The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why We're Mean to Our Future Selves (LIVE from Boston)

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Who do we volunteer to run a gruelling half-marathon? Who do we expect to give up sugar, or quit drinking? Who do we demand clears out the garage in the middle of summer? Ourselves. Mean, right? Turns out we make demands on our future selves that our present selves would think are unrealistic or unreasonable. And the reason we do it is because our minds are really bad at anticipating the wants and needs we'll have in a week, a month, or a year from now. And that harms our happiness.  Talking before a live audience in Somerville, MA, Dr Laurie Santos and Harvard professor Jason Mitchell explore how we can be kinder to both our present and future selves.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's 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 We love that for you. Someone else will, too. Be more you this year.

And find them on Bumble. Pushkin. Please remember that we are located in a residential area. We ask that you please be quiet and don't shout. We're for neighbors on any stage of the building. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. What you're about to hear will probably sound a little bit different than our usual episodes. That's because I recorded this show not alone in my tiny podcast closet at home, but in a huge auditorium packed with people. Hello, hello, hello.

This is so cool, everyone. That's right. You're about to hear our first ever Happiness Lab live. The event was held early in April at the Arts in the Armory Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I'm a Massachusetts girl myself. Grew up in New Bedford. Just down the way, New Bedford folks in the house. The listeners who came to the event got to experience a top secret sneak preview of one of our upcoming seasons and had a chance to take part in a live Q&A after the show. But what you're about to hear was the main event of the night. I did a live interview all about a happiness topic that I struggle with a lot myself, the question of how we can be nicer to our future selves. The happiness we experience in the next few days, weeks, and months often relies on the decisions that we make today.

But if you're like me, you may struggle with treating your future self as nicely as you should. Maybe you sign your future self up for way too many projects or commitments. Or maybe current you doesn't get the rest or breaks or exercise you need for future you to feel good. In this special live episode, we explore why our brains sometimes allow us to treat our future selves like crap, and what we can do in the present to make our future a happier place. And we get to explore all these questions with a scholar that I regard as one of the most special of our special guests. I'm excited to introduce my Happiness Lab live guest, Jason Mitchell. Jason is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

He did his undergraduate and master's degrees at Yale University. After his time at Yale, he came to Cambridge in the late 90s to do his PhD in psychology at Harvard, where he had the honor of being in the same incoming graduate class as yours truly. After finishing his PhD, Jason stuck around to become a professor here, where he had the important distinction of teaching not only Intro to Psych, Psych 1, but also their new course on well-being, The Science of Happiness, which covers a lot of the same topics that I do in my Psychology in the Good Life class. Jason is an amazing scholar and teacher. He's also my former roommate on two different continents. He is one of the

smartest, funniest people I know, and he is one of my oldest and dearest friends. And I'm so excited that I get to introduce him to you on our first Happiness Lab live event ever. So please put your hands together and give a warm Happiness Lab live welcome to Jason Mitchell. This is a great audience. I know, they're right. I hope you feel warmly welcomed. So Jason, my Happiness Lab listeners are used to hearing from happiness scholars who are also my friends. I bring a lot of them on the podcast. But you have the distinction of knowing me longer than any of my former Happiness Lab guests. And like, honestly, most people in my life, my husband's out there, you actually have known me longer than I have known my husband. And so why don't you start

by telling our friendship origin story? And with the magic of podcasting, if you say anything embarrassed that I don't agree with, you'll hear it, but then we'll edit. But yeah, what's our origin story? Yeah, our origin story, in my mind, has two parts, both of which begin with questionable decisions of 21-year-old Lori and 21-year-old Jason. We're going to be editing a lot, so I can tell.

So in the first part, we were both undergraduates at different institutions, and we were visiting the University of California, Berkeley for interview weekend. We were both applying for graduate school there. And on the last day of this visit, the agenda was mainly supposed to be fun, and it centered around some volleyball tournament. I think it was faculty-student volleyball. Faculty versus student volleyball. And as you know, I'm not the least athletic person, but it turns out I can't play any sport that involves a round ball. And so you and I decided

we would, instead of doing this, play hooky and explore the Bay Area. I think it was the first time either of us had been in California. And we were 21. We were both so excited about all this freedom and this opportunity to do something on our own. So we spent the whole day just kind of wandering around. What Jason's not conveying is we didn't tell anyone we decided to do this. We just left. And only later did we find out that the faculty and students were like, where did those two people go? Yeah, they're actually quite worried about it. So then fast forward a couple months later, we had both decided to come to Harvard. And again, I'm not sure what I was thinking, months later, we had both decided to come to Harvard. And again, I'm not sure what I was thinking, obviously not thinking, but I woke up one morning in July realizing I had no plan for

housing. Like where was I going to live when I moved in six weeks? And I didn't know a single person in Cambridge except for you. So I remember writing a panicked email saying, do you know anybody who's looking for a roommate? And as it happened, you guys, you and Lucy and Kate were one person short for an apartment in Cambridge. And so I happened, you guys, you and Lucy and Kate were one person short for an apartment in Cambridge. And so I became the fourth person. And we put out Students' Joy. That was a very tame version. We won't have to add any of that out of the podcast. And so our origin story started when you decided to come to Harvard for graduate school. And one of the reasons you did that was that at the time, Harvard was this burgeoning department that was studying something that was really cool in the late 90s, this field

called cognitive neuroscience, which sounds like a mouthful. What is cognitive neuroscience? And why were you so excited about it? Yeah, it is a mouthful. So cognitive neuroscience. So let's think about the two different parts of that term. Psychologists use the word cognition or cognitive process to refer to kind of the recipe that the mind is using to create our understanding of the world around us and our thoughts and feelings. So if you think about what a recipe is, if you were baking, for example, you would take pretty simple ingredients, say eggs, flour, water, sugar, and then combine them in some way to create cakes and cookies and croissants. Cognitive psychologists are interested in the same sorts of issues. How do we take very

rudimentary thoughts or rudimentary perceptions and turn those into the complex behaviors that humans engage in? So if you think right now, your ear is receiving a bunch of very rudimentary signals, just some air coming in, And somehow your brain is taking that signal and turning it into an understanding of the words that I'm saying and the meaning behind my words. So what's emerged from this way of thinking is to think about the mind as a kind of complex machine. But think about it, if you were just to encounter some machine and you didn't know how it worked, you know, if I got some MIT folks, there's some here in the audience I see, and said, you know, I've got this new machine, there's some here in the audience I see, and said, you

know, I've got this new machine. I don't know how it works. Can you help me understand it? They'd probably spend some time poking and prodding and seeing what kinds of behavior and engaged in, but eventually they'd want to open it up. They'd really want to see how it was built, where the wires went. And that's true for cognitive neuroscience. The neuroscience part is our desire to see, well, how is the actual hardware giving rise to this recipe? And at the time in the 90s that you started, you know, this was a really exciting time for actually doing that, for actually looking at the hardware in a way that it probably hadn't been ever before in human history, right? Yeah. So before the 90s, there was really only

three ways that you could understand how the brain worked. One was to look at what other animals' brains did by doing research on mice or monkeys, which, you know, you kind of hope that our brains work the same way. And people were a little queasy doing that kind of work. You could look at individuals who were undergoing surgery for other reasons. For example, they might have brain tumors or epilepsy. And while their skulls were open, you could actually poke and prod their brains and see what kind of behavior that elicited. And the third way was to wait for individuals who had naturally occurring damage, people who might have, say, a stroke that selectively damaged

one part of the brain. Starting in the late 80s, mainly for medical purposes, researchers began to develop techniques that would allow us to actually look at the living, healthy brain as it was doing anything we asked individuals to do. And this was really a revolution within psychology. And so tell me a little bit about what that felt like being like a nerdy, you know, post-college student, 21 year old who gets to like actually study what brains are doing in real time. Yeah. In many of our experiments, we ask subjects to perform some basic kinds of tasks. And we're able to see, not in real time, but pretty close, sort of how their brain is actually giving rise to language, to thoughts, to our ability to understand other people. And to me, it feels like one of the

most intimate things you can do, actually see inside at people's thoughts. And so when you had this intimate tool to look at how people were thinking and how their cognition was working, you decided to study a particular topic. And it turns out a topic that brains are pretty good at. You decided to study how brains make sense of other minds. Why were you so excited about how brains make sense of other minds. Why were you so excited about how brains make sense of other minds? Yeah, I recall at the time that every one of my advisors said this was a crazy idea. They said, you can't possibly hope to look and find specific brain regions that are

involved in something so complicated as social interaction. What you'll find is just some mess of thousands of brain regions all participating in this ability. But instead, we found something quite different. So starting around the turn of the century, we found that very specific brain regions seem to be important for human social abilities. When I'm, for example, interacting with you right now and making sense of your questions or trying to come up with words that you will understand, I'm involved in a very elaborate, complex understanding of what your mind is doing and how I'm able to affect your mind through my words or through my actions. And this turns out to be a fascinating aspect of the kinds of things humans can accomplish.

And one of the most important things for human happiness, right? Because all the things you're talking about, whether you're connecting with language or making sense of my behavior, like this is really part and parcel of what we do when we're socially connecting, which, as you know, is really super important for happiness. But it turns out that the brain doesn't just do this. It kind of does this like on default, too. This was something that neuroscientists also discovered, right? Yeah. So it turns out that the story of the brain regions that are involved in social thought

actually comes from multiple directions. So there were a group of individuals like us who were looking at what does the brain do when it's talking to another person or thinking about another person's mind. And we found this set of brain regions. I won't go into all the details, but one of them is called the medial prefrontal cortex. And it's sort of in line with your nose, just behind your forehead. Another group of researchers who really weren't fundamentally interested in psychology at all were just interested in the question about whether all brain regions were sort of equally hungry. That is, did they use the same amount of

oxygen and glucose as they were doing their thing? Or were some sort of more efficient than others? And what they found was that it turns out that, yeah, brain regions really vary in sort of how active they are, how much they require feeding. If you rank order the brain regions from the most hungry, the ones that are kind of always on, to the ones that are least likely to be on, you find at the very top of the list the same regions that are involved in social interaction. So one interpretation of this is that humans by default have brains that are interested in other people that we sort of lock on. We're sort of primed to think about and interact with others. But your work specifically, it started to show that our brains don't think about all

people the same way, that we use different brain mechanisms to think about different kinds of people. So tell me a little bit about this work. That's right. So one of the questions that people within social psychology are interested in is how humans make sense of the behavior of other people. So for example, imagine that right now, Lori jumped up, ran off stage. So of course, I would look at that and think to myself, well, there goes Lori. I wouldn't stop there, right? I would absolutely, and you would too, you would absolutely want to try to understand why she had just engaged in this behavior, right? So I can come up with some ideas. Maybe you're angry about something, or maybe a spider just fell from the

rafters. Maybe you really have to go to the bathroom. So that act of trying to understand why you are doing something requires me to make reference or understand something about your mental states. What are you thinking right now? What are you feeling right now? What are your goals and intentions as you're engaging in this behavior? So researchers in the field refer to this often as theory of mind, that what humans do when they make sense of each other's behavior is try to make sense of what their thoughts and feelings are. other's behavior is try to make sense of what their thoughts and feelings are. So one of the questions that immediately comes to mind is, how do I make sense of someone else's thoughts and feelings? I've never seen one of your feelings directly. I can't peer into your head right now, but I'm not completely flummoxed by what's going on inside your mind. And there's something very

perverse about the way humans are doing this, because in a sense, I've taken a relatively simple behavior, you getting up and leaving, and I'm trying to make sense of that in terms of things that are clearly way more complex and that I have no immediate access to. But here's the trick. I've never seen one of your feelings and experienced those directly, but I have experienced feelings directly in my own head about myself, my own thoughts and feelings and other mental states. So one of the tricks that the brain can use in making sense of other people is to start with their own predictions about how they would respond in such a situation. What would it take for me to get up and walk off the stage, right? Maybe I wouldn't do it if I just had to go to the bathroom, right? That would be embarrassing. But I might, if for example, a snake fell from the

rafters. And so maybe I begin to narrow in on what you're thinking when you're doing that by using myself as a kind of starting point. But here's the caveat here. In order to do that, I have to think that you and I are governed by similar kinds of rules, that you and I are going to respond in similar ways given the same kinds of situations. So in a sense, to use myself as a proxy for you requires kind of assumption that we're a similar kind of person. It in a sense, to use myself as a proxy for you requires kind of assumption that we're a similar kind of person. It turns out that the brain respects that difference. When we've looked at how the brain responds to thinking about similar others, we actually find it very hard to differentiate that act from simply asking a subject to think about themselves.

In contrast, if the person's dissimilar from me, maybe they have very different political values or come from a very different cultural background, the brain will engage in very different kinds of processing and trying to make sense of what is going on inside that person's head. So it's literally using different brain tissue to think about someone who's kind of different than you, a stranger than you would to think about yourself. That's right. Yeah. So the two things that I think are interesting is that it's hard to tell the difference between thinking about oneself and thinking about similar others, and that we then cordon off.

We use different kinds of recipes when we think about people who are not like us. And this, it turns out, has some interesting consequences for how we think about strangers and kind of the mistakes we make. And one of those mistakes psychologists refer to as the fundamental attribution error. What's the fundamental attribution error? How does it work? You know, the fundamental attribution error is a idea that social psychologists have been exploring

since the 70s. And really, it goes something like this. If you as an audience are listening to us or watching us, it's very easy to think about us as in this moment and what you can actually see about us right now. So it's very easy to think about us as professionals, as we're erudite, we, you know, to the extent that we are. Don't laugh, it's their first story. But think about what you never see. You never see us at a party, for example,

or you don't see me playing with my kids and being silly with them. So it's hard for you to see all the ways in which I might be different in very different contexts, right? All that looms large to you is this thin slice of my behavior right now. And it turns out humans have a very hard time using or understanding how situations, how the environments we find ourselves in, the contexts we inhabit, how those things constrain and produce our behavior. We call this the fundamental attribution error because one of the things that I might want to do

as I'm looking at people's behavior or trying to make sense of them is to figure out, is this person doing this because that's who she really is deep down inside? She's just a really curious, smart person? Or is she doing this because the situation calls for this behavior right now? Now, remember just a minute ago, I said that humans have brains that are sort of by default looking to think about other people's mental states. So one of the consequences of having a brain like that is humans tend to latch on to mental states as the explanation for why people do what they do. They're doing this because they're a jerk or they're doing this because they just are a very funny person. And what we find difficult to understand, what remains relatively invisible to us, is all the ways in which situations might produce certain kinds of behaviors as we're moving through the world.

which situations might produce certain kinds of behaviors as we're moving through the world. But this means that we sometimes wind up shortchanging people because we can recognize those situations when it comes to ourselves. I'll use an example that sometimes comes up on the podcast. I have a borderline road ragey tendency, but I don't think of that as a tendency in myself. I'm not like a mass hole or anything. I just happen to sometimes be in situations where I really need to merge and I'm in a hurry. This effect occurred this morning when I was driving to Assembly Square. I was trying to merge in and I was in a hurry.

I had a podcast to get to. I'm not a bad person. I was just in a situation. But there was somebody else merging in at the same time I was and that person was a mass hole. Like they weren't in the same situation I was. But you see the fundamental attribution area at work, right? It's allowing me to kind of shortchange the people around me, because I don't think of what could be affecting them beyond what's going on in their

mental states and their personality. I just assume they're a jerk or they're X, Y, and Z, right? Yeah. So I think in many cases, the context or the environment can serve as a kind of mitigating factor. And because those mitigating factors are invisible, we instead attribute people's behavior to their mental states or who they are deep down inside. And that can often have negative consequences for exactly the reasons that you're suggesting. And so it's obvious that these consequences apply to our social connection, right? Because we might not be connecting with people in the way that we should. But what's unexpected is that it also causes problems for how we connect with ourself. Because this tendency of the brain to misunderstand and mispredict others also applies to ourselves in some situations. When we get back from the break, we'll learn how our brains

turn our future selves into strangers. Jason will explain why that causes big problems for our happiness, but we'll also hear some strategies we can use to understand our future selves a little bit better. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Thank you. 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. Jason, so we're talking about how we sometimes screw over our future selves. And I wanted you to start with the story of procrastination that you sometimes share with your students. Yeah, so it turns out I'm in the middle of procrastinating on multiple things. I'll just mention two. One of them is I'm procrastinating on my taxes.

So I'm not alone. It is the beginning of April. Taxes are due in just a couple of weeks. And yet the IRS tells us that about a third of Americans don't submit their taxes until the very last day. So here I am. I've had since January to do this, but I keep putting it off. And someone just before the show said, well, that's kind of ridiculous. If you hate doing it so much, why didn't you just hire someone to do it for you? And I thought, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous. There are people who are professionals who get paid to do this. And I could have asked someone else to do it for me.

So maybe that was a kind of procrastination that I didn't need to engage in. But I'm also procrastinating. I have been for about a year now on starting to get in better shape. Because of the kids, I would need to get up pretty early in the morning. And pretty much at the beginning of every month, I tell myself, this is what I'm going to do. And then somehow the month comes and goes and I haven't done it. And part of me thinks that, well, the problem is that unlike taxes, there isn't someone else I can hand this off to, right? Like I can't just ask someone else to exercise for me and reap the benefits. Except I realized recently that there

is, there is someone else I can ask to do this, and it's future Jason. Because I definitely don't want to get up tomorrow morning to exercise, but I can ask Monday Jason to be that person to do that. And in a sense, this is what we mean when we talk about procrastination, this way in which we offload the things that we're not crazy about doing now to our future selves, thinking that they will want to do it more, prefer to do it, or at least be less miserable in accomplishing those things, even though we ourselves know that we don't want to do them right now. pray to this all the time. But despite the fact that I have experience with it personally, from a psychological perspective, it should be really weird that we want to offload this crappy stuff onto our future selves, that we kind of think of our future selves as this other person

that we can offload stuff onto. But your work has really shown that when we look in the brain, we get some hints about why we do that so easily. Remember before we talked about how the brain seems to differentiate between thinking about similar others and dissimilar others. So one question you can ask is, how do we think about our future self? How do I think about Jason in a month from now? It turns out that very often we think about our future self not as us, not in the same breath or the same way that we think about our current self, because we don't use the same brain regions in many cases to think about what the likes, dislikes, goals of our future self are going to be. And that's kind of terrible because it means

we're really treating our future self like a complete stranger. And that kind of is where a lot of the miseries of life come up, right? That's right. So we seem to have this very strange theory about who our future self is going to be. We tend to think that our future self is going to be the kind of guy who doesn't mind getting up early,

going for a run on a 25 degree dark morning in Boston. On the one hand, we think of our future self as this sort of aspirational self, this person who's going to have fixed all of the problems that currently plague us. On the other hand, we also think about our future self as somebody who's not particularly perturbed by all that much. We tend to think that our future self's not going to mind that trip to the dentist as much as we ourselves would mind that trip to the dentist. He's also not going to enjoy things nearly as much as we ourselves would mind that trip to the dentist. He's also not going to enjoy things nearly as much as we would enjoy things. If I'm given a choice between having

some delicious cake right now or an even better one this time next week, screw that future guy. He's not going to enjoy that dessert nearly as much as I'm going to enjoy it right now. And so we tend to make these decisions that favor our current self, in part because we just simply have the wrong theories about who we're going to be in the future. So one of the consequences of seeing our future selves as strangers is that even though we like to think of ourselves as nice people, we sometimes kind of treat strangers like crap. And that sort of means we end up treating our future selves like crap too.

I know this was something that researcher Emily Pronin and her colleagues had looked at. Do you want to explain this study? Yeah, this is one of my favorite and most diabolical studies in the field. So Emily is a professor at Princeton. She and I were actually in the same class in college. And what Emily did was present her subjects with a very unpalatable set of choices. She mixed together this concoction of, I think it was soy sauce and ketchup and water, and then asked her subjects, how much of this would you be willing to drink for me for science? And subjects take a look at this, smell it. Good sports. They say about three tablespoons or so, right? So not all that much. Then she asked another question. She

said, well, look, we really do need this for science. So suppose for the next subject, if you had to decide how much that person was going to drink of it, and they, without missing a beat, say, yeah, that person's fine, but let's give him half a cup. So people are not being very nice to this other stranger. But here's the most amazing part. She also asked some subjects, suppose you were to come back to the lab in a month, and I asked you to commit now to drinking some amount of this. How much do you think you'd be willing to drink? And what they say is half a cup. My future self will be perfectly fine with doing that, just like that stranger would. As if you think to yourself, yeah, I'm not going to be bothered by that. And this problematic theory of this like kind of ideal

future self who's like super rational, like it comes with other biases as well. And one of these is one that your Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert talks about as the future anhedonia. What is future anhedonia? Yeah, we think about our future self as being a kind of Spock-like character who's not going to have high highs or low lows. My Spock-like future self will just very stoically drink the half cup of tomato soy water mix and be perfectly okay with it. So in Dan's work, subjects are asked, hey, if you were to find $20 right now, how good would that feel to you? Scale from one to nine. And subjects not surprisingly say, hey, that sounds pretty good. Maybe it's a seven out of nine to find 20 bucks. Then he asks other subjects, how would it feel to your future self if your future self found $20? In three months time,

imagine that you find $20. How exciting is that going to be to you? And what subjects say is, meh, it'll be about a five, five and a half. What a strange thing, right? As if your future self is incapable and willing to experience the same highs that you know that you yourself right now would experience. moral actor. But there's a second way that we get our future self wrong, which gets back to this idea of the fundamental attribution error that we talked about earlier, which is that we don't understand the extent to which our future selves are really affected by the situation. We also don't give them the benefit of the doubt in the same way we kind of don't do that for strangers. Right. So one of the things that I think is most difficult about making decisions for your future self is that it's very hard to imagine in our mind's eye what all of the situational constraints on our future self might look like.

We're bad at that when we think about other people. We don't see the fact that you're merging because you made a mistake. We just think that you're the kind of person who barges in in traffic. And I think we do something like that when we think about our future self. We don't think about all the ways in which we're going to be busy this time next month or all the ways in which we'll be tired at the end of the day. And so we can very easily commit ourselves to things that we might even enjoy without taking into account the various ways that situations will conspire against us. And this could have some funny consequences that folks like economists study, right? Even in the purchases that we make over time.

That's right. So one of my favorite studies is looking at individuals who are at a grocery store just about to do their shopping for the week. And at the end of when individuals are in line about to buy their groceries, the experimenters come over and they basically just more or less weigh how much the person is buying. And they ask the person another question. When was the last time you had a meal? And it turns out that individuals who've gone to the supermarket hungry buy more food for the whole week than individuals who've gone having recently eaten.

As if we have trouble putting aside our own current state of hunger in this instance, in order to make proper decisions for our future self. This is also reminiscent of studies that economists have done looking at seasonal variation in the kinds of houses people buy and the kinds of cars they buy. So what kind of cars do you think people buy in the summer? They buy convertibles. There's a much higher rate of people buying convertibles in the summer, even in places like New England, where there are approximately 10 days a year when it makes sense to use a convertible. Likewise, if a house has a pool, it's much more likely to sell and to sell at a higher price if it's marketed in the summer. In both cases, people are imagining all the amazing things that they're going to do with that pool and all the amazing cool rides they're going to take in that convertible without thinking about the long periods of time when they're not going to be able to use those features. And one of the worst ways that we kind of screw over our future self and this kind of mistake about paying attention to the situations that are going to present themselves inevitably is when we think about the amount of time that our future selves

have. This is something that researcher Gal Zuberman talks about as future time slack. What's future time slack? That's right. So in the same way that we tend to think about our future selves as having it all together, being the kind of person who's going to want to exercise, we also tend to think that our future self is going to have a lot more free time than they actually do. Now, one reason for this makes sense. If you look at your calendar for April of next year, chances are it looks pretty empty. empty. So if somebody asks you, for example, to be on their podcast live at a show in Somerville, you think, sure, of course, I'm going to have a great time doing that. I'm going to have plenty of time this week to enjoy that. Now, of course, what actually happens is that as April of next year rolls around, your calendar gets more and more full, as it always does. And so when that actual event comes up, you're just as busy at that time than you

would be if it was happening right now. And so we get our future selves wrong because we think of them as this ideal actor. We get our future selves wrong because we're not taking into account the situation. We're not taking into account how much time they're really going to have. And all of this raises an important question, which is how do we overcome these biases so we can stop screwing over our future selves all the time? Are there strategies we can use to meet our future selves where they are? When we get back from the break, Jason will share a few key strategies that we can use to better fight all these biases and simulate our future selves a little bit better so that future us can become a friend rather than a stranger. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Thank you. than a stranger. The Happiness Lab will be right back. you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's 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. So Jason, I want you to help us fix all this stuff. And I want you to start with strategies that I know you use personally to overcome some of these biases. And one of them involves trying to get as close to your future self as possible by kind of bringing your present self there.

One of my favorite strategies you use for this involves kind of simulating this question of do you want to do something tomorrow? Talk to me about how this strategy works. So as we've been talking, it's very hard for me to actually simulate or imagine what my future self is going to be like. Humans seem, for whatever reason, to fall short when they try to imagine all the things that are going to impinge upon their future self or what kinds of thoughts and feelings and desires their future self is going to have. So one of the things that I do in my life is to say, look, I don't even need to worry about that particular question. What I should do instead is simply answer the question about whether I want to do something now. If somebody asks me,

hey, can you attend this wedding next week? Do you want to take on this work project that's due in a few weeks? Rather than thinking, is this going to be something that my future self is happy to do? I say to myself, if I had to do this right now, would it work for me? Would it be something that I get enjoyment out of? And very often the answer is no. I feel too busy to do that thing. I know that it's going to be stressful to try to finish out the semester and also go to this wedding. The fact of the matter is that if that's true for me now, it's very likely to be true for me in a month or this time next year. And so I can answer the question on behalf of my future self by simply answering it for myself now. And I love this

strategy because it really fights this idea of future time slack that we had before. Because sometimes if I ask myself, do I want to do it now? I'm like, it sounds fun, but I absolutely don't have any time to do it right now. And that can be the answer too, right? That's right. And you're right that if that's true right now, if you feel like you've not got the bandwidth to do this thing that would otherwise be fun, chances are that's also going to be true in a month or this time next year. It doesn't feel like it though. It doesn't feel like that. So that's one strategy I love. Another strategy we can use is sort of the power of language to It doesn't feel like that. and you can also reverse the process by bringing the future to you. One of the things that we know from research on social interaction or social thought is that there's enormous power in putting yourself into the shoes of another person.

So you mentioned before that we treat strangers or people who are dissimilar from us in very different ways than we treat ourselves and similar others. One way to fix that problem or to change that is to simply ask subjects to spend five minutes writing a short little vignette from the perspective of that other person using first person pronouns. I did this, it happened to me. And that very act of simply seeing through the eyes of another person using first person pronouns to really inhabit that person's experience seems to be sufficient to take somebody who's dissimilar and bring them into the orbit of similarity.

Now, I think that that's also possible when we treat another stranger, our future self, rather than thinking about that person as a me in the future or a you or that guy, to really think about me. This is happening to me. This is my choice. I'm the person who's going to be experiencing these events. And my sense is that that very act of simply changing the pronouns that we use and describing our future selves might be sufficient for ameliorating some of these effects. This is one that I'm definitely going to use, because I really fall prey to talking about my future self in the third person. I'm like, well, that's June Laurie's problem. Like June Laurie is going to have it

together. But now I'm going to say, that's my problem. How am I going to solve it? And instantly already just in my brain right now, it's like, oh wait, it's my problem. It's not some other stranger's problem. I also think this is cool because it reflects the way that we can use language in the opposite way. So some of you might have heard our episode with Ethan Cross about how we can use language to kind of perspective take more, right? Often when we're kind of ruminating, we're like, oh, I've got to do this. I've got to do this. But you can use the strategy of saying, Laurie, how would you do this? Let's think about it, Laurie. How would you solve your problems? You go third person to try to get some perspective. This is the same thing, but it's the opposite. It's going first person to get some perspective on your future self. So I absolutely love this. But you've also

argued that one of the things we need to do to make sure we're making good decisions, even when we use these other techniques, is to know what our current preferences are, to make sure we're kind of aware of what we actually want right now. Because this is another way we go wrong. We simulate it. Oh, our future self would like X, Y, and Z because I like X, Y, and Z. But we don't right now even actually like X, Y, and Z. Right. I think human social life is very complicated.

And maybe you've had the same experience. But I often find myself saying yes to things, not really because they're my own preferences, but because I'm interested in avoiding other social consequences that might come with saying no. So in a sense, this is though a way also of being unfair to our future self. There's some pain that's going to be associated with this. Either I can say no to someone right now, and that's going to feel awkward, and I'm going to feel a little guilty. But if I don't say no, I can avoid that moment of awkwardness. But I'm going to commit my future self to some event that maybe he doesn't want to participate in.

A wedding or a job, a piece of your job. Don't say podcast. Don't say podcast. And so I think I love this suggestion too, because to do that well, I think you have to harness two strategies that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab. So one of them is being a little bit more mindful. We have to actually know and notice what we like and what we don't like. So if we're saying yes to something because we kind of feel a little icky about saying no or we feel like it's awkward to say no, that's a moment of mindfulness where we need to notice, huh, I'm feeling a little like kind of regret right now. I'm feeling a little aversion. We need to acknowledge and notice that, which I think is powerful. But another strategy that we talk a lot about in

the Happiness Lab that's effective here is that that means that our current selves, which are hopefully making a good decision for our future selves, are kind of taking on something that feels a little tough, that feels a little tricky or maybe too emotional. And so what are some strategies that we can use to help our present selves take on tough stuff, make the future easier by making the present a little bit tougher? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. If there's some evenly distributed unpleasantness, it's probably better to get it out of the way now than to have to live with that unpleasantness over some long period of time. You know, looking forward, what's the word, dreading some event that's coming up. But you're right that that requires us to interrogate in the present how much we want or don't want to be doing something and what that's going to mean for our future well-being. And there's a key way to do that, which is to find ways to allow those

negative emotions, right? I'm sitting down to my taxes and I hate this and I hate this and I definitely, I hate it, but I can allow that, right? I can sit with this uncomfort. You know, I'm procrastinating on something because I'm anxious about it and I'm scared. I can sit with this uncomfort. I'm procrastinating on something because I'm anxious about it and I'm scared. I can sit with that fear. These are all techniques that we know we can engage in. We just need to do them in the moment to protect our future self. And so, Jason, knowing more how the brain works and why we sometimes get into these situations with our future selves, has that helped you to do a little bit better and not screw your future selves over as much? You'd be surprised at how hard it is to overcome these tendencies. I think. No, no, I wouldn't. I think even knowing about them, even studying them, we are built in a

certain way that makes it very hard for us to take our future selves seriously. And I find that I constantly have to remind myself that I am in a relationship with my future self, that he has feelings too, and would like to think that I'm a friend. And so I think it's one of these aspects of life that we have to kind of constantly refresh and remind ourselves to do better with. Well, thank you for giving us all some strategies that we can use to help our future selves out. Please join me in thanking Jason Mitchell

for a fantastic talk. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley and the amazing Courtney Guarano. Our show is mixed by Evan Viola and our fantastic music was provided by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the theme at our really great venue, the Arts in the Armory, and to our lead on-site sound engineer, Sarah Brugger.

And big, big thanks to our live studio audience. Happiness Lab would also like to thank Carrie Brody, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliore, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, Ben Davis, and Doug Singer at WME, and the rest of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Sanders.

Thank you all. That is the end of Happiness Lab Live. Thank you again for coming. Woo-hoo! Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's 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.