's hypernormal. It's at a dose way higher than we would have ever got previously. be the one we want to be craving for the rest of the day. And it's hypernormal. It's at a dose way higher than we would have ever got previously. Yeah. That's very interesting. I like, look, this is the home of bro science. So you are among friends here.

If you want to speculate and pontificate about different potential reasons for why this theory might exist. What about the other end of the day then on a nighttime? How can we trick our brain into better sleep? So again, I think a lot of people know that already blue light, avoiding being on the screen, having an evening routine. I think the one thing really to keep in mind, which is going to sound so obvious when I say it, but somehow people ignore it,

is that by the end of the day, you're tired. You're tired. You don't have enough energy to make good decisions anymore. So anything you can do earlier in the day to facilitate good decision-making in the evening is going to help you sleep better. So, you know, maybe don't have a TV in your bedroom if you can avoid doing that. Maybe have your phone charger outside of the bedroom as well.

Maybe, you know, I'm saying, I'm just thinking about screens because I see so many people who literally watch TV while having dinner and then they go to the bedroom and they watch more TV while in bed, get rid of the screens. But as I'm saying this and I know not many people are actually going to do it, it's definitely one of those things where again, because your energy stores are so depleted in the evening, it's actually really, really hard to make good decisions. So environmental design, anything you can do to design your environment where even if you have one brain cell that's still working in the evening, you're still going to make

the right decision. This is really the best investment you can make. Yeah. the right decision, this is really the best investment you can make. Yeah, it's a, you know, the two ends of the day seem to be the areas that people make a ton of bad decisions. Um, it, you know, look, everybody fucks up and we are in a world that's designed to capture your attention, but you do have these two windows that are weirdly absorbent, do have these two windows that are weirdly absorbent or kind of influential. And, you know, if you were going to spend your time on screens being stimulated by dopamine, you know, bundling that into the middle of the day is if,

if that was a, you know, a decision, you can move around the proportion of how all of this different stuff happens. But yeah, I like the idea of making easy decisions better. I think putting the phone charger outside of your bedroom is a very easy solution for this and for anybody that uses their phone for their alarm. Radio alarm clocks have been around for a hundred years. So I think that excuse, I'm not convinced quite works. Uh, yeah, I, it's, it's a very strange thing to think about how much what we consider of as ingrained thought patterns or a part of our nature is actually some weird reflection

of a habit or an activity or an action that we keep on doing to ourselves. And before we know it, we're kind of being puppeted internally by a thing that we did externally. No, absolutely. And there's also, I think, you know, we need to have a little bit of a self-compassion also when it comes to these things, because a lot of the being on our screens, scrolling through social media, watching TV in the evening. For a lot of us, this is a numbing mechanism, a coping mechanism to deal with stress and anxiety. A lot of people come back from work tired and stressed and the only way they can disconnect that they know of, because again, it is so easy, right? You just turn the TV on or you go

and you scroll through social media. And so I think also giving ourselves a little bit of grace and knowing that this is what's going on is important. And so as you said, maybe start implementing easy, small changes. It doesn't have to be perfect. So charger outside of the room and also putting a timer on in terms of how long you stay on social media in the evening after, or maybe saying no scrolling

while I'm eating, I'm going to eat and I'm not going to look at any screen. When I do that, there are small changes that you can do. And if it's not perfect, it's okay. I love it. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. So people can find my book, Tiny Experiments, anywhere books are sold. I talk about a lot of the topics that we discussed together in it.

And I have a newsletter at nestlabs.com, which I send every Thursday. Heck yeah. I appreciate you very much. which I send every Thursday. Heck yeah. I appreciate you very much. Thank you for the day. Thank you. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom reading list, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found fiction and nonfiction, real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.