The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - No.1 Neuroscientist: NEW Research Explains Why Life, Work & Your Sex Life will eventually get Boring! (HOW TO STOP THIS HAPPENING) Dr. Tali Sharot

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Is new always better? Instead of always chasing the newest thing, is there not a way that you can appreciate the people and possessions already in your life? In this new episode Steven sits down again with leading neuroscientist, Dr. Tali Sharot. Dr. Tali Sharot is the director of the Affective Brain Lab and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Sharot’s research combines neuroscience with the study of behaviour and psychology to examine how emotions and motivation lead to people’s beliefs and decisions. She is the author of the award-winning books, ‘The Optimism Bias’ and ‘The Influential Mind’. In this conversation Dr. Sharot and Steven discuss topics, such as: How to shake up your life Ways to break the feeling of being in a repetitive cycle Why people become immune to joy How to see what you’ve always missed How to have the best holiday Why you should take a break from your partner to improve your relationship How to keep a relationship spicey Why humans need the feeling of being in control The secrets of motivation Why the midlife crisis is real and the ways to beat it How VR can help people overcome fear Why happiness is low in midlife How to increase productivity Why humans get bored of happiness Why the idea of living your best life doesn’t exist Why people need to disrupt their life How to increase your levels of happiness Why 40% of people quit a new job How to use change to improve your life The ways that social media is like prison Why social media is ruining expectations Ways to make people believe you How changing incentives can change your life Why Gen Z will change the world People becoming addicted to risk Why risk can help get rid of anxiety The brain trick image Dr Tali refers to - https://bit.ly/3sMa86R You can pre-order Dr. Sharot’s new book, ‘Look Again: The Power of Noticing What was Always There’, here: https://amzn.to/3SEbVp5 If you enjoyed this episode, I recommend you check out my first conversation with Dr. Tali Sharot, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZK1nawEXQ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to the show. Let's continue. What advice would you give me to make sure that my relationship stays fresh and new and spicy? Actually, there's a great study that when people... The sexual desire for the partner goes up. Dr. Tali Sherrod. She's a neuroscientist. Author. One of the world's leading researchers on emotion, decision making.

And how to change our brains for the better. This is negatively affecting your life and you don't know it. We have a study where we ask people, what was your favorite part on your vacation? And we found the peak of enjoyment was 43 hours into the vacation. And people used one word more than any other word. And it was the word first. The first view of the ocean. The first cocktail. And then the joy goes down and down and down.

Why? It's because the input into your neurons is constant. And when things are not changing, our brain just stops responding. And the problem is that even if you're living your absolute best life, a great relationship, a good job, comfortable home, after a while, those things don't bring us the joy that they should. Because when something is always in front of you, you stop attending to it. That's true also for the not so great thing around us. Sexism, racism, cracks in our relationships. After a while, we don't notice them. And if we don't notice them, we don't change them.

One reason why happiness is low in midlife is because things are a little bit more routine. The problem is we really don't like risk-taking. So how do we change that? Two main things. One is... Tali, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. For those people that aren't familiar with your career, can you give us a little bit of an overview of your academic background,

but really, I guess, the summary of the mission that you're on and the work that you've done. What are you trying to understand? What is it that you're trying to do with your professional life? So in very general terms, I'm trying to understand human behavior. Why do people do what they do? Why do they feel the way that they do? And I use a lot of different methods to try to understand motives, to try to understand needs, and hopefully use that not only for us to understand human brains better, but also to make our life better, perhaps make better decisions. For anyone that's listening to this right now,

that has a vision of who they want to become. And it's different from who they currently are in some way, habits, behaviors they want to adopt. Is step one awareness? Is that step one awareness of your own cycles and thoughts and patterns? One thing you should concentrate on and be aware of is what is already good about yourself, right? So not only what do I want to become, which I'm not, but what am I, which is great? What already great skills I have, right? Personality traits I have, because those are things that you can build on, right?

And so look at it not only in this kind of negative way, but look at it in a positive ways. And so once you've done that, yes, then we can say, okay, this is my goal, right? And the next thing is, how do I go from where I am to this goal? And if you have a specific plan, and you're not necessarily going to follow that exact plan, right? But if you have a plan and you kind of really think through the details, what happens is that if you can imagine that vividly, that will then create your belief that it's more likely to happen, right? If we have a specific plan concrete,

that makes us feel it's more likely to happen. And if we think it's more likely to happen, we're more likely to follow through. And then there's a lot of little tricks of how to get us to follow through. One really important one is looking at your progress. So say you want to go to the gym and at the first week, you only go once a week. And then the next week you go twice a week. Or maybe when you go, the first time you go, you're only running on the treadmill for 10 minutes. And then the next time, 20 minutes. But put down those numbers so you can actually see them. Because when people can actually see their progress,

that is extremely motivating, right? You always want to be a little bit above from where you were. So that's one thing that's hugely important. Is that sort of scientific research that supports this idea that progress has a very sort of motivational impact on people? Yes, absolutely. There are great studies. One study that I'm thinking of was where people had to do a task which required them to learn the rules. And they would get money, rewards for doing it well. And every so often they ask people, how are you feeling right now?

What they found is, yes, when people got rewards, when they got money, they were feeling good. But it turns out that they felt the best when they learned something new, right? When they progressed. That's when they were really feeling the best. And there's another study in which people could play one of two games. One game, all the rules were clear. It was really easy for them to do the best that they could do. In another game, there was a bit of uncertainty. They had to learn. It wasn't clear, right?

It was challenging to some respect. And they could play those two games. And then every few minutes, they said, OK, you could stay in this game or you can move to the other game. What they found is people liked to play the game where they had to learn, where there was uncertainty. They did not like to play the game where they always did well, where they were not progressing, where there's nothing to learn. So progress is really something that we strive for. And when it happens, that really makes us feel better, right?

It makes us feel like we are moving forward we don't like to stay even if where you are is great right really really great after a while it's not enough right you want to expand you want to progress those subject matters appear in your new book look again when you're talking about the importance of variety in our lives and it really shows up in all aspects of our lives this need for variety which you're kind of talking about there people want to try something new they want to learn something new they want to be stimulated in some way it's very true in work you talk about that a lot and as an employer it really kind of hit me that one of the most effective things I could do to keep my team members motivated would probably be to like change their jobs quite often,

or at least add new elements to their responsibilities quite often. Yeah, what the book is about is about habituation. And habituation is basically the phenomena which governs basically every part of our brain, which is we don't respond to things that don't change. When things are constant, where they're not changing, our brain just stops responding. And once you do change things around, even a little bit, then we start responding again. And at work, you know, it's often the case in big companies, for example, that people will take employees and will let them rotate through different divisions once in a while, right?

Because if you're staying at the same place, doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, you become complacent to some extent, right? But once you change, you're now talking to maybe a little different people. Maybe the projects are a little bit different. Then you start encoding again. It also enhances your creativity. The word habituation is quite a long word. I'm sure most people won't be familiar with the word, probably never heard it before. I didn't hear about habituation until I was doing a lot of research ahead of my book and came across a lot of your research. But a really interesting way to illustrate what habituation is, is with images like this.

Now tell me what's going on here. We're going to put this image on the screen. And also for those of you that are listening on audio, there'll be a link to this image in the description of this episode. But essentially when you look at this image, in the center of this image for 30 seconds, especially when you're looking at it on a computer screen, all of the colors disappear

if you stay focused on that black dot in the middle of this image for 30 seconds. So this was a discovery by an Austrian physician in 1804. What he discovered is that if you look, you have to not move your eyes. So fixate on the black cross and don't move your eyes. The colors fade away. They become gray. And if you're really good at this, I've done this a few times and I was able to do this. Actually, the gray goes away and the whole thing just becomes white. Why is that? It's because the input into your neurons, if you're not moving your eyes, is constant. So the neurons are just getting the same input,

so they stop responding. They're like, well, there's nothing new here. You know, let's save our resources for something else that's going to come along. So you stop noticing the color altogether. And that is habituation. Now, once you move your eyes, color comes back. Well, if anything moves in the background. Yeah. Well, you do. Yeah. Yeah. So then if you're moving your eyes, then the input into different neurons change, and then you consciously perceive the colors again. And I think it's the same in our life. If everything is constant, we don't perceive the goods and we don't perceive the bad. But if we move our eyes enough, you know, metaphorically, then we'll start noticing

and feeling again. Do all animals do this habituation thing? Yeah, so it's something really fundamental. You see this in every living creature. And I think to me, that's what's so interesting about this, right? Because something that seems to affect every part of our life, from our relationships, to our mental health, to our ability to innovate, you can actually track it down and you can see it's in every living animal. There's this habituation, the fact that neurons respond less and less to things that don't change, right? And that's true for things just like sound. If you hear the same sound again and again and again and again, you're no longer conscious of it. You're no longer responding to it.

So that's just perceptual habituation. But habituation is also true for the fundamental things in our life that we really care about. And this is why people can have really great things in their life. I'm sure you do, right? Maybe like a great relationship, a good job, or a comfortable home. But what's interesting is that after a while, those things don't bring us the daily joy that they should. Because we kind of habituated to it. Sort of like what is thrilling on Monday becomes boring on Friday. And the interesting thing is that's true also for the not so great thing around us. So there might be bad things around us like sexism, racism, cracks in our relationships or inefficiencies at work. But

if they're there all the time, after a while, we don't notice them. And if we don't notice them, we don't try to change them. Where does this come from? This idea that once we're exposed to something, we kind of phase out and can't see it anymore. It's because if something is in front of us for a while and we're still alive nothing bad happened right then the brain doesn't really need to respond to it anymore because the brain's trying to conserve resources right right we need the resources to be ready for the new thing that is coming your way right which can be threatening or it could also be really great, like, you know, food or something that you should grab. And that's basically why we stop responding. Of course, if something is hurting you, right, you will continue responding to that, which is why

it's a little bit difficult to habituate to pain. To pain, yeah. What are some of your favorite examples of everyday habituation of everyday habituation yeah like things that yeah yeah i told you mine before we started recording which was um if i go to the gym and then i come home i can no longer smell myself because you can i can smell myself for maybe a couple of minutes when i'm working out that i'm like getting hot and sweaty but then once I'm around myself for like 10 minutes, I guess my brain is just no longer sending the signal from my armpits through my nasal receptors to my brain.

Yeah, so smell is really a good one because that happens really, really fast, right? So if you put a perfume in yourself, it really smells strongly. But then you put the same perfume a day later, you don't smell it as much. A week later, you don't smell it that much. So those are really easy to see around us. But I think to me, the more interesting ones are habituating to things that we enjoy a lot, and then we enjoy less and less and less, and things that are really bad but we stop noticing so for example there's a great study in which people were asked to think about a song that they like tell me a song that you like or even an artist that you like oh gosh there's one i'm listening

to at the moment house gospel choir angels watching over me okay would you prefer to hear that song from beginning to end no interruptions or would you prefer to hear it with breaks? With breaks? Yeah. I don't want to hear it with breaks. Okay. You want to hear it the full thing, right? And you think you would enjoy it more, correct? Yeah. Okay. 99% of people say exactly what you say, right? I'm going to enjoy the song more if I just hear, I listen to it continuously with no breaks. But counterintuitively, when the study was conducted, it was shown that people actually end up enjoying a song more if there are breaks. By breaks, you mean they just put gaps in it? Gaps in it. And in fact, what's more interesting is not only did they put gaps,

for different groups of people, they did different things during the gaps. Maybe there's quiet, maybe there's annoying noise, and it didn't matter what they did in the gaps. When you had gaps in the song, people enjoyed it more, which is really counterintuitive, right? And they were willing to pay twice as much to hear that song in concert. So why is that? So if you hear a song that you really like, it's really joyful, but it turns out that over the whatever, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes of the song, the joy kind of goes down. You habituate a little bit, right? If you have a break, the joy is quite high and then it starts going down. There's a break.

And so then you go back up, right? Right. And so you habituate a little bit, but then you go back up. So overall, you're enjoying the music more. And they did the same with massages. So what do you prefer? A one-hour massage or 20-minute massage break? 20-minute massage break.

20-minute massage break. The one-hour massage. Right. Again, everyone says, I prefer the one-hour massage. But again, when they did the study and they asked people, how much did you enjoy it? The group who had breaks ended up enjoying it more. So what you're saying is we need to put more bloody adverts in this podcast.

That's exactly what I was thinking. This was exactly what I was thinking. People are loving the adverts. Because you think, you know, intellectually, you think, oh, these adverts are annoying. But I think what's happening, and, you know, no one's actually done this, this exact experiment, but they should. I think that in fact, people may enjoy your podcast more with the ads, even if you can't, even if they go through it like that, it's a little gap, it is possible. And that was my thought. All the comments that were like, we fucking don't want anymore. That's so interesting. And one of my favorite examples is actually vacation. So holidays.

So I was working on this project with a big tourism company in the UK, and they wanted to know what makes people enjoy holidays the most, right? When do they enjoy the holiday the most and why? So we did surveys and we went on these resorts to interview people. And we found two interesting things. The first was that the peak of enjoyment was 43 hours into the vacation. And why is that? Well, we think the reason is that first you get to the resort and then you have to unpack, you know, all of that. And then you start really enjoying it. And then the joy goes down and down and down over time. You're still enjoying your holiday a lot, but the peak

is within 43 hours. And then the related second bit of data that we saw is that when we asked people, what was your favorite part of the vacation? People used one word more than any other word, and it was the word first. So they said the first view of the ocean, the first dip in the water, first cocktail, right? They enjoyed the second time they went into the pool, the first time, but they enjoyed the first the most. Because firsts are kind of novel, right? And then you habituate. The second time you enjoyed a little bit less than the first time you enjoyed it. You're still enjoying it, but not as much as the first time. So does that mean that for holidays, I think you argue this point in the book, you do, yeah, about instead of doing, you know, four week holidays, it's much better to do

weekend breaks. Because if it's 42 hours or so, that's optimal enjoyment. Right. So you're trying to think about how can I maximize my enjoyment, right? And when it comes to vacation, maybe one good idea is instead of going for a two week vacation during the year, maybe, you know, have a few long weekends vacations. Now, of course, if you're flying somewhere far, then you might not be able to do it. It's a cost and so on. But you might consider instead of going to this far away vacation for two weeks, maybe you want to go somewhere closer to home, but have more of them. Because then you get more firsts. You also get more afterglows. So that's when you're coming back from vacation and you're still happy because you were just on vacation.

And you're also getting more of the anticipation of the vacation. Interesting. Which is hugely beneficial for your well-being. The anticipation part before you're actually even there at the resort or wherever you're going. I mean, this begs the question about the other thing we habituate to, which a lot of us don't want to admit, which is our partners and our sex lives.

Two things I've talked a lot on this podcast about as it relates to things that we kind of get used to and then no longer can get the same level of, I don't know, pleasure, happiness, appreciation, gratitude from. Does it apply to relationships and sex? Yeah, so I think it does. And I think the solution is very similar, breaks.

And I don't mean like a relationship break. Right. What I mean is have, you know, an evening for yourself. Go on a weekend, perhaps, on your own. And then when you come back, everything kind of re-sparkles. Is there any data to prove this? Because it's a feeling, it's something that we all know intuitively. Like me and my partner both know that when we're spending time apart,

it's good for our relationship. Every relationship knows that. It's good for our sex life. It's good for our appreciation of each other. But is there any data that supports this? Yes. And I'll tell you what the data is, which is so obvious. You think it's like, why do people even do a study about this? But there's one study and it simply shows that when people are away from their partner, their desire, their sexual desire for the partner goes up. What is it about our partner going away that makes us want them more? It's related to habituation, right? But it's also related to where your attention is.

When something is always in front of you, you sort of stop attending to it because it's always there. And so your brain then goes, okay, what else do I need to get, right? But if they're not there, then your attention can go back to them. And then there is a more basic level of how pleasure works. There's this great quote by the economist Tiber Skitovsky. And he says that pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires, right? Incomplete? Yes. So the idea is that you're always wanting a little bit more. Okay. Right. Intermittent,

meaning there's breaks. And then you always, and it's incomplete because you always want a little bit more. And I think that quote is, you can apply it to almost everything, right? Even to food. There's another fun experiment where they have two groups and one group was given mac and cheese to eat, which they really liked every day for a few weeks. And of course, they liked the mac and cheese of the first day. They liked it in the second day. But after a while, they couldn't see mac and cheese anymore And of course they liked the mac and cheese the first day, they liked it in the second day. But after a while, they couldn't, you know, they couldn't see mac and cheese anymore.

They really did not want mac and cheese. While the other group got mac and cheese just once a week and they enjoyed the Mike's and cheese much more, right? And so it's true for food. It's true for music. It's true for our relationships. It's true for vacations. What's that type, what's that restaurant where the chef brings you, I don't know, like 13 different courses of food?

Oh, that's too much. So that's not good. Okay. So here's what I think about choices. First of all, you don't want to give people no choice at all, right? So if there's a restaurant where you get no choice at all, I don't think that is overall a good idea. I mean, what you could do, for example, if you want to have a restaurant

where there's an option that the chef decides, still make it a choice, right? So you can have on the menu chef's choice, but I'm still, you know, sitting there and deciding, okay, the chef is going to choose for me, but that's still my choice. What is that, Matzo? Because it is well known that first, having a choice is really important for people's sense of control and for their enjoyment. And once they choose something,

they like it better than if someone else chooses for them. They really, you know, one thing that we really don't like, humans really don't like, and actually other animals as well, is having no agency, having no choice. That causes anxiety. So we do want to make sure that people have a choice. At the same time, you don't want to have too many options because that can be overwhelming, right? There's the famous experiment where people are given an option to choose between 60 different jams and some people are so overwhelmed, they just leave the store empty handed. So you don't want to go to, right, too much choice, which could be just overwhelming because there's, you know, for like too much cognitive resources, right?

Anything that we do that requires an amount of cognitive resource that is above some kind of threshold can feel aversive, right? So having a choice where you have to choose too many things, that's not good. On the other hand, not being able to choose anything, that's not good either. So you want to be somewhere in in the middle going back to this this subject matter of relationships what advice would you give me based on everything you know about habituation to make sure that my relationship stays spicy and uh we go the long term what things can i you know what do i need to be aware of what what things can I, you know, what do I need to be aware of? What things can I do? Okay. So just thinking about like habituation related things, I would say two main things. One is breaks, meaning having some distance once in a while, right? And the second is

doing new things together. Okay. Right. Because if you're always doing the same thing over and over and over, which couples sometimes do, there are like a few things that they like to do, right? Because it's hard because each person has their own preferences of what they like and then you find an overlap. And that overlap is not necessarily huge. So then you just, you know, do the same thing over and over. So I think as a couple, it is good to explore. And I don't necessarily mean like sexually, but just everything like what type of movies you're going to watch and you know, what type of activities. And that can also expand your experiences.

I think together, right? On the point of sex, though, I do think sex can get boring if you don't constantly try new things. It's just, it's if you plan to be with someone for 50 years, finding new things to try is work, to be honest. And I guess life is work. So it's work worth doing. You know, I'm almost, I don't know, almost five years into my relationship with a little bit of a gap in between. And it's a conversation we've had a lot, which is how do we keep things fresh and new and interesting and spicy because like any couple or like any people you fall into as you say like comfort habits we go to this restaurant because we know it and they know us you know you go to this place

because you know the place and you that's your favorite restaurant there or whatever you watch this thing on tv you follow this okay this cycle of monday to monday to sunday monday we do this then saturday and sunday we do this you know and it can be it can the monotony can seem to take a joy out of life right yes and i think you want a little bit of balance so some of this kind of routine and things you're familiar with there's something nice about that as well right so it's not, I'm not saying every weekend do something completely new, right? But just so you have your kind of routines and then, you know, you insert some novel activities or something, something new. So it's, it's kind

of a ball, a balance between exploring new things, but also exploiting the things that you enjoy. Do you think there's a, cause I was thinking about it, as you were speaking about men and women, if there's a difference in their ability to habituate. And in my experience, maybe that's just because I've always been the man in the situation. I'm less likely to seek spontaneity, I think, in terms of like coming up with new ideas for places us to go my girlfriend she's so like let's go to this flower thing let's go to this then let's go to this plan let's go over here she's very explorative so i was just wondering if there was a variance you'd ever seen in any research about a man's ability to habituate versus a woman's no i haven't

so i don't necessarily think there is and i don't necessarily think that it is a case that men are more explorative or more exploring. But, and this is not based on data. This is just my observation. I often hear that people say, I like to explore, but my partner likes to do the same. Or I like to just do the same all the time, but my partner likes to do the same, or I like to just do the same all the time, but my partner likes to explore. I hear this again and again. It's true in my own relationship. My co-author, Cass Steinstein, who wrote the book with me, he also says exactly the same, right? So for him, he likes to exploit, and his wife likes to explore.

For me, it's like, I like to explore, my husband likes to exploit, and I hear this again and again. And that makes me think that it is not a coincidence. That is perhaps the case that people who like to explore end up with people who like to exploit because to do the best that we can in life, we need to do both.

So maybe it is, you know, this balance. Interesting. Two individuals. Because if you're left on your own and just exploring all the time, you might not get to the optimal balance in life. If you're exploiting all the time, then you're unlikely to find these new things, right, that will actually be great for you. You will learn, gain new pleasure, and so on. So it may not be a coincidence. And I think in a lot of these traits, almost every psychological trait that you can think of, they are individual differences. You can go all the

way from one extreme to the other extreme, right? If we're talking about optimism, all the way to pessimism, exploration, all the way to exploitation, right? And everything in between. And normally, it's kind of a bell curve of sorts. And I think it's not a coincidence, right? Because if you think about a society, a group, a team working together, you do need these variations for people to push each other in different directions such that as a team, we get to the best that we can get. We talked about learning a little bit earlier on and about the importance of change and novelty. I'm someone that's just fallen back into the habit of reading books again and writing about them.

And it's brought a huge amount of lost joy to my life. And I had almost lost sight of it through becoming so busy in my professional life. I'd lost the joy of learning new things. And because I do this podcast as well, and it seems to, I learn so much from speaking to the people I speak to. But just recently, getting back into reading books again

has brought this new sort of excitement to my life. And your book provides a lot of evidence as to why that might be. Yeah, I think it is a case that probably, you know, in recent years, people are reading less, right? And we kind of forget the joy of reading, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. I think the difference between reading a book

than watching a video is when you read a book, there's an extra mental activity that you're doing, which is you're imagining, you're visualizing, right? It's also in your own pace. So you read something and maybe that elicit triggers some kind of association in your mind, right? So you might like stop for a little bit and then continue. So there's so much more going on. And I think because of that, when you read a book, you can relate that more to yourself and to your own life, right? Versus, I mean, watching films like that, that's great as well. But that is a difference, right? It's more about you and your inner experiences and memories coming more alive. And then it also ties to what you already know.

The midlife crisis. Is this a real thing? Yeah, absolutely. It is well known that stress is the peaks in your midlife and happiness goes down in your midlife. Suicide, for example, peaks, especially for male in midlife. Definitely like something that we should think of and notice. And we don't really know for sure why it happens. But one thing that happens in midlife is that you have a lot of stressors coming your way. So we're talking about 40s and 50s. So you have you might need you have little kids that you need to take care of. Maybe you have elderly parents that you're worried about.

Professional life has a lot of stressors in midlife. So that's really a time where we see the midlife crisis. But one thing that we think is that perhaps this is also a time that you're not progressing as much, right? So kind of in your 20s and so on, you learn a lot, you gain skills, you get to perhaps a good position. And then it's sort of plateauing, right? For a lot of people, it can kind of plateau in midlife. Perhaps they have a good job, right? But they're kind of stuck. They're not really moving as much. They're not learning as much, less variety, right? Things are a little bit more routine. And that could be one reason why happiness is relatively low in midlife. It's also hard to see like what is next sometimes, right? While you're climbing up, it's you're kind of, well, this is my goal. But once you get there,

it's a little bit disappointing to some extent, even if you've done really well, right? Because as we talked before, one thing that is really important for our happiness is kind of us believing that we have something to gain, something to go forward to. Now, why does then happiness go back up after midlife, right? So we don't know, but here's one speculation that at a certain point in time, maybe you're retiring, then actually life changes again. In an odd way, there can actually be more variety and change and learning. You need to learn how to live life again with this new context of not going to work every day. And you might make decisions, all sorts of decisions of what to do with your time which will require you to learn again when you get to say 40 40 50 years old you're

probably in a relationship which you've been in for a while yeah it's not that there's not that pursuit your job your career your profession your identity identity, your geography, your house, friendship circles are probably all well established at that point. And your hypothesis is that the lack of forward motion and the abundance of routine means that you lose something in life. Yeah. So things are less new, right? It's kind of same, same, same. Imagine the best day of your life. You wake up in the morning and you eat like the best breakfast that you can think of, right? And then you interact with the people that you love the most and you go do the best activity like what you want. And you see your favorite movie.

So the whole day is your favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite things. Really great. And then you wake up the next day and you do the same. And then you wake up the next day and you do the same. And then you wake up the next day and you do the same, right? A week in, a few weeks in, the best day of your life just doesn't elicit as much joy, right? And also, there's nothing to learn anymore. So even if you're living your absolute best life,

if it is the same again and again and again and again, it will eventually be a little bit even depressing, I would say. So that's by definition, not our best life. Right. So then it is what is our best life. So I think when people think about what my best life is, what they're thinking about is, oh, I want that great house, right? I want that great partner. I want money or, you know, and then you can get all of these things. But if they remain constant, that's just not going to be your best life. And you can engineer this. I mean, even if it's like midlife and everything is set and you're in one house and

so on, for example, you can go take a course, learn something new, right? A new field that is not your own. You can go a new sport, right? There's things that you could do, go visit places that you haven't been, try to make connections with people that are a bit different from your regular crowd that you're interacting with. It's a little bit hard to do because it's going to require effort. The easiest thing to do is just continue. Same, same, same, same, same. We assume that happiness will be derived from us. I almost don't know how to say this, like from us being on autopilot. Like if we do what society said, you work a job, you get a partner, you create a house, we assume that will lead to

happiness. But what you're saying is the research shows that we actually need to keep almost dismantling or disrupting our own experience to find happiness or to be happy. I guess we can't find happiness, we be happy. Yeah, did a whole bunch of surveys to figure out what are the factors that are most associated with people's happiness. And the number one was meaning, right? People who could say, I have meaning in my life. That was number one. Number two was control.

People who felt they have control over their life. And I don't remember what number income was, but it wasn't especially high. Oh, I think social. So social connections was really high as well. Right. So a lot of these things were these psychological things, not necessarily material things that really induced people's happiness and satisfaction from their life. Somewhat linked to that. Studies show that after getting married, people report to being happier on average. Yet about two years after their honeymoon period, happiness

levels tend to be the same as their pre-marriage levels. Yeah, so this is a well-known what's called the hedonic treadmill. So the hedonic treadmill means that we sort of have a baseline level of happiness, which is determined, a lot is genetic. It might be determined by early childhood experiences. And we can move from that baseline. We can go up if something good happens. Maybe you have a good relationship, marriage, you get a promotion. It can go down if something bad happens, even bereavement. But it turns out that in most cases, you climb back to your baseline level of happiness. So these things, they can go up and they can down and then you kind of adapt, right? And you end up trying, you know,

and this goes back to this idea that we're trying to get all these things. We think, oh, once I get this promotion, then I'll be really happy. And then you get the promotion and it's great. But then after a while, you just go back to your baseline. Now, on one hand, this actually is not a bad thing because imagine you get your first entry level job and people are really happy with their first entry

level job. Great. But imagine I just continue being really happy with my first entry level job, right? I won't be motivated to move forward, right? So this is why habituation is there because it's moving us forward as an individual and as a society. On the other hand, it also reduces our joy. And it also sometimes causes us not to see some of the bad things around us because we habituate to that as well. Another reason why habituation is important is for your mental health, right? And that's kind of related to what we just talked about, where bad things happen and slowly, slowly, slowly we adapt and we go back to baseline. We are able to recover, right? It's kind of our superpower, our immense ability to just bounce

back for most individuals. And what's interesting is that you actually see that people with depression, they habituate much slower. So there's a great study that was conducted in the University of Florida by a professor, Aaron Heller, where he had students who just got exam results, and he asked them how they were feeling. And then he asked them how they were feeling after every 45 minutes for the whole day. And what he found is when people got bad results, they were feeling bad, right? They're not happy. And that's true for people who never had depression episodes in their life and people who were experiencing depression or had depression before. So everyone was feeling bad at the beginning. Those people who did not

have any history of depression, they slowly, slowly, slowly started feeling better from this bad grade. Those with depression also started feeling better, but much slower, right? So in other words, depression is related to slower habituation, slower recovery from negative events in your life. And one reason we think this is, is because depression is related to going over these bad events in your mind again and again, not letting go, right? You're kind of like chewing over them again and again and again. And that is something that is preventing you from recovering and bouncing back from these aversive events. If habituation causes us to

lose the joy of our current situation, then how come, as you say in chapter two, the chapter about variety, you say that up to 40% of employees resign within the first six months of their new job. You'd think their new job would bring them joy because it was different. But up to 40% of employees resign within the first six months. So new things can bring us joy because they're different. However, at the same time, and this kind of goes back to the vacation example that I gave you, which was people are not the happiest when they just get to the resort. It takes them time, right? It takes them 43 hours to get to the peak joy. Why? Because they still need the time to adapt, right? They need to unpack. They need to get used to this new routine. Same thing with a new job, for example. So on one hand, getting a new job, you're going to learn things and that's

great. And eventually it will get you joy. But when you're there for the first day or the first few days, there's a lot of getting used to things around you, right? You need to like figure who's who, right? Who's on top? Who's in the bottom? Like, where is the cafeteria? What am I going to eat? There's so many different things that you need to figure out. It can be stressful. It can be overwhelming. And you often want to just like run back to your old life, run back to your new job and do a U-turn. And the problem is that often people don't predict this. They can't see ahead, right? They think it's like, well, I'm unhappy with my new job on my first day or my second day or even the first week. That means that this is not a good job for me. You

know, perhaps it's not a good job for you or perhaps you just need to allow it some time to adapt. So, you know, my recommendation is whatever it is that you're trying that's new, it can also be something like a new relationship, right? Give it some time because you're going to have to get used to the things that are also not great. You will also get used to things that are great, but you have to get used to those things that are not great. And then after a while, you won't see them anymore, right? So it's not going to affect you as much. So give it time. Now, if you gave it time and still you're unhappy, sure.

Yeah, make a change. There's a clear message in here for managers, employees, CEOs, founders about how to keep their team motivated and engaged. And the message that I'm hearing is the importance in creating variety in their work. Because I always think in businesses I'm involved in, if someone's doing the same thing for like 12 months, we're going to have to have a conversation within the next three months because they will typically come to me and say like something's not something's not right and it's typically that people need a bit of variety in their work I

guess because that gives it a little kick of meaning again you know I I think I've always hypothesized that people need like five things to really like their jobs number one is a sense of forward motion towards a goal so that's progress i guess feeling like you're making forward motion number two challenge they need to be like sufficiently challenged not too challenged because then there's lots of issues under challenged lots of issues lose motivation like in game psychology number three is control and autonomy so feeling like you've got control over your life, your work. Number four is meaning in the work you're doing,

subjective meaning. Jack's reason for doing this podcast will be entirely different from someone else in the team, for example. And then the last one is working in like a supportive group of people. There's a lot of studies about this that you want a situation where you're learning something because if you're learning nothing,

people are not engaged, right? But if it's like so difficult that you're learning something, because if you're learning nothing, people are not engaged, right? But if it's like so difficult that you can't learn, right? People are unhappy as well. So you have to be like in the spot in the middle, right? That's a sweet spot. And again, it's different for everyone, right? Where it's not too easy, but it's not too difficult. So you have something to learn, but you're still progressing. And that's very important. There's a great study showing that if you put people in a room and there's absolutely nothing actually prefer physical pain than to just not do anything at all. So that's on the one hand. And then, of course, on the other hand is when you're sitting in a class or you're listening to a lecture and you have no idea what's – it's too much, right? Because you haven't gotten there.

Maybe you'll take the steps. Eventually you'll get there. But you started off by saying for employees you need to kind of change, right? Give them different projects and so on. And what's interesting, not only will they enjoy it more, they're more likely to get to creative solutions. Start with the fact that what has been found is that people who habituate slower are more creative. So there's different ways to measure how fast you habituate. What they did in this study is that they had a sound,

the same sound again and again and again, and they measured skin conductance, which shows, so it is how aroused you are. When you're aroused, you sweat more. And that is measured by the skin conductance, right? And so when there's like a sound, there's a response. So if a sound is the same sound again and again and again, most people habituate, there's no longer response, you know, long skin conductance. But for some people,

they continue responding, right? Because they're not habituating. And what was found is those people who continue responding, those were the people who already showed creativity in their life. They had a patent under their name. They had an exhibition in an art gallery. They had a book that they wrote. They had got prizes for innovative work. And the question is, why is that? And I think the reason is that because of habituation, we filter a lot of information, right? And, you know, it makes sense. Information is not important. But if you don't habituate, you're going to have a lot of bits of information in your mind simmering.

Objects, sounds, bits and pieces of knowledge that are not important on their own. But they're just going to stay in your mind. They're going to simmer. And once in a while, they will create something new. And that's where innovation comes in. And really, if you think about the most creative solutions that people come up with, it's usually they take something from one field,

something really boring, unimportant, mundane. And that bit of mundane piece of information then solves a problem in this other completely different field. And or there's like this part of knowledge here that is boring. And this other part of knowledge in this other field that also seems very mundane. But you put them together and suddenly you create something that is really, really interesting and creative. I mean, often you see, for example, people taking what they know from biology, which, you know, on its

own doesn't seem so important, but then they take that and they use it to solve a problem in a different field, technology, for example, right? That is like the most creative solutions. So how do we facilitate that? How do we facilitate disabituation in order to enhance creativity? And the answer is change, changing your environment. And it could be simple things. There are studies showing that if you just change your environment, let's say you're working in the office for a few hours and you go work in a coffee shop for a few hours, right? That change can actually also enhance creativity. You're sitting and working and then you're going out and walking or going out for a run. Studies show for the first six minutes, you're going to be more creative and also vice versa.

So if you were out walking, out running, and then you come back and you sit in your office, for the next six minutes, you're going to be more creative. Now, six minutes may sound like that's not a lot of time, but sometimes there's just enough for you to get the aha moment. I can remember those instances where I came up with an idea that would then change my course of research for a long time. Those ideas that were really important. So if I think about these examples, like one example was I was in the office trying to solve this problem and I couldn't find a solution. So I decided to go to the gym. And then, so I walked to the gym

and then before, while I was walking, while I was getting to the gym, that's when, you know, the solution came about. And I remember like calling my student and like sharing that. And that would then change years of what we were gonna do, right? So just all I did was changed my physical activity, changed just my physical surrounding. And that's

exactly what these studies show. Or another example was, again, I was in my office and I took a break and I was reading the New York Times science section. So not hugely different, but still different, right? And then I read something about monkeys, and I do humans. And that again, that was, ooh, that an idea came about by taking a break and doing something that was a little bit different. And I think every single example of this, it's always like that. It's never me trying to think of something new, me trying to find a solution. It's always doing something else, which then something unusual, not something that I do like 90% of the time in a day. And that doing those times is when these kind of new ideas came about. You know, the brain generally,

having spent so much time studying it, what are the fundamental surprises you've come to learn about humans that you think most people just don't understand or agree with like the things that we don't want to believe about ourselves that are unfortunately true things that are unfortunately true i see this right i read this throughout your work things where you go humans wouldn't say they're like that if you ask them but clearly they are because of the research. Right. Yeah, I mean, it is true that we're not conscious of most of these kind of systematic mistakes that we make and the biases that we have. For example, I mean, maybe our belief system is a great example of why we believe what we believe, I think that if you'd ask people, why do you believe a certain

thing? They would probably give you some kind of rational explanation, right? I believe this thing because, you know, here's all the evidence and so forth. But in fact, most of the times, the reason we believe something is that we were brought up in an environment where that belief was a popular one or people around us believe it. Oh, we've heard it again and again. You know, one interesting thing is this is a huge effect where people are not aware of it. As long as you hear something repeatedly, even twice, the likelihood that you believe it goes way up versus something that you hear once. It's called the illusory truth effect. You just, there's so many studies showing this. You let people, you tell people something twice,

they don't remember that they've heard it twice. And they're going to believe it way more than something that they just heard once. The reason for this is that the brain process information that it's heard before less, right? Okay, so let's say I tell you that a shrimp's heart is in its head, right? So when you hear that, that sounds really surprising, and your brain takes a lot of resources to process this. You might think about the last time I ate a shrimp, right? Or just imagine the shrimp's heart is in his head. But the second time I'm going to tell you this, a shrimp's heart is in his head, your brain's not going to process this that much, right?

And the third time, it's not going to process it at all. Now, when your brain takes less effort in processing things, that causes a signal of familiarity. And as a result, we're more likely to believe something. When something requires less effort and less energy to process, we believe it more. So anything that you hear again and again and again, as you hear it more and more and more, it takes less energy to process.

And if it takes less energy to process, our brain then concludes that is as likely true. And for good reason, because most of the time when you hear something again and again and again, most of the time is likely true. And for good reason, because most of the time when you hear something again and again, again, most of the time it's true. So if you heard something from, you know, your aunt, and then you heard it from your friend, and then you heard it from your doctor, why do all the people tell you all these things? Because on average, it's true. But sometimes it's not going to be true, right? It's going to be false beliefs, right? And even even even things like it takes you less energy to process a large font 14 font

bold it takes us less energy to process it versus like small font yeah we see that across the board in all of our marketing companies is that if we just make the font a little bit bigger we get more clicks so it turns out yeah not only are people more attentive they're going to believe it more so there's studies showing that you show people two sentences. One is in big fonts, bold, and one is in small. And you ask them, you know, how likely is this to be true? How likely is that to be true? Those sentences that are in big, bold fonts, people are more likely to believe they're true because the brain requires less energy to process it, which then makes us conclude that it's likely to be true. And it's true for like, for example, if you do it with like red color, right? Anything that makes it easier

for us to process. If we hear things more clearly, we're more likely to believe that's true than if you put a little bit of noise. People are less likely to believe things are true anytime that it's hard for us to process. So what that means is if you want people to, if you want to help them believe what you're saying, right, take on your recommendations, you want to make it easier for them to process it. So you could do that visually, big fonts, so on. But the other things you can do is you can relate it to things that they already believe in, what we call priors, right? So if I want to convince you of something, it might be a good idea for me to think about what do you already believe, right? And then try to tie

that to what you already believe, because that will require less processing. Or I could tell you something twice or three times. Now, of course, it's not like I'm going to tell you something really, really crazy, right? The earth is flat three times and you're going to believe me, right? But I'm talking about these things where like, it could be true, right? And so I tell you that a few times, and then eventually you're more likely to believe it and you don't know it's because you've heard it a few times. So if I said, salad and sugar are good for you, versus just sugar is good for you, maybe more people are more likely to believe the first sentence because I've included a statement that you know from prior knowledge is true,

which is cabbage is good for you. Yeah, that is a great example. That is a great example. Because our brain goes, yeah, salad is good for you. And then, you know, by the time we get to sugar, we're like, okay, that could be true. And also, it makes you be more believable. And just to say, you need a little bit

of sugar sugar is not only bad yeah a little bit so you talked to learn about dehabituating our lives why why and where do we need to dehabituate our lives where do we need to change things and introduce novelty i'm almost wanting to come away with a little bit of a little bit of a checklist for my own life here I feel like I'm I understand the part on relationships which is take breaks from my partner try new things with them you said as well so go to new restaurants go to new places do new things on the weekend in work um quit my job I guess that's what you're saying no absolutely not no do not quit your job you know change role add new responsibilities you could it could even be something as i mean you don't have to completely change what you're doing but you could at the same time try something new and in fact you

know from from you know i'm sure you do that because you have different things that you're doing right and so that means you have variety in your day because you do your because you have different things that you're doing right and so that means you have variety in your day because you do your podcast but then you also have your companies and your companies are different right so this is a good example but not everyone has that right a lot of people just have the one job but if you can take on you know learn something new right induce variety into your day in that way, that is great. That will cause you to start being on kind of a learning mode, right? I take also from that, that as an employer,

it's really important that we have all of our team members on a personal development plan, which means making sure that they've got intellectual forward motion in their lives. They're always learning something new. They're always striving for something new. And that every team member in like my company should have something they're currently learning about outside of their core responsibilities. Right.

So sometimes it would look like they're going sideways. Yeah. Right. So sometimes it doesn't look like the path is like just progressing forward. But sometimes perhaps the plan is to go a little bit sideways which means like it's not the obvious thing yeah that they're gonna learn right for their role okay yeah you see something's not gonna become a better editor or producer or whatever he's gonna learn music almost anything different that you learn is probably going to feed back.

Yeah. I guess it comes right down to even the route you cycle on the way to work in the morning or small things, right? Small decisions you make, hotels you stay at, the airline you choose to use. Is there any other ways that you've dehabituated in your life having learned about this? Yes. But I want to just say something about, you said use different airlines and so on. So on one hand, yes, but on the other hand, if something is not super enjoyable, but you still have to do it. So for example, maybe flying, maybe travel, like when you're traveling for business, it can be painful, right? So in those cases, in fact, you want to do the same thing again and again. Why?

Because you habituate to the negative, you see? So if you think about things that you don't like to do, you may actually want to do it in the same way over and over, right? Because I mean, unless you think like you get on a plane and you're super enjoy it. But like, you know, for me, I just like want it to be over with. Right. So it's easier actually to use the same airline, to do the same thing. So in some parts of life, actually, you want to choose to do the same thing.

And in fact, in some parts of life, you want to do these things that you don't enjoy in one chunk. You know how we talked about the good things you chop up? The bad things you want to swallow whole. So if you think about things that you don't like to do, but you really need to do, like, I don't know, I need to grade papers. I need to do household chores. When you ask people, like,

would you rather do this thing that you need to do, but you don't like, would you just get it over with? In one go go or do you want breaks in between for a breather people like breaks for a breather right um if it is not i don't know washing the floor or whatever there is doing their taxes they want the breaks but in fact they suffer less if they just get it over with because then they habituate to the negative. Yeah. Right?

Yeah, that makes sense. So for the positive, you want variety and so on. But the things that you're not going to learn a lot from, you just need to get them over and done with, just get them over and done with, and even do it in exactly the same way that you've always done it. Is social media going to make me vicariously habituate i.e through looking at other people's lives and the experiences they're having it's moving my bar up

like my my own perception of expectations in my life up in an unpleasant way so that when I go to that same place that Jenny went to on Instagram it's less enjoyable for me because I've already kind of experienced it through the lens of Jenny's Instagram stories. Right. So this has a lot to do with what do you what do we expect from life and how do those expectations impact us? So I think obviously social media is causing us to have unrealistic expectations. We always, I don't know, for most of us, we feel kind of disappointed with ourselves. We go online is because, of course, a lot of people go online and they post the good things, right? Oh, I'm on vacation, I got this award. And then you go online and you're like, oh, all the people, all of this good things are happening constantly. And so you feel disappointed about your own life, you have unrealistic expectations. And it shifts what we

call adaptation levels. So basically, we adapt to our daily life, and then things that are better than our daily life, we feel good and things are worse, we feel worse. But sometimes our adaptation level can shift not based on our reality, but what we expect maybe will happen and also what we see other people are doing. So let's talk about expecting what will happen. So there's a study showing that when prisoners are about to be released, they are still in prison, but in their mind, they're already like thinking about the release, which is great. And so now their expectations are kind of higher and that makes them feel worse, right? So they're actually very close to release, but in fact, they're feeling really bad because their daily

life is much worse from what they expect their daily life to be. That's kind of like social media, isn't it? You're sat in your house looking out at people partying in some hot, sunny country, having the time of their lives. You feel like you're in prison. Your expectations are being raised because you're watching them have the time of their lives. So suddenly your house feels like, you know, a prison. Yeah. So your expectations can be based on what you just expect for yourself and also what other people do. Now, I'm not saying that high expectations are bad, right? Because there's two things happening at the same time. One thing is when the outcomes, so this is related to dopamine neurons. So basically dopamine neurons in your brain are firing all the time, right?

And then when outcomes are better than expected, they fire even firing all the time, right? And then when outcomes are better than expected, they fire even more, burst more, right? So you expect to get this amount of salary, you get a higher salary, dopamine goes up. You expect the steak to taste quite good. It tastes even better. They fire more. And when things are worse than expected, they start quieting down, right? So they're quieting down when things are worse than expected. And that is highly correlated with your mood. When there's big bursts of dopamine, you feel good. When the dopamine is quiet, you're feeling bad. But that quiet is important because that quiet says things are not as good as I expected them to be. And it signals to your brain, I need to learn something.

I need to change this, right? There's two things you can change. You can change your expectations. You can lower them or you can change the reality, right? And so this negative mood that is associated with outcomes not being as good as you expected them can actually lead to progress. So it's a bit of a delicate kind of balance, right? And so often, I mean, there's this really counterintuitive finding, which is when people don't have certain things in their life, for example, in countries where the healthcare system is quite bad,

the healthcare system doesn't affect people's daily happiness as much as in countries where the healthcare system is good. So when the healthcare system is good, you expect it to be good. So then any variation can impact your kind of satisfaction. But if you're living in a country where like, well, I know the healthcare system is I'm it's not going to even affect how I'm feeling right you have no expectations and you're kind of that's not going to impact your happiness I remember you had a TED talk didn't you which did uh 15 million views on how to motivate yourself to change your behavior okay yeah what can I take from that TED talk to achieve my new year, new me goals? Okay, so I talk about a few principles there. And one is, a lot of times our goals are in the future. So I want to go to the

gym because eventually I want to lose weight. I'm not going to lose weight that very second, right? I'm not going to like get into my jeans that very day. Eventually, I know that if I go to the gym, I will become healthier, right? So it's a lot of times about the future or you say, I want to get a promotion. So I'm going to work really hard today so I can get promotion in the future. The problem is that it's really hard to motivate yourself to do something immediate for a reward that's going to come a long time from now. So what you need to do is you need to figure out what can I get now? I'm going to the gym because I want to be healthier and thinner or whatever in the future. But is there anything that I can get at the very moment?

I've heard people tell me that the way that they motivate themselves to get the gym is they say, when I get to the gym and I get on the treadmill, I'm going to allow myself to watch some trash TV or read like, you know, a magazine that I don't always allow myself to read. So that's one thing, right? Think about what the immediate rewards that you can give yourself or someone else, maybe you're helping someone else to achieve their goals. What can we get immediately, not only in the future? For example, another person told me that their husband, they really wanted their husband to go to the gym. And so the husband went to the gym and they got back and the wife said to the husband, oh, I can feel your like, I can see your muscles, right? So it was immediate, right?

They gave him like immediate rewards. So try to think about, I call it like bridge the temporal gap because there's an action happening today and there's this like goal in the future, but you have to bridge the temporal gap to try to think about, okay, what can I also get now? It could be an emotional response, right? I mean, a lot of times when we do something like we work hard, we solve a problem, we go to the gym, we feel good. It could be the emotional response. So maybe one way you can do is make that salient, right? Maybe like track your emotions, track your mood, and you can say, okay, this is what I did today, right? I went to the gym today, this is

how I was feeling, right? And so that's also an immediate reward. I was thinking about this idea of discipline and what creates discipline and I was hypothesizing if there were to be a discipline equation what it might look like and I kind of concluded that there's three parts to the things and areas in my life where I've been able to maintain discipline and the equation looks something like this the start of the equation would be the why like however much I valued that goal so it could be going to the gym or whatever plus the reward that I got from the pursuit of the goal so the perceived reward I got from the pursuit of the goal so that's actually like going to the gym doing the

exercise being on the treadmill the feeling after walking, walking home, like the, you know, and then minus the cost of the pursuit of the goal. So that's like having to like leave the house, get in the Uber, put my shoes on, travel for 45 minutes, wait, you know, lose two hours. And if you want to be disciplined in any of your life, you need to therefore increase the why in whatever way you can get really, really clear on why that matters. And in your case, create those pacts, like a social pact, a financial pact, whatever to make it really important to you. Do whatever you can to make the reward

of the pursuit of the goal more enjoyable. It might be going with a friend or something, going to a gym that's closer. I don't know. And then do everything you can to reduce the cost of the pursuit of the goal. So... Right.

And the problem is that the costs are often immediate yeah right and then we fall into what's called the present bias or sometimes it's called temporal discounting which is that often we value what's happening in the moment more than the same thing if it was to happen in the future right um and that's true for both like bad things and good things things that are just happening now our brain brain is like, oh, I'm going to decide what to do based on this immediate thing. And the problem is that the costs are often immediate, right? To go to the gym. Yeah, they come first, right?

So you have to overcome those costs. And I think as you're saying, one thing you could do is to try to get those rewards closer in time, right? So if I go to the gym, I have to like walk to the gym. I might tell myself, okay, I can listen to a podcast while i'm walking so that's enjoyable exactly exactly while i'm running yeah simon cynic threw a really when i was at his house talking to him about this he threw an objection at me he was like yeah but this morning in la i got out of bed and went and emptied the bins at 7 a.m knew if I didn't, then there'd be repercussions. So I ran that through this framework. And I was like, well, your why was strong, because the repercussions of you not getting out of bed, the bin overflows, you probably get fined

by the local council. The reward of the pursuit of the goal really wasn't there. And the cost, fortunately, was lower than the why. So discipline occurred. Right. And that's because we're a sophisticated creatures, right? We're not only driven. I mean, those things immediately are strong, but we're not only driven by them. We have these frontal lobes, right? We're sophisticated creature. We can value things that are in the future. So what I'm saying, and I say, you know, immediate is important. I'm not saying future isn't important for us and we don't't use that we do, right? And we're able to do that. Another thing that people do is they actually put in artificial costs for not doing the right thing, right? Like a social pact is one where I've announced it to the world on my Instagram that I'm going to do it. Then there's a reputational cost if I don't.

Right, right. And for example, you know, there's those silly things where people say, I've heard this when for writers, and they tell, I tell the friends, you know, I'm going to send you my chapter Monday at 7am. And first of all, that's that's a pact, right? I mean, I have to send it because I told you not because you're even going to read it, right. But if I don't, then I am, you know, $100 is going to come into your account. Like maybe you even already put it, right? But if I don't, then I am, you know, $100 is going to come into your account. Like maybe you even already put it, you know, as like a future thing, which you can stop, right? So there's a cost, you put a cost to what will happen if you don't do that immediate thing. Just goes to show, I think, fundamentally, that we're just driven by incentives. You know, we think it's something else. But really, at the very fundamental level,

everything just seems to be about incentives in business and work and relationships in life absolutely i mean every decision every action conscious or unconscious is very much about incentives right the good and the bad i think what's interesting to me is that those incentives are quite variable. They can be money. They can be food. They can be like social interaction. Or variety. They can be variety, yeah. So what the incentives are is very variable. What, you know, what the good that I'm getting,

also the bad, right? What feels bad. A lot of different things can feel bad. So interesting. So if you go down to like creatures low in the evolutionary scale, I think for them, things are more basic, right? For them, it's just like food, temperature, right?

Things like that that are really about survival. But as we go up and up and up the ladder and we get to humans, for us, there's a lot of different things that can be incentivizing. I was saying to one of my colleagues the other day in a business that I'm like an investor in, he was telling me about one of his team members who was like just a bit, had lost the love of her work. And he told me the list of reasons she'd said in the like exit interview as to why she wasn't enjoying her work and I looked at the list of things and intuitively it felt like the person didn't actually know why they weren't

enjoying their work anymore and so I had a conversation with this person who was leaving this company and we got to the very bottom of it and at the very heart of it was just a loss of meaning in the job they were doing they They couldn't answer why it mattered anymore. They thought the work they were doing no longer mattered. And when you'd ask them, they would have said a lot of other things. You know, they would point to small little things in this and that in the office and whatever else

and the music that's playing. But at the very heart of it was actually just an absence of meaning. And people aren't, I don't think, very good at understanding that they've lost meaning or that meaning is so important or that what it is. Yeah, and that goes back to the survey that I mentioned where they found that the number one thing that was important for people's happiness was meaning. And what does meaning mean?

I guess is that what you're doing is valuable, right? Two. Yeah, two. So that's a good question i think it's probably beyond yourself i don't know maybe it is even something about immortality right wanting to feel that what i'm doing is gonna change something beyond myself um and it's it's not necessarily about generosity although you know generosity and could be part of it but it's not necessarily about generosity, although, you know, generosity could be part of it, but it's more about making a difference, right? Steve Jobs had this saying that he said something like a dent in the universe, right? Making a dent in the universe. I think a lot of

people want to do that. And, you know, you don't have to invent the mac to do that it could also be how you affect your family how you raise your children right and that thing that those are the kind of things that can continue to be even when you're not there i've noticed this trend gen z and the younger millennials are the change the world generation. And what I mean by that, hear me out, is that I have so many young kids coming up to me, especially over the last sort of 10 years generally, that would say to me, I want to change the world. And you'd ask them like, what do you mean? They'd say like, I want to change the world. They can't tell you necessarily what they want to change about it, but they want to be the person that had that impact on the world. They can't tell you necessarily what they want to change about it, but they want to be the

person that had that impact on the world. And I think that sits in contrast to what my father would have said as a 65 year old man, if you'd asked him at 20 years old, what do you want to do in your job? I don't think my dad would have said, change the world. I think he would have said, I want to be a structural engineer. You know what I mean? And I think that going back to your point about habituation and people's desire to like, I don't know, for immortality, is it plausible that because of social media, because we've seen a lot of world changes, we've adjusted our own, I don't know,

expectations of our own contributions to now that this young generation, if they're not changing the world or if they're not having such a profound impact on things they don't have their level of meaning has habituated to now the base minimum of impact they need to have is to change the world just i mean they can't just get a job right and when i when i said about a dent in the world i did not mean as as i said before I don't mean like inventing the Mac. It could just be making a nice meal that people enjoy, right, or something.

It could be things that are quite small. And, you know, thinking about your father, he wants to be an engineer, but he wanted to be an engineer. But why? Right? He said that's what he wanted to do but why did he want that right so he probably I don't know but maybe he wanted to be that because that would enable him to create new things right and so in just creating new things you're changing the world so I think I don't think he was aiming at that though whereas the young kids that come up to me they're like

aiming at that so they want to like they want to change the world and they haven't figured out how whereas my dad wants to be like an engineer and the consequences he ends up changing the world yes but he probably wants to be an engineer for some reason right i could guess um and i think he doesn't you know people don't think about it change i mean it's, we're using the same words, but I think these perhaps different generations have different aspiration, right? Because changing the world, when we say those, when I say the word, I don't mean like changing the world, right? I'm just saying, doing something that creates a change in your world. I mean, maybe that's a better way to do it, better way to say it, some kind of change in your world, not necessarily I'm doing global change, like Steve Jobs, but in some way, this is a luxury. And that's true also,

even for your father's generation and for this new generation, right? Wanting to have meaning is a luxury that we have because we have our basic needs, right? Because we have food and shelter and, you know, just like safety, the very, very basic, we can then start thinking about meaning. But on the other hand, you can say, well, just being able to care for my family and keeping them safe, that also has meaning. Risk. In order to change our lives, we have to sort of lean into risk in key areas. For those people that are, you know, thinking about changing their lives,

but they're looking forward into uncertainty and they're seeing risk, what advice would you give them based on what you know about habituation, but more broadly from the brain, that's going to encourage them to take that step into the unknown where they believe risk lives yeah so we quote the rock climber alex hernold in in the book and what he says is that that he has a comfort zone which is kind of a bubble around him and as he tries more and more things that bubble just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. He pushes those boundaries. And what happens is that those things that seemed crazy to him, absolutely crazy, then suddenly become within the realm of possibility, right?

I think the takeaway here is you have to start. You have to try. And what is helpful to know is that even if you try small, so let's say their goal is quite up there, it's like a huge risk, right? Yes. But just try small, right? And then suddenly the next step wouldn't seem so crazy, right? And so on and so forth. We see that, you know, risk habituates and it helps us explore different things. It helps us try new things. It can also go in a bad direction, right? Because of risk habituation.

What is risk habituation? Risk habituation is you do risky things. What we find is that when people do risky things, let's say gamble. We have a study where we let people gamble without letting them know if they won or lost. They just gamble, gamble, gamble. We tell them at the end, okay? They gamble, they start gambling just a little bit. And then the next, they gamble more and more and more and more, right? They feel more comfortable with gambling, less anxious, right? They also feel less excited.

So they need to gamble more. And so risk really escalates because our emotions in response to risk habituate. So with risk escalates. So that's financial. And I mean, that could be a bad thing, right? So it's again, it's like both things are at the same time because you might take huge risks

because that you shouldn't really take. We do this with virtual risk as well. So we want to put, what we wanted to do is test people's physical risk taking, but of course we can't put them in danger. So what we did is we use virtual reality. And what we did is we use this game where you put the headset on,

and then you go up the elevator to a skyscraper. And you walk on a plank up, up, up, up in the air, right? It's all virtual. Have you done this? I have. Yes, I did it in New York City. It was terrifying. Okay. Yeah, it's terrifying. It's such a positive. It's really interesting experience, because you know, that you are on the ground, right? I know that I'm in my office. I know that I'm safe. But at the same time, my brain is completely tricked. It's such, you know, it really makes you feel quite humble at how easy it is to trick your brain.

You're feeling really scared. And when we let people do that, they start off by maybe taking one little step and two little steps, right? And then the more they do it, they feel more comfortable with it, right? They walk more and more and more, take more virtual risk until, you know, 10 trials in, they're jumping, right? And we actually measure their anxiety, we measure skin conductance response. And the more they do it, the less anxious they feel, so they take more risk, and the less excited they feel. So they take more risk and the less excited they feel. So they need more risk to take to feel, you know, the same level of excitement. Yeah. And I mean, on one hand, they're exploring more. In some cases, it could be dangerous for you. And you said in the book that people later in their careers are more likely to

have accidents, right? I think you said athletes later in their career have accidents more and people on construction sites have more accidents later on in the project than at the start of the project because they start to take more of those risks. It made me think about, you know, the study you talked about where you get people to gamble,

but they can't see the results yet of their reckless behavior. There's many areas of all of our lives where we're gambling with something, but we can't yet see the results of that behavior, whether it's like with our health or whether it's habits we have like smoking. I'm smoking. I'm eating this junk crap over here.

And because I haven't yet had the results come in, the doctor hasn't yet called me and told me there's a problem. I just keep going. And my behavior can escalate in those departments until I get that phone call, which is like, you've lost all your money or your health is, you know, you've got something bad that's happened. Yeah. With long-term investments, right? A lot of the investments, financial investments that we make are long-term, right? So we may start small and then we grow, grow, grow, grow. And we don't know the outcomes

until years later. So something collapses. What do you want people to come away from this conversation with? What is the key takeaway? A lot of time people may not feel so much joy in their life. And then they look around them and they conclude that maybe I'm not feeling so much joy because my relationship isn't that good

or my job isn't that good. And you know, my job isn't that good. And, you know, maybe it is, but maybe they are good, but they've just been the same for a while. So we have to be really careful, right? And one way, as you know, we mentioned what you could do is just like spice it up a little bit, shake it up a little bit, right? And see what happens. And vice versa. A lot of times, they are things that are negatively affecting your life and you don't know it because they're always there social media is one example that you might you might a lot of people may suspect that social media instagram twitter is causing them a little bit of anxiety a little bit of stress but they don't really know for sure. You can't measure it until you take a break, right?

It's a bit like the AC noise looming in the background. You don't notice it, but when you stop, when you turn it off, you're suddenly, oh, that's so much better. I didn't even realize that this thing is causing me anxiety. So I think, you know, experiment. I think that, you know, the last chapter in the book, we call it experiments in living.

Experiment in living because it's really hard to know what are the things that are really good in your life and what are the things that are not so good in your life until you make some changes. Take a break from social media for a few weeks. Do something different. And then you will see. You write about people taking a break from social media, don't you? Yes, yes. There's a great experiment that was conducted by the economist Hunt Alcott, where he took 1,000 people, he gave them $100 to get off Facebook for a month, and he took another 1,000 individuals and he gave them $100 to just continue what they're doing. At the end of the month, he came and he measured their well-being. On every single measure that he had, those people who quit for a month were happier. They were less anxious, less depressed, less sad. So in every measure, they were in a better state, right?

And they were surprised. They had no idea that this was going to have such a huge effect on them. But here's the even bigger surprise. They said that they were happier, right? They fully admitted it. But most of them, straight away at the end of the month, went back to Facebook, right? Which fully admitted it. But most of them straight away at the end of the month went back to Facebook, right? Which is really interesting because you acknowledge that the thing is causing you, you know, a negative effect on your health. So when do you go back?

I think there's two reasons. One is you gain information and knowledge. That knowledge may, you know, it may not make you feel good, but we value knowledge and information. And that's perhaps one reason why the people went back. It could also be something like addiction. I mean, a lot of things in life that you're addicted to, you kind of know they're not good for you. You know they're not causing you happiness. But there's need, right? There's something pushing you. There was this crazy stat I read in your book about the impact that leaving social media had had on people equated to getting a in 2004, it just started at Harvard, right?

And then a while later, they went on to, you know, a lot of Ivy League universities one by one very slowly. And then 2008, they opened up to the world. And what he found is that in every university that Facebook was introduced, mental health went down. What was the reason he could do the study is that the university had measures of people's well-being, you know, because they actually measure it quite often. And he can see in every university, mental health went down, every university. And then in the population, Facebook was introduced in 2008. In the next 10 years, the depression episodes were increased by 80%.

Now, you don't know causation. None of this tells you causation. It is only correlational, right? Interesting. But, you know, so he's claiming that using statistical methods, he estimates that potentially a quarter of this decline in mental health

can be due to social media. Again, you can't really, it's not a, this is why the other experiment is a little bit better because the other experiment, Hunt Alcott manipulated whether people were online or not. So he could actually do a control experiment and measure it, right? So he could show causation.

This other study that suggests 25% of mental health decline was caused due to social media. That's a correlational result. But, you know, there could be some truth in it. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left to you is, what is one thing that people who are listening could do that you know about that would improve their lives? How about something simple?

How about people just now email, call, turn to someone and tell them they love them? It would not, you know, it doesn't completely change your life, but it will change your feelings at that very moment. Tali, thank you. Really enjoyed the conversation. And I'm so fascinated by your work and it's a real service to humanity what you do. So thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.