The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - A New Hope

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Research shows we all look for moments to make a fresh start - new years, new seasons, new decades. Our optimism about making big, positive changes is strong, but it fades quickly. As we enter 2020, Dr Laurie Santos asks Wharton's Katy Milkman about the science behind the "fresh start' effect and examines ways we can maintain our new habits beyond January.For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

The big reason I make this podcast is to let you in on all the scientific research that can help you lead a happier life. We're currently working super hard on the next full season of the show, which will have the same mix of experts, empirical data, and real-life stories that you've come to expect. Season 2 will be out this spring. But I wanted to mark the passing of 2019 and the beginning of a whole new decade with at least a few tips for how to make the most of the new year and beyond. Now, you're going to hear the phrase New Year, New You a lot this January,

and you probably think it's a marketing gimmick, one that's there to guilt you into signing up for some new gym or enrolling in a class you know you'll stop attending before we even reach February. But the science says this doesn't have to be the case. So over these next four special shows, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to talk to four different experts and have them talk us through some practical tips that will allow us to harness the power of the new year in order to make positive changes in our lives. that will allow us to harness the power of the new year in order to make positive changes in our lives. So if you're ready to feel better, then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, for the Happiness Lab 2020.

So what are my New Year's resolutions for 2020? Well, I'm certainly going to try to improve some of the habits we covered in the first season of this podcast. Because there's good scientific data to suggest doing these things will make me happier. But the one phrase that stands out from all these amazing interviews we recorded last season came from my friend Nick Epley. He's the one that said, Happiness is like a, is like a, you know, a leaky tire on your car. You know, your tire goes flat a little bit. You got to do something else to pump it back up.

Happiness is like a leaky tire. We can't pump it up and forget it. We need to keep attending to our happiness levels. So for better or for worse, I know that making resolutions to be happier in 2020 will come to nothing if I don't find ways to put those goals into practice. And I know from past experience that I've made and broken a bunch of promises to myself about forming new habits. And so like in most episodes of The Happiness Lab, I decided to ask for help. And I knew just the scientist who could come to my rescue. Hi, I'm Katie Milkman, and I'm a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And I'm also the host of Choiceology, which is a podcast about how we make decisions and the biases that sometimes lead us astray. Katie's research explores scientifically validated ways we can stick to our new goals

by hacking our self-control. First off, like, what is self-control? Because I think people hear that term and they don't really know what it means. Yeah, well, when I talk about it, I mean the ability to resist temptation. So whenever we're exercising self-control, we're resisting some temptation in our environment, whether it's the muffin that I brought with me to this interview that I probably shouldn't be eating and I failed to resist, or resisting the temptation to sit at home when you should be getting some exercise, or resisting the temptation to impulse buy something when you should be saving. Those are all examples of exerting self-control. I mean, of all psychological phenomena, I feel like avoiding temptation is one that I experience

a lot, right? Why are we so bad at it? Why are we so bad at it is such a great question. My read of the literature is that we're so bad at this because probably evolutionarily it made sense like a bazillion years ago, right, to react to instant gratification stimuli in your environment. And thinking about the long term, when you, you know, needed to make sure that you had food tonight, and that you weren't attacked by a lion and so on. Thinking about those long term things was just less critical. But of course, things have changed. And evolution probably hasn't kept up with the fact that in our new environment, it is actually pretty wise if you could save for retirement and not eat the muffin that's sitting in front of you, but rather, you know, hold off for the smoothie and so on.

We often think we can just crush temptation if we try hard enough, no matter how many times we failed to resist the pull of that muffin in the past. Yeah, well, we are consummate optimists, or consummate over-optimists, I should say. But Katie's work has shown that our overconfidence can actually be a hidden strength, if we can harness it. And that's the reason that I wanted to talk to Katie now, as we start this new decade. You see, she's an expert on why our optimism seems to be especially high on significant dates like the start of a new year. So I've done some research on the bizarre ability we have to wake up at certain moments that feel like fresh starts and convince ourselves, you know, that was the old me who failed so many times to get home in time to spend time with my family and cook fresh meals to get to the gym. Whatever those things were, that was the old me.

I'm turning 40 now. I'm going to be able to do it this time. Katie first became interested in this question when she was asked about it by some Silicon Valley executive types. I was in a session with the VP of human resources at Google, and he asked a question after we'd been talking about their struggles to get employees to exercise more and, you know, save more for retirement, all the classic self-control stuff. He said, does anybody know when it's ideal to roll out programs that are aimed at tackling these problems? Like, are there good times to do that? And I said, oh my gosh, that is such a great question. And I don't think the literature has anything to say about it. My initial reaction when I got that question was like, well, obviously New Year's,

right? I think most people have that intuition, like obviously New Year's, we know about New Year's resolutions. But then as I started thinking about that, the intuition grew to like, that's not the only moment when we feel kind of fresh. And so we started thinking like, what are those other new beginnings? What are those moments? And we started listing, you know, Mondays, birthdays, you know, Mondays, birthdays, you know, some of the holidays that we celebrate feel like fresh starts, particularly some religious holidays like Yom Kippur for people who are Jewish is a big fresh start. Your sins are behind you. Easter, right, in Christianity. So like pick your religion. Many of them have these

fresh start moments. So we started thinking about that and we said, let's collect some data. It turns out that most people don't start new habits randomly. There are specific times when our minds are prone to making a fresh start. And our first step on that fresh start journey towards our new goal is usually to Google it. We looked at when people search for the term diet, which it turns out, by the way, is the number one New Year's resolution. So that was like an obvious one to look at. which it turns out, by the way, is the number one New Year's resolution. So that was like an obvious one to look at.

And we also got data from a website called stick.com, where people go and create goals and put their money on the line that they'll forfeit if they fail to achieve those. So we saw over and over again that people are more likely to create goals or search for the term diet on Google or go to the gym at the beginning of a new week, at the beginning of a new year, following birthdays, following some holidays that feel like fresh starts. So think more Labor Day than like Valentine's Day. But that pattern just leapt out of every data set. And so that was really interesting. And then we said, like, can we actually experimentally cause people

to experience fresh starts? And so we said, okay, think of a goal you want to pursue to a bunch of undergrads. And they said, okay, I've got a goal. I've got a goal I want to start pursuing in the future. And we said, great, you can pick the date to kickstart your pursuit of that goal. We're going to send you a reminder. We're going to help you get on track. When would you like it to be? And we gave them a menu of options. And what we did then is we flipped a coin and randomly assigned some of them to get a menu of options that included the first day of spring labeled as such. And others got exactly the same menu of options. included the first day of spring labeled as such. And others got exactly the same menu of options and the first day of spring was included. But instead of labeling

at the first day of spring, we just labeled it the third Thursday in March. So it always had a label. It always was like called out as a special day. But in one case, the special day was a fresh start and the other was arbitrary. Think about when you might want to start a new habit. Would you want to start on March 20th, some random Thursday? Or the first day of spring, that season of new life and new opportunity? Katie found that three times as many subjects wanted to get her a reminder on March 20th when it was labeled the first day of spring. I mean, when you think about it, this is a pretty weird effect. In reality, time is a continuous quantity, and so you might think that that's how our minds see it, as continuous and relatively linear. But it turns out that's not how our minds work. We tend to break up time into different categories or mental accounts.

We think in terms of different temporal chunks that represent different times in our life. For me, I have one temporal chunk before I met my husband and then after we started dating. life. For me, I have one temporal chunk before I met my husband and then after we started dating. I even have pre-launching this podcast and post. In an objective sense, there was no real moment in my life that separated each of those events. I mean, in the big scheme of things, everything was pretty much the same the day before I started my podcast to the day after. But psychologically, these moments represent huge breaks in my life, spots where I feel like I really changed as a person. I bet your life has a lot of these psychological chapter breaks, too, which leads to one of the reasons why our mind is so prone to the fresh start effect. So we think those were the college years and those were my 30s.

You have these different periods and that's how we construct memories of time. We create this narrative that makes our life feel like it flows. But that means there are chapter breaks. And those chapter breaks provide an opportunity to capitalize on that feeling of a fresh start and get people to really pursue their goals with more vigor. When we enter a new decade or hit a big birthday or start a new job, it can feel like we're entering a totally new phase of our lives. We end up separating our past self from our present self.

And that psychological distance, that feeling like we're a totally different person now, it means we can forget the flaws of our past. We have the sense that we really do have a clean slate. And since we don't want to mess up that clean new slate, we're more motivated to stick to our goals and not screw things up. But there's a second reason that temporal boundaries help us make a fresh start. Research shows that the big events in life can lead to big picture thinking. We start to gain

some perspective and spend more time self-reflecting. And all that self-reflection can push us to make big changes. In one study, researchers Adam Alter and Hal Hirschfeld tested people who were coming up on a new decade, participants who were, say, 39 years old and about to turn 40. They asked them, how often do you question the meaning or purpose in your life on a scale from one never to four often? People who were about to switch birthday decades reported a score of 3.28 out of four, which was higher than any other age. Alter and Hirschfeld also found that people at those transition ages were more likely to engage in new, meaning-building behaviors, like running a marathon for the first time.

And feeling motivated to try new behaviors often leads to successfully adopting those behaviors. Basically, what we have shown is people try to pursue goals more. But do those goals actually stick? Almost by definition, that means they achieve more because if you don't pursue a goal, you can't achieve a goal. So ask yourself, how do I want to harness this fresh start effect? What kinds of goals do I want to put into place? We'll talk about that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. demonized because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. We've just entered not just a new year, but a whole new decade.

So what kinds of goals do you want to achieve with this new fresh start? As usual, I think that's a question for science. For the rest of this short mini-series, we'll focus on four goals that science shows can improve your happiness. The one we'll tackle today with Katie's help is a pretty common one during the new year, getting in a bit more exercise. A lot of my research of late has actually been focused on gym attendance. I've learned a lot about how much exercise matters for well-being. And it seems that basically, if we could get everyone to exercise and sleep, it's about as close as we've come to finding the fountain of youth. We'll talk about sleep later in this series, but let me walk you through the evidence showing that exercise is connected to well-being. One study had subjects do 20 minutes

of cardio on a stationary bike and tested whether that burst of exercise protected the subjects against a whole suite of negative moods, things like tension, anger, depression, and even fatigue. The researchers also tested how long that mood boost lasted. They found that just 20 minutes of heart pumping not only reduced negative mood states, but the reduction lasted for over 12 hours. But exercise doesn't just bump up

our mood. One study found that a half-hour workout three times a week was as effective at reducing the symptoms of major depression as a prescription of Zoloft, one of the most common anti-depression drugs. Exercise also reduces anxiety. Ten weeks of regular running exercise decreases panic disorder symptoms as much as some of the best anti-anxiety medications. There's also research showing that exercise increases cognitive performance, and of course, it also makes our bodies healthier. And that's why Katie's focused on exercise in a lot of her own work.

But she's done so in a way that's different than that of most experimenters. I tend to be really excited about doing what science nerds call field experiments, which means instead of doing studies where we bring undergraduates into a laboratory environment and have them make stylized choices, I try to capture people in their natural environment and see if I can change their behaviors there. Sometimes sounds a little silly, like, wait, you're trying to get people to go to the gym? But anyway, I think we can make a big difference there. When most people think about their self-control failures, like, oh, I have to get to the gym, or, oh, I have to diet more, I think people's intuition is they just need to, like, suck it up and get some willpower and just do it. What is wrong?

Nike has really hurt us in this regard. Yeah, just do it, right? You know, people, like, literally, like, buy these t-shirts that say, just do it, when they're thinking about going to the gym, and then they don't get to go to the gym. So what's wrong with this willpower approach? Yeah, well, the science suggests it's really hard to just do it. And so actually, what research points to is that the best solutions take temptation out of the equation entirely, so you don't ever even have to have that struggle internally. So live next door to the gym and leave

your gym clothes out or heck, sleep in them, so that there are fewer decisions to make in a moment when you might make the wrong choice. So the idea is we're using, we're trying to use the situation to take temptation away, is that? Exactly. So the further away temptation is from the decision maker, the less likely you are to fall victim to it. So really the research suggests rather than trying to just do it, you need to set yourself up for success by creating environments where you'll never face temptation in the first place. That is the first best solution from my read of the literature and from all the studies I've done. There are lots of other intermediate solutions because sometimes you can't change the environment. Like maybe you live next door to Dunkin' Donuts and like you're not going to move.

So you have to find other solutions. But whenever possible, it seems the first best is just get the heck away from temptation because it's a pain to fight it and just do it. But there's another very counterintuitive way to fight temptation. And that's to use it to your advantage. It's a technique that Katie first figured out how to use in her own life. It came to me when I was an overstressed graduate student who was trying to fit it all in. And I was really struggling with a couple of self-control problems. One of them was that at the end of a long day when I'd been, you know, taking complex econometrics classes

and had homework waiting for me, all I really wanted to do was like binge watch TV and read novels and just indulge. But what I knew I should be doing was getting in a workout because that always made me energized and it made me healthier overall. So I had these sort of two struggles. One was I should have been doing my homework, actually, and I came home and I just wanted to do entertainment stuff. And the other was I couldn't get myself to the gym.

And I came up with a solution, which I called temptation bundling. Once I realized what I was doing, I actually sort of did it innately. And then I was like, wait, this is a trick. It's working. And that was I only let myself actually indulge in audio novels. I really love novels. So it was like Harry Potter, things like the Da Vinci Code. I only let myself listen when I was exercising. And so at the end of a long day, I would be worn out, but I'd get all excited to go to the gym because I knew I could hear the next chapter in my latest thriller and find out what happened next to my favorite characters. Some people do it with TV. I realized this is working super well for me. And I decided I wanted to run a study and try to see, hey, is this like a universal thing or am I just a weird grad student? And so just across the street

at the University of Pennsylvania gym, we recruited staff and students here and we said, hey, do you want to exercise more? And it wasn't hard to find like 500 people who raised their hands. And we said, do you own an iPod? If you own an iPod, you're eligible. And also most people had like an iPhone or an iPod of some sort. Then we brought them into the lab and we randomly assigned them to different experimental conditions to see if this idea of temptation bundling could actually add value. One group was in our treatment condition. And what happened to them is they were given a menu of 82 audio novels that people had pre-rated as like super fun. So these are books just like the ones I like, Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, John Grisham books, you get the picture.

So people picked the four they wanted to listen to most. And then they loaded them onto a loaned iPod, actually. And we took them to the gym. And they did a 30 minute workout while listening to the first 30 minutes of whichever of those novels they were most excited about. And the workout ended. And we said, we hope that was fun for you. If you want to hear what happened next in the novel, you'll have to come back to the gym. We're going to keep this loaned iPod in a locked monitored locker, and you can only access it when you exercise. So as you might imagine, people were pretty excited to come back to the gym and find out what happened next. We had another group that also came to the lab, also had iPods. We actually gave them a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble of equal value to those loaned iPods. So they could have gone and bought them, but we didn't give them this idea

to only listen while exercising. And we took them to the gym. They did a 30 minute workout and we said, you know, do more of this. This is great. And those were the key groups. We had one other group in the study that's sort of a little less interesting. We just told them the idea and we were like, try to self-restrict and see how that goes. So here's the key contrast. The group that we gave the tempting audio novels that could only access them at the gym ended up exercising about 56 percent, not about, they ended up exercising 56 percent more than the people in our control group who didn't have this opportunity. But it suggests that like by doing this activity where you're bundling the temptations,

you get people to kind of, you know, kill two birds with one stone, right? They solve their problem of the too much indulgence and then they also solve the problem of not going to the gym. Yes, absolutely. And that's sort of what I think the magic is of temptation bundling.

That's a little different than some of the previous ways we've tried to solve these problems. And it can be taken to places besides the gym, even though that's where we started with it, to solve two problems at once in many domains. So for me, I now use it all over the place. So, for instance, I only let myself get pedicures while I'm catching up on manuscript reviews, which is a tough part of our job as faculty. Two birds with one stone there. as faculty, two birds with one stone there. I try to only let myself go to my very favorite,

very unhealthy burger restaurant when having meetings with sort of that are a little bit more difficult. So that gets me over the hump to like schedule that meeting with the person who's maybe a little bit of a challenge. But it also means that I'm not going to that restaurant and eating bad food too often. I also do things like only listen to my favorite podcasts while doing household chores. So there's a lot of different ways you can use this. Some of my students have told me they do things like, you know, only get that Starbucks Frappuccino they're craving when they're heading to hit the library. I just got a funny one yesterday from a friend. She said she told someone about temptation bundling who was working on her dissertation. And this is a person who loves scented candles. And so this young woman now only lets herself burn scented

candles while she's writing her dissertation. And so she gets that like aromatherapy experience. And she said it's just really transformed her productivity. So I thought that was one of the more creative ones I'd heard. That's awesome. My own temptation Bundling story was like, I was living in Boston for a brief period when I was on sabbatical and I wanted to start going to the gym. And the gym had these like TVs on the thing, which I didn't actually have at my house. I didn't have cable TV. But I started watching the Jerry Springer show, which was like deeply embarrassing, but kind of fun for me to watch.

But it became awesome. It was like I worked out for the whole hour because I get to watch this really terrible thing. But it was beautiful because like they only had the cable TV at the gym. I didn't have it at awesome. It was like, I worked out for the whole hour because I get to watch this really terrible thing. But it was beautiful because like, they only had the cable TV at the gym. I didn't have it at home. That's amazing. I actually, I have a number of friends who've told me the way they do it is by not paying for cable or not buying TVs in their homes and, but then signing up for a gym that does have TV. So that's, that's a way you can basically enforce it without having to, you know, pay somebody for a service exactly so i think those kinds of tricks are ways that we can create temptation bundles where it's less willpower

required to like stick to some goal of pairing these things i'd also feel like that one worked for me because the jerry springer was like a particularly embarrassing temptation for me right so it's like you didn't want to admit it right and so it's like you wouldn't be something that i would watch or i would feel too guilty to just like randomly binge watch it on my own so it was like the special extra temptation temptation that worked too it's perfect yeah it's perfect because i would like to run the study in fact once upon a time when we designed the original study i was like we should really vary the extent to which the things people are bundling with exercise are tempting right like give some people ulysses to read and other people,

you know, can read The Devil Wears Prada and we'll see like, is all bundling created equal? Like, I'm pretty sure it's the things that we really feel guilty about that work best because we really don't want to do them elsewhere, but there's such a great enticement to go and do the things that are good for us. So there you have it, your first official tip from the Happiness Lab 2020. You're now entering a new decade. So why don't you embrace this new life chapter? What goals do you want to achieve? Whatever it is, temptation bundling might be a great way to make that new habit stick. I hope you'll join me over the next few weeks, and I hope you'll spread the word. Tell your friends about temptation bundling,

and if they're looking for a tempting podcast to listen to while they exercise, I'd be honored if you told them to check out The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Mia LaBelle, Julia Barton, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg.

The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.