The Liz Moody Podcast - The Secret to Getting in Shape, Sleeping Better, Saving Money, And Being More Confident and Productive (Yes, Really!) with Dr. Katy Milkman

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Today’s episode is all about giving you the science you need to make the changes that will make every facet of your life better, from your career to your workout routine to your relationships. My guest today is Dr. Katy Milkman, a behavioral scientist and Professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the course of her career, she has worked with or advised dozens of organizations on how to encourage positive change, including Google, the White House, the U.S. Department of Defense, Walmart, and the American Red Cross. Her wonderful book, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, was named by the NYTimes as one of the eight best books for healthy living in 2021. the most common things people want to change in their life why laziness can be a huge benefit (and exactly how to harness it) an easy, science-backed trick for building habits the number one thing people get wrong when trying to build habits how to get PAID to work out (yes, really) research-backed tweaks to overcome procrastination and be more productive at work how to harness science-backed techniques to eat healthier how to figure out what you should actually change to get the life that you want the daily decisions that make up 40% of deaths in the US the best time to make a big change if you want it to stick how to use temptation bundling to make hard things a habit what science says about manifestation (it’ll surprise you!) specific action steps toward becoming more confident how to form an Advice Club and why it’ll change your life what to do when you try to make a change and fail  We would LOVE to hear from you any thoughts, reactions, or takeaways you have as you’re listening, so definitely screenshot and tag me @lizmoody and Katy (@katymilkman). I would SO appreciate it if you shared this episode or any favorite episodes with someone you love in your life! PS: My Patreon is live! You can join Green Smoothie Society and get access to ALL of my green smoothie recipes and advice! Get all the deets at patreon.com/lizmoody. This episode is sponsored by AG1 by Athletic Greens. Visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  This episode is sponsored by Seed. You can get 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic by going to https://seed.com/daily-synbiotic and using the code LIZMOODY.  This episode is sponsored by Paleovalley. Head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a cookbook author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're eliminating burnout, hacking our blood sugar to increase our energy and balance our hormones, or learning how to eliminate self-doubt and go after our dream lives. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics interest you, definitely scroll back in the archives. Today's episode is all about giving you the science that you need.

need to make the changes that will make every facet of your life better, from your career to your workout routine, to your relationships. My guest today is Dr. Katie Milkman, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the course of her career, she has worked with or advised dozens of organizations on how to encourage positive change, including Google, the White House, the U.S. Department of Defense, Walmart, and the American Red Cross. Her research is regularly featured by major media outlets such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR, and she currently co-directs the behavioral change for good initiative at the University of Pennsylvania and hosts Choiceology, a popular podcast about behavioral economics. Her wonderful book, How to Change, The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to be, was named by The New York Times as one of the eight best books for Healthy Living in 2021. Like her book title says, this episode is all about getting you to where you want to be in life.

Katie is so good at synthesizing the latest research and making it super understandable, actionable, and fun. On this episode, we talk about how to figure out what you should actually change to get the life that you want. The number one thing that people get wrong when trying to build habits. Research-back tweaks to overcome procrastination and be more productive at work. How to harness science-back techniques to eat healthier, the daily decisions that make up 40% of deaths in the U.S. The best time to make a big change if you want it to stick. What science says about manifestation, and I think this one will surprise you. It certainly surprised me.

Specific action steps towards becoming more confident, how to form an advice club and why it will change your life, what to do when you try to make a big change and fail, and so much more. I want to hear what changes you're making and which of Katie's tricks you're using. So definitely screenshot this episode and tag us both on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody and she is at Katie with a Y Melkman. Also, send this episode to a friend so that you can hold each other accountable in making the changes that you want to make in your life. There's also just like a lot to unpack and discuss here. So send it to someone so that you guys can kind of like process it and work through it together. And if you were new here, welcome. I am so glad that you found the podcast. Don't forget to

subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast platform so that you don't miss out on any future episodes. We have got an incredible episode about how anyone can make way more money coming up, along with a new edition of our How to Dress Cute series and an interview with an MD about eating to beat depression and anxiety. And to everyone out there who is sharing the podcast, putting it on company slacks and telling everyone that you know, I see you, I hear from the people who found the pod through you. I appreciate you so, so much. You're the reason that this podcast has grown so much, and I am just endlessly, endlessly grateful. Okay, without further ado, here is Dr. Katie Milkman, who's going to teach us how to make all of the changes that we need to

live our best possible lives. Katie Milkman, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. just telling you, I'm such a huge fan of your work. And I feel like it keeps everybody that I'm a fan of also appears to be a huge fan of your work, too, which is really cool. Oh, thank you. I'm so honored and excited to be here, looking forward to this conversation. Amazing. So let's just start off with what are the most common things that you find that people want to change? Oh, that's a great question. I think health and wellness is at the top, right? So people want to get in shape. They want to eat better. They want to sleep more and a more regular schedule. They want to meditate. So those are really common wish list items. People are also pretty interested in productivity at work. So a lot of

the time, people want to make changes that will make them more effective in their jobs and avoid distraction more in life. Many people want to be better parents. And then there's definitely lots of financial goals that I hear about people who want to make sure that they're building up a good nest egg for retirement or even just an emergency fund. so that they can live more comfortably. And do you find that the same strategies for making change happen are applicable to basically all categories, or does it differ a lot based on the type of change that you want to make? Yeah, it's a great question.

There are definitely some universals that are pretty applicable across categories, but there's also things that are more useful in some settings than others. Let me give you an example. In the financial domain, a lot of the best hacks that are the most useful allow you to basically put savings on autopilot. So doing something like setting up an automatic deduction on a monthly basis of a certain amount from an account where you might see that money to an account where it feels like it's gone. I like that. I'm like very money avoidant. So I feel like the more I can save without having to confront my money situation, the better. And I feel like a lot of people

feel like that. They're like, I'm happy to make money. I'm happy to save money. But I don't want to have to think about my money. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The ability to put things like that on autopilot is really unique to savings because unfortunately you can't sort of mindlessly put your healthy eating on autopilot and just know that it'll be taken care of once a month without you ever lifting a finger. So there are some different strategies that we can use in different settings, but there's a lot of universals. Is that like the part of your book where you're talking about why laziness is maybe a good thing? Yeah, exactly. So it's funny because in many parts of change, laziness is obviously a huge barrier, the fact that we tend to go with the path of least resistance in general.

But it is exactly what you're pointing to. It can be great when there's some solution we can use by basically creating a default that helps us on our way, like setting aside a certain amount of money every month through an auto deduction system. That's a great example of a default you can set up. It just happens without any attention. And then the lazy thing you do, which is not thinking about saving works. Are there any other category? in which you would say we should lean into our laziness because I love my laziness. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think we can lean into our laziness anytime we want to deliberately try to build a habit

because a habit is essentially, it's a shortcut, it's a lazy strategy, it's one that we've gotten so used to. We don't have to think about it. But it does still require some deliberate practice, essentially, to create a habit in most settings. So for instance, if you wanted to exercise, which again is a very common goal for people, you can be really deliberate about using a high motivation period to put in like a burst of energy essentially. So if you start doing something and you do it at a very high frequency and you reward yourself for that activity, that can help you build a more consistent habit. That's really

how habits are created is through like you take this action enough times that it starts to feel easy and simple and and you put it on autopilot just like practicing the piano, which is a very deliberate form of behavior. You're sort of teaching your fingers where to go in the keys. You can practice a behavior you want to engage in and it becomes easier and easier. So that actually can help put things on autopilot. And I think it's not something we think about in the same way as we might think about auto-deducting money from savings. But one other thing that's useful to know about habits is I think a lot of people think they need to be really rigid. Like, we need to always do it at the same place in the same time if I'm trying to develop a habit. But actually, my research is shown it's

important to do the opposite, which is to mix up when you engage in a behavior that you want to create a habit around so that it won't become a rigid habit that's sort of like, I only do it under these perfect circumstances, but rather a habit around, you know, I'm going to get to the gym or I'm going to get my workout in no matter what. Sometimes that'll be at 6 a.m. before I get to work. Sometimes it'll be at 5 p.m. after I'm back. And so by practicing getting it done under some circumstances and really putting in that energy up front, you can create a way that it becomes the path of least resistance. Okay. I have questions about both of those because they're both kind of counter to what I would have thought. So to the first point, I always think when I'm starting a new thing that I should kind of

immediately get into the cadence that I can keep up forever. Because if I try it like too hard, I'll scare myself off and then I'll never create it as a habit. So but you're saying, I think, that like we can go hard at the beginning and that makes it stick and then we can kind of back off. Yeah, absolutely. So I completely understand what you're saying about like what if I'm then pushing myself too hard. I think actually the logic here is is pretty similar to what you're saying, but with a small twist.

So the logic is that if you are feeling motivated, which it turns out there are cycles and our motivation, right? Like every New Year's, we get a little burst of motivation. We're more willing to try something. Something else happens in your life that makes you feel ready for a change. You're ready to invest in a way that you wouldn't be if you're just sort of going about your usual routines. Whenever that moment hits, leaning into it as much as possible is valuable just because the more you do it, the more it starts to become habitual. So that repetition builds a habit. And if you're feeling that motivation, which will eventually wane, you want to use it to carry you as towards the habit as possible. That's not saying like it needs to be every day or else you're a failure.

That actually is really dangerous logic. It's rather just, you know, do it as much as you can tolerate when you're feeling that motivation because that will, you know, the more you do it, the more it sticks. And that's basically what all the research shows. Like if you can get people going to the gym in a burst of energy for a month, say they go eight times, you're going to see in general, what we see is about 33% of a habit that you build will last, even if you basically take away any sorts of rewards that you're offering people or incentives. And so if you're going to be able to retain a steady state through habituation, say 30% of what you can get when you're really motivated, that says, like, get as much as you can when you're really motivated because then you'll have more carryover.

Okay. That makes sense. And then I'm going to ask what seems probably like a rigid question in the name of flexibility. But to the second point, is there a right amount to be rigid about your habit, to get it to stick and a right amount to do it at a different time and kind of like develop that flexibility, or am I overthinking it? No, you're not overthinking of it. It's a great question. And I think the answer is that we don't know exactly what the sweet spot is, but I can give you a little better answer than just like a shrug. We did one big experiment with Google employees where we had thousands of them randomly assigned to different experimental conditions to try to build an exercise habit. Everybody told us the date and time when it was best for them to work out on a regular

basis. They, you know, they said Monday through Friday, say it, and it had to be the same time on those days. So maybe they'd say Monday through Friday, the best time for me is 7 a.m. Once they did that, we said, okay, some of the people are going to get paid for going to the gym if they go within two hours of 7 a.m. And only then. And other people get paid for going to the gym anytime, but they'll still be reminded to go at 7 a.m., which is their preferred time. And then we look at, looked after that month ended to see which of these groups ended up building a more lasting habit. And we had expected it would be the people who were going consistently, actually, based on past research, which shows that in general, people who have more consistency in their behaviors

are also more habitual. As you can see, that's a really, it's like a circular argument. That's why we wanted to test and see, is that actually really the best way to build a habit? What we found is that the people who were less consistent in when they went, the ones who were rewarded for going any time, not just in that narrow time, they ended up building more lasting habits after this period of a month of training essentially ended. And they ended up going about half the time at their ideal time and about half the time at other times. So, and that's compared with the group that was rewarded only for going in their ideal window. That group went 85% of the time at their ideal time. So that tells you a little something that like 50 to 60% consistency might be a sweet

spot, it's better than 85% consistency, which created too much rigidity where people weren't able to basically go, they weren't able to recover if they had a miss. They basically said, like, it's now or never. That was the routine they got into and stopped going outside of their regular time. And how can I get somebody to pay me to work out? Because that said, you know, it's amazing how many apps there are out there that will offer you different kinds of rewards for exercise. I'm just like one that I, that comes to mind immediately that, I did some research with years ago. It was called Achievement.

And I think anyone can sign up for that. But there's all sorts of different business apps. And they like pay you to work out somehow? Yeah, for steps. If you hook up your, a lot of these apps, you know, like you hook up a wearable and you're sharing data. And then they'll give you like gift cards that you can, you know, earn badges and things like this because they're all sorts of different.

And often employers will offer these kinds of incentive programs too. So I think there's actually quite a lot of opportunities to get paid oddly to exercise. out there, lots of programs. And of course, you can sign up for programs where you'll get bonuses and things like this and badges and whatnot. Maybe I should be a better employer to myself and start giving myself more rewards. Yeah, absolutely. Good job. But you can also, you can go out and find apps that offer these sorts of things because they'll have, you know, promotions and kind of end partnerships. So they're out there. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic. But your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your skin for eight hours

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Marley Spoon just makes eating well feel easy instead of stressful. And honestly, that is everything. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. head to marlyspoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. Let's pick a few of the common changes that you mentioned. Let's say being more productive at work.

what are some specific research-back tweaks that might work for that one? One of my favorite suggestions for this is to basically use a tool that I call a commitment device. And the reason that I often go here for productivity is that I think one of the biggest barriers when it comes to productivity tends to be procrastination, right? Like there's something more instantly gratifying that grabs our attention in the moment, whether it's social media or a great podcast we've been wanting to listen to. to, or going down an email rabbit hole when we have an important project that we really need to focus on instead. So how do we get ourselves to focus on those long-term goals and invest in those

as opposed to getting caught up in the temptations that can distract us? Well, one tool is actually what's called a commitment device. A commitment device is when you impose constraints on yourself that will penalize you or restrict you in some way in the service of a larger goal. And it sounds kind of odd. It's like being your own manager, right? We're used to other people giving us like deadlines or the penalty if we don't achieve it or boundaries, but it's odd to set them on ourselves, but research shows it can be really useful. And there's a number of different kinds of commitment devices. I'll tell you about the most counterintuitive, but that you can use as a productivity hack for sure. The most intuitive of them is a cash commitment device where you literally

set a goal, say, you know, I'm going to get this many pages written each day for this report, or I'm going to have an hour of focused work time every day from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Where I don't check email, I don't go on social media. Then you choose a referee who can hold you accountable. And in this case, you might need some sort of digital referee where you might have some sort of a program on your computer even that you choose to use that doesn't allow access and blocks other sites for a period of time you could set up. And then you put money on the line that you'll have to forfeit if you don't achieve this goal. So that's what really makes it bizarre. You're literally penalizing yourself.

You can also just do it with an accountability partner, right? Like another person who you say, okay, we're both going to commit to this and we'll check in at 10 a.m. And see how we're doing. So there's varying levels of extremity you could go to with the commitment device. Like, is the penalty the shame of telling your friend who you promised you, you said, you know, hold me to this? Or is it literally a fine that you levy on yourself? But commitment devices are really useful tools. They also force you to plan out and think about like, what is my bite size goal?

what is the exact objective that I'm trying to achieve, which is so important in terms of productivity is a great example of this, right? Often you could just say, I want to be more productive. But what does that mean? Like, what is the specific goal on a daily basis? And when we break things down into those bite-sized daily measurable, achievable goals, we get a lot further. Well, if you haven't defined it, how do you know if you've attained it? Exactly. Exactly. And how do you know what you're striving to attain? Right. Exactly. Okay. Let's do the same thing, but for another thing, that you mentioned. Let's do healthy eating. What's like a research-back tweak that we could do for that?

Actually, it's funny. I think healthy eating is a particularly good one for commitment devices because you often, well, healthy eating, there's an objective in the long run that is in conflict with what you want to do in the short run, right? Your long-term objective is like, I want to feel good. I want to know that my body is getting all the right nutrients, that longevity is in my future. But right now I want a slice of pizza and cookies because that will taste great, right? So you've got this impulsivity challenge. And there's really two ways to deal with temptation. One way is like beat it at its own game. Find a way to make the thing that is good for you instantly gratifying itself and tempting. That's easier to do with something like exercise, honestly, like by doing

exercise with friends and making it fun. It's a little harder to do with healthy eating, but it's not impossible. So a strategy with healthy eating is things like you can try to, you know, like use apps and gamify it and like give yourself points and rewards. So there are ways to make healthy eating fun. You can also focus on what are the healthy foods I actually like. Yeah, I'm going to say like, we're just making really delicious healthy meals count as that. So that's the other key mistake we often make. And there's great research by Caitlin Woolley and Ilet Fishbach at New Chicago and Cornell University, who've showed that when we have these goals that are misaligned with what's tempting, we often think, like, I just have to take the puritanical

approach. I'm going to like, you know, find it was efficient route to, like, I'll only eat kale. And like, I'm going to do one of these sinless diets. That's sort of our mode. But actually, it's a mistake and that we tend to do better at achieving goals when we find a way to pursue them that's more fun because we persist longer. And one of those things can be healthy eating. that isn't completely sinless. So maybe it takes you a little longer to reach your goal of feeling truly, you know, drinking smoothies that you find delicious

as opposed to kale salads. You may actually enjoy the process and we persist longer when we find it fun to pursue our goals than when we're just taking these puritanical direct roots. And persistence is the name of the game. I wonder how much that ties into the notions that you talk about where like our beliefs matter too.

So I wonder if the belief, that like healthy food is boring, isn't delicious, whatever, like would impact how we feel when we consume it, whereas if we could shift that mindset, we could shift our reaction to consuming it. Yeah, I love that. There's really fascinating research by Ali Krum, who's a psychologist at Stanford University, who showed that when she gave people literally an identical smoothie, it was just mentioning smoothies can be delicious. And she randomly assigned some people to learn that the smoothie was caloric and indulgent and to hear that it was a milkshake. And other people were told, like, it's a healthy, good for you, low fat smoothie. And what was interesting is that after they

consumed exactly the same beverage, people who had different perceptions of what they'd consumed had both different perceptions of how full they were and also different gut peptide reactions. Their bodies literally digested the food differently. People felt more full and their body acted as if they were more full metabolically when they thought they had had this sort of indulgent treat than when they were thinking of this as a sort of slimming, good for you. That's so interesting. Yeah. So telling ourselves that we're indulging in delicious healthy foods as opposed to thinking of them as these like sinless beverages or snacks is literally going to make your body react differently. Okay. I love that. And then you said there was a second way that we could kind of try to help ourselves eat healthy.

year? Yeah. And the second way is we just talked about basically the carrot approach, which is a little bit of a mixed metaphor, since we're literally talking about food, but making it fun. So the care is like rewarding. Make it more enjoyable in the moment. That's my, I would call that a carrot. And then the other is the stick, which is like, well, actually, can you make the stakes higher for making a slip up so that even though normally we think of the consequences as long term, they'll feel more immediate. And that's where commitment devices come in. So just as You can use commitment devices as a productivity hack and say, find yourself if you don't get focused work done or write at least a page a day on your report.

You can do similar things when it comes to focusing on healthy eating. You can define goals for what you want to achieve and then have referees who will find you if you don't achieve them or people who are looking out for you and checking in and how you're doing. And there's a couple of different websites where you can set these kinds of goals and they can be quite useful. Be minder and stick are two that I know of where you can. You can literally send money to a charity you hate if you fail to achieve goals, which is pretty, it's sort of like a funny way to make it really sting. It doesn't have to be that much just to put a little bit of skin in the game that's an upfront

cost as opposed to just knowing, oh, well, you know, maybe I knocked a year off the end of my life by eating cheeseburgers for the last two months every day. Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of the definition for the healthy eating as well, because I think a lot of people have this abstract notion that they want to eat healthier, but it's so much easier to be like, I'm going to have a vegetable at every meal that it is to be like, oh, I like want to be healthier. Who knows what that means? I think that that narrowing in on what you're actually, I like the apps and the tracking and stuff like that hugely because it forces us to figure out

what we're going for. Yeah, absolutely. That's true, by the way, of every kind of goal. It's always critically important to define not only what's the long term, but what's the bite size? Like, what will I do today? And one of my favorite research studies on this is the study that was done in savings where people were asked, do you want to save $150 a month? Or do you want to save, so that's one group? Another group is asked, do you want to save $5 a day? And it's literally the same thing. They're making the same choice.

They're signing up for the same thing. The same thing will happen to their account. But it's something like three times as popular when it's framed as $5 a day because that bite size commitment is really helpful. So in addition to the helping you figure out what it is that you need to accomplish by setting these kind of bite size goals. It also makes them feel less daunting because it's not this big global, I want to get healthier. It's the each day I'm going to eat two servings of vegetables. I love that. Okay. This is a weird question, but do you have any insights on how to know what to

change? Like how to get at the actual problem that we're trying to address? I'm thinking about all the people who they move cities to be happier and then realize that their relationship was actually the cause of their unhappiness or they quit their job. and then they realize that that didn't have the impact they want. Or they don't even know where to start. They're just like, I don't like my life, but I don't know what to change. Is there a way to decide what changes we should pursue to get the results that we want? Oh, my gosh, that's such a great question.

I'm trying to think of the most useful offerings I can provide because there's so many directions I could go with that. There is no crystal ball that I know of that we can look into to figure out, like, what should be our top priority for change. And it's going to be different for every individual. And I should say, I do think that therapy and can be a really wonderful way to get into, like, what are some of the things that are barriers? Like having those conversations with other, you know, friends, family can also be really

valuable into people who know you can sometimes perspective take in ways you can't about what's a source of frustration and what's a barrier. I will say that there's generally a tendency to overestimate how much making a single change will impact your life. So there's a lot of research on happiness that shows a focusing illusion where we think, you know, if only I lived, say, in California instead of in Philadelphia and I had beautiful sunny days in the winter as well as the summer, like everything in my life that isn't perfect would be great. You're literally like describing me. Like that is like if I live anywhere, I'm like sure that if I live somewhere else, like I would be a different person. I would be living a different life. I would feel a different way every single day.

And then I move and then it doesn't change. Yeah. Well, there's normally a little change, right? Like better weather does tend to make us feel a little happier and so on. But we focus so much on the thing that we're changing that we neglect the fact that our life is the accumulation of a lot of small things that really matter. You know, the big things in life seem to be things like, are you in a happy relationship? Do you have close friends and family around? Do you have good health and good financial resources?

Are you exercising and eating well? Those are the things that matter the most, but we'll focus on minutia or one small thing and we'll assume that if I can just change it, everything will fall into place. And really, it's this constellation of things that create health and happiness and wellness. So knowing that may be productive that will overestimate the value of any change. That's also a little disheartening, though, and I guess I would say there are lots of things we know that generally make people happier. There's a whole science of studying happiness and things that make us happier are good relationships. That's really reliable.

Doing things for others makes us happier when we give to other people, when we give our time, our resources. That makes us happy. When we feel a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, that makes us happier. So changes that move in those directions, are likely to be good changes to make as opposed to some of the superficial ones that I think a lot of us immediately leap to like, I wish I lived in a place that had better weather or I wish that I had a nicer house. Things generally don't make us as happy as experiences, but we expect them to. And so there are some misconceptions there and that might help us think about where we should

really invest in making change in life. Is there any research on how changing our bodies I think a lot of people are like, oh, I wish I look different and they're like working out to look different or like they get plastic surgery. And then I'm curious if actually achieving that change of looking in a different way, what the effect of that is. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, certainly one of the things that I think people get wrong about exercises, they think that going to the gym is a means to an end of a different keene body or something. And really the benefits of exercise are less around weight loss and more around mental health and things like, you know, you know, reducing cancer risk and risk of dementia. And so it's like all sorts of much more downstream health benefits rather than literally the shape or size of your body that you get from exercise in general.

I guess I would categorize the idea of my physical appearance as one of the things that I haven't seen much research suggesting makes us vastly happier in the way that giving, meaning relationships do. Of course, if there is some. something that's truly harming your ability to have strong relationships, someone who's a burn victim and wants to have plastic surgery so that they can look in the mirror and feel comfortable and confident enough to present their ideas in a meeting and to go on a date, then there probably are huge benefits to getting to the point where you're comfortable. So I don't want to

downplay the fact that there can be important settings where physical appearance does give us the confidence to do better. Yeah, I'm thinking about all the people who are like, oh, I'll start living my life when I lose 20 pounds. Like, that's when I'll start dating. That's when I'll feel good about going out with my friends. And I've just never seen that actually be the case. So I was just curious if there was research that supported that. I don't know of specific studies on overestimating the benefits of something like weight loss on happiness. But I also will just say it's not one of the things that I've seen people show increases happiness. The big things that increase happiness, it's just not one of them. The big things are good relationships, physical activity, financial

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Yeah, absolutely. And P.S., that's how I felt about it too. So when I was an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I still work today, I didn't have a super clear, I'll say mission and research purpose. I was interested in behavioral science. How can we better understand the way people make decisions? And there were a lot of aspects of this that intrigued me. I was wandering, I'll just say.

And I wandered over to the medical school to a research seminar. And I wouldn't say there are a lot of people I know who would tell you that seeing a graph on a slide changed their life. But I'm enough of a nerd that that's what happened to me on this particular day. So it was a research seminar where a slide went up that had a, pie chart on it. And it was the percentage of premature deaths in the United States that are attributable to a variety of different causes. And those causes are things like, you know, genetics, the environment, accidents. And one of the categories was behaviors that we could change, decisions we make on a

daily basis about things like whether or not we're physically active, what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, whether we buckle our seatbelt when we get into a car. And what absolutely blew my mind is that those daily decisions make up 40% of premature deaths in this country, more than any other cause on that graph. I would have guessed 5%. These aren't the big things, but I was wrong. They're the big things. And seeing that, recognizing that these choices we make could accumulate to have such huge consequences that really changed my life because I realized I already studied decision making. I'm interested in this topic. I could really help. If I focus my work and research on trying to understand how can we help people make the changes

they already want to make, by the way, how can we make it easier? How can we make it more straightforward to choose the healthy options, to buckle the seatbelt, to get the vaccine, all the things that will lead to those good outcomes, it could make a huge difference. And of course, by the way, once you recognize that these little things accumulate in health, it's easy to see the same is going to be true. in when we're making financial decisions, where we're making choices about our education. In so much of our life, these daily decisions clearly snowball.

That changed my, gave me a mission and purpose in my work to try to understand what could science do, what tools could we offer that would really make change more feasible for people. Yeah, it's actually really powerful to have them grouped together because it gives them a weight that like,

it's not every little action on its own might not move the needle, but when you put all of these actions that are, like you said, within our control together, they hugely move the needle. And it's motivating to, like, do all the little things. Absolutely. And to know that you can impact this incredibly important outcome, how long you have on this earth. Okay, so let's dive deep into some of your strategies.

I want to start with your famous Fresh Start Effect. I cannot tell you how many interviews I've listened to are books that I've read where people are like, The Fresh Start Effect by Katie Milkman. So can you just share? what that is and maybe some examples about how manipulating our own timing can impact our ability to create the changes that we want. Yeah, absolutely. So this is joint work with UCLA's Hang Chen Dai and Jason Reese at the Wharton School. We all got really interested in this question of whether or not there were certain moments that could motivate us to make a change after I had given

a big presentation of my research at a large company and got a question about whether or not there were certain moments when people are more open to change. Heng Chen, Jason and I started reading about autobiographical memory and learning about the fact that when we think about our lives, we don't think about our lives linearly. Instead, we think about them as if they unfolded as a series of chapters, as if we're characters in a book. And, you know, one chapter might be the college years,

another might be the years living in Boston. Another might be, you know, the years working at this company. whatever those chapter breaks are, they give us a sense that we have a fresh start and a clean slate and new beginning. And whoever we were beforehand, before that chapter break came around, you know, you can say that was the old me. And the old me might have failed to achieve their goals, but the new me is going to be different and able to do it. And what we've shown in our work is that there are actually predictable moments when these chapter breaks arrive and we get a sense of a new beginning. And the most famous, of course, you don't need me to tell you this is New Year's, which gives us, sense of renewal and leads us to make all sorts of new goals, resolutions.

But also every Monday is a fresh start for people. And we see spikes in goal setting on popular goal setting websites for everything from health and wellness to education to our finances. We see it at the beginning of a new month. Of course, see it, as I mentioned at the start of a new year. The celebration of birthdays is a fresh start. And there are certain holidays where we see fresh start effects coming along. dates that we associate with new beginning. So think more the start of spring or the celebration of a

holiday like Labor Day and last maybe Valentine's Day. But there are some days that give us a sense of a fresh start. And also there's research showing when you move to a new house, for instance, a new community. There are other breaks in life that give us a fresh start sense as well. That's the fresh start effect. And we've found that if you highlight fresh start dates for people, Not only will you just see people naturally do this, but if you draw attention to a fresh start, you'll see people are more excited to pursue a goal on those dates. For instance, if we say, hey, do you want to start saving after your next birthday? Or do you want to start saving the start of spring? You can increase sign-ups for things like a 401k program with an employer relative to if you just invited someone to start saving at an equally distant future date that's arbitrary.

So we can use them and they come about naturally and motivate change in our lives. Is there anything that makes a fresh start more likely to stick? Like I'm thinking about the people whose New Year's resolutions, they can keep them and they change their life. And then the people who revert to their old behavior. Is there something the old behavior people could have done differently? Oh, yeah. There's a lot of things that could have done differently. And NPS, a fresh start on its own is not enough.

It gives you the motivation to begin, which. We never get anything done if we don't start. A lot of our goals fail because we don't actually set ourselves up for success by using the right strategies to succeed. The truth is there are a lot of different barriers to success and different strategies we need to sort of choose the right one to match it. We've talked about a lot of them already, right? We've talked about things like, I'm trying to make it fun, which may be my favorite takeaway from all of the research that's been done on change, that if you're not enjoying something, you won't persist. and people make this mistake and they pursue their goals in a way that they think is efficient and will get them their fastest, but that is miserable, and so they'll quit. So that that's a

really important one for persistence. But there's so many other tools, too, from using commitment devices to making concrete plans. And no temptation bundling is one that you talk about. Can you talk about temptation bundling for a little bit? Yeah, I would love to. Temptation bundling is actually a very specific tool for making it more fun to pursue your goals. So it's something that I discovered in my own life and then studied and proved it was my first real me search project. Like it worked for me. Wait, can I do a research study and see if this would work for thousands of other people? So I was struggling to motivate myself to exercise when I was a graduate student. I'd come home at the end of a long day of classes and just all I wanted to do was indulge and like

curl up on the couch, binge watch lowbrow TV shows. My homework wasn't getting done. My exercise wasn't happening and I was kind of a mess. And I decided to try something new, which was I set a rule for myself. I said, I'm only going to let myself indulge in that entertainment I crave. That's not really a great use of my time. If I am at the gym on the elliptical, which is my preferred machine. And suddenly, I actually started craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day of classes. All I wanted to do was get on my workout machine and find out what happened next to the characters I was invested in. Time would fly while I was there and I'd come back to my apartment feeling refreshed and completely ready to dive into my work. I'd had my break. I'd gotten my rejuvenation and I was ready to focus.

It was sort of life-altering. And so I started realizing there are lots of ways I could use a similar hack of basically combining something that felt like a chore that I dreaded with something that was a source of pleasure and that would make it more tempting to engage in the chore. So for studying, you know, like only letting myself pick up my favorite beverage from a favorite cafe when I was on the way to the library at the books or saving favorite podcasts for a while I was folding laundry and doing dishes or cooking a fresh meal for myself and my family. There are all these different ways that I now temptation bundle. But I've done research since that proves that actually giving people ways that they can combine temptations like listening to lowbrow audio books with exercise can increase. can increase the rate at which they achieve their goals. Even students turn out to appreciate temptation bundling

when they're doing math problem sets. If you play music for them, give them markers and snacks and make it a more fun environment so they're combining things they enjoy with something that feels like a chore, they persist longer. So there's lots of different ways that we can use this insight. Yeah, I do.

I listen to podcasts while I work out, and it's like been the thing that's made me be able to work out effectively. I know you talk about limiting the fun activity to just when you're trying to do the hard activity. Is that just like a little bonus? Or can I listen to podcasts the rest of the time? Or do I have to like only listen to them when I work out? The ideal is that it's something that's reserved for this other activity.

Because otherwise it isn't such a temptation and it doesn't, you don't necessarily build the association between these two things as strongly. So theoretically that's the ideal. Maybe like my favorite podcasts when I work out and then other podcasts like the rest of the time. Or the guilty pleasure podcast, perhaps, the one that... Trying to think if I have one. Whatever it is that you most look forward to so that it can be a little tug that pulls you towards the activity you otherwise might not get around to doing. We talked a little bit earlier about how our beliefs actually impact our physiology, like with the healthy eating and things like that.

And I was curious if your research on beliefs to you suggest that manifesting actually works. Say more about what you mean by manifesting. It was interesting because your research on beliefs was kind of the strongest argument for this notion of thinking about and thinking about what you want and making that actually come to pass. So I think there's a little bit of a delicate balance here in that I would actually point to research by Don Moore of UC Berkeley, who has a wonderful book called Perfectly Confident. And I think it makes a nice point that you have to have a certain level of confidence to achieve. but of course if you have too much confidence,

if you just think, like, I believe I'll get there so I will, then you're not going to lift a finger. So there is this delicate balance where you have to believe you have a shot at achieving something. You know, you have to surround yourself with exemplars who show you this is possible. You don't want to be hanging out with a bunch of people who aren't achieving their goals, who are never making progress towards the things that you'd like to see yourself achieve because they're going to show you, oh, this is impossible. Or people who are constantly cutting you down.

So who you're, who you're surrounded with turns out to be really important to building what you believe. But on the other hand, if you are overconfident because you think, I've got this in the bag, you know, then you're not going to take the actions you need to in order to actually achieve your goals. So there's this funny balance. And I think some of the tools that I am most gung ho about are tools that both build your confidence, but also show you that it does really take work and effort to get to the end. It's not just believe it and you'll be it. That's not enough. Because if that's where one heads, almost everything in life does take hard work, everything worth achieving. And so you'll be left kind of high and dry.

When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out are good nutrition. And yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of those. that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction

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start learning risk-free. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody, Masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. So what are some of those tools? So one of them I just mentioned in passing, which is thinking about building your social network in a strategic way so that there are other people around you who are working towards similar goals. And maybe you're a little tiny bit ahead of you. So they push you and show you what's possible. And you can learn from them about, you know, what are the specific strategies they're deploying?

And by the way, we tend to pick some of that up naturally. Like if you end up with college roommates who are higher achievers in school, you end up getting better grades. So some of that will just happen by hanging around. But Angela Duckworth and I have shown that we can actually improve how well people pick up that social knowledge when we just nudge people to be really deliberate about copying and pasting strategies that are working for their friends who have similar goals. So we can do a little.

better if we very intentionally ask people, it seems sort of silly and obvious, but we often don't think to ask someone who's in our social network, hey, I've noticed that you're also trying to run a marathon. Could you tell me a little bit more about your specific schedule and what are some of the things you do that feel like they really work? And then try to adopt those strategies. So we can copy and paste and be deliberate about the peers we choose. Can I just ask a follow up on that? Yeah. I think it's easier said than done to surround yourself with these types of people. I'm curious if you have any advice for meeting these people and bringing them into your world. And a lot of people are like, oh, just like reach out.

But often, especially when you are reaching out to people slightly more advanced in their career or whatever, you kind of feel like you're bugging them. And sometimes you are bugging them, you know? So how do we do that? Yeah. No, it's a fantastic. It's a fantastic question. And I think it depends a lot on what is the goal.

So is it that you're trying to build a group of like-minded career professionals, then often a good place to look is whether or not the organization you work for. For instance, if you work for a big organization, has any sorts of social groups, whether or not there are community centers in your community where there are support groups like this that already exist. But there's a lot of organizations, religious groups often create these kinds of affinity groups. There's a lot of different organizations that already are out there that can help you meet the right

kinds of people, depending on what your objectives are. If your objectives are related to health and physical fitness, there's tons of different ways to find communities online and also locally, you know, where you can go and hang out. Like if you want to get healthier, often it's, you may want to join a local gym and start going to certain classes and strike up conversations with other people you see there. So there are different ways to form those networks. It can also be by reaching out to people who are already your friends and saying, hey, I have this new goal. I'm trying to find some other people who are working towards something similar. Do you know anyone you could introduce me to? So we can be proactive in different ways, whether it's through like the communities we already belong to and

looking for affinity groups or through our friendship networks and families. Okay, so keep going other tools. Yeah. Another thing that I think is an underappreciated one, it turns out that when we coach and mentor others who have similar goals, that also helps us. And it does this for a few reasons. One is it boosts our confidence to be in the position of an advice giver. When we're advising others, we sort of see we have something to offer. Someone's looking up to us. And that makes us feel, gosh, well, maybe I actually am not such a schmo. And I really could offer the world something. And we really could make progress. It also forces you to introspect about what could be an effective tool. And once you do that, you may dredge up insights that you wouldn't have thought of if you were

just working on yourself. But if you're trying to help someone else, you're going to think harder, more deeply and make sure that you have something to say. And then once you've given that advice to someone else, you're going to feel hypocritical if you don't walk the talk, if you don't follow your own advice. Lauren S. Chris Winkler, professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, has lots of great work, some of which I've gotten to collaborate on, showing whenever we advise others. And it's important that it be solicited advice because unsolicited advice can make anyone feel crummy. But if other people are interested in looking for a mentor or a coach, and we step into that role, it actually helps us improve our own performance in that domain. So looking for opportunities to

be a coach and mentor can be really valuable. Yeah, I love your advice club idea. I think that's such a cool, a cool way to do it. Can you talk about that for a second? Yeah, absolutely. So in my own life, I have applied this in a way that I actually really didn't realize what I was doing. at first. But I have a group of female professionals who are at a similar career stage at different universities. We all have similar goals around doing research and science we're proud of and communicating it to a wide audience. And we have an advice club where we reach out to each other when we're facing a challenge. And we knew it would be great for lots of reasons. We knew it would build a community, a friendly community. We knew we'd get brilliant insights from other women who

were at a similar stage that would help us make better choices. But an aspect of it that I didn't appreciate going in was that when I'm asked for advice, it helps me because it builds my confidence as I'm able to, as an outsider, think more carefully and frankly, clearly about how to handle a given situation. We often have blinders on when it's our, you know, it's our own challenge. We can get emotional about it and not have that perspective. But when it's someone else's challenge, I can think much more clearly. It builds my confidence. I can do this for myself too. And I often see something come up for a colleague or a friend before I face the very same challenge. But then when it comes up for me, I know exactly what to do.

So it's been just absolutely invaluable. And I think we should all have more advice clubs when it comes to our careers and our life goals, people who can be a support network, who can offer wisdom and who let us exercise our muscles at thinking carefully through problems and reminding ourselves that we can be good coaches and mentors to. I love that. Would all of these strategies work for overcoming internalized limiting beliefs? Like people have told us for years that we're not good enough or I'm thinking about like when society tells us that our worth is based on how we look or what gender or race or socioeconomic level we are. Yeah, I do think advice clubs can be a great way to build confidence and us to some of those nasty stereotypes. And I do think it's also, though, important that you make sure if you're forming a group, like this, that it's going to be a group where you really have trust and that it's going to

reinforce positive beliefs rather than negative ones. So you may want to look for a group who faces, has faced similar challenges. And I mentioned my advice club as a group of female professionals. That's very deliberate because I think there's different barriers we face and we can build each other up and give advice that's relevant to members of our identity group. And there's lots of other groups that might benefit because they face specific challenges in the workplace, or with health and wellness that are different than, and you don't want your group to be unable to relate to your own situation. Okay, so if we start making a change, we do all of these wonderful things,

but then we relapse. We stop going to the gym. We call an old boyfriend. What's the very first thing that we should do to get back on track? Great question. One of my favorite piece of advice on this comes from Stanford University's Carol Dweck. Carol has written about the importance of having a growth mindset. And she mostly focuses on it in the context of educational outcomes and thinking of intelligence,

not as something that's fixed, but is something that can grow with effort and that through failure we learn as opposed to thinking about everything with a fixed mindset, which would say through failure we're diagnosed as incompetent. That idea of a growth mindset, though, can be applied much more broadly than to just educational achievement. It's really true of pretty much everything in life that through setbacks, we can, can grow stronger and better and do a better job the next time, as opposed to every setback being diagnostic of our incapability to achieve. So I would say that trying to adopt a growth

mindset whenever you hit a setback and look at it not as final and not as a diagnosis of what you're capable of, but saying, what can I learn from this and how can I do better next time and adopting that way of looking at and recognizing every failure is an opportunity to grow and learn. That would be probably my first and number one piece of advice. I love that. Okay, two final questions. One, you host the wonderful podcast Choiceology. I'm curious if you could just give us like one piece of advice that you've learned from

all of your interviews about how we can make smarter choices. One thing that comes up a lot on Choiceology, which is a, it's a podcast about making better decisions and understanding the various biases that can prevent us. for making good decisions. One that comes up a lot is what I'll call the planning fallacy. That's sort of the name for it in the academic literature. In general, what it tells us is that we tend to have a rosy, optimistic view of how long it will take us to accomplish something. We forecast how long will it take me to write a book and we say, oh, I can definitely do that in a year. No problem. We forecast how long or engineers forecast how long it'll take to build the Sydney Opera House and they say,

you know, three years and it takes 10. And my one year to write a book took three. When we're making forecasts of how long things will take, we imagine the best possible outcome and the smoothest possible path. And we don't think of all the things that can go wrong. And we rarely collect data about, well, what was the experience like for others who tried to attack a similar goal? How long did it take them. If you think about renovation projects, right? Like every home renovation project, it's always over budget and over time. But if you just collected some friends estimates on exactly the same renovation project, you couldn't, you wouldn't always be over budget and over time because there is some normal. So I think we should collect more data before we do that kind of forecasting exercise

and recognize that whenever we're planning, we're planning for best case scenarios and we need to do more planning for worst case scenarios and more looking at data and less just relying on our intuition. I actually heard somebody say that for the notion of manifesting that we shouldn't just be like thinking about our dream life and being like, I'm going to get to my dream life, I'm going to get to my dream life, but thinking about, well, here's a hurdle I might run into on the way to my dream life and how can I think through overcoming that hurdle? And that's actually like a more helpful way to vision. Absolutely. Thinking through obstacles is one of the most critical things we can do in order to get to success. I'd say that's maybe the most important point I make in my book

is that we want to understand what are the things that will hold us back and then tailor our strategies for those obstacles. And Gabrielle Ettingen, who's a professor at New York University Psychology Department, has done wonderful work about how important it is to include that obstacle component whenever we're thinking about a plan. First, think what could stand in my way, just when I'm approaching a goal and then consider that can help us consider more carefully what we really need to do in order to achieve it. Yeah, I love that. It almost feels a little like negative, but I guess the point is it's like realistic.

So it actually helps you get to the positive place. Exactly. The way that you can avoid those negatives becoming not just potholes, but traps, is by by thinking through them and then, figuring out how am I going to navigate around them. Can you just leave us with one homework assignment that we can all do today to help us make a change that will benefit our lives and to stick? Yeah, I love that.

And I love giving homework because I'm a professor. Homework is the best. Yeah, I'd say, write down the goal. What's a goal that you would like to achieve? Because we all have something we want to get better at, something we want to do better. And you're going to write down some big goal. like I want to be fit or I want to have more financial security. So then after you write down the goal,

write down what's the bite-sized thing that you are going to do on a daily or at least weekly basis? No, it's, I want to learn a new language. Then it's, I'm going to get on this language learning app for an hour every day. Okay. So now you've got your bite-sized goal. Now I want you to think about where will you do it? When will you do it? How will you get there?

Write that down too. And now you've really got a detailed, plan. There's some, there's a cue that's going to trigger your action rate 4 p.m. on Thursdays. I'm going to go to a language class. The more concrete you make it, the harder it is to back off of it. And hopefully that bit of homework will get everyone a long way. They're going to be less likely to forget. It's clear what they need to achieve. They're more committed because they've made that specific statement about what their objective is. It's going to be harder to procrastinate on this clear intention rather than a vague one. So hopefully that will be useful. And then hopefully all the other things we talked about

combined will help a lot as well. Oh, I have no doubt that they will. Thank you so much for taking the time to share all of your incredible wisdom with us today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I hope you loved this interview with Dr. Milkman. I am definitely going to be forming an advice club and you know that I'm temptation bundling up the wazoo. I literally can't imagine working out without my favorite podcast, to be honest. I would love to hear which of Katie's tricks you're trying and what changes you're making. So screenshot and tag me on Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody and Katie is at Katie Milkman. I'm also going to be doing a giveaway of a bunch of Katie's book. So go leave a comment on my infeed post about this episode so that you can snag one for yourself.

If you are a first time listener, don't forget to subscribe and join the fam. If you did love this episode, I would so appreciate a quick rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It's one of the best ways to support the show and it is so, so appreciated. And of course, the best, best way to support the pod is to spread the word. So please, please, please share this episode with anyone that you think would love it. Text it to a friend or email your mom or dad or put it up on your Instagram or your Twitter. It's all so appreciated and it's the reason that I can have on these amazing guests and share all of this wonderful information with all of you. Okay, I love you and I will see you next Wednesday on the next episode of the Healthier Together podcast.