Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Making — and Keeping — New Year’s Resolutions | Hal Hershfield

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

A leading behavioral psychologist reveals practical strategies to help you actually make the changes you want to make this new year (and beyond).Hal Hershfield is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making, and psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and the author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. His research on future selves has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, as well as the Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today. In this episode we talk about:What he means by a future self, and why thinking about your future self will help you make better decisionsHow to think about your future self without neglecting the present momentThe importance of commitment devices, and what they are — including some which you can even adopt right nowThe importance of breaking down big goals to make them achievableHow to reframe commitments so that you actually stick to themThe role of mental time travel to help you actually do what you say you want to doRelated Episodes:How to Change Your Habits | Katy MilkmanAtomic Habits | James ClearSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/hal-hershfieldAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee 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. Hello, everybody. Happy New Year. You may be waking up today contemplating how to make and keep New Year's resolutions. The bad news, I'll lead with this, but there is good news. The bad news is that human beings are notoriously bad at this. Most of us will have bailed on our resolutions by February. The good news, though, is that there's a ton of research

into how best to make and keep your resolutions. And today, we've got one of the leading thinkers in the field here to walk us through it all. You can make and actually keep your resolutions, but you have to do it in the right way. And we're going to get some expert advice today. Hal Hirschfield is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision making, and psychology at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. He's also the author of Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. We talk about the research that Hal has personally done as well as the work done by his peers in this field.

Among other things, we cover what he means by a future self and why thinking about your future self can actually help you make better decisions right now. How to think about your future self without neglecting the present moment. What commitment devices are, the importance of breaking down big goals into manageable parts, to make them achievable, how to reframe commitments so that you actually stick to them, and other behavioral strategies such as temptation, bundling, and tangential immersion. strategies such as temptation, bundling, and tangential immersion. But first, BSP, blatant self-promotion, starting this week on the podcast, we've got a special New Year's series featuring some of the smartest people we know talking about the advice they

can't live without. You're going to hear from the legendary Buddhist nun, Pemma Chodron, about one radical, non-negotiable practice for her, and you'll get a master class in kick starting or refreshing a meditation practice from John Kabatzin, the series kicks off on January 3rd, many, many guests. You're gonna love it. Meanwhile, over in the 10% happier app, we're kicking off a meditation challenge

that we're calling the imperfect meditation challenge hosted by my friend and colleague Matthew Hepburn and featuring some great teachers, Carlisle and Don Mauricio, also friends and former guests on this show. It's free, it runs for 14 days. They're gonna help you cut through perfectionism and shame, stuff that can derail your meditation habit. If you wanna start the new year strong,

this is for you, it kicks off on January 8th and you can join in the app right now, download the 10% happier app today, wherever you get your apps. If you've ever stayed at an Airbnb, you know that it can be a fun and affordable way to visit a new place, but have you ever considered whether you could be an Airbnb host? Maybe you're planning a long weekend

with friends or family this fall while you're away, you could Airbnb your place and make some extra money to help pay for the trip. Maybe you have an extra bedroom or in-law unit where friends and family come to stay with you, you could Airbnb it and make some extra cash while it sits empty. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it.

My wife and I have talked about doing something like that before we certainly love staying in Airbnb's, especially when we go to the beach. But again, Airbnb, as an experience, isn't all about you staying in somebody else's home. Whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host.

Hal Herschfield, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. I'm really happy to be here. Happy new year. Happy new year to you too. We're taping this before new years, of course. But I'm anticipating that we'll both be hung over by the time people are actually listening to this episode. How bad do I be feeling? Yes, exactly. Well, if we hung over by the time people are actually listening to this episode. How bad do I be feeling?

Yeah, it's exactly. I don't even drink, but I'll be hung over from probably meeting too many cookies or something like that. And like a lot of family time. Yes, yes. A psychic hangover for sure. I was going to say it's a specific kind. So let's talk about this.

I mean, this is a time of year to state the blazingly obvious when everybody's thinking about, you know, how do I get my shit together? How can I change my life? How can I make some specific changes that will help me going forward? And everything I ask will be in that spirit. Before we get into the tactical advice that I know you have, I'd be curious to get some background on you. Any time I have somebody on the show who's dedicated their lives to a specific area of research, I always ask, why? You know, why is this such a focus for you? Yeah. No, I mean, it's a good point. Look, I'm a psychologist. My parents are both clinical psychologists, my wife is a clinical psychologist. So essentially, for much of my adolescence and

even young adulthood, I swore against going into psychology, but I guess it sort of found me. And at the same time, I look, I was an English major in college. One of the themes that kept popping up in every book I read was something about identity and who people were and how they related to others and how they changed in a short period of time

and a long period of time. You could just say that I was sort of like an organic interest of mine, and it's stuck, and when I eventually started graduate school, I just started studying these issues of identity and how we think about ourselves, but most importantly, how that relates to our decisions and how we can improve them.

And as much as I try to study other topics, there's so much more to be learned here, and so I keep coming back to this general field of understanding who we are and how our perceptions of who we are impacts the decisions that we make. That's a, I don't know that I've ever thought about it in exactly those terms. We've definitely done a lot on the show and I've wrestled a lot in my own life with making decisions that are not totally stupid. But I don't know that I've ever thought about it within the context of my identity and

how I see myself. So what's the connection there? Yeah, I mean, look, to be fair, I didn't either. When I first started to investigate some of these topics, it was really through the lens of just trying to understand why people have a difficult time with long-term decisions. And I kept getting caught up in the minutia of the specific aspects of decisions themselves.

I was at the time looking at financial decisions, retirement decisions. And the more I kept asking questions about this type of decision making, I would return to this bigger question of how do I even see myself now and then how do I see myself at the point in which I will realize the consequences of these decisions that I'm making right now.

And so it was that sort of lens that then got me down to this sort of viewpoint of the self over time and our identity over time and how that then got me down to this sort of viewpoint of the self over time and our identity over time and how that then factors back to what we're choosing right now, or I should say another way we're not choosing to do right now. Does that make sense? It does. I think what you're saying is that how we see ourselves and how we think about ourselves really does have a significant impact on the decisions we make that will affect our

future self. Yeah, yeah. You said it very well. I mean, at the end of the day, the nutshell summary is that the way that we see ourselves and how connected we see ourselves to the person we will one day become, that has an impact. That sense of connection has an impact on the decisions that we make right now, whether we, you know, on a very basic level, whether we choose to spend more or save more, you know, whether we choose to get off off the couch and go exercise, but on a deeper level, you know, how we choose to spend our time. And in what ways are we spending that time that we'll look back on in a more satisfactory way or possibly

more regretful way? I think those are sort of the, some of the outcomes that matter here. Do you think most people spend much time considering their connection to the future iteration of themselves? I'm not sure, I'm just thinking about how I think about the world. I don't know, I mean, yeah, maybe I'll think about how I, am I feeling the morning, given the decision I might make right now, but I don't know that I think that much about who I will be in 10 years and whether that impacts what kind of decisions I'm making.

I mean, I would imagine the decisions are, for most people, basically like, I hate myself. So who cares? Like, why am I going to invest in any of this? Like, why am I going to get off the couch at all? Or I'm totally obsessed with myself. So I'm obsessed with how I look on Instagram. So I'm going to do X, Y and Z. So I feel much more like now based for most. That's my guess for most people. Well, I mean, I think that's probably true. I mean, not to be too on point about it. But,

you know, now is the period that we live in, right? So we, you know, of course, that's what we're paying attention to. I don't think that people are walking around saying, well, how do I feel about myself in five years? How do I feel about myself in 10 years? Here's my suspicion. I suspect that it is something that operates in the background for many people. And it may not be something that we call

to mind regularly. It may not be something that we call to mind ever, but I do believe that like many other aspects of time perception and how we sort of relate to time, it's something that is happening, it's running in the background. I'll also say I think it probably comes to the forefront during big momentous decisions. Or you know, for instance, when I'm starting to really take a step back and almost run an audit of my life, the type of thing that we do when we face milestone birthdays or the start of a new year or a career change, that's what I think you're most likely to

have this almost explicit conversation about who I want to be and what will happen in five years, 10 years, and so on. Yes. Or you think about weddings, people talk about I can't wait to grow old with you. Every time I hear that, I think these are people who have no idea what it's like to grow old. But there are big moments in our lives where we are projecting forward. Yeah. I mean, look, my suspicion is that those moments occur almost during chapter breaks when we're sort of forced to step back. You said weddings, I would add graduations to the list, births, divorces on the negative side.

Anything that makes us take pause. And there's something that's uncomfortable about doing that. I think there's some discomfort involved in running the life audit. But some of my own work suggests that it's something that we do end up doing, especially around milestone birthdays, but I imagine at many other times as well Yeah, well one time that you've already mentioned and I mentioned before that is New Year's

What is it about New Year's? I mean because it's just another day on the calendar Really and the calendar is a construct in and of itself. So what is it about New Year's that really makes us do this? Right exactly. It is funny. It's arbitrary in some way. One of my colleagues here at UCLA Hang Chen Die has some great work on what she calls the fresh start effect. That's work she's done with Katie milkman and others. And essentially when we have a quote-unquote fresh start, it gives us a new opportunity to start doing the things that we've been saying that we want to do it.

You know, it wipes the slate clean and it also allows me to convince myself possibly, possibly in error, but it allows me to convince myself that this will be the time that I do things differently, right? Now I won't procrastinate. Now I'll start meditating more. Now I'll start spending less and so on. But that's motivating. And by the way, it doesn't just happen at New Year's.

The research shows, you know, it happens at the start of a new quarter, even on Mondays, right? You know, on a lesser degree. And then of course birthdays and whatnot. But New Year's is a particularly salient one. I would almost ask, would it be even bigger, you know, the start of a new decade and so forth. I mean, talk about wiping the slate clean, right?

Just to say, you mentioned Katie Milkman. She's been on the show before talking about the fresh start of reactant, other aspects of human behavior change, which is such a thorny topic. I'll put a link in the show notes for people listening today who, you know, want to go even deeper on this subject, because it is so relevant right now. I'll put a link in the show notes to my previous discussion with Katie Milkman. But back to you, you made a reference to the fact that perhaps this is a fallacy,

but we believe that this time, our resolutions will work because it's a new year, we've got this fresh start effect. Why do resolutions fail so regularly? I can't remember the statistic, but it's something off the charts. Yeah. Look, there's a variety of reasons.

I would bet that one of the big ones is that we just get sucked back into the present. And life takes over in a way that it was dominating before we made the resolution. I don't mean to be pessimistic here, by the way, because I sort of fundamentally have an optimistic view of the possibility for behavior change. Part of the difficulty isn't just that we go back to our sort of pre-resolution reality, but part of the difficulty has to do with the types

of goals that we set, and the way that we go about tackling them, there's now a pretty big body of research looking at what are some of the ways that we go about tackling them, there's now a pretty big body of research looking at what are some of the ways that we can make goals clear, what are the ways that we can set them more realistically, what are the ways that we can maintain them, not stop the second that we mess up. I'm happy to talk about some of that by the way, Dan, but I don't know if that's too far-field

from what you wanna talk about, but I would love to hear it. Okay, two of my favorite bits of research. So one is a project led by Marissa Shrieve, where she introduced a concept of emergency goal reserves or emergency reserves. And so think about it this way. Let's say I have an unrealistic goal of working out seven days a week. I could actually create a different version of that goal where I say I want to work out

seven days a week, but I'm gonna have two emergency reserves each week. Where let's say I can't work out why dip in, I just should have count that as one of my emergency reserve days. The beauty of this is that if I fail to work out one day, it's not as if now I've completely messed up. I can just say, okay, well I just dipped into my buffer, I'm gonna get back on the horse.

The funny thing is I could have a different goal of working out five days a week. That's effectively the same thing as seven days plus two emergency days. But what the research suggests is that the seven days plus two emergency days actually works better at getting people to stick with the goal. So that's one sort of just tip or intervention

that I think may be particularly useful in thinking about how to secel in a way that makes it more likely that we'll keep up with them. Another one that I really like is it's related in some way, but goal ranges. So rather than saying, I would love to meditate three mornings a week. I don't know if this is embarrassing to admit that I don't do more than that, but I would love to do that. So I could just say that I want to meditate three mornings a week, or I could say, I want to meditate anywhere

from one to five days. Now, what's nice about that is that if I hit my three days, I still have a further goal that's going to stretch me, and I'm just going to try to hit five. But if I'm somehow finding myself having a hard time sleeping, or I have a particularly busy week, and I'm not going to get the three, at least I can tell myself I hit the low-end goal of one day. So you can see how it works on both ends where the high-end goal stretches me further, the low-end goal keeps me involved.

To me, one of the biggest things about these types of goal setting endeavors is just trying to figure out how you maintain the energy and effort that's required to keep it going. Sounds from the data points that you just referenced that given how thorny behavior change is, the human animal tends to benefit in this endeavor from some sense of flexibility. 100%, 100%, but it has to be the right kind of flexibility. There's other work that's looked at the goals that I recommend to others and the goals I recommend to myself. So let's say you and I both wanted to go in a healthy eating endeavor. I can say I'm going to have three healthy meals a week.

I don't know when they're going to be, but I'm going to have three healthy meals a week. If I were to be asked, what would I recommend to Dan? My answer is shipped. I'd say, well, you know, Dan, I would recommend that you choose Monday, Wednesday, and Saturdays are healthy eating dinners. You might even want to make a plan that every week you have a partner we do it with. So we actually have this realization that it may be better to recommend some degree of consistency. I'm not going to call it rigidity, but I'll call it consistency for other people. But for ourselves, we say, well, I can be flexible.

And you can easily see where the problem may arise there. But there's nuance in what we mean by flexibility, right? We can be flexible in setting a range of goals. We can be flexible in having sort of an emergency reserve. But when it comes to actually putting the goals into practice, I may benefit from trying to have some consistency and regularity. I mean, this is nothing new. I mean, this is, if you think about it, we've known forever

that this is effective parenting too, right? The kids who have a very unpredictable set of discipline won't know what to expect. They need the boundaries, they need a consistency. And the same, maybe true for our own goal-setting adventures. So wouldn't it be safe to say overall that behavior change is hard, but with the right strategies it is doable?

That is my optimistic take. There's so much that operates against our ability to follow through and do the things that I think we'll eventually look back on with satisfaction, happiness, meaning. But given the right set of circumstances and motivations and external help, I think absolutely,

I think it's something that can happen. Look, I'm a social scientist, and so we were always trying to isolate the one thing that caused A to move to B. But in reality, maybe the case that the kitchen sink often works well, right? You know medical researchers often want to throw the kitchen sink at the equation is because they what they care about is a change taking place and it may be difficult to isolate like why it necessarily happened. And I think that may be a good lesson when

experimenting with our own behavior change techniques. Eventually, maybe want to sort of break it back and say, okay, well, what really works for me? But if we want to see some movement, it may be good to try a number of different things. But the kitchen sink approach seems like it could be fraught in that it would lead to sort of leaf in the wind mindset where it feels chaotic and erratic. And so, for example, like on New Year's, if I'm thinking about making some resolutions, you might not want to throw the kitchen sink

and make all the resolutions that you might want to have won that you're going at. Right, yeah, and maybe I should clarify, when I said kitchen sink, I meant perhaps there's two or three different tools that we might want to use at a time. There's some video synchrosies here. It may be easier for some people to say, I'm going to try one thing right now and make

it as simple as possible. There may be other folks who say, look, I want to both meditate more and eat healthier and so I'm going to try this technique for meditating and this technique for eating healthier. But your point's a good one, which is we can only go so far. We may not want to try to change everything all at once. Yeah, and my experience, the confidence and happiness and satisfaction that can come from establishing one habit

and making one important change can fuel you to make others. I think that's right. I absolutely think that's right. I'm trying to think as an analogy, there's a lot of work looking at how people repaid debt and the advice from financial advisors and economists would be to say, you know, pay off the highest interest loans

first. But in reality, we may benefit from paying off whatever the smallest balances so that we feel like we've made some progress and then move on from there. I think there's a link to what you're saying here, which is, you may feel motivating and may feel like we have more progress if I can just say, look, I've checked out the box on one habit. Now let me fuel others. In a couple of weeks, we're going to do a series on the show, we have this recurring series

that we call Sainly Ambitious, which is, you know, how to like do your work life better to be more successful and achieve your goals, but without driving yourself crazy or being craved and about it. And one of the people we're going to interview, his name is Daniel Goldman. I know him as Danny. He's a friend of mine. He's quite famous for having written a book called emotional intelligence back in the 90s. So you'll know who he is, and I suspect some people listening will know as well.

And a piece of advice that Danny gave me many years ago, which people will hear him talk about right here on the show in a couple of weeks, is do the easy things first. So when you're writing, he and I are both writers, just like do the easy stuff, because it generates this sense of momentum. Again, people will hear him say this in a couple of weeks here in the show, but he actually clarified that in our interview to just do the easy stuff, only do the easy stuff because

if you're just doing easy stuff, you will get everything done. And I'm not sure I believe this, but this is his view that you're just constantly creating enough momentum so that everything becomes easy. Yeah, yeah. I love that. You know, one of the things that resonates about that is that it strikes me that you're also just taking the tension out of any of these really difficult tasks.

One of the things I like to talk about is this tension between current self and future self and that many of our self control battles, if you will, boil down to this current self, making the sort of painful sacrifice in the future self-benefitting. And anytime we can sort of dial down the pain on what current self is experiencing, I think it makes it a lot more likely

that we follow through to do something that then benefits future self. And I mean, writing is that perfect example, right? Because it could be something I'm writing for pleasure, it could be something I have to write for work, whatever it is, but at least in my experience, getting started is the most painful thing, right? Because it could be something I'm writing for pleasure, it could be something I have to write for work, whatever it is, at least in my experience, getting started is the most painful thing, right?

And at some point, anything we can do to just smooth that path to getting started and make that not so painful will I think increase the likelihood that we then keep it going and do the thing we wanted to do. I'm not sure if I can do it. Coming up, Hal Hirschfield talks about the role of mental time travel to help you actually do what you say you want to do and how writing a letter to your future self as Hoki is that may seem can be a huge help.

Quick reminder you can join the free 14-day imperfect meditation challenge over on the 10% happier app. Now, create the meditation habit you've always wanted this January with my friends Matthew Hepburn, Carlisle and Don Marissio. Download the app now to get started. Well, you've brought us to your work or back to your work. So there are a couple of, I wasn't trying to force it, but I didn't feel that way. I have a million questions for you about your work, so I'm glad you did that.

One of the key concepts in your work is mental time travel. Can you teach us a little bit about that? Oh, sure. Yeah, mental time travel. I mean, it sounds a little bit like it's something out of a sci-fi novel, but we do it all the time. If you've spent any of our conversation thinking about what you're going to have for lunch, that's a form of mental time travel, right? but we do it all the time. If you've spent any of our conversation thinking about what you're gonna have for lunch, that's a form of mental time travel, right?

Or if you've thought about what you might be doing in a couple weeks after the chaos of the holidays have died down, that's a form of mental time travel. So it's anytime we think ahead to the future or think back on the past or something even more complicated, think ahead to the future and think back

on how we will feel then about stuff we do now, all of that is mental time travel. And why is that so important in your work? So here's the funny thing, we have this unique ability to do it. You know, there's some debate about whether other animals can engage in mental time travel as well, but I think if you sort of boil it down,

humans are incredibly sophisticated at our abilities to travel through time in our minds. At the same time, we often act in, you know, what we could call present biased ways. We act in ways that almost overweight the consequences of things that are happening right now and underweight the consequences that will occur later. We almost devalue the future to some extent.

The reason mental time travel is important in my work is because it's almost the fuel that can get us between who we are now and who we will eventually be and allow us to think more deeply about the feelings that we'll have and the way that we'll react to some of the decisions that we make today. And yet, it sounds like many of us struggle to do it effectively as it pertains to making healthy decisions for our future selves. So you're right, you're absolutely right.

But I think it's an important point to make that I don't start from the standpoint that people should be saving more, they should be eating healthier, they should meditate more, they should go to sleep earlier. Frankly, that makes me sound like a really boring person to spend time with if that was my point of view. But I think when we say effectively, what I subscribe to there is the notion that effective means doing the things that I say that I want to do. So if I say I want to go to sleep earlier but I can't do it, that's not effective mental time travel,

that's an effective behavior. If I say I would love to not succumb to Instagram ads and start spending less money right now but I just can never do it. And then next year rolls around and I feel like I don't have as much money for the vacation I want to go on, that to me is sort of ineffective decision-making. That's what I mean by ineffective. And then to come back to your point, my argument is that in many ways we do act in a way that could be considered ineffective

or could be considered, you know, quote unquote suboptimal in so much that many people often regret the decisions that they're making right now in which that they could make different ones. Yeah, this isn't you or us telling people what resolutions they should make and how they should live their lives. It's us helping people do what they say they want to do.

Exactly, I think that's exactly right. It's bridging that gap between the intentions that I have and the actions I take. And so how can we learn to mental time travel in a way that will help us do that? Right. So I mean, this is a big, this is the big question we could talk for the rest of the show about this. But one thing to consider here is what types of decisions are we talking about improving? By my rationale, there's the big single shot decisions. I want to

sign up to work with a trainer or not. I want to save more and spend less. And then there's the ones that are sort of the repeated decisions. The things that happen multiple times a day like dieting and eating and exercising or single one time a day but multiple times we'd go in a bed earlier and so forth. So I think to some extent we need different strategies for these different types of decisions that we're making. When we talk about the big decisions, one of the big sort of less frequent decisions, one of the strategies that I've introduced in my work is to try to help people connect

more emotionally to their future selves. And we've tried a variety of techniques. One of the ones that I've really am fond of is a letter writing conversation, or an email writing, what a conversation, where you're writing to some sort of future self, whether it's in a year, the self at the end of 2024,

that's gonna look back on this new year period right now, or a self in five years or 20 years, but pick some future self, right a letter to that future self, but then write another letter, write a letter back from the future self. This is what the research suggests can actually boost connections to future selves. And the reason why is because it forces you to step into the shoes of your future self,

it forces you to be empathetic. By the way, if that is hard, and the research hasn't texted this, but anecdotally, I do this when I teach all the time, I have people write a letter first to their past self. Because I think that can kind of grease the wheels for this sort of somewhat awkward conversation. That ends up being a pretty emotional exercise. And then we sort of flip it around and go the reverse and say, okay, now write a letter to your future self and now write a letter back.

It can take some time, but this is a strategy that I think can be particularly useful in trying to get over the hump of making some big decision and what's that decision gonna look like, and how I'm gonna react to it. And by the way, you may not know. We are just taking guesses. The future is so uncertain.

But it represents more of a direct strategy than what we normally do, which is often just sort of hope that works out. One of the many things I've been criticized for is, I should just amend that to say, one of the many things I've been criticized for is I should just amend that to say one of the many things I've been criticized accurately for. I'm not meaning to signal that I get inaccurate criticism. I'm meaning to say that pretty much all the criticism is accurate and one of them is that I can be dismissive. And so I feel that coming up a little bit as you talk about this exercise of writing a letter

to your past and then future self and then having that self right back to you, I do find it intriguing, I suspect I would get a lot out of that, but I'm, yeah, I feel like, oh, well, I'm not gonna do that. Like I'm not gonna sit and do that. So how do you get past that? Yeah, wait, can I ask a question, why do you feel that way? That's a great question. I mean, I think it goes back to dismissiveness. You know, like I was

dismissive of meditation for my whole life. And now my whole career is built around it. So sure. I think just a little bit of that sounds a little corny. I don't do journaling, for example, even though I am a journalist. I mean, I write memoirs, but I don't do journaling, for example, even though I am a journalist. I mean, I write memoirs, but I don't write, you know, I don't journal in any way. And part of me suspects that someday I actually will start doing that because I'll have a good guest on and they will convince me to do it. And I guess another thing is that sounds really time consuming and unless or until I sign up for some course where I'm forced to do it. I'm probably not gonna like do it at any given moment because I've got so much other

Shit on my to-do list sort of them. So yeah, I Mean now all of a sudden I think this is a challenge to be the guest that gets you you know to do some But so my reaction and my own dismissiveness because I'm similar to you and there's a part of me that feels like This could be a little hokey, it could be a little corny. I think part of the reaction stems from the fact that it's not necessarily an easy solution, it's not necessarily a quick one. I mean, wouldn't we love when it comes to behavior change to be able to flip some switch, take some pill, and then that's done, and now I can go about doing like all the other shit that's accumulated as you've said. That said, what I'm suggesting here isn't a daily letter writing exercise.

It could be a one-shot exercise that just forces you to step back. I'm also thinking about, gosh, we do so much other stuff, especially around these fresh starts to try to make a change. It is kind of the right time to step back and maybe have this conversation. I also wonder if there's some version,

and I have to sort of take off my rigorous social scientist hat here and put on my speculation hat. But I have to wonder if there's a version of this that doesn't evolve, the sitting down and writing the letter back and forth and more just having the conversation. Maybe it's in your own head, with your future self. And I hesitate there because it'd be really easy

to do that quick. I'm think that I've done it and checked the box, but it's probably not that deep, but it may be better than nothing. I think part of the value here is creating some sort of reckoning with the person I'm eventually going to be, the person who's going to sort of benefit or not from the decisions that we're making.

But I'll say one other thing, which is, you know, like any other behavior change strategy, those idiosyncrasies, perhaps this sounds too hokey for you, but other strategies will sound better, and we'll explore that. But there's other folks who might say, you know, that sounds like something that I might get something out of. So I would pick what sounds right to you. Some degree. Just to pick up on your point about doing this in your head instead of actually writing letters, a new friend of mine recently said something to me.

We're both parents and he was saying that sometimes when he's putting his kids to bed and finding himself muttering internally about why is this taking so damn long, he will jump forward to the perspective of his 85 year old self and say how much would that person give? How much money would that 85 year old person give to be back putting the kid to bed for 30 seconds? Dan, I couldn't agree more. My kids are seven and four. And it's funny, I don't have this so much of bedtime

as much as I have it, A, when they're fighting with each other. But the sort of general moments where I feel like I've got a million things going on around the house and my daughter, that's a seven year old, who you was, can you do this thing with me? It's like, I'm finding you really needy right now. And I don't think about 85. I think about five years, six years from now

when she's a teenager. And I convinced myself, oh, she'll be different than other teenagers, and she'll still want to spend time with me, and at the same time, I know that's probably not true. And I think how much will I just want to go back to a period of time where she wanted to spend time with me? You know, that is a conversation with my future self. And look, their times

were just makes me feel guilty for saying, well, I still got to do the thing I need to do. But I would say on balance, it makes me a little bit more likely to just say, screw whatever I was just doing. I can get to that later and help you with whatever sort of arts and crafts is of the moment. I have two stories coming in a mind or two comments coming in mind. One is a story, one is a comment. One story is that I was talking to somebody close to me recently who was in the process of explaining to his wife why he couldn't do a family thing and his wife turned and started singing cats in the cradle to him.

That's tough. That's tough. That is tough. Yeah. It was pretty on point though. The comment is that if you are a parent or if you have kids in your life in any way, if you can tune into this, it's actually a great way to sensitize yourself and bring some more awareness to the notion of future selves. Because when I think about my future self, you know, age 85, that's harder to, if I make

it that far, it's harder to connect with. But in two years, your seven year old will be a genuinely different person. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, I mean, and if that's concept sounds at all Abstract just look backward, right? My seven-year-old is a very different person from the one she was when she was five And we can sort of project that forward, but I think you brought up a bigger point which is With more and more sort of expanses of time it becomes that much more difficult to relate to that ultimate future self and

To that end, I don't think we need to jump right ahead to 85 or 65 or whatever, because that's really hard. But we could start two years, five years from now, and there's some great work on working backwards that I think could be really useful there. But it almost may be off-putting to go too far into the future if we don't start with a slightly more proximal closer period in time. So we're going to move on to other tactics but just to make sure we didn't give this one short shrift, I think what you're saying is the letter writing campaign could start with your past self then be to your future self and then be from your future self back to your present

self. And you reluctantly can see that if one is dismissive or wary of the actual letter writing, one could do this work in one's own head. Yeah. And maybe I'll add something on to this here. Let's just talk about what's happening under the hood here, right? Part of what I'm trying to get at here is a way to make the future self more vivid and more emotional. When we move through time, we're hampered by the present

to some degree. The future is really abstract. And part of what happens there is that the abstraction of the future makes it a little bit less emotional. There's some great work on what's called future anodonia, which is a fancy term for saying that in our minds the future feels less emotional somehow. And I mean, if you think back, sometimes people think back to the past, they say,

well, I can't believe I felt the thing that I was feeling was such intensity back then. This goes back to the mental time travel. We have a hard time stepping ahead and stepping back. The letter adding exercise part of what that's doing is creating a more vivid image. I mean, my own work, I've also explored age-progressed images where we show people their future selves as a way to get that future to be more emotional. And that in some ways borrows from charities

who do this really well, right? If they're trying to get you to donate, they don't give you stats, they give you a picture, they give you a story, they tell you a narrative. And I think to the same degree, if there's a different technique that you wanna use that can make that future self more vivid, don't write a letter, tell a story.

What is the story of you at 50, you at 60 look like? I don't know if you react less dismissively or cynically. I don't know, I don't mean to make that too pejorative, but really what this is boiling down to is trying to create some concrete version of ourselves that we can then connect with. And if it's a letter, if it's a picture, if it's a story, I think it can go far beyond what we're normally doing,

which is just thinking about that future self and really abstract and maybe less emotional terms. I'm actually just to be clear, I'm really supportive of this concept of creating some sort of relationship with your future self in no way dismissive or skeptical about it or cynical about it. And actually, I think the letter writing thing is very compelling.

I think I'm personally more likely to start doing this as a thought experiment. But I think all of it sounds great. And from what I can gather, there's data behind this. Yeah. I should just say, as a side note, I also feel like the thought exercise feels a lot more like something I'd want to do than the letter writing one. Of course, over the years, I've done sort of everything, but I don't know if it feels more natural to me. Now, the data on this is, I am my collaborators.

We've explored the age-progressed images. We've explored letter writing. Other people have explored letter writing, and still others have done sort of more of a story that's told. or letter writing, and still others have done more of a story that's told. And as just one example in a recent paper, we worked with a bank, this was a bank in Mexico, and there was 50,000 customers. And half of them got sort of a standard message that it's important to make a contribution to your retirement account. And half of them got that message plus the opportunity to see themselves older using age-progressed

software, the ability to see what older using age-progressed software, the ability to see what one would look like at retirement. And the group that got those images, they were 16% more likely to make a contribution. And I mean, the caveat here is that it's pretty small base rates, right? Like, I mean, anytime you do a messaging campaign, you don't hit the majority of people. But what I think is promising about this is that that's a very low touch type of intervention. I mean, think about how many communications

you get from your bank that you ignore. And I think it holds some promise for other domains and other opportunities to try to enhance the vividness of the future self. That's in the financial space. Other work has looked at, actually, was more of a thought exercise of just trying to talk about a more vivid future. This is with women in rural Kenya, and has found that that sort of vividness exercise of really talking about a more concrete future self leads to more preventative health actions, also leads to more saving,

but the thing that they were focused on that particular work was chlorinating water so that one's kids would have fewer digestive issues. So that's in the health space. You could imagine are there other spaces where this would matter? And again, it boils down to making that future self more vivid. Coming up, Hal talks about why thinking about our future selves plural can help with behavior change, and the importance of commitment devices.

He'll describe what they are and how to put them into practice. There are other tactical and strategic pieces of advice that I want to get to from you, but let me just ask a more theoretical question. The title of your book is your future self, but in the book, you actually talk about our future selves plural. In fact, here's a quote from you, you are actually a wee. So can you just unpack that a little bit before we dive back into the practical stuff?

Yeah, here's the way I think about it. We have many different versions of ourselves. There's the simple, I have my work self and my home self, right, and I've got my family self and my friend self and I have my nighttime self and my home self, right? And I've got my family self and my friend's self and I have my nighttime self and my morning self. But then we can think about selves over longer expanses of time. You know, I've got the, well, for me, I've got my middle-aged self. And I've got the version of me at 7580. Now, those are two selves, but there's many selves along the way. And the number of selves I think about and how I think about them depends on what I'm really considering, right?

Let's say I have an image in mind of, I want to be healthy in 25 years so that I can still travel and still go on runs and still interact with my kids and maybe grandkids who knows. There's many selves along the way that have to help me get there. Like I also have to think about this weekend's self. Like is that guy gonna go on a run or a walk or whatever? It is kind of a thorny subject of multiple selves.

The way I like to consider it is that we can have sort of a big, almost cumulative future self. And we can have many selves along the way that add up to that eventual future self. But it really depends on what we're thinking about. I do have a future self for next summer. And that guy wants to go on a trip with my family. And that's going to require some specific decisions between now and then financially and time wise and whatnot. That's just one future self, right? There's going gonna be others that will exist long after

he's had his trip or not. Does that resonate? Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess the way I think about this is, and I'm not sure this is correct, but this is the way I think about it, at least right now, my present self is thinking about this, is that there are,

and you're a psychologist and I'm not, but there's this modular theory of mind that we have different modes. I think of those modes as being like the tiles within a magic eight ball that are competing for salience at any given moment, competing for the top slot, that is the one visibility portal we have

into the magic eight ball if you've ever played with one of those. So I've got my angry mode, my jealous mode, my kind of mode, my patient mode, whatever that are all given various causes and conditions, reaching the steering wheel at any given moment. So that makes sense to me about our many selves you have something you want to say to her. Yeah, to that end, there's somebody I wanted to mention here. There's actually a language professor at Stanford, Joshua Landy, and he talks a little bit about the multiple selves problem.

And he actually uses the analogy of a bus, where he basically says, the bus driver is the most dominant self, that may be the current self. And then the passengers are different iterations of our past and future selves, some of whom may be having a louder voice at other times and can actually almost impact the driver and some of whom may be quiet. Now he talked

about that in the space of grief and the idea that when we have someone close to us who dies, the driver at that time may be most influenced by the sadness and the possible trauma of that moment, but then eventually that driver is gonna step to the back and a new driver will take over and he'll become a passenger and he may shout occasionally and other times he may be just sort of quietly sitting there.

I really love the notion because I think it it highlights the idea that it's not just that we have one current self and one future self, but that there's many different selves, and the different selves will have a different ability to impact what we're thinking about, what our motivations are, what we're deciding right now. So when we write a letter to our future self, which self are we writing to? I almost never specified it. And maybe that's too messy. But to some extent, I think what matters here

it is incredibly is what's the goal? What are we trying to think about? If you were to ask me the thing that I'm considering right now for a variety of reasons, I would talk about my health in five years. And so if I were to engage in this conversation, it would be a future self in five years, and it would be around the notion of health, and am I doing the things that take care of myself that I need to

do. But I think, you know, you can see why I kind of balk at the idea of specifying which future self someone should be thinking about, because everybody has different goals in mind and different concerns that are front of mind. If that feels like I'm evading the question, though, let me know. I can try to say, I can say more specifically. No, I mean, I think we're adding some useful to a point complexity to this, which is, the self is not one thing. In fact, it may not exist at all if you're looking at this from a Buddhist standpoint. But we have many modes, I think that's kind of uncontroversial to say. And then the question is, when we're trying to get in touch with our future self,

which mode of that self are we connecting with? And I think what you're saying is, you know, pick your poison. It's really up to you. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, you said that well. All right. So let's go back to some of the ways we can get more intimate with our future self so that we can make decisions now that serve the goals that we are setting for ourselves. You talk about something called commitment devices. What's that all about? Right, so I love the concepts of commitment devices

because there are these strategies that are incredibly effective if you adopt them. Let me give you a setup that happens in my house a lot, at least. I woke up this morning and I didn't feel like my health is self in part because last night I ate some of my kids Halloween candy and I know that's going to sound funny at this time of year, but they got a big bag and it just sits in our pantry and I think they've forgotten they've moved on to other things

And I sort of slowly pick away at it And then I eat a little bit and then I eat a little more and then I was like well, I'm still kind of hungry And I'll have some granola whatever you don't need to go to the nuance of what I ate last night But there's no need and I woke up not feeling great and then I said you know what tonight I want to make sure that I don't Do that like I don't need to snack tonight. And I have also tomorrow morning that guy I want him to wake up saying I didn't snack last night, but then I have this guy tonight. That guy is going to be tired because today is a pretty busy day and I've got a lot going on.

And I'm worried that he's going to end up sort of fucking this whole thing up. Sorry if that's great. So here's what a commitment device does. It recognizes that tension. It recognizes the tension between what actually one of my students, Megan Weber, she's been calling the planner, do a reflector model. It's a little bit of a twist on some other models, but you've got the planner who wants to not snack. You've got the reflector that's tomorrow's self who wants to reflect back and say, I didn't, and then you've got the doer. That's the guy who snacks. And you can put in your sort of dilemma of choice there. I don't want to be on my phone during dinner. That's another one, right?

there, I don't want to be on my phone during dinner. That's another one, right? What commitment devices do is they put guardrails on future behavior. So as to make sure that the doer acts more in accordance with what the planner and reflector both want. And there's a whole range of types that can operate here. So the quote, softest ones would be like, if I were to just tell my wife, yeah, I'm just gonna make a promise to you that I'm not gonna snack tonight. Well, what happens if I do? Nothing really, other than a cost to my self-esteem,

because now I'm somebody who didn't stay true to their word. And, you know, what else does that mean about me? But, at the end of the day, I could probably get around that because we're great at rationalizing things. I know I told you I wasn't going to, but it did rain a little in LA today, and that's just enough of a weird event that I deserve. I deserve to snack, right?

So there's a psychological cost there, but there's not really a material cost to messing up, but it's a type of thing that could keep me on track. But there's more extreme ones, right? I mean, of course, I could rid my house, I could make a show of it and throw out my kids Halloween candy. That's difficult, but if I did, then the temptation is no longer there. My modern day version of that is that I actually have

an electronic timed safe. It's called the K-safe. I talk about it in some of my work, but it was designed to lock away snacks. And then the developer of it, Dave Krippendorf, found that people were using it for things, well, beyond snacks. Like drugs, alcohol, gaming remotes, phones, right?

And so when I talked to him, he'd asked me if I, like, what was the thing I was trying to stop? And he, I was like, being on my phone around my kids. I probably should have said it more generally, but we got to start small, as you said. And he said, okay, well, then I'm going to give you the opaque box. They have two. There's one that's clear and there's one that's opaque. And he's like, if I give you the clear one, okay, well, then I'm going to give you the opaque box. They have two. There's one that's clear and there's one that's opaque. And he's like, if I give you the clear one, people try to, try to peek in. And I don't do it all the time, but I try to do it during dinner time where I put my

phone in there. I'll set the timer for two hours or an hour and a half. And what's interesting about this, here's a commitment device to constrain the guy who is going to sort of inadvertently look at his phone during dinner time. You know what it is, there's a variety of reasons I wanted to quickly respond to something or look up the weather or whatever, and then suddenly I find myself on my phone, well this just makes it impossible to do that.

That's a stronger commitment device where you're taking away an option. And then the strongest commitment devices, which the research shows are the ones that work the best, are the ones where work the best are the ones where you add in an accountability partner who who is like checking to make sure you did the thing you said you're gonna do and you impose a cost to messing up. So there's a great website called stick dot com STIC KK and I see KK and what that website allows you to do is to make a commitment and state what it's going to be, state an accountability partner, but also state what the cost is going to be if I mess up. So if I snack tonight, I've given it my credit card and I've also given it the name of

an anti-charity, an organization I don't want to donate to. And then if I mess up, instantly some amount of money gets taken out of my account. So it's a popular site, especially among behavioral scientists. But one of the things I really like about it, one of the things I like thinking about with it, is that it requires some sophistication to go about properly, right? In other words, if I say, if I snack tonight, then a thousand dollars is gonna be charged in my credit card and donated to XYZ campaign.

That's too much. I'm not gonna actually follow through with it. I have to pick the right amount for me or the right punishment for me to actually make it so that I sort of stick with this strategy. I wonder if the people who started stick are stealth Trump supporters,

because he probably gets more money from that site. That's great. It's Dean Carlin is the name of the guy. He's a professor and well, now I've got to ask him. That is really funny. So, all right let me just go back to the food thing, the snacking thing. First of all, I mean we're the same guy in this sense. I literally woke up today hung over from eating too much cookies last night because I was tired last night and just ate too many cookies

and I feel like shit today and I'm having this conversation with my future self. Tonight, the same thing I want tomorrow, Dan, to wake up feeling fresh because I don't want to have so much drag in the system tomorrow as I have today. And I'm already thinking about like what's my strategy for this evening. Funny, there was an episode of this show, which I'll find and put in the show notes too, with the guy who wrote Atomic Habits. Oh, James Clear. James Clear, so many years ago.

And he talked about the case safe, or just basically the idea of locking up snacks. And we got an enraged email from a listener saying that is sending a really unhealthy message about our relationship to food and our bodies. And I remember at the time being dismissive, but I actually, I don't have the rage at all, but I've come to believe that my past self was wrong on this to be dismissive, because I give myself full permission to eat whatever the hell I want. And I don't think declaring certain foods sinful is healthy and you're not in your head in agreement, so I'm not lecturing you. I don't think that's helpful. And I worry about locking up

food because it does send a signal to myself or others that certain things are off limits, which creates kind of pathology around that food. And so it's really about understanding, oh yeah, well, X and Y food might make me sleep poorly and feel horrible tomorrow. And so how am I going to manage that? Anyway, I'm saying a lot of words. Is this all land for you? No, well, it does. I mean, I think part of what I'm hearing here is the motivation for wanting to lock

something up matters. Yeah, I think your explanation of this behavior leads me to feel worse tomorrow and whatever that behavior is. Is really important because it would be really hard for me to tell you, well, don't do that because it's not, you know, you shouldn't prioritize feeling good tomorrow.

I mean, that would be crazy. But maybe the nuance here is that there can be the sort of slippery slope toward pathologizing certain behaviors that could be problematic in terms of modeling, especially for our kids or other people around us. Part of me wonders whether or not it's not a positive thing to model the idea that like sometimes I have issues

with controlling my impulse. Some of them as I wanna do something and I don't feel good doing it later. So I'm trying to figure out ways to be a better version of myself where I don't do that. Now, I mean, I think if you... There's a big difference between locking up the cookies for 24 hours, so you don't have them tonight and swearing off desserts forever. And I know some people do this. I know some people say, I just don't eat dessert. And that's fine, like if that's your thing, right? But I think there's daylight between the two strategies.

And I'm trying to empathize and think about what's the perspective of having a rage field response to that. And I suspect a large part of it boils down to the modeling that's exhibited to others and what sort of message we want to send out there. And I wonder if there's a way to counteract that. Yeah, I think the rage which I understand and maybe I'm overstating what was in that person's mind,

but the disappointment and frustration and upset was that many people feel, and I think justifiably victimized by what the culture sets as an ideal kind of body. And so I think if you're locking up the food, I'm not sure I'm ever gonna cosine on locking up the food, but I think there's a difference between locking up the food because if you eat it tonight,

your future self in the morning is gonna suffer needlessly. I think there's a difference between that and locking up the food because you're saying one should never have cookies and by extension, your body should look a certain way. Even though it's an aesthetic standard that has nothing to do with the underlying health implication. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I joke, you know, that I'm in LA before, right?

But maybe I'll just leave that there. But yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. So let's get back to some of the other strategies and tactics that we can use. Well, I'm just going to list a bunch of things and put them out there for you. Think about the time that lies ahead in terms of days rather than years, make the present easier, take the good with the bad, temptation bundling, tangential immersion, and make the big small. So those are a bunch of ideas that you want to hit them all, do some of them. We can do some. Here, I'll start with the idea of make the present easier.

That's kind of an overarching bucket, by the way, to take a step back. The way I think about these sorts of processes that we're trying to do, this sort of idea of connecting to the future and making it like, quote unquote, better. One bucket is bring the future self closer. That's sort of idea of connecting to the future and making it, like, quote unquote, better. One bucket is bring the future self closer. That's sort of the vividness we talked about.

Another bucket is staying on track, and that's the commitment devices, and then the sort of third bucket is making the present easier. I alluded to this before, but there's the present self. That's the one who always has to endure some sort of quote unquote sacrifice for a future self. And so when we talk about making the present easier, what I mean by that is figuring out any way that we can turn the dial down on the pain that we're experiencing right now. So I think you said make the big small. The gist there is to try to break down any sort of goal pursuit exercise into smaller

buckets to make it feel easier. So I'll give you one example from my own research. This is a project that it was Slohmob and Artsy and Steve Schu, where we collaborated with a FinTech company, Acorns. It was a savings app. Anytime people signed up for the app, we asked them if they wanted to enroll in an automatic savings plan.

And I hope you don't roll your eyes at how sort of silly this intervention was, but we asked one group if they wanted to save $150 a month. We asked another group if they wanted to save $35 a week and we asked a third group if they wanted to save $5 a day. And the thinking here is that $5 a day feels a lot easier. There's a lot of things that I could think of that in theory could cost $5 a day.

There's fewer things that cost $150 a month. And as it turned out, and this was a couple thousand people in each group, as it turned out, seven percent of people signed up for the savings plan when it was $150 a month, but 30 percent signed up when it was $5 a day. And there's something silly about it, because it feels like a trick. It's just the same amount of money it's just expressed differently. But the framing there feels a lot easier to sort of undergo. I should say after a month there were some folks who dropped out. I think they were probably like, shit, this is 150 hours a month, but we still got, we still had way more people enrolled in the program than we would have otherwise.

A recent paper is actually found similar thing works with getting people to volunteer. Instead of saying however many hours per year, they're saying just four hours a week. And that increased the likelihood of people signing up to volunteer, which is, you know, there's something... There's something a little tricky there. But then I apply that in a larger way. And I know others have talked about these types of strategies, but one of the takeaways for me is, what's the sort of smallest piece of the puzzle I can pull off? And what if I just do that? And this goes back to the conversation we had earlier about making things easy, starting simple.

I think you said it, right? That's one strategy you would mention a couple of years. Maybe I'll talk about one or two others. So I think in the same sort of category comes Katie Milkman's excellent work on temptation bundling. The idea there is you pair your, quote, unquote, painful sacrifice with something pleasurable. So the classic example is listening to a juicy audio book while you work out and only being able to listen to that juicy audio book if you work out. And,

you know, what you're doing there is it makes it a little easier to pull yourself out of bed, pull yourself, you know, out of the house and go for the run or whatever it is, if you're coupling it with something that feels good. There's another version of this from one of my colleagues at UCLA, Ali Lieberman, and it's called TAN-GEN-GTL-Emergin. The idea with TAN-GEN-GTL-Emergin is that if we want to try to increase the length that we do something, so the classic example she talks about is brushing our teeth, which that may sound trivial, but we know a lot about the role that teeth health that oral health plays into the rest of our lives.

And we're supposed to brush a certain amount of time two minutes, which feels like an interminable amount of time when you're actually brushing your teeth. The idea behind tangential immersion is that you partner the sort of unpleasant or uncomfortable activity with something that is pleasurable. Okay, that's just like temptation bundling, but now you have to think about the match being right. So in other words, if I say, okay, I'm going to brush my teeth and watch like a really engaging horror movie while I do it. Most likely, I'll stop brushing my

teeth because the horror movie is way more engaging than brushing my teeth. But if I can because the horror movie is way more engaging than brushing my teeth. But if I can instead pair the sort of uncomfortable activity with something that's equally, like a, maybe brushing my teeth is a little boring and doing a word puzzle on my phone on my other hand, that's just a little bit enough engaging. It'll make it more likely that I'll continue

to follow through with the task. I've used it a lot with like trying to tackle somewhat boring tasks that I just need to follow through with the task. I've used it a lot with like trying to tackle somewhat boring tasks that I just need to get through. Maybe I can say something that's a little bit different from some of this though, which is that a lot of what we've been talking about kind of boils down to this idea of like me now doing something for me later.

And I think there's two things I want to sort of like correct here, just in case they get misconstrued. One is, you know, there are times when doing something for later actually benefits me right now. I mean, the kind of banal examples, if I go on a run, that is good for my future self. I also feel really good right now, right afterwards. If I'm hesitating on calling a buddy of mine

because I don't feel like I have 30 minutes to catch up, but I know it's good for our relationship. The irony is that it's also good for me right now when I eventually sit down and have that chat. That's one point I wanna make. The other point is that I think there can be a danger of doing too much for the future and missing out on the present. There's a world in which living for right now

is actually doing a service for our future selves. Call it the big party that I feel hung over from tomorrow in one way or another, you know, whether it's drinking or food or socializing, whatever it is, the experience of that, the memories of that, like, will actually benefit my future self. And I think it can be easy, especially in the work versus life space. It's just sometimes put our heads down and tell ourselves we're doing something for our future selves. And then you look up and you realize

you've missed a big chunk of the present. So I really don't want anybody to leave this conversation thinking that all we need to do is go sacrifice now, make the present more bleak for a brighter future. I really think it needs to be two sides of the same coin. I don't know if that makes sense to you. It does, and I think it's actually a beautiful place to bring this to a close.

Like, if I could write a letter back to my past self and maybe I'll actually do that and follow your advice instead of being dismissive, I would tell him, stop worrying so much. And you know that my presence, I would remind whatever year old Dan, the 52 year old Dan, feels like, you know, pre-game is over. Stop living your life for some future outcome.

I wish I had that mindset a long time ago. Just to say also that I totally grew you up for me socializing is absolutely worth the cost and sleep, or whatever hangover I'm going to feel the next day because that is the stuff of a good life. And you are providing your future self with memories and you are making yourself healthier now in a way that will make you healthier later. Even if you've missed some sleep because you're strengthening relationships and relationships are the most important thing from what I can tell for longevity and happiness. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more there. I remember at some point being worried that my kids were going to miss their bed times at the holidays, you know, because they're with their cousins or their grandparents or whatever it is that routine's getting disrupted. And you quickly realize that any sort of like hit that you get

to the routine that you have to adjust or any hit that you get tomorrow, because your kids cranky, it's worth it to have the, you know, whatever, whatever that memory is that they're creating, they're at the bond that they're strengthening in that moment, which of course, then I look back like you and I say, what couldn't I apply that same lens to myself, you know, and get in the moment a little bit more in a way? Well said.

Hal, thank you very much for doing this. May your future self tomorrow morning be clear and not groggy and remorseful and may your future self when you hear this post on New Year's Day be as happy as possible. Hey thanks, Dan. This is an awesome conversation. I appreciate you having me. Thanks again to Hal Hirschfield. You can listen to the conversation with Katie Milkman that we referenced during this conversation. If you dive into the show notes, we'll put a link there that episode is all about changing your habits.

Your future self will thank you for listening to that. We've also put a link to a conversation I did with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Lots of good stuff to help you. Make and keep your resolutions. Good luck out there. Thank you for listening. Really appreciate you.

Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter where we sum up the learnings from the various episodes that we post here. We'll let a link to that sign up in the show notes. And thank you most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer.

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