Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 466: The Science of Handling Uncertainty | Maya Shankar

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

It seems like a design flaw in our species that we live in a world of constant change yet most of us are not comfortable with uncertainty. In this episode, we talk to Maya Shankar about how to get better at dealing with change and to stop seeking what scientists call “cognitive closure.”Shankar is a former Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team. She also served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations, and is currently a Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google. She is the host of the Pushkin Industries podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which was named Best Show of the Year in 2021 by Apple. In this episode we talk about: Why humans are so uncomfortable with uncertainty and changeWhat a behavioral scientist actually does in the worldWhy even the host of a podcast about change isn’t immune to the uncertainties of life The benefits of cultivating a more malleable sense of selfWhy humans are such bad forecastersThe importance of auditing yourself when you’re undergoing a big changeHow to take advantage of big reset momentsThe concept of cognitive closure and why encouraging an open mind can make us more resilient  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/maya-shankar-466See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, it seems like a design flaw in our species is that we live in a world of constant change and infinite fluxing gumbo. And yet most of us are not comfortable at all with uncertainty. So, today we're going to talk about how we can get better at dealing with change, how we can stop seeking what the scientists call cognitive closure when it's generally not on offer.

My guest is Maya Shankar, a former senior advisor to the Obama White House, where she founded and served as chair of the White House Behavioral Science team. She also served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations and is currently a senior director of behavioral economics at Google. And she is the host of the Pushkin Industries podcast called a slight change of plans, which is so good that it was named best show of the year in 2021 by our friends over at Apple. In this conversation, we talk about why humans are so uncomfortable with uncertainty and

change, what a behavioral scientist actually does, why even the host of a podcast about change is not immune to the vexations of uncertainty in her own life, the benefits of cultivating a more malleable sense of self, why humans are such bad forecasters, the importance of auditing yourself when you're undergoing a big change, how to take advantage of big reset moments, and the concept of cognitive closure, and why encouraging an open mind can make us more resilient. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, in mind can make us more resilient. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping

our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out

Okay on with the show hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head like it's only fans only bad where the memes come from and where's time for my space listen to baby this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Sean Kerr, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. Let's do your origin story to start here.

Before we start recording, you were explaining that you trained as a cognitive scientist and behavioral sciences is one sort of umbrella term that often gets used in your field, and you now do a podcast on the science of change. How did you get interested in all of this stuff in the first place? Yeah, I think, you know, from the time I was a little kid, I was really drawn to human connection and understanding what makes people tick and how our minds work. As a really young kid that expressed itself in the form of my passion for the violin.

So I actually was a aspiring concert violinist as a kid. And then my career was just suddenly brought to an end when I had a hand injury at age 15. And I was told by doctors that I couldn't play anymore. And this was after really just solely devoting myself to the violin for years at this point. I was studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and it's like Pearlman had asked me if I would like to be his student. And so I really felt like I had a shot at becoming a professional.

And so I just remember being totally heartbroken and devastated that this thing that I loved and that had so defined me was no longer something that I could do. And I think we all have these moments in life where things just change suddenly and we have to figure out what the connective tissue is that can help land us in our next spot. And for me realizing that the part of the violin that I loved more than anything was the ability to connect with people to potentially make people feel something they'd never felt before, to forge an emotional connection with strangers. It was a really powerful feeling.

And so what happened is the summer before college, when I was supposed to be in China studying with my violin classmates, I was at home injured and unable to play the violin, and I ended up stumbling upon a book by Steven Pinker called The Language Instinct. And I opened it up and I just started reading a couple pages and was just completely an awe of this organ, of the human brain and what it's capable of. And I totally taken for granted my ability to speak and understand language, and when Pinker pulled the curtain back and showed me just how sophisticated and complex the cognitive machinery is that's operating behind the scenes, it really lit up a huge kind of curiosity in me and ultimately led me to become a cognitive scientist, to study

the inner workings of the mind and how we make decisions, how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world and how we define ourselves over the course of our lifetime. You know, a lot of work on identity. What does a behavioral science expert or a cognitive scientist do in the world. It's a good question. I mean, typically we become professors, which I didn't do. I did my PhD and then did a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience where I was again studying the neuroscience behind decision making. And then I kind of realized that maybe academia wasn't a good fit for me for a number of reasons, including that I just didn't know if it was consonant with my very gregarious, extroverted personality. I feel like I really wanted to work on teams.

I'm impatient, I really wanted to see impact quickly and I felt like it was harder to get both those things out of academia. And so, you know, I grew up in an academic household. My dad's a theoretical physics professor and I always saw him as a role model that I remember calling him and saying, pops, I'm not sure that I have it in me to do this very noble thing that

you're doing. And he's like, look, I could have told you that years ago, given your temperament. So when I ended up having Dan, I wasn't sure what a cognitive scientist could do in the world outside of, you know, doing research. And so I ended up calling up my old undergrad advisor, listeners of the show, I know her, Laurie Santos. She's the host of the Happiness Lab, and teaches a lot of courses on happiness. I've known her since I was 17.

She's been my mentor from the very early stages. And I said, Laurie, that thing that you've been mentoring me on for years at this point, and it's been so wonderful to me on, I don't really think I want to do this anymore. And so I was talking with her about interviewing for general management consultant roles. And I remember her thinking, oh my gosh, I put too much into this kid for her to now be jettisoning the field at large. And so she shared this really powerful story with me about how, at the time, the federal

government under Obama leadership was using insights from behavioral economics, from behavioral science, to automatically enroll low-income kids into the national school lunch program. So this was a case where the government was offering this program for low-income kids, giving them free or reduced price lunches at school, but the data showed that millions of kids were still going hungry at school every single day, and spite of the fact that this program

was available to them. And when they did a behavioral audit of the program, they realized that that was for at least two reasons, the first reason being that there was a big stigma associated with signing your kids up for a public benefits program. You know, later on when I was in Obama White House, I chatted with principals and they would tell me, you know, parents are really proud of the work they do, and they don't want

their kids depending on the government just to make sure their kids have lunch. Then there was another barrier, which was an extremely burdensome, complicated application form for the program. If you put yourselves in the shoes of, say, a single mom who's working three shifts to make ends meet, it's actually really overwhelming to have to fill out this complicated forum that requires referencing multiple tax documents and is do on a certain day and you have to take time off at work to go to the post office and buy the postage stamps and whatnot.

And so what the government did is they used a very elegant insight from the field of behavioral science, which was the power of defaults. And they automatically enrolled all eligible children into the program. And so now parents only had to take an affirmative step if they wanted to actively unenroll their kids from the school lunch program. And so that was just changing it from an often to an opt out program.

And because of this policy change, 12 and a half million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day, which had so much emotional resonance for me, and I was thinking, wow, that's exactly the kind of work that I want to be doing. But there was no such role in government, and so I ended up sending a cold email to Cass Sunstein,

who was co-author of the book Nudge, and had worked for Obama for four years, and asked if he'd be willing to make an introduction to Obama leadership for me, and within a few days, I was interviewing for a role that didn't exist, trying to pitch them on the idea of creating an applied behavioral science role, right? A practitioner of behavioral science role

and also trying to convince them that they should hire me to play that role. That's really interesting. Just to say that we had Cass Sunstein's co-author, Richard Thaler on the show a couple months ago to talk about their book Nudge and he uses this term choice architecture and how scientists can create an architecture of choices knowing what they know about the way the human mind makes decisions that nudge people in the direction of positive outcomes like getting food to kids who might not otherwise get it.

So we were describing what you study it as an undergrad and beyond that sounded broader the understanding the human mind and how we acquire language how we reason how we do everything that the mind does, whereas these kind of little nudges that we've just wandered into discussing, that seems a little narrower. Am I understanding this with some degree of accuracy? I think there's just different subsets of the field. So yeah, I started researching cognitive science and studying cognitive science and what they would call lower level cognition. So I was looking at the visual system. I was looking at how we process objects

and how we know that an object at moment one in time is the same object that our visual system perceives, you know, a moment later. And so that was, again, what they would call like lower level cognition. But then there's also this higher level reasoning, right? Which is how we make decisions and how we operate in the world. And I guess I don't see that as narrower as much as just

a different area of the field. And I think what Thaler and Sunstein did so well was to take our current understanding of decision making and translate that into applied work, right, where we could actually take these insights from human behavior and meaningfully apply them to the way that we design government programs and policies in order for people's lives to be better. And so when I joined the Obama White House, that was kind of my north star,

is, okay, we have the current architecture of a policy or program that what are we missing from a behavioral science perspective that might prevent the average person from taking advantage of the program or fully understanding their choices or making good choices within that context? And then how can we redesign those programs accordingly? While we're on this subject, it's interesting to me that nudges or behavioral science, it's kind of values neutral in a way. You could nudge people for nefarious purposes, although of course that's not the way you would view your work, but I would imagine that's an important nuance in what you do or did.

Yeah, it's definitely values neutral. Certainly the way that we worked when we were in the Obama White House was to align our end goals with the goals that government agencies had already articulated for themselves. So for example, we're trying to get more veterans enrolled in an educational and employment benefit after their years of service. We're trying to get more military service members enrolled in retirement savings plans. We're trying to help student loan borrowers effectively pay off their loans in a reasonable timeframe. We're trying to help people get treatment for PTSD.

Like, we would always defer to our government agency colleagues who already had programs with well-defined goals and then use these tools from behavioral science to help agencies achieve those goals in a more effective and efficient manner. help agencies achieve those goals in a more effective and efficient manner. So how did you go from this work to your current work where you're interested specifically in what you call the science of change, which is how humans deal with the non-negotiable relentless pace of change in life?

Yeah, I mean, I think navigating change is a key part of how and why we make the decisions that we make. And so studying change has always been a part of my time as a researcher, and then also in my work as a practitioner of behavioral science. But it was actually just a personal experience I had in 2020 that propelled me to make my podcast of slight change of plans and to really dig into

the science of change through the lens of storytelling and what we know from research to really blend those two. And basically in 2020, and I'm sure a lot of listeners can relate to this, I was feeling really overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change that was happening around the world when it came to the pandemic, racial injustice, in my personal life. My husband and I after years of trying had successfully found a wonderful surrogate who was pregnant with our baby girl and unfortunately she miscarried and so we are navigating that loss and I was feeling so lonely and isolated in my grief, because I couldn't even spend physical time with the people that I had told and that I loved because of quarantine.

And so overwhelming is how I would describe my psychological state in that moment. I was just completely overwhelmed. And at that moment, I remember Dan putting on my cognitive science hat just for a moment and thinking, okay, the specifics of this moment may be unprecedented, right, I might be very intimidated by what my current day life is presenting me with, but don't forget that the human

ability, your ability, Maya to navigate change, is not unprecedented. We've done this rodeo, this change rodeo many, many times before. And so even if the specifics look different, in current day, your human ability, your psychological ability to navigate change for humans to navigate change is very much there and is a skill that we've all been cultivating our whole lives just by virtue of being human.

And that was very grounding for me and made me think that I had so much I could learn from other people's changed stories, even stories that didn't look like my own on the surface because at the end of the day our underlying psychology might share some similarities. And so I began this quest to try and find people who had navigated remarkable change, who had endured psychological shifts along the way, and to mine their stories for wisdom and insights about how we could navigate change better in each of our lives.

And that's what became the show, a slight change of plans. And I talk with people who have navigated remarkably different changes, right? I talk to a black jazz musician who, one night was approached by a member of the Ku Klux Klan and his life took a turn and he ended up convincing dozens of KKK members to leave the clan. I talk with a health nut 30-year-old who ends up getting a cancer, stage 4 cancer diagnosis in spite of all of his best efforts to be as healthy as possible

and is navigating that in the middle of quarantine. And then I talk with a friend of mine who lost her younger sister in a fatal car accident. And what's been so interesting about this show is, again, these stories seem so different. And yet, there's so much universality in the way that people are navigating these unexpected moments of change in their lives. And I feel like I'm just I'm just a much wiser person for having learned so much from my guests. I mean, you put your finger on a really important question and I know you mentioned to Gabrielle one of my colleagues on this show that you recently put together a document summarizing the many things you've learned and I'm going to use that as a guide to the rest of this interview. Before I do that, though, just want to go back to the miscarriage and say, I'm sorry, that happened. My family has been through something similar and it's wrenching.

Have you guys been able to get past it and where you at with that? Yeah, so that was an interesting turn of event. So, the initial miscarriage was in March of 2020, and inspired the show, and I launched a slight change of plans. And then in late summer of 2021, our surrogate was again pregnant and this time with identical twin girls. We felt so lucky because our embryo had actually, our one embryo had split and we are now expecting twins. And then again, at exactly the same day of development, our surrogate miscarried. And doctors surmised that there was just some sort of biological incompatibility

between our beloved surrogate and our embryos. And it was really interesting, Dan, because this was happening while was in the middle of recording season two of a slight change of plans. And I felt so humbled because in that moment, as someone who studies the science of change, as someone who had been investigating this topic for quite a while, I felt such a desperate need to bring clarity to my situation because I didn't feel I had any. And so what ended up happening is two days after the second miscarriage, I asked the producer of my show, Tyler, to interview me as a guest on a slight change of plans.

You know, it's kind of like even the host of a slight change isn't immune to these totally unexpected changes in life. And so I ended up releasing a very, very personal episode called Maya's Slight Change of Plans, which I never, ever expected that I would do. But I felt that I owed it to my listeners and I felt I owed it to myself to really process my change out loud and try to make sense of it in the same way it asked so many of my guests to do about their changed stories in the past. And it was an incredibly therapeutic experience. And to this day I hear from listeners all over the world who are sharing how my sharing the story

affected them in a positive way. And that means so much to me, you know, to turn what was such an awful experience for my family into something that had a silver lining that helped people heal. You know, there was one email I got from a woman who moved me so much. She had lost her 21-year-old son to a drug overdose and she said that it was my sharing of this story that

really helped unlock change for her and helped her see her relationship with her son and her son's death differently and it's just hard to describe how much those kinds of things mean to me and make me feel just so worth it to put myself out there in this way. Yeah I'm'm glad you did. I'm sure it was wrenching, but it sounds like it's helped a lot of people. So just to pick up on one thing, you said there that you were humbled because here you are an expert in how we navigate change and you were facing an enormous amount of uncertainty and you didn't like it. And so I think that raises the foundational question,

which is why does the human animal reacts so negatively to uncertainty? Yeah, and this is why we react so negatively sometimes to change because change is often followed by uncertainty, and we dislike uncertainty. There is this fascinating research study showing that people who were told that they had a lower percentage chance of getting an electric shock were far more stressed than people who were told that they had a very high chance of getting the shock.

So we would rather be certain that a bad thing is going to happen than have to manage the feelings of uncertainty that accompany more of the unexpected. And I think in investigating my guest stories and also looking at the research, I think the reason why we don't like uncertainty and we don't like change is that it almost definitionally involves a loss of identity. And that's very destabilizing. So I think as humans, we often attach ourselves

to specific identities as we move through the world because it gives us a sense of security and psychologists refer to this phenomenon as identity foreclosure, right? Where we are foreclosing on an identity where we commit to a specific identity and fail to maintain an exploratory mindset and you know, I saw this happen to me when I was a violinist, that was the number one defining trait of Maya, right? First and foremost, I was a violinist,

and so when I lost the instrument, I remember thinking, I expected to grieve the loss of the violin, I did not expect to grieve the loss of myself. I didn't expect that it would come with such a profound sense of personal loss. And that it would, yeah, just rock my sense of self. And so when things change, we just, we relinquish certain identities, whether it's being a sister, being a healthy person,

a single person, a very person, you know, whatever identities we carry multiple identities at any moment in time. And I think it can be painful and disorienting to have to navigate that loss. So just to sum up here, why do we fear change? You've given us two reasons. One is, we don't like uncertainty. We'll take electric shocks over uncertainty. And two is, it's a threat to our identity identity to which we cling often very tightly.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And so many of the episodes that I've had on a slight change of plan seem to corroborate this. I remember, you know, I mentioned I interviewed this 30-something. He's actually built Cancer Detection Tools by Day, his name is Scott, and he had done everything in the books to be Mr. Healthy and Mr. Fit, intermittent fasting, high intensity interval training, he's vegan, carried turmeric around with him, and then he gets this stage for bone cancer diagnosis at 32 that leads him to have to amputate his right leg, remove a vertebra from his spine, have another surgery on his other leg, and move to MD Anderson in Texas to have 18 administrations of chemotherapy. And what was so surprising to me and talking with Scott is that he shared, you know, my any given day, I feel like

my mind is more concerned that I've lost my six pack than it is that I might die. And that was so revealing to me because it emphasized that, you know, for so long, Scott had this particular identity, this way of seeing himself in the world. And losing that was its own kind of grief that he had to navigate alongside all of the hardship that comes along with a cancer diagnosis. You say that the answer here is to cultivate a more malleable sense of self. How can we go about doing that? Yeah, it's a really, it's tough, but we know there's really compelling research on social

identity priming and the fact that the labels we give to ourselves or give to others can really affect how we act. We tend to act in ways that align with our current identities or our aspirational identities. And so one technique that I found to be helpful, certainly in my own life, is to start identifying myself as someone who excels during times of uncertainty, who actually thrives during times of uncertainty, who's, you know, challenged, oriented, and doesn't always need the kind of cognitive closure or reduction of ambiguity

that we as humans crave. So I think attaching your identity to being able to navigate change well can actually be helpful. It's a helpful reorientation, a reframing of how we go through the change experience. And then the other thing that I think is really helpful is to try and build more durable, sturdy identities. And what I mean by that is instead of attaching our identities to any given

pursuit, right, in my case, to being a violinist, or you can imagine you're being a doctor, being a mom, whatever the identities are, being a doctor, being a mom, whatever the identities are, being an athlete, try and attach your identity to the features of that pursuit that really make you light up. In my case, it was, as I mentioned earlier, in the conversation, a thirst for human connection. For other people who might be seeing impact or witnessing self-growth, whatever the feature is, if you can identify what those features are, then if your circumstances change, and you can no longer do that specific pursuit, you can at least still find other

pursuits that share those underlying traits. Well, let me stick into that and I'll use myself as an example because I'm you know, an incurable narcissist either that or because I even know what are examples that come to mind. But so I'm, uh, what do I do? Uh, I guess I lost my identity as a news anchor, but I, you know, I'm a writer and a podcaster and I try to make compelling content that helps people do their lives better. If I lost my podcast and my book deals or I got long COVID and had so much brain fog that I couldn't write or podcast anymore, how could I create an identity now that would be malleable in a way that would allow me to endure that kind of change? Yeah, I mean, so I think long COVID aside, which would introduce a really serious set of considerations. I think this would assume that the brain is in the same state of health, but I think I would first ask you what is it

that you enjoy about podcasting and writing books? It's hard because this stuff, it gets pretty gooey, but I think for me, actually, the answer would be something around a human connection, helping people, learning from people, being super curious about other people, etc. etc. Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to identify, because that wouldn't be the same motivator for a lot of other people. And I think we each have our specific set of motivators that draw us towards certain passions or hobbies or professions.

And I think when you strip the profession or the pursuit of its superficial features, and you look beneath the surface and you try to understand what aspects of it are really motivating to you and really inspiring to you, then at least you can try to find that through line elsewhere. So life has thrown many curveballs my way. I went from being a violinist to an academic, to a public policy person to now creating a podcast on change

and they seem very disparate, very disconnected on their surface. But I think the thing that really does connect them is all of these pursuits have been feeding my curiosity about the human condition and how people navigate through experiences, and how we connect with one another, and how we define ourselves in key moments, and how we get people to emotionally connect with one another. Right? And so certainly in my podcast, I feel like this is almost designed for my personality type, which is every conversation I have is about being able to forge a deep emotional connection with my guests and my audience through a shared

story that's being told. And so I just think it can be helpful for us to figure out those traits because then our lives can also feel less disjointed. It's easier to craft a narrative that helps us see our lives as slightly more cohesive, which I think can actually be soothing given the human mind's orientation. Well said. You used to phrase a few paragraphs ago, cognitive closure, what does that mean?

Yeah, so it's just referring to the idea that as humans we really do like having environments where there is little ambiguity, right, in the same way that we were talking about. We don't like uncertainty, we don't like ambiguity. And so we like just having perfect information about the current state of affairs and what the future will hold. And what they find from research is that people who have less of a desire for this kind of cognitive closure, who have a more open mind, who are essentially more okay with the uncertainty piece are much more resilient in the face of change.

And it does seem like it's a mindset that is not immutable, it's not fixed. You can actually try to cultivate it, this kind of open mind. And so it's something I certainly need to work on. I think I have a strong need for cognitive closure in my day-to-day life, just given my orientation. And so I've been working on, you closure in my day to day life, just given my orientation. And so I've been working on, you know, as I said, even those labeling techniques

of trying to see myself identity as someone who aspirationally thrives during times of uncertainty and as a problem solver and likes cracking the nut on different challenges, like those things can be helpful. Coming up, Maya Shankar on how to create a more subtle relationship with change. Why humans are bad cognitive forecasters and the importance of auditing yourself when you're undergoing a change.

Right after this? Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life Is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really

enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you,

what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon music or Wondering app. This notion of creating a more supple relationship with change, you described one technique for doing it, which is to sort of will yourself into creating an identity of, yeah, I'm good at dealing with change.

Are there other, because you said this isn't a fixed and immutable situation where we can get better at this? Are there other tactics that you've seen either in the data or from your guests? So I think there's actually two pieces of advice I've given. So one is around trying to, I don't know if I call it like willing and identity as much as aspiring to have that kind of identity and cultivating it doesn't happen overnight. You can't just be like, I'm someone who's awesome at X and you're not awesome at X, right? So this does take some work.

The second though was making clear to yourself what it is you're attaching your identity to so that you're meaningfully determining what it even means for you to change, right? So it can be more sturdy to think, well, I'm losing the ability to play the violin, but I'm not losing myself. I still have that thirst for human connection at its core. I think that can be stabilizing in these moments. I think the third thing that I would share is, and this, I think if we all can better appreciate, can help us in these moments, navigate uncertainty and navigate change better, is to remember that we are really bad cognitive forecasters. Dan Gilbert showed this in his book, Stumbling Upon Happiness.

We're really bad at predicting what things will make us happier, unhappy in the future. And I think the exact same thing is true when it comes to change. We actually are quite bad at predicting how the big changes in our lives will change us. And we tend to have over leased and plastic models of how those big changes in our lives will change us. And I think the thing that I've seen my guessfall prey to, and I certainly have fallen prey to, is that when we think about how any given change in our lives will affect us, we tend to think about that specific change in isolation, almost as though it's operating in a vacuum. And so we think about the most obvious things that might result from that change.

But that fails to appreciate that our lives and our psychological makeup is actually very complicated, very complex, and that change in one area of our lives often has spillover effects into other areas of our lives that are impossible to predict in advance. And so my guests have often been quite surprised that what they coded as being an exclusively bad change

at its outset turned out to have a much more nuanced and multi-faceted effect on them, oftentimes in good ways. The reverse has been true as well. People who coded changes as exclusively good were humbled by how it was a much more complicated fallout than they expected. I think that that's reassuring. I think that there's a hopeful message there, which is we should really be auditing ourselves

through our change experiences, because we will change in lots of unexpected ways, but there may be, in fact, positive ways in which we're changing that we simply don't anticipate. And you know, bring this back to Scott, he was really amazed that despite this loss of identity, he started to become a better person in his eyes. He felt he was more empathetic with others and with himself. He felt like he was

starting to understand what it really meant to be Scott, and that maybe this fitness thing was not as important to him. It wasn't as foundational to his core as he had thought it was. And overall, he feels like he's just learned so many valuable lessons from this experience. And that's not to say everybody would feel that way, but it has been interesting that, at least for Scott anyway, his worst case scenario happened. And he's come at the other side with a quite nuanced understanding of the ways in which this has impacted his life. This forecasting issue is this is why we get expressions like, you know, every cloud as a silver lining or on the flip side, be careful what you wish for.

Yeah, that's right. And again, I don't want to make it seem like there are some clouds in life that won't have silver linings. And I think it's important to acknowledge that those exist too. However, on average, I would say there might be some redeeming parts of a negative experience. And at a minimum, going through a change, especially an unexpected change, will reveal to you parts of your personality that you might not have tapped into. They may have been laying dormant.

And it's through the change that they actually emerge and you become acquainted with them. So at a minimum, what I've seen from all of my guests on a slight change of plans is that there has been a lot of personal growth that has happened through their change experiences, a deepened understanding of self. Can we get better at forecasting? And is that even something we should think about endeavoring to do? I think only in a meta way, I think approaching change with a profound amount of humility is the thing that's going to give us a slightly more sophisticated complex read on how we might interact with

change. So it's almost just like this meta-concorded awareness that that's going to be the case. But I do think the forecasting piece is really hard. And that's because we not only are complex systems, we're operating in these massively complex ecosystems, where we're not sure how even other people will respond to us in our changes. I was interviewing a guy named Morgan. When he was in his 20s, went through gender reassignment surgery to align his body with his true gender identity, which is male. And he was saying at first, he was so liberated by this change to be freed from

the prison of being in a female body. And he was just elated by this change. And then very soon after, he was confronted with the harsh reality of what it means to be a black man in society and how people were interacting with him. And that Morgan talked so beautifully about this transition, but it was understanding that as much as he could try and predict what these changes would be like, he was never going to be able to predict how others would engage with him or the specific way in which they were going to engage with him.

And so I think we're never going to quite crack the nut on the forecasting piece. There's going to be a lot of exogenous variables in the world that will change outside of your control. And it would require being able to be a fortune teller, essentially, like a future reader and that we don't have that human ability and we never will. So yeah, I think we just have to work

within the constraints of what our minds are capable of. I think you said the key thing, which is approaching things with humility, it reminded me of a great expression I heard recently from a Zen master who advised his students to wash their minds and don't know so. And so yeah, you could get a big promotion or you could get fired.

And people could say, you know, how do you think this is gonna go for you? And you could say, I don't know. And that would be the most honest answer and it might tee you up actually for navigating things in a more effective way. Yeah, I think we fall prey to the solution that it's almost like a magic mirror where I'm Maya, I pass through this mirror, I'm totally unchanged other than the fact that

I'm, for example, getting the promotion. And so everything in my life, my mentality, the way I interact with other people, the way they interact with me, all of that is going to remain unchanged. It's just going to be me plus positive promotion. That's not how it works. It's just what's complicated in that. I think one of the things that I've learned from the show is I think in advance of it, I would have, you know, before I started making a slight change, I would have thought,

oh, I would give different advice to someone who's navigating an unexpected unwilled change than a person who's navigating a willed change that they view as positive, right? That's like a good change. And now I no longer think that. I think I would give the same advice to both people, which is to approach their change with humility and to see how that change is affecting other parts of them. Because I think I've also learned from other guests on my show that they have changed

in response to the change, sometimes in ways they didn't want to be the case. And that's disrupted their well-being because it was happening almost outside of their awareness because they didn't think to audit themselves as they were going through the change. Right? And so I think that's an important lesson too. In this document you put together recently that you very generously described to my aforementioned colleague, Gabrielle, you talked about some tips to prepare us to better navigate the relentless pace of change that just comes along with being in the world. And one of the tips was small and reliable daily rituals.

Can you talk about why you think this is important? Yeah, I think it's important to have these rituals because when you feel like you're losing grass with a world around you and the stability of the world around you, it can feel really nice to center yourself in these moments that do feel like they're within your control. I mean, we're never going to rid ourselves of the very natural human desire to want to be in control,

to want to be in the driver's seat. And so, like I was saying earlier, we kind of have to work within the constraints that we have as human beings. And part of that is wanting to feel like we have a little bit of control at least, that it's not all entirely an illusion. And so, the ritual can be very simple, but it should be something that you're able to do on most days, right? Because it's not that hard. And so, you know, taking a walk, calling a friend, for me, it is actually starting my day with a very traditional cup of Indian style tea. So I have fresh ginger slices, cardamom, I boil milk.

It's a whole ritual for me, even when I travel. Because it really does make me feel centered every morning to anchor myself in the stability of the small ritual. And I remember, you know, Dan, it can feel jarring when you're in the throes of a big change to indulge in this thing. And I remember after the second miscarriage where we lost twins, I remember feeling, oh my God,

like nothing seems to fit in today. Like nothing that I normally do fits into today, given where my mind is at. It all just felt out of place, but I forced myself to do the tea. And I think subconsciously, it kind of convinced my brain, okay, there's some things that are still normal about today. Even if it took my conscious brain some time

to catch up to that philosophy, I think my subconscious brain was fooled at least temporarily into being like, okay, you're still having the cup of tea. You know, the day's still advancing, time is still taking. And I think that was really soothing for me. I hope it is for listeners. I buy it. It lands for me for sure. Another thing you recommend is seeking out on the regular, all inspiring experiences or

experiences of beauty. Yeah, I love this research. I was talking about it with a friend of mine, Ethan Cross. He conducts research on how we contain the mental chatter in our minds. And he was sharing with me a study in which patients who were recovering from surgery actually recovered faster from their operations and took fewer painkillers when they were assigned to a room that looked out onto a small set of trees versus patients who had the view of a brick wall.

And they were also evaluated as being more emotionally resilient. And this is not some ethnic, napah, valley view, right? This is just some trees. And they actually have done research showing that you can even get some of these gains from like a screensaver of nature or painting. But I think the mechanism that play here is that feelings of awe and beauty allow us to distance ourselves from our own egos from our individual identities and to feel things that extend beyond our own needs and wants and anxieties. And so when we're exposed to these awe-inspiring experiences, it gives us that very healthy distance to see the world is bigger than us, right, and to almost contextualize our place in it. And there's some really fascinating neuroscience research showing that neural activity that's

associated with self-immersion actually decreases. So when they run FMRI studies, they found that. And I love this piece of advice because almost everyone has access to an awe-inspiring experience. It could be looking up at the sky at night, looking at the stars. It could be, you know, man-made awe, a Taylor Swift song. It can get me there. But I really love this because I think it is accessible to all of us. And we might not appreciate what's happening at a psychological level when we invite these experiences into our lives, which is that they are actually healing and perspective giving.

Yes, it sounds like that's the key. The salutary smallness that can result from getting a true sense of your place in the universe. Yeah, I mean, I've talked to astronauts like I was talking with Scott Kelly about this getting a true sense of your place in the universe. Yeah, I mean, I've talked to astronauts like I was talking with Scott Kelly about this, who is an astronaut who spent nearly a year in space. And he had this kind of remarkable experience

where he was looking out onto planet Earth and seeing no geographical divisions whatsoever. It was all just this beautiful pristine looking planet. And then on the space craft, there was CNN playing, like they were actually able to listen to the news. And he was hearing about all the trauma that was happening on the ground because of human conflict and whatnot. And I think in that moment, that gave him that kind of perspective, right? And that was, you know, very few of us will have the astronaut version of this experience. But it was an example of kind

of all capturing him and allowing him to see humans, you know, it's just a tiny little small part of this universe and maybe we're needlessly in conflict with one another. Well, I agree with that. You think came on this show. That conversation actually had a real impact on me. Yes. And what I love about his work is that he dispels myths that I think some of us are laboring under when it comes to calming that mental chatter that basically venting or ranting about our problems is gonna make a big dent have a positive impact.

And I just love it when he presents these findings that run against the zeitgeist. So a lot of our conversation Dan actually ended up centering around how the current popular state of mind is, you know, we should all be present-minded. It's all about being in the present. And I was, I felt like I was a lobbyist in this conversation for the past in the future because I, I think it's a remarkable human ability that we're even able to, that we're able to mental time travel and occupy these different states of mind that we're even able to, that we're able to mental time travel and occupy

these different states of mind where we're either reflecting on past memories or we're fantasizing about the future or imagining things. It's a huge driver, a human ingenuity. It's just an incredible part of our psychology. And Ethan and I, you know, we're bonding over the fact that I think we sometimes worry that that message is getting lost because there's so much present mind andness focused, but I think we should have a more compassionate

relationship with the fact that our minds can wander, because it's also a uniquely human ability that confers all kinds of advantages that make the human experience really special, really singular in quality. You mentioned that venting is actually not helpful. Can you say more about that? Yeah, so one of the things I've chatted about with Esen is that it feels really emotionally good to just kind of like dump the problem out onto someone else. But the challenge that we often face with a person that we choose to confide in is that their instinct, naturally being, you know, empathetic human beings,

is to try and make you feel better, is to soothe you emotionally and commiserate with you and make you feel heard and validated. When actually, sometimes the best approach is for them to be giving you cognitive reframing strategies to actually see your problem through a different lens, to actually have perspective to, yeah, I was saying before, you know,

reframe the nature of the problem so that you can look at it differently. And so something that he shares is the importance of, or at a minimum, just being really selective about who you're venting to to make sure that they understand that at times you want them to go into cognitive mode, where they're not just commiserating and helping you kind of relive all those angry, frustrated feelings, but are actually doing the work to get you to a more productive place by the end of the conversation. Right. It's a tricky balance because my reflex for a long time when somebody would come to me struggling with some sort of change was to try to fix it for them. But actually, what people really want, I think, on a visceral level, I think is

to hear the two magic words that sucks. Yeah, no, you're totally right. This is actually something we dive into on a slight change of plan. So I love that you're bringing this out. This is exactly what we discussed, which is that there is that tension. And it's a very delicate balance of both making sure that the person's emotional needs are met, and then at a certain point pivoting to cognitive mode when it feels appropriate to, but absolutely both need to be done in most conversations. Coming up, Maya talks about extracting meaning from the stories we tell ourselves,

the best people to give us advice and taking advantage of reset moments to integrate new habits after this. You talked earlier about loosening control and how hard it is for humans to do that. Are there any other techniques for loosening this tight grip that we all seem to have around the things we care about, which are nonetheless subject to the law of impermanence? Is there anything I didn't give you a chance to say in this zone before I ask you a few other questions? Sure, I mean, I think in the throws of change, right, we can also often feel consumed by rumination about the past, because we like being in control, you can get into these

spirals of, oh, if only I had done this, if only I had done that, things would be different, right? Or you can worry about what the future is going to hold, that you could try to have that severe grip on it. One thing that's validated by research, which I really like, is around this notion of distance again, which is using techniques to is around this notion of distance again, which is using techniques to distance yourself from your problems and see them through

a slightly more objective lens. And so there is research showing that when we stop thinking from a first person perspective and instead imagine we are giving advice to a friend, thinking about things from more of a third person perspective, it can help us see those problems more clearly and objectively and avoid getting trapped in our emotions. And so I think one thing that can be helpful when it comes

to our relationship with control is the reassurance that basically no matter what your spiritual or religious beliefs or broad philosophical views on this life, we are natural born storytellers at our core. And so what we find is that no matter what happens in our lives, most people try at least to build narratives around their stories and to try to find meaning in the good and the bad things that have happened to them. And I've found that always lightly reassuring because I'm realizing along the way, of course, that I don't actually have a lot of control that controls an illusion. But I know that my psychology will help me in those moments, at least a bit, by trying to create a narrative around it and try and

extract some meaning and or silver linings from the experience. So, to know in advance, and no matter what happens, your mind in some ways will be an ally to give it meaning after the fact. Yeah, and that's not to say that the pain won't feel as intense from the change, but I do think that this insatiable feeling to create a story, to create, to engage in sense-making, right? And I think we engage in sense-making because we are essentially trying to resist the ranomeness of the world around us because that's such a jarring reality to face, right? Like I'm, I don't have religious beliefs, I believe things really just do happen, not

for a reason, but just happen. And when I think too hard about the inherent ran randomness in our universe, it's very overwhelming. And so I think our psychologies are wired to try at least and make sense of the things that happen to us. And we can learn about ourselves in the types of stories we tell ourselves about what matters to us, what we value, what we don't value. It's not always going to be a veritable representation of reality, the stories we tell ourselves,

but I think that they are educational. They teach us something about who we are and what we care about. And the conclusions aren't always gonna feel good, right? I mean, we live in a complicated world and there's not always little perfect bows we can use to tie up the things that happen to us, but to just let our minds go where they want to go

when it comes to seeing if there's meaning that we can derive from hardship, I think, can be part of the healing process. Just to pivot a little bit here. I believe you also on the show talk about techniques we can use to motivate change that we want, behavior change, goal setting, et cetera,. etc. What have you learned in this sphere?

Yeah, so how there are so many things that I've learned, and a lot of this has been in my wheelhouse too, because I've studied behavior change, and certainly that was very relevant in the role that I played in government. One of my favorite findings is how important it is to examine who it is who's setting the goals. Because what we know from research is that when we're the ones that are defining our own targets, we're better at achieving them. Versus when someone tells us that this is our goal. I think it makes a lot of sense.

I think we've talked about this a bit already, Dan, but we love being agents over our own experiences. We like having our hands on the steering wheel. And I think that's the case too when it comes to who's setting the goals. And so one trick can be, you know, even when you do have to be given guidance by someone, let's say you have a personal trainer who's like, you're doing squats, even if they just give you a set of options from which to choose, that can make you feel more ownership over the goals that you're setting

and make you more likely to stay motivated. Another one that I really like, it comes from a friend of mine, IEL at Fishbock, is to set goals when you're in a similar psychological and physiological state as the one you'll be in when you're striving for that goal. And I think this is so important because it's kind of counter to the advice,

don't go to the supermarket, hungry. Actually, you do wanna be in the case of goal setting, setting goals when you are in a similar psychological state to the one you'll be in when you're actually trying to achieve that goal. And the reason is that you need to bridge any empathy gaps you have between your present self and your future self. We tend to not have that kind of empathy

where on a Sunday at 2 p.m., I may I might think, oh yeah, I'm going to get up at 6 a.m. every morning this week to go to the gym is, okay, this is 4 p.m. or whatever, this is afternoon Sunday, Maya talking, right? And so if you have gone up at 6 a.m. and you're working out and then you decide you want to keep doing this every day, that's better because at least that empty gap has been bridged. But don't set yourself up for unreasonable targets by defining goals and setting goals when you're in a very different frame of mind or in a different

physiological state. So it's interesting you kind of look at both sides of the coin here. There's the change that's involuntary that happens to us. And then there's the change that we are hoping to make for ourselves, which of course is an arduous process. But it sounds to me like in your current work, you're looking at both sides of this coin.

Absolutely. And I think what I'm learning is that the line is blurred between them in terms of how we respond to our earlier discussion about kind of falsely coding or almost, yeah, the line is blurred between them in terms of how we respond to our earlier discussion about kind of falsely coding or almost, yeah, engaging in this very simple model of the world, where there are will and then there are unwield changes. And I'm seeing that as a messier space than I did before, which is really helpful, actually. And I think what I'm trying to get at is to have a more open mind

in the face of change. And I think that more open mind actually makes us more resilient. And I don't mean more open mind as in more open to change. I mean, literally having a more open mind to all of the ways in which the change might affect you, or it might affect the people in your life. Instead of just putting in the good bucket

or the bad bucket. Yeah. You've done a great job with this. Is there anything in our remaining minutes here? Is there anything that I should have asked but didn't? So another thing to think about when you're thinking about goal setting and motivation is to make sure that you're rewarding the right thing. And by that, I mean, don't reward yourself for having done 60 minutes of work.

Try to reward yourself for something that reflects quality, a dimension that reflects quality. So the amount of work completed versus the amount of time you spent working because otherwise, sometimes then we're just running out the clock and quality suffers. There's what researchers call the middle problem. We experience high levels of motivation

at the beginning of a pursuit and also at the end of a pursuit. But there's a drop in motivation in the middle. And so one of my friends, IELET Fishbok, who's a professor of psychology at Chicago, she recommends keeping our middles short or non-existent. So if you're trying to be healthy, for example, you might have a lot of willpower in the morning, you eat that healthy breakfast. But then by the time lunch comes, you kind of like, loosen the rules a little bit and then by dinner, you're like, okay, no, you need healthy. So she was kind of cheekily saying that you could reframe lunch as an extended breakfast, or, you know, lunch is an early dinner if you're trying to stay healthy.

But there was such a charming study, Dan, where people were, were given a pair of scissors and were asked to cut out five identical shapes. And at the beginning of the experiment, they were really, really good about it. They very neatly and carefully cut their shapes out. But by the time they got to the third shape, they were literally cutting more corners. And so, and then, you know, towards the fifth shape, their shapes became really well cut again. And so just being mindful that we do get this decrease in motivation, it's kind of like a little curve downward. So just to be mindful of those middles and it could be as simple as you know, you have

an annual goal, but maybe you want to parse that into mini goals where you have, you know, each month you have a goal and you divide it up into weeks. So that way your middle is not a three month summer stretch, but your middle is actually just like a few days in the middle of the month, right? Another piece of advice that I love is actually around advice giving. So there's research showing that when we give advice to someone else who's trying to achieve a similar goal, that's a highly effective way of motivating ourselves. And I think the mechanism here is that when you are giving advice, you are yourself recalling

past behaviors that were successful, or you're forming specific plans of action for the future. And so there was a study showing unemployed people who gave job hunting advice to others were more motivated to look for a job than another group of unemployed people who received advice from an expert. And so I love that. I think we all have the ability to look at our lives and even look at the areas where we're struggling, but then to figure out, hey, if I was going to be

the one sharing advice here, what advice would I give? And I think it brings clarity to our our thought process. It helps us understand what we have been good at. And it helps us create better action plans for the future. I can really relate to that last idea. I mean, because somebody who now makes his living obnoxiously bad during people into meditating, that advice giving is actually really motivating for me to continue my practice. So just one small example. Yeah, I love that one. And then I've got two more for you guys in case you want me to. Yes, please. Keep it coming. Keep going. Okay, great. So this research comes from my

my friend Katie Milkman. You must know her, Dan. Yes, she's been on the show, she's great. She's an expert on the science of motivation and she talks about two concepts that I love and I absolutely use in my day to day life to be better. So the first is around temptation bundling and long story short, it's really just about pairing an unpleasant activity with an activity that you find really intrinsically and immediately rewarding. So for example, you only listen to your favorite songs when you're working out.

You only listen to your favorite podcasts when you're folding laundry. And you deny yourself that pleasure in other parts of life. My poor husband, he'll try to play like a Casey Musgrave's album, All We're Cooking for Dinner. And I'm like, no, that's an exercise song. I can't listen to this now, because I'm not suffering enough.

But it's funny, you actually end up looking forward a bit to those things that are harder, because you can look forward to watching your favorite movie or TV show or listening to your favorite song. And then Katie talks about the importance of capitalizing on fresh starts. So we're better at sticking with goals when they are accompanied by something that feels new

and like a reset moment. So a birthday moving to a new home, getting married, first day of spring, even the first day of the week can feel like a fresh start. And I think the mechanism here is that when we are engaging in a transition of sorts, say moving to a new home, there's already a set of behaviors that are going to be different, right, in that new home. And so it's easier for us to integrate these new habits into that new life where new things are happening anyway. Or you know, you enter the beginning of a week with a new mindset or a new set of goals. And so your mind might be more open to integrating these new sets of behaviors.

Thank you very much for coming on. Before I let you go, can you just plug anything, obviously you've got your podcast, but anything else that you're putting out into the world that you might want people to check out? Yeah, sure. I mean, the love of my life is my podcast, a slight change of plans.

Well, I guess my husband too, but folks can listen anywhere they get their podcast. And I'm so excited because we have an incredible cast of characters. And it's just been such an edifying process for me down because I feel like no story is the same in lots of really important ways and yet they're all unified in a lot of other really important ways. So the podcast is really just about better understanding the human condition at its core and it's just

been such a passion of mine and I'm really excited for folks to hear it. Excellent. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks again to Maya, really appreciate her coming on. Check out the third season of a slight change of plans, which includes some of the episodes Maya mentioned in this conversation. Thanks as well to everybody who works so incredibly hard on this show. They include Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, Maria Wartelle, Samuel Johns, and Jen Plant. And we get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode about how to deal with distraction. I think that's a pretty universal issue, and my guest is the great Shiloh Catherine.

pretty universal issue and my guest is the great Shiloh Catherine. He's got a new book with five strategies straight from the Buddha himself for dealing with distraction. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.