The Liz Moody Podcast - Top Neuroscientist: The New Formula For Building YOUR Dream Life

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

What if you could achieve a life full of happiness, security, and success while also enjoying the ride? My guest today tells us exactly how to do just that by throwing out your detailed 5 year plan (yes, really) for this new approach instead. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a top neuroscientist, entrepreneur,  and best-selling author. After reading her amazing book, I had to have her on the podcast and share her approach with you all. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • The 24 hour task to find out what’s getting in the way of you achieving your dreams • The single rule that makes any life decision less scary—even the huge ones • Why almost every popular goal-setting method (yes, even SMART goals) might be working against you • The 3 types of "cognitive scripts" subconsciously running your decisions • The exact question to ask yourself before quitting your job to chase a passion • Why willpower and discipline are the wrong tools for building healthier habits • A simple 3-word framework for finally beating procrastination for good For more from Anne-Laure Le Cunff: • Book, Tiny Experiments: https://nesslabs.com/book  • Newsletter: https://nesslabs.com/newsletter  • Instagram: www.instagram.com/neuranne  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Osea: visit OseaMalibu.com and use code LizMoody to get 10% off your first order • NOCD: to learn more about OCD therapy with NOCD, go to NOCD.com and book a free call. • ZBiotics: Head to ZBiotics.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for 15% off • Wildgrain: go to Wildgrain.com/LizMoody (or use promo code LIZMOODY at checkout) to get $30 off your first box + FREE croissants for LIFE. • AG1: visit DrinkAG1.com/LizMoody to get a FREE AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit.  The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 456. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And Laura, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So you're a top neuroscientist. You're the author of the phenomenal book, Tiny Experiments, which is one of my favorites that I've read. We're going to get into a ton of things about goal setting and decision making and finding our purpose today. But I also really like to ground things for people so they can like see how these things apply in their lives. So we started off by asking listeners for areas that they feel stuck, that they're struggling. And I would love to have you weigh in with your best wisdom. That sounds amazing. let's do it. Okay, so these are from listeners. I'm 36 and I still have $40,000 in student loans, no house and basically no savings. My parents had already had me and my brother by my age. I make a decent

salary, but somehow I'm always behind. I feel stuck and enjoying my own life because I feel so much shame about how behind I am. What's really interesting about this one is just saying I feel behind based on what, based on which definition of success. And a lot of my work is around how we tend to copy and paste a definition of success from other people. I actually don't know people who are actively trying to not save a lot of money to not get a mortgage, to not buy a house, because they're optimizing for freedom. And I would ask back to that person is what is your actual definition of success, not necessarily having X amount of money in your bank account, not having all of those external markers that you can show to other people to say, look, I'm doing great,

but things that you actually care about. And then start exploring how you can get there. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing. And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. What if you really sit with it yourself and it is something like I really want a house because that will make me feel safe and secure or I really want a family? and it's things that don't feel accessible to you, even if you've really zoomed in and you're like, these are my things.

Yeah, I would probably start by breaking it down, like, what's the first step towards home ownership? Every time we feel stuck in this way, it's usually because we're focusing so much on the end outcome, the end result, the one that is maybe 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, that we don't even get started.

So what's the first step? Well, you probably need regular source of income. This person sounds like the good. got that first step. So first, yeah, little pat on the back. You have that first step ready. Savings. You don't have savings yet. What does that look like to start saving now? Is there anything you're spending money on that you can maybe spend less money on or not spend money on? Are there maybe other sources of income that you might want to explore so you can have a little bit of extra money? So taking those little steps and then starting to to experiment with different ways to actually

make progress towards this version of success, that is your version of success. The first thing that you mentioned was based on this idea of cognitive scripts, right? Yes. Which I heard about for the first time in your book. And I literally read it. And I sat back and I thought, oh, my gosh, because I started circling through all of the scripts that I've been inadvertently, unconsciously running in my brain. Can you break down what the idea of a cognitive script is and maybe where it might be

showing up for people listening that they might not be aware of? A cognitive script is a cognitive script is a. pattern of behaviors of decision making that we are applying automatically in our lives. And very often, those patterns are borrowed from society, from the people around us, and they have a huge impact in terms of how we design and live our lives. In the book, I talk about three big buckets of cognitive scripts. There are thousands and thousands of cognitive scripts, but I find that most of them you can put in those three buckets. So the first one I call the SQL script.

The SQL script is when you make decisions today based on the decisions you made in the past. This is the script we follow when we feel like whatever we decide to do needs to make sense based on our past life. You've probably seen so many people do this. I've done this to, for example, a recent graduate that is only going to apply to jobs

that make sense based on their major or only exploring new relationships that are similar to the relationships that you had in the past. That's one bucket. The second bucket is the crowd pleaser script. This is when you make decisions based on what you think is going to please the people around you.

Keyword here, what you think is going to please the people around you because you're not in their head and you don't even know if that's the case. A lot of people choose careers also based on what they think their parents and their friends are going to approve of. And the last big bucket is the epic script. It's when you make decisions based on the ideas. that whatever you do needs to be big, needs to be impressive. And anything less than that is failure.

That's the one that I'm the most guilty of. How do we begin to identify when these scripts might be running our lives, our decisions, the goals that we're making for ourselves? And then how do we begin to break free from them? You really need to pause and start observing your life. The reason why we follow those scripts is because we don't give ourselves any time or space or distance to be able to notice them. There's an exercise that I recommend doing that I call self-anthropology.

The idea is to pretend just for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life as the topic of study. And the reason why I pick this metaphor is because when an anthropologist goes and studies a new culture, they have no preconceptions, no assumptions, and very importantly, no judgment. They just observe. So just imagine for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist and you can take little notes and ask yourself, why do I spend my time in this way? Why is this thing taking so much of my attention? Why is this a goal of mine? And you will notice, I guarantee you, you will notice decisions that you

are making on autopilot. We'll do the next listener question in a second. But I'm curious if you've recently found a cognitive script in your life and noticed it and then changed your decisions or behavior based on that awareness. Oh, absolutely. Since the book came out, I've been constantly approach to do public speaking, speak at conferences. And I started noticing how I'm optimizing for more and more prestigious conferences because it looks good on your CV. People congratulate you when you say you spoke in front of 2,000 people, 3,000 people. And I did the self-anthropology exercise again and I realized that actually this is not really what I wanted. I'm spending more and more time away from home. I'm not seeing my family as much as I used to. Although the prestige is great

And it feels really good to have people telling you that you're doing great work. This is not really what I want to optimize for in my life. And so now I'm starting to experiment with other ways to teach where I can stay home a little bit more. Online workshops are not as sexy, but they're more aligned with what matters to me in this season. Yeah, I think a lot about how many of us are making the choices that, like, feel a little sexy, but they're not actually better and might be making our lives worse. I know I do that constantly. This is so common. And a big part of it is that we're social animals.

And so external validation is actually a really good signal for us of belonging and safety. It takes effort. It takes actual conscious effort to remind yourself that you're safe. And you don't have to optimize just for this sense of external validation. Well, and also you touched on this earlier, but like we don't actually know what other people are thinking. And often they're thinking about us so much less than we think. So like people aren't sitting around and being like, man, It's so cool.

Anne Lord did a TED talk. You know what I mean? Like, they might think it's cool for a second, but then they're really just not thinking about it anymore. Yes, which makes it even more absurd to make decisions based on that. No, and yet. And yet. And yet, here we are.

Next listener question. I constantly have the desire to be healthy, like exercise, eat well, sleep well, et cetera, and equally constantly have difficulty maintaining routines that support this. It's just easier to sleep in, skip the gym, et cetera. In the moment, being lazy feels good, but I regret the decisions later. Help. This is very relatable. We've all been there.

What can be helpful is to explore the gap there is between where you want to go and how you're getting there. Quite often, we design our health routines in a way that feels like work. And this is part of why it's hard to get out of bed and do it. I would encourage this listener to experiment with ways to be healthy that feels so good and exciting that you actually want to get out of bed. I'm going to give you a personal example. So I used to try and run several times a week.

And it was really, really hard to stick to it because I hated it. And yes, I felt good afterwards. And I kept telling myself, get out of bed, go and run. You know, you know you'll feel so good after you've done it. But still, I would skip so many of my runs because I didn't look forward to it. Now what I've done through experimentation, I tried so many different health routines. None of them worked, including the ones where all of my friends were raving about it. that was not a good predictor of whether I would like it or not.

And now what I do is that I go to something called ecstatic dance, which is two hours of listening to music and moving your body in whatever way you want, even if you look completely crazy. I've noticed that I have no difficulty now, getting out of bed and going there, because it's fun. It's actually fun for me to do this. I'm not saying it's easy to find a health routine that feels good, but it is absolutely worth it to invest a little bit of,

of time and energy experimenting to find something where it doesn't feel like work where the feel good effect only happens after you're done. What if there's something that you feel like you should be doing for your health that you just cannot make fun? So for instance, strength training comes up over and over and over on this podcast, especially for women in their 30s, 40s and beyond, like we need to be strength training. I've learned to love it. It feels like a jungle gym to me. Like there's something that feels very childlike about like, oh, fun machines and stuff like that, listen to a good podcast, love it. But I think for a lot of people, they're like, well, if I can't make that fun, should I just not do it, even though all the doctors are telling me

to do it? I would argue that almost anything you really want to do can be made fun. Is it doing it with a friend? I do that too. I love it. Yes. This is something I don't see enough people try. A lot of people feel like I need to figure it out on my own. This is my own health journey. This is a very personal thing. But the truth is in lots of countries, we get healthy together. One of the things that I love seeing is whenever I go to Asia to speak at a conference is, and I take a taxi to go to the venue, you see all of these older people in Asia exercising in the park together. It's a completely normal thing to do and they stretch and they chat and they laugh. The movements they're making are not so different from what you would be doing in the gym, but they're actually

making it fun. It's outside with friends. They get to catch up. And so again, thinking about the cognitive scripts that we have, the automated ways that we have of thinking and living our lives, almost any time I hear someone saying an absolute truth or fact saying, this can't be fun, I always want to question it. Are you sure? Or maybe you're looking at it from a lens that is a little bit too narrow. That's so interesting. Also, I mean, I feel like it works both ways because often with our friends were like, it kind of gets boring to go to dinner and catch up on our lives and then we go home and we're doing the same thing. But if you do something like a workout or a hike or something together, it gives you this activity that you're sharing, which reinforces the friendship. And then

the friendship makes doing the thing easier. So it's the cycle. Whatever the opposite of a vicious cycle is like a positive cycle. Yes, absolutely. And I think this is a really good example of thinking about it in a completely different way. Instead of saying, there is this thing that I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I hate doing. How can I force myself to do it? How can I use willpower? How can I use discipline saying there's this thing that currently is not really fun? How can I actually incorporate it in my life where it feeds all of these different areas in a way where it would almost then feel like I'm losing something if I stop? So the other things that this listener mentioned were eating well, sleeping well, et cetera. So eating well would applying this be like, I'm going to make healthy food,

but I'm going to make it really delicious so that I actually crave it. Yes. And also eating with other people, inviting a friend of her. Meal prepping with a friend. Meal prepping with a friend. Setting the table, make it really pretty. If you're someone who likes posting your food on social media, lots of people saying, where are you doing this? We should stop doing this.

Why should we stop doing this? If you love doing this, making it a really nice table, making it pretty, having a date with yourself, even if you can't have a friend coming over. That is such a cognitive script that so many of us are running, which is like, my house needs to be pretty for other people. This table needs to be set for other people. I don't deserve it on my own. Who's the most important person in your life?

It's you, right? So why don't you deserve to also be treated in this way and having the nice table, a little candle, nice food, take your time eating it? Yeah, go on a date with yourself. Do you have any other tips for getting out of bed in the morning? Because that's like one of my tricky areas. Okay, so I wake up.

I don't wake up with an alarm, which has been a life hack, and I really find that helpful. but I wake up and I feel like a little groggy and tired. And so then I want to wait around in bed because it feels nice until I'm not groggy and tired anymore. But like that day never comes. So eventually I'm just like, oh, okay, finally get up. But then I'm 45 minutes late for my entire day.

And it's just not a good way to start my day. Something that I have found very helpful is making the process of getting out of bed fun. So again, instead of feeling like, oh, getting out of bed is so bad and so I hate it. And I just have to push myself and get through it. I actually make it fun. So I start rolling around in bed. I start rolling around in bed. I start stretching in bed. I'm really feeling my body and feeling like, oh, this feels good actually. Whenever I feel like I had enough of that, because it's, you know, it's fun, but it's not something you want to keep up doing for two hours. I just roll out of bed. Like literally roll out of bed in a very silly way. If anyone was seeing me,

and fortunately nobody is watching. And so yeah, I literally roll out of bed. I literally roll out of bed. I know it sounds silly, but that's been really fun for me. And again, it always, always stems from the idea of questioning whenever you say something is not fun. Something is uncomfortable. I hate this. I just need to push through. What would it look like to experiment with different ways where this is actually not true? This can actually be fun.

Okay. Next listener question. I'm paralyzed by reaching out to people I meet in order to make them my friends. I feel completely isolated and alone. And yet, if I meet someone and we seem to vibe, I am completely paralyzed. I always assume that I'm annoying and not good enough. I cannot move past this thinking. A big part of running experiments is to detach yourself and your self-worth from the outcome.

So when a scientist runs an experiment, whatever the result, they don't go like, oh my God, I'm such a bad scientist if the data is saying something that they didn't want to see. So if you really treat it as an experiment, what you do is that you send a text and then you look at what happens. but the response that you get says nothing about you as a scientist. I'm not saying it's easy, but it really helps and really looking at it as an experiment. This would be maybe a good moment to go over some of the rules of tiny experiments. Can you talk about what makes a tiny experiment? A tiny experiment is basically just saying, I'm going to test an action for a specific duration.

That's it. So you pick something that you're curious about and you commit to doing it for a certain duration and to withhold judgment until you're done collecting your data. So you could say, I will send a text to everybody I find interesting for a month. And for a month, anytime you have a good conversation with someone, you send the text. And you're detached from what the result of that action is going to be. At the end of the month, you can look at the results. How many people replied?

How did I feel? Was it so horrible when people didn't reply? Oh, maybe you noticed that the first few times someone didn't reply. positively, that felt really bad, but the fifth time, you were fine. That's what experimenting is all about. It's doing the thing, testing different parameters, looking at the result, and detaching your sense of self-worth from the result. And there's a few things that you've said are really important for those experiments. Why does it need to be a length of time? What are the actual specific rules and why are they there? The specific length of time is what makes the difference

between an experiment and a habit. When you decide to start a habit, there is no duration. You say from today onwards until for the rest of my life, I will run three times a week. That's a habit. For an experiment, you say from today until the end of the month, or for three weeks, I will run three times a week. That means that any time you don't manage to do the thing,

this is not failure. This is data. Why didn't you run? Was it because something happened that made a difficult? you know, new meeting or whatever. Was it because he really resisted it? It didn't look like fun. Was it because you felt tired that they all data that you can learn from and then design

better experiments? So that's why it's very important to have a duration. Second, I call them tiny experiments, not huge experiments that are going to take over your life. So the idea here is to keep it small enough that you can actually finish collecting your data and see whether it works or not. If you pick something really big, really overwhelming, you're not going to finish it. But you're not going to know if it's because the action is not something that works for you

or just because you went too big too quickly. So keep it very tiny. And if it works, if you like it, you can do a second version afterwards. You can do it again and go a little bit more ambitious. Not to get like two in the weeds, but what would be too big and what would be too tiny? Your tiny is different from my tiny. So this is really about having this honest conversation with yourself. I did a writing experiment a few years ago where I said,

I will write and publish a short article every day for 100 days. And a lot of people said, that's not tiny. Yeah, that's exhausting. That is, yeah, not for me because I had been writing every day already for my entire life. I love writing. This is actually my comfort zone. For me, the experiment was around publishing. It was about forcing mechanism.

where instead of keeping all of my writing for myself to publish it, even if it didn't feel ready, even if there were still typos, I had to do it every single day for 100 days. So that was my version of Tiny where the writing every day was not the problem. It was the publishing. No, the Tiny was like press print essentially or whatever the online version of that. Exactly. Press Publish. That was the version of Tiny for me.

Another example for me was with public speaking. So I used to really, really struggle with public speaking. Massive anxiety, could not sleep at night. stomach cramps really, really bad. And so I designed a tiny experiment and I asked myself, what is the smallest, tiniest version of a public speaking experiment? And for me, it was, you will record yourself every day for one minute on your phone and publish it online with no scripting. But one minute and only on your stories on Instagram, that was terrifying. For some of my friends who have podcasts or who do a lot of public speaking, that probably

sounds ridiculously easy to do. For me, it was really, really hard. And you can see the videos. I ended up posting them actually on my profile to really try and learn in public. But you can see on the first videos, even my hands. Like this, I'm like really tense. And I look almost scared to be on camera. By video number six or seven, I'm a lot more relaxed. I even recorded a video in front of my gate before flying somewhere, which I would have never done in public. So that was my version of Tiny for public speaking. So whatever feels like you're pushing yourself to explore, something you're really curious about in terms of figuring out if there's a way to do it that works for you, but that still feels doable. As you're speaking, it occurs to me, I feel like obviously

the huge benefit of running tiny experiments as you get the information that you need to change your life. And one of the things that you're saying is that many of us are going about changing our life in a way that's not actually serving us. But there's these two other benefits. And I do think you touch on them in the book, but I just want to make them really clear for everybody listening, which is one, you're going to end up with a much kinder voice in your head, which I think the way that so many of us talk to ourselves in our head is like, you're such a piece of shit. Why can't you just send that text to the person? And then she wouldn't even like you anyway. And you're like, if it's just information, a scientist isn't sitting there and saying that type of stuff.

So that's incredible. But then also with the video publishing online, you got to see your progress. My sister's a therapist, and she often talks about how one of the main functions of therapists is to reflect your progress over time back to you because that's such a huge important part of growth. If we don't see how far we've come, we can't go any further in the future. And by running these tiny experiments, you can see where did I begin? What information was I getting then? What did it look like?

And then where am I now? And you can celebrate that. Absolutely. And any progress is useful progress in the sense that I always tell people that. that you should really optimize your tiny experiments for self-discovery. As long as you learn something new about yourself by the end of the experiment, even if that's not what you expected, that is progress. That's like such a freeing way to live.

Do you ever turn experiments into habits or do you think habits are completely overrated within this context or framework? Tiny experiments are actually a really good way to discover habits that might work for you. A problem that I see quite often is that people also tend to copy and paste. habits from other people. And you just see your friend who started running or who started meal prepping or who started self-care routine and you say, oh, if he's doing this or she's doing this, I'm just going to take that habit and start implementing it. When it doesn't work for you, then you blame yourself. Instead, you can run experiments and try them. You try them,

but it's just an experiment. So that running routine, that self-care routine, do it for a couple of weeks, do it for three weeks, see what happens. If it works for you, great. Turn it into a habit. If it doesn't, now you know. And if someone then mentions it to you, you can say, oh, actually, I tried this and it doesn't work for me. I'm also curious if you can do that on the flip side, like if you've had a habit for a while and you have this little hit of intuition that maybe it's not serving you anymore, if you could run an experiment of not doing that habit and see how that feels. Thanks for asking this because I usually talk about this when people tell me, I don't think I have the time or the energy to experiment.

And I always say, well, experiments can be about removing something. It doesn't have to be about adding something to your life. Something that people I've worked with that they've tried, for example, at work, is what would it look like to remove one of your weekly meetings? What would happen? Quite often nothing, actually. Some of your meetings are in your calendar just because they've been there for a very long time. what would it look like to remove one step from your very converted routine that you have in the morning?

Is there's one step here that you're not quite sure about that you could remove? Or what would it look like to make one of those steps simpler, smaller, quicker? I love that. Okay. Next listener question. I'm stuck in my work. I'm looking for business slash work opportunities, but I feel like something is wrong with almost everything. I did the what you are good at slash what you love list, but that does not work for me.

How do I begin to figure out my next direction in life? There are so many frameworks out there that help you think through those decisions when it comes to your career. I would argue that to know what you want to do in life, you need to try doing it and then see if it works for you or not. You need action, you need conversations, you need actual real world data for you to know whether a career path is for you or not. So some tiny experiments that you could run here is I will reach out to you. to one person on LinkedIn every Monday and ask you have a quick virtual coffee chat. Just asking them about their actual work.

What does it look like? Not the pretty version that we have on social media, but backstage, what does it look like to do the work that you're doing? Would you actually like doing this? Or if you're interested in writing, for example, why don't you start? I will write a short news editor on Substack every week for six weeks. Let's see if you like it, the actual act of writing.

Anything that you want to do, is it a career in food and entertainment, in education? There is a version of that that you can try that is quite small and time bound that will give you way more information than any kind of theoretical framework or worksheet that you would go through. What do you think prevents us from taking that step? Is it the epic script where if it's not like the big, full-on thing, then it's worthless? Is it being worried what other people think of us? I think it's because our culture around goals and success tells us that in order to take the next step, we need to have perfect clarity. And so a lot of people are stuck in this overthinking slash research mode where they want to know where they're going before they start walking in that direction. It's a very linear way of approaching uncertainty that gives us this illusion of control.

It feels very reassuring when you can say, I have a plan. I know where I'm going. But quite often, what happens is that the plan actually doesn't align at all with reality. So that's the main thing that gets in the way in terms of taking those first steps. And where does pragmatic reality fit in with this? Like I heard from a lot of listeners who are like, I don't really like my job, but there's a ton of layoffs happening right now. I'm really nervous about the economy. Should I keep this job or go to try to find a job that I like?

better. How do we weigh in the state of the world, our position in our family, and how the money that we make impacts that? This is where you can play with the size of the experiment. So if you currently need the money, you need the stability, you're worried about not maybe finding something straight away or your caregiver, or whatever your situation is, you can keep the job and experiment on the side and keep those experiments quite small. Whenever you feel like you're onto something that is quite a good, exciting and there is a sense of possibility here, you can make that experiment a little bit bigger. Only when that experiment becomes so big that it becomes impossible to keep the current job, plus running that experiment, you can consider quitting the job. You will never hear me say,

just quit your job and follow your passion. I think this is very dangerous advice. I will always tell people, keep the job, start experimenting. And when your experiment is giving you enough data that it's time to quit your job, then do it. Obviously, I cannot go to the spot every single week, but what I can do is recreate that feeling at home. And honestly, Osea is the biggest reason that I'm able to do that. My two favorite Ocea products are the Undaria algae body oil and the Undaria algae body butter. They are both incredibly hydrating, but even more than that, they have the yumliest smell that I have ever smelled. It's grapefruit, lime, cypress, mango, and Mandarin.

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It's a condition where unwanted, distressing thoughts called intrusive thoughts get stuck on repeat, often about the people or things that you care about the most. And then you feel driven to do mental or physical behaviors like seeking reassurance or avoiding situations just to get some relief. While I love traditional therapy, it's not actually what works best for OCD, which can leave a lot of people feeling stuck, and then that can lead to depression, and I say that very much from personal experience. The good news, though, is that OCD is highly treatable with the right specialized care. What works is ERP therapy, which stands for exposure and response prevention.

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To learn more about starting OCD therapy with NoCD, go to noCD.com and book a free call. Relief is possible. It is so important to me for you to know that. So go to n-o-cd.com and book a free call today. A lot of you guys know that about four years ago, I started being what I call an intentional drinker, meaning that I've stopped drinking just because it's like a Thursday night. Now I drink a few times a month at the most. And the only downside of that is that I have almost zero tolerance for feeling poorly

after I drink now because I'm so used to feeling energetic and good every single day, which is why I'm so, so excited about zbiotics pre-alcohol. I tried these for the first time at my friend's birthday party in Vegas, and I was very skeptical, but now they are my absolute go-to. Zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic, invented by PhD microbiologists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. When you drink, alcohol converts into a toxic byproduct in your gut, and it's actually a build-up of that byproduct, not dehydration like we have been told forever,

that's to blame for those rough days after drinking. Zibiotics pre-alcohol produces an enzyme that helps breast, break that byproduct down. The science actually makes a ton of sense. And again, I felt a huge difference. August does not slow down and neither to you. Pre-alcohol keeps it that way. Go to zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody and use code Liz Moody for 15% off. That is zbiotics.com slash Liz Moody, code Liz Moody. Do you think that our job should be our passion? Definitely not. I think it's very risky to try and find a job that is your passion. If it turns out that your job becomes your passion. This is great. This is fun. It can be a really good thing. I don't think this should be a

goal. Why not? People are miserable trying to find a job that is also their passion. And I also think that because of that, they minimize all of the other areas in our lives where we can find really deep meaning. I think it is very ambitious to want to be a good friend, to want to be a good parent, to be a good contributor in your local community. Those are also great ways to find passions that are not in your day job. Yeah, you're sort of famously against the idea of trying to find your purpose in life, which feels related. Can you speak to that? We've become absolutely obsessed with the idea of finding our purpose. There's a little graph in the book that shows that mentions of finding your purpose have grown over 700% over the past two decades.

So we are all trying to find our purpose. Part of it, I think, is that there is a huge incentive in our society and on social media to say, hey, look at me, I found my purpose and I can help you find yours or just I found my purpose. I'm successful. I know where I'm going. Living a good life. So we have all of those incentives that make us feel that if we haven't found ours, then our life has no meaning. And I don't think this is helping us make good decisions. Without a purpose as like a guiding North Star, how do you suggest we wake up and think about what to do on any given day, given that there are infinite possibilities and options. I think curiosity is a way better compass than purpose.

Waking up every morning and asking yourself, what am I excited to explore? What am I excited to find out, whether about myself or about others, about my work or about the world, and going to bed, feeling that you've learned something new today, that is a way better way to live your life, that is going to be a lot more conducive to having deep connections with people, personal growth, and a sense of meaning that is not based on having this big purpose in your life. It also occurs to me. I know that you've done a lot of research on curiosity and you think it should be something that we're all prioritizing in general. But it occurs to me that even if you feel like you have found your purpose, you're like, my work is my purpose,

my spirituality is my purpose, my children are my purpose. Bringing that lens of curiosity to that thing will only enhance it and you. Absolutely. And keeping on asking yourself, is this purpose I've had for the past five years, 10 years. Is it still my purpose? And if not, get rid of the kids. Sorry. Maybe you don't get rid of the kids, but there can be a sense of grief when sometimes when you realize that something that has been such a huge part of your life may not be the main

thing anymore in this season. And allowing yourself to first fill that grief and then make room for something else that may take a little bit more space. And that grief can live there even if it is something that we can't necessarily opt out of. Like it's a job we have to stay in. Maybe I actually hear from people. People insist this cannot be possible, but I've heard from thousands of people who do have regrets

around having children. Is that about learning to live in the grief and saying yes and? Yes. Your responsibility to those kids is not going away. You still should do your best to be a good parent. But it doesn't mean that you need to derive your sense of meaning from raising those kids. We can get that sense of meaning from another place in your life. That's okay.

And similarly for staying in a job that maybe doesn't feel as meaningful to you anymore, if you have to, having this sense of clarity can be incredibly healing, knowing why you're staying in this job because maybe you have all of these other responsibilities. Maybe kids actually are part of that equation and you need to stay in that job. Fine. you're staying in this job out of a sense of responsibility, but it doesn't mean that you need to find your purpose in this job. And it's completely okay for you to start exploring other ways to create meaning in your life. Okay, we have other listener questions that we will get to, but I want to take a little

bit of a break because you prepared two truths and a lie for me. So you have three things you're going to say, and I'm going to guess which two are true and which one is a lie. Go ahead. Sleep helps the brain consolidate new memories. That feels true. A detailed plan makes your future more predictable. That also feels true. Mind wandering can support creative problem solving. That also feels true. Ooh.

So? I feel like sleep definitely does. So I'm going to say true. I think given your stance on experiments, you're going to be anti-plan. So I'm going to say the middle one is false. And that would be correct. Yay! Insert clapping noise.

Yay. I know it sounds very intuitive that making a plan is going to make your future more predictable, but there is a lot of research around what psychologists call the planning fallacy that shows that making a plan actually only gives us the illusion of predictability. So we feel like we have a crystal ball because we have planned every single step. But obviously we have no idea what the future holds. And so instead of having this perfect plan, it's good to have a general sense of direction of what you might want to explore.

But there is a point at which you can overplay. plan. How do we know when we have tipped into over planning? One of the ways is to drop a little bit into your body and try and see what you're trying to achieve here with the plan. Are you trying to fill in control? Are you trying to feel like you have thought about everything that could happen because it comes from a place of anxiety? Or are you planning out of a place of curiosity? if you're only really just trying to think about what could be different directions that I could explore, what could happen, what are things that I might want to look at

or conversations that I might want to have, then this is the good kind of generative planning that can help support your experimentation and exploration. But as soon as you see yourself trying to have every single step mapped out, this is coming from a place of anxiety and control and you might be falling prey to the planning fallacy. Okay, I have two questions about this. that. One, I talk about in my book, something called whoop goals. This is the idea that you have a

goal and you also figure out what obstacles might get in the way of you achieving that goal and then you make a plan for that too. Would you be like, yeah, that's good? Or you're like, you're planning on top of planning on top of planning and that's worse? It depends how many obstacles you're looking at, I think. If there are a couple of obvious ones that you want to spend a little bit of time thinking about, I think that's okay. I'm not anti-thinking about the future. I think it's good to think about the future. It's really about finding this balance. If you start having this crazy, like, whiteboard in front of you, like in the movies where you're trying to find out who's the serial killer, then maybe you're ever doing it. And what do you think about the

visualization, manifestation, idea that we have to be really crystal clear on our future to create that future for ourselves? I think there's a huge difference in between saying you're going to manifest something just because you think it's going to happen, which doesn't work, and there's no science to support this. But believing that you are capable of doing something is really important. So if you are using visualization in a way that allows you to take action because you believe that you are the kind of person who can achieve this, then this is good. If you are using manifestation in order to bypass the actual work and effort it's going to take there, or as a way to minimize failure, to avoid failure,

then this is not helpful. What about like a five-year plan or a 10-year plan? Also, you were like, are you doing from a place of anxiety? I'm like, yeah, obviously. Like, I'm doing a lot of stuff from a place of anxiety. But I'm always pushing my husband to have a little bit more of that like five-year, 10-year, 15-year vision. And I'm like, how can we make it real if you can't even see it in your mind?

Like, am I in the wrong there? or do I need to have an idea of what I want in five years or ten years to take steps forward towards it? You say it yourself that it comes from a place of anxiety. And let me ask you a question. Over the years, how much of the good things that happened in your life were things that you could have planned 10 years in advance? I have an interesting answer, which is that a lot of the stuff is stuff I dreamed about, but it happened in ways that I did not ever think it would happen. So like I had my first book deal and I walked in at Penguin Random House and the office there is like lined with all there.

It's like all these famous books they've published over the last like hundred years. And I was like, oh my God, this is incredible. But I was there not for the novel that I thought I'd write since I was five years old, but for like a popsicle cookbook. And so there was like this piece of like, oh, I'm publishing a book. That's my lifelong dream. But it was in no way the book that I thought I would publish. Although now I've built my career off of that to a place where I am working on the novel that I always dreamed of writing. This is actually a really good answer and very aligned with what I think is helpful in terms of thinking about planning here.

What you were doing is believing that maybe one day this could happen, but you didn't end up writing the book because you had a detailed tenure plan in front of you telling you exactly what step you should follow and at what time. It is really important to believe that something is possible for you, to be open to those possibilities, which will also allow you to spot when there's a door in front of. of you that might be worth opening and a path worth exploring. This is really, really important, but it is not the 10-year plan that allowed you to actually get to the point where you publish the book. What would you say to somebody who has a hard time believing in what's possible for them? This is why it's so important to have examples in our society of people who have done different things and coming from a lot of different backgrounds with a lot of different life stories. Unfortunately, we're still at a stage where a lot of versions of success or

are only shown in the media based on very specific types of profiles. So first, I would say to you this person that don't blame yourself if it is hard to visualize a certain type of success if you haven't seen anyone like you achieving this kind of success. So I feel like our society also puts a lot of pressure on the individual to just believe in themselves. It's very hard if there's no one giving you the raw materials for you to develop those beliefs.

So that would be the first thing that I would say. And the second one is, before you start believing into this very big version of success, is there something smaller that you can do so you can prove to yourself that you can do it? Self-belief is actually a muscle that you can train. And so if, you know, let's go back to the example of writing the book. Believing that you can write a book is actually really hard. But what about believing that you can write an essay? Just write an essay and put it out there.

What about believing that you can actually write an essay and then get it published in one of the magazines that you read? What would it look like? And taking it step by step like this until you get to a version of yourself that can actually believe that you can write a book. That's almost the epic cognitive script too, right? Take the big dream that you don't feel like you have permission to have and like walk it back a little bit and say, what's the smallest version of this dream that I do feel like I have permission to have and then climb the ladder from there. Yes. And the reason why this works is that you're not trying to fool yourself or trying to force yourself to believe in something you're not ready to believe yet.

Next listener question. My partner and I don't know where we should settle down. Should we prioritize being by my parents or his for the extra child care help? Should we prioritize the place that is the best job for him or the best job for me? Should we live where we have the most friends or community or just the place that we like the most in terms of weather, the vibe of the city or the types of people that live there? So this listener is basically trying to decide where to move. and it's a big decision. It's a scary decision. What would it look like to experiment about a big decision like this? I would look at those different factors and try and see if there are ways to test

what is actually having an impact on you. So the weather, for example. When you go on holiday, how about for the next year, you decide to go on a holiday a little bit more based on the weather? Try to go on a holiday in a place that has bad weather.

It can still be an interesting holiday in terms of culture, in terms of whatever that is, it's not nice weather. That is so interesting. And see how you feel. Have conversations over dinner every evening. How did that feel for you to be in this cold weather today?

So you can start experimenting with this. Same with cities, for example. Like you can go there, spend a weekend and actually talk to people there. Go to events. When we visit a city, we tend to do all of the touristy stuff. What would it look like to go to a city and actually go to the local book club or go to a cooking class or, you know, walk in a neighborhood that you normally wouldn't go to. And maybe when you go and buy some food in this new city that you're visiting, talk to the casher, ask them, what is it like

to live here? Do you like it or not? So really pretending that you are a scientist and you are trying to look at all of those different factors and variables and trying to learn more about those cities, yes, but also, how do these factors impact you? And are there having an impact that is important enough that you should take that into account? What would be? What would be? the experiment to see how much community impacts us. Because I think a lot of people are weighing. Should I stay in the place where I have a lot of community, but I don't really like the place or should I go to a new place where I don't have any community, but I really like that place a little bit more. For this, I think it can actually be really helpful to remove your community for a while.

It can be really, really hard. But what would it be like in your current city to not see your friends for a month? You're not going to see them for a very long time if you move to another city. Oh, that's interesting. Are you able to not see them for a month? How does that feel? It's also so interesting just to even reflect, as you're saying, these things, how they make us feel. Like, I realize, as you said, the weather thing, that I literally optimize every vacation to have the ideal weather. Like, I am searching, like, best time of year weather-wise to go to this place. And we move somewhere. People always ask us, like, why we live where we live. And we say because it's sunny, the most percentage of the time in our general area. We super prioritize that because it

matters to my mood so, so much. And you know that, right? But what about all of the other factors that you ended up? giving up. Yeah, we did. We're like a little further from a lot of our community. And we've had to also compensate for that. Like we will drive a little bit further. We'll prioritize seeing our friends because we know we optimize. If I wake up and it's gray out, I'm grumpy. And if I wake up and it's sunny out, I'm happy. And it's like that straightforward for me. Yes. And so that's a very visible one. And it's great to know that. And so for for this listener, I think it would be really helpful to actually look at those factors. And so instead of having two columns and thinking about this

or that, actually go and experiment with each of those factors, and then with your partner, have those conversations. I feel like this is like hot ones because these are getting progressively harder. The next one is, I feel stuck in heartbreak. He broke up with me and I did not feel like I had a choice. I know I need to move on, but I cannot stop loving him and I cannot figure out how to. I don't think you can experiment your way out of heartbreak. This would be really the one part where there's no framework for this.

only need time. What you can do though is experiment with ways to rebuild happiness in other areas of your life that feel supportive. Is it spending more time with friends? Is it volunteering? Is it investing in learning, in exploring and trying a new hobby, a new career, a new support, whatever that is? But I think it is also really okay sometimes to admit that some parts of our lives just require time, that healing takes time. Yeah, you cannot be a little scientist about absolutely everything. So I would say heartbreak and losing someone or probably the two human experiences where you cannot experiment your way out of these. Are there any other things you would do differently as a neuroscientist when it comes to those two things? Knowing that it

takes time, there's this concept in Buddhism of the double arrow. where the first arrow is the thing that causes pain. And then we shoot a second arrow in the same spot by feeling bad about the pain. And we make ourselves miserable because we feel like we should heal faster than this. We should figure it out faster than this. As a neuroscientist, this is really the only thing that has been helpful to me is knowing that any time we experience pain, it takes time for the brain to process it and for us to be able to move. move on in a healthy way. So giving yourself grace, really. These are probably the two

spiciest hot sauces. I've been with my boyfriend for six years. He's genuinely a good person and nothing is wrong, but I keep waiting to feel sure one way or another and I never do. Everyone says when you know you know, but I don't know and I'm terrified of both leaving something good and staying in something mediocre for the rest of my life. How do I make the decision of whether to stay or go? The entire question is based on the assumption that you should know for sure. And it's impossible to know. Part of you would always have a doubt. And over the years, you will end up meeting other people, have great conversation with others. And it will happen that you ask yourself, oh, would that person have been a better partner than the one I committed to build a

relationship with? And this is going to be something that you'll have to go through for the rest of your relationship and for the rest of your life. That's okay. That's actually okay. That uncertainty, I think is a very healthy part of building a life with someone. I also am like such a believer in we don't find a partner. You don't know you know type of thing. You choose a partner and then you build a life with that person, which also makes me reflect on the amount of tiny experiments that you are consciously or unconsciously running before you make that choice.

So like I think before you decide, yes, this is the person that I want to choose to build a life with, you should be in some really tricky, difficult situations. You should see how they react to being stuck in traffic, having a crisis at work. What do they do at a health crisis? What do they do when your parents need something? And it's inconvenient. You have to drop your plans to go and help them out. How do they treat the people that you love?

Those are all tiny experiments. And I think it can be really helpful to reflect back on how did they act in those tiny experiments? Absolutely. This is actually a really good illustration of how you keep on updating your decision based on the information that those experiments. are giving you. So you start at the beginning of your relationship with all of those tiny experiments that you described, even as you said, if you're not running them at a conscious level. But this is also why I think you're never 100% sure, because life will keep on throwing you curveballs. And there might be a time it can happen in 20 years when something happens and

the response from your partner is really not what you expected and is actually not okay. And if that changes your decision, that is okay to you. It is hopefully for life. if your relationship ends up being healthy, nurturing, and everything you need for the rest of your life. But if it's not, it is okay to change your decision. And some of the happiest people that I know have changed their decision. Yeah. I always joke with Zach that I feel like the people I know in second marriages are the happiest because they like know what they got out of and they know what the happiness that they feel now

is like in comparison. But he's my first marriage. So that's... I love him. But I'm like, I want to be at a second marriage. Although there's the Esther Perel concept. Have you heard that of like you can start a new relationship within the relationship that you have?

So we can like have a second marriage within our first marriage, maybe. Absolutely. I think any decision is in the moment can be in the moment the correct decision if you're using all of the information that you have available to you. Yes. If you were disappointed in something that happened in your relationship. But based on the information you have right now, you think this human being in front of you is still the best person you want to keep on trying, building a relationship with.

Starting from scratch and having that second relationship with the same person can be amazing to, I think. Okay, last listener question. I cannot figure out if I want kids. My husband and I go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And I am so terrified that I will choose wrong and not be able to take it back. Yes, that's a big decision. That's a really, really big decision.

And it is one of the ones we were laughing earlier. You can't really just push it back in. She decided that you don't want it. Again, I always try to question the assumption that this is not something you can experiment around. If you have people in your family who have kids, can you take the kids for a month? And I know that... A month? Yeah, why not?

Maybe it's... Is it a bad side for me that that sounds entirely overwhelming? Does that mean I shouldn't have kids? That is an interesting signal. Interesting signal. Just to listen to you, I'm not saying it's the only signal you should listen to you. But yeah, just sometimes thinking about an experiment even without conducting it can be really interesting. And I know as a kid I used to spend in the summer a month at my grandmas, for example.

And so if you have a sister or doesn't have to be a month, a couple of weeks, maybe someone in your family who's feeling a little bit burned out right now and offering to take the kids. So you can actually try that or just trying to surround yourself with more kids and see how you feel. But I think having the more extreme version of you actually have to take care of them nonstop for a certain period of time can be a good way to explore this. What about the people who say, yeah, I don't like other people's kids, but I would love my kid. Like, it's different when it's your own. Well, those people sound that they know and they should do it.

And they might be wrong and they will do the same thing that many, many parents who have recreated doing it do, which is, again, you still have a sense of responsibility and you made that decision and it's not one that you can revert. But if they feel like they're ready for it, then they should go for it. Do you think with having kids that if it's not 100% yes, it's no? No, I don't think so. I think this is such a scary decision that it is completely natural to not feel 100% sure. I don't have an exact number of it on it, but maybe it feels at least 80% sure before you make that decision.

I had an expert on my podcast who works with couples specifically about this. She's a psychologist. And she said 60%. And I thought that was so interesting. And it did take some of the pressure off. I just think waiting to be 100%. sure. Like, it feels insane. I'm not 100% sure about a single thing in my life. Yeah, 60% also sounds good. And I think, yeah, the idea, the important idea here is that this is definitely not a decision where you need to be

100% sure. You also talk about procrastination. And you say that a lot of the popular advice around procrastination does not work. How come? A lot of the advice around procrastination is based on the idea that procrastination is bad and something you need to get rid of. And so you need to push through, you need to use willpower, or you need to have all of those complex productivity systems, so you avoid it. My take on it based on the research is that procrastination is just a signal from your brain. It's your brain trying to tell you that something is currently wrong with the work you're trying to do or with the way you're trying to approach it.

But our response, because of everything society is telling us about procrastination, how it's a lack of discipline, how it's laziness, makes us ignore that. signal, although it has so much interesting information in it. What I encourage people to do is to approach their procrastination with curiosity, again, just like a scientist. And ask your procrastination, oh, welcome back. What are you doing here? What are you trying to tell me? I'm listening. What if my procrastination is trying to tell me it's a really beautiful day and I should go lay in the sun and eat raspberries? But I have a podcast episode tomorrow and I need to read the whole book and prep my questions and I have something I actually have to do.

Go to the field and eat raspberries with your notes, maybe. It can actually be fun. So I have a very simple framework that you can use in order to have this conversation with your procrastination. The idea is to ask, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart or from the hand. If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, the task makes no sense. So maybe it's not aligned with your priorities at work or with whatever you want to achieve. maybe you should not be the one doing it.

It could be someone on your team. So the task makes no sense. And although it's not at a conscious level, your brain is trying to tell you, why are we even spending time on this? And so you procrastinate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that although at a rational level,

you know you should be doing the thing, which is kind of what you were describing here, at an emotional level, it doesn't feel like it's going to be fun. It doesn't sound exciting. And so you procrastinate. And so in that case, make it fun, make it exciting.

Is it a little co-working session with a friend that you like hanging out with? Is it doing it as part of a walk? Is it going and sitting in your favorite coffee shop to do the work instead of staying at home? And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills, the right resources, the right tools in order to do the work. And in that case, raise that hand. Ask for help. Does that mean asking someone to tell you how to do it?

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for. It means that everything has been tested and cleared for harmful substances from the yarn all the way to the finished product. And they are fair trade certified. So the people actually making your sheets are being paid and treated fairly. Most people start with the signature sheet set and honestly, once you feel them, you're going to want to do the entire bed. They feel like a fancy hotel, but Maybe even better. It's made travel actually worse for me, fair warning, because my own bed at home is, like, nicer than the nicest hotels. It just feels so good. I get so excited to get into it every single night. It's time to upgrade your sleep with Bowlin Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bolandbranch.com with code Liz Moody. That's Bolandbranch, B-O-L-L-B-L-B-Range.com slash Liz Moody. Use code Liz Moody to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. Okay, let's just say a few things that I procrastinate on or other people procrastinate on. My house is a mess, but I'm tired. I don't want to clean the house, so I just lay there scrolling instead.

Cool. Head is saying probably, yeah, you want to clean your house, right? Heart says not fun. Hand, you know how to clean your house. So this is a heart problem here. How can you make it fun? So for me, it's putting music on and dancing my way through the cleaning. And I pretend that there's a camera and I'm in one of those.

old-school movies and I'm like dancing while doing the dishes and singing to myself. That's the way that I do that. Sometimes it's grabbing my partner and doing it together. And we almost make it competitive. I'm like, I'm doing the kitchen. You're doing the living room. Who can finish faster? So whatever it is that helps you make it fun. What about I have a big project that my boss is making me do and I cannot get started on it until the deadline is like right there? This one is interesting because it could be the head telling you that the project makes no sense. Sometimes your boss asks you to do something and you actually don't think this is going to help with anything and this is a waste of time.

So that would be the first question I would ask is, does it make sense at a rational level? If it doesn't, I know it's going to sound a little bit uncomfortable, but just like, I really wish we would be in a work culture where it's normal to say, hey, I've been procrastinating on this. And it's because I don't think this is the right approach. can we take 15 minutes to talk about it and see if there might be another way to achieve what you're trying to achieve that actually makes more sense. So that could be a really good way to go about it. And what if you don't feel like you're in that work environment? I think a lot of people are in jobs where they just feel like they have to produce stuff and they don't feel like they have that flexibility to push back on that.

In that case, you have to move down to the heart part and just try and make it fun. And especially if it's with a colleague where you feel safe to tell them, I hate this piece of it. I don't want to do this thing. But can you just hang out with me while I finish this? Yeah, not forcing yourself to pretend that the head is aligned and just moving on to the next one. What about procrastinating on a big dream in my life? In that case, the head wants to do it. Again, always questioning it.

Do you actually want to do it? Is that your dream? Is that a dream that you copy and paste it from other people? Or is the way you're approaching it even making sense? So you might have the dream to have a positive impact on the next generation. That's like a big dream, right? And in your head, it means that you need to become a teacher. But is that the right approach, right?

So first I would question the head. Once you're sure that, yes, actually, this is exactly what I want to do. I actually want to be a teacher. Then go to the heart. Is it because the path to becoming a teacher is actually not fun? And it feels like it's all of this work and effort to get to the point where I get to do the thing that I want to do. Well, are there other ways to teach that are different, but you can maybe get started straight away, especially in today's world, you don't necessarily need to go through

the traditional path and teaching in a school, right? You could teach online, you could create your own workshops. If you found a fun way to do it and you're still struggling, it might be the hand. Maybe you actually don't know how to produce a good teaching experience. So how can you get that knowledge. Do you need to get coached? Do you need to maybe take an online course yourself first? Do you need to talk to someone who's done it and who can tell you how they did it? So you can see how when you stop blaming yourself for procrastinating and you start asking those questions, you can actually get unstuck much more easily. There's a thought in the writing world that the way to actually produce a book is to be willing to produce something that's truly terrible at the beginning.

And I think that is different than raising your hand and saying, I don't know how to do this. I want to learn to do it better. Can somebody help me? You're actually saying, I'm just going to be bad at this. And by doing it, I'm going to learn to do it. How do we know when we might need outside help and when we might need to just give ourselves permission to be really bad at something?

And that's going to be how we're going to produce the output that we really want. We should ideally always give it a try first. So just give it a try. And then if you're actually stuck. So not you imagining that you cannot do it, but you trying to do it, realizing that you cannot do it and then getting help. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, we're going to play a little game called underrated, overrated. These are going to be common goal setting and decision-making tactics, and you're going to tell me whether you think they're underrated and overrated, and why?

Great. Smart goals. Absolutely overrated. Smart goals are a traditional approach to goal setting that assume that in order to be successful, you need to have a very, very clear idea of the goal that you want to achieve. And they're mostly used in companies as part of management frameworks. The reason why they're overrated is because a lot of people feel like if a goal cannot be reduced to this very fair framework that is measurable with corresponding KPIs, then it is not worth pursuing. How do we get over the idea that we tend to want to pursue that, which is measurable?

The thing I think about all of the time is our pursuit of wealth societally. And it's because you can say you can point to an amount and be like, oh, I have this much money. And it's so much easier to mark your life by that than I have this much love or these types of relationships or this much freedom. So how do we get over the idea that the things that are measurable are just like easier to pursue? It's very hard to do that because as you say, our entire society is really based on very measurable metrics of success. And so whether that's money, number of followers on social media or even how many friends you have. Yeah. Also, weight, I think, is a big one. Absolutely.

How strong am I is a really hard thing to measure. Although it's one of the reasons I love strength training because I'm like, oh, I lifted more this week than I did last week. So it does add this measurable amount. But like I think one of the reasons we are height on dating apps because it's measurable. Yes, absolutely. So I think first, just being aware of it, the conversations we're having right now, just reminding yourself that this number doesn't make it more important. It just makes it easier to measure and that the things that are truly. meaningful in your life, usually don't have a number that you can put on it. So you can actually

almost flip it on its head and try and focus more of your time and energy on things in your life that are more qualitative versus quantitative. So as you mentioned, you know, how you feel in your body, love and support with the people that you have around yourself, or even how you feel when you wake up in the morning. Tired. Yeah. That is actually an important signal to pay attention to you. I know. Yeah. I'll roll around in bed, though, and we'll see if that helps. Okay, the 10, 10, 10 decision-making framework. So this is the idea that when you're making a decision, think about how you're going to feel about it in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.

Underrated, I think this is actually a really good way to think about decisions. If they are important enough that you want to do that little exercise, you obviously don't want to do it for every little thing that you do. But I would apply it in areas of your life where you're trying to experiment with change. So let's say you're trying to eat healthier. for example, you could use it for every time you're grabbing a snack in the kitchen. How are you going to feel about eating this snack in 10 minutes? And, you know, it puts things in perspective where maybe in 10 minutes you're not going to

feel really good about it, but in 10 years it's going to be fine, right? Like it won't matter at all. Exactly. So if you really, really want that snack right now, just go and have the snack. It's okay, right? But if you don't really want it and you know that in 10 minutes, you're not going to feel great about it and just put it back in the fridge. Yeah, it's interesting because I thought you're going to go that way with it.

the like don't have the snack way, but it's interesting to be like, if I won't really feel that good in 10 minutes and it won't matter in 10 years, then why am I even bothering to do it? Yeah. The answer is going to be different for everyone. If you're really early in your health journey and you know you're going to feel terrible about it in 10 minutes, don't do it. But if you're a little bit further along and actually having this little cookie, maybe in 10 minutes, be like, I shouldn't have, but in 10 years, they'll be fine, then have the cookie. Or you could run an experiment and say, I don't know how I'm going to feel about it. why don't I eat it and see how I feel in 10 minutes?

Perfect. Yes. Doing a pros and cons list. Overrated. Pros and cons list are another example of tools that give us the illusion of clarity. There is absolutely nowhere you're going to be able to think about all of the pros and the cons. And there's actually research that shows that we end up listing more things in the column that already agrees with whatever we were thinking before making the list. So if you thought it was a bad idea before making the list, you will have more cons.

And if you thought it was a good idea, you will have more pros. Can't that be helpful in its own way, though, because you're like digging into this part of your psyche you might not have been consciously aware of? This is actually a really good use case that I hadn't thought about. So yes, if you want to use a pros and consist as a way to discover what you already think, then great. But if you're using it as a tool to know factually what is the correct decision, then no. What about the regret minimization framework?

So that's thinking about yourself at 80 or not. 90 or on your deathbed and then asking which choice you would regret making or not making right now. Other rated, there's a lot of research also showing that we're very, very bad at predicting how we will feel about something in the future and especially if that future is in a few decades from now. This is an exercise where you will, again, give yourself the illusion that you know you're making a decision that will make sense over the long term when there's actually no factual basis. A lot of this comes back to, we're running our experiments. we're getting more information, but we're also really making peace with that which we will not know.

Is there something that you find particularly helpful in, I don't know, coming to terms with uncertainty that's inherent to life? I am trying to picture myself when I'm 80 and the feeling I want to have is to be able to look back and think, wow, there would have been no way I could have predicted that this would be my life. I love that. Okay. New Year's resolutions. massively, massively, massively overrated. It can feel really motivating to use those kind of transitional times in our lives to set new goals. And yes, there's going to be higher motivation to set the goal,

but it doesn't mean that it's going to be easier to follow through. So many people set new year resolutions in January, but I think it's something like 80% of them who abandoned them by the second week of January. I think it would be much better if people set new year experiments. Oh, that's fun. Is there too many experiments to run at a time or could we like set an experiment a month for the year? Or like how could we approach that? It's funny because a lot of people who tend to resonate with the tiny experiments approach are highly curious. And so the first thing they want to do when they hear about it is go and run five different experiments at the same time. So I'm sorry if this is going to be a bit disappointing. But I have a role that you should only run one experiment at a time. But I have a good reason for it. The reason is that. that it's the same as with scientific experiments. If you're changing every single variable in your life at the same time,

you're going to have no idea why things are changing. It's like dirty data. Exactly. So you should only change one thing at a time, one experiment at a time. And then if you want to, yes, you can absolutely decide to run one experiment every month. What I find a little bit more helpful, though, is to do it when you need it. So anytime you feel stuck, anytime you're facing a decision where you're a bit unclear, you're not quite sure. Then ask yourself, what is the tiny experiment version of exploring the possibilities that I have in

front of me? Love it. Morning routines. Perfectly rated. Okay. So how important do you think a morning routine is? I think a morning routine is important. I think it's a really good way to start your day with the foundation that is going to help

you fill your best throughout the day. The reason why I'm saying they're neither overrated or underrated is that I think it kind of balances out. I am seeing people who go a little bit too crazy when it comes to their morning routines. And I don't think it should become something that takes you two hours and where if you miss any step in the routine that you feel crap for the rest of the day, which is something that I see people doing. And I also see other people. And I think those people, it's in reaction to the people being a little bit too crazy about their morning routines.

We say it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, which is also not true. So I think having a simple morning routine that you can stick to and that also you look forward to can be incredibly powerful. You're a neuroscientist. Can you make an argument to me why a morning routine matters for our brains? Our brains learn through repetition. And so whatever you do every single morning, your brain is going to expect. So if your brain expects you to take your phone and start scrolling every morning, then it's going to start craving this. You want your brain to start craving something good, something nourishing for the mind and for the body in the morning. This is to me the main reason why you want to have a morning routine, because whatever you do

during the morning is going to impact how you feel throughout the rest of the day. You want to crave things in the morning when you wake up that are going to be good for you for the rest of the day. Does that make sense? It does make sense. So as a neuroscientist, what is your morning routine? So I roll in bed. I roll in bed for a while I stretch and then I get out of bed. The first. The first, first thing I do is journaling every single morning. And I like doing it when I'm not fully awake because I'm not judging myself as much. I'm not trying to find solutions as much. I'm generally just taking whatever is on my mind and putting it on paper. So I make myself a cup of coffee and I sit down and I journal. I tend to try and protect at least an hour for this.

Sometimes I'm done after 15 minutes and sometimes I need the full hour. And sometimes it even happens that at one hour, there's so much that I need to process that I feel like I need a little bit longer. Are you journaling with a prompt? Are you free writing? Free writing on paper. And I bought something called a brick that I have on my fridge. And so I brick my phone for that duration of journaling. And then just getting ready, shower with music. And I kind of like dance. And I really try to basically feel good about the day that is going to happen, feeling excited, feeling curious, how you ping myself up for the day. If somebody is trying to construct their ideal morning routine,

what are some experiments that you would suggest that they run? Really anything that you see your friends or even that you see online, like a podcaster recommend, and yet you're curious about. Not because you feel like you should be doing this, but you have a feeling that maybe it could help. All of these recommendations can be turned into an experiment. And the idea again here is not to say, I have to do this because everybody is doing it.

The idea is to say, huh, I'm kind of curious. Would that work for me? And if it doesn't, that's completely fine. And if it works, then I can incorporate it in my morning routine. With the idea also that if it stops working at some point, that's okay. Maybe it was helpful in that specific moment in your life and it was supportive. Maybe not anymore. That's fine.

Yeah. I do think if you're listening to this podcast, I definitely think you should go through and say, what am I still doing that might no longer be serving me? I just think that is such a powerful practice. What about evening routines? Are those equally important? Winding down is really important. Yes.

For me, it's closing my laptop at the same time every evening. If I can close it earlier than that, this is great. But there is a limit at which I close my laptop. Then no screens after a certain time, which is not a fixed time for me, but it's making sure that I have at least an hour in between the last time I look at a screen and the time that I go to bed. if my partner is at home ensuring that we have time to catch up, even if it's 10 minutes, because it can be really easy when you're busy to just come home, finish working, and go to bed,

your roommates, basically. So trying to avoid the roommate effect. Something that I heard you say, which was a huge unlock for me, is that in the evening, we have less decision-making power because we've, like, used it up throughout the entire day. And so whatever we can do to make it so the things that we want to have happen do not require us making decisions in the evening is going to be really, really helpful. Can you speak to that? Yeah, absolutely. So we make thousands of decisions throughout the day and all of these decisions require a little bit of cognitive effort. So by the end of the day, a lot of our willpower is depleted. We really need those choices to happen almost automatically without us having to proactively make

those decisions. This is also why I think you should keep your evening routine as simple as possible, low effort and really focusing on the things that are actually important and meaningful to you. So anything that has to do with your health and like any supplements and those kind of things that you need to think about, try to do them in the morning where you have a little bit more energy. And in the evening, think about what is nurturing. Is it a good conversation? Is it a good book? I want to dive into one last topic and then we'll do a speed round.

You were recently diagnosed with ADHD. I'm curious if that's impacted how you approach goals or decision. or productivity in your own life. What's been really interesting for me getting that ADHD diagnosis is that I realized that I had actually designed a lot of things in my life around the way, I think. My career is very nonlinear. I organize my time in ways where I can switch from a project to another. Anytime I find something a little bit boring, I don't want to write anymore.

Then I have something else that I can be working on. So noticing that and now trying to do it in a more intentional way. I used to blame myself a lot for the fact that I had a hard time sticking to working on one piece of work for extended amount of times, except if I was really deeply focused on it and I loved it. And now I recognize that this is just the way I work. And so I'm optimizing for that. So the way it's really changed my relationship to work is really a lot less using willpower and discipline to make decisions, but really optimizing for having fun, being curious. And I end up doing the same amount of work, maybe even more, actually, and having a lot more fun while doing it. Is there anything that pragmatically on a day-to-hour level you're doing differently?

I have blocks that are themed. So I will spend one morning on academic research. But then within this, I can go in my tasks and do whatever feels good in that moment. I always have a bunch of open tasks. And so instead of doing what I used to try to do, which was most of the time, important task first and then I move on to the rest. I treat it more like a candy jar now and I look at the tasks and I go for the thing that feels right right now. And I know I'll get around to doing all of those different things at some point, but I'm not forcing myself to work in a linear way.

How do you think about the relationship between getting a diagnosis like ADHD or autism that can give language to this thing that you might have been feeling for a really long time and just feel like this huge sigh of relief? And I have a girlfriend where her partner just got a diagnosis like that. And now he's like, well, I don't have to try to change. Like, this is who I am. Now I know that I, he has actually ADHD and autism. And he's like, now I know. And so I'm just going to be this person and you can choose to love me or not. How do you think about the relationship between getting these diagnoses and still having the ability to change our behavior? The point of a diagnosis is that there is a challenge. There would be no diagnosis if there's no

challenge. So I think it's very important to make the distinction between there's nothing wrong. with your brain, because there is nothing wrong with your brain, but also there are challenges. And ADHD and autism actually do create challenges when it comes to work, to communication, to lots of areas of our lives, because we do live in a world where everybody has a different brain. So it doesn't actually make sense to say, this is just how my brain works and there's nothing we're going to do. We should actually try and figure out, how can we design an environment that is more supportive?

How can we build a relationship in a way that is supportive for everyone in the relationship? So yes, it's great to have the diagnosis to understand that this is how your brain works, but also your brain is not just in a vacuum. Your brain is part of relationships, part of a society. And so how can you actually make it work? And it's not always easy, but there is work to do. That work is not necessarily work that only the individual needs to do. It needs to be something that we do together.

But saying this is just the way it is, is also ignoring or trying to ignore all of the challenges that can come from having different types of brains that need to coexist together. Okay, I've got to speed round for you. What is one thing that people commonly do to be productive that you would never do knowing what you know about how the brain works? Eat the frog first. This is terrible advice. We've been told that in order to be productive, you need to take the thing that you really don't want to do and do that first. And I would say, well, maybe take a second to ask yourself, why is it you don't want to do it? What's the reason behind that?

What's the hottest take that you have about goal setting? We will all be happier if we had fewer goals. What's the hottest take that you have about decision making? It ultimately doesn't matter if the decision you're making is going to be correct in the long run or not. The only thing that matters is whether you're able to learn from the outcome. What's one thing that you wish you could say to somebody who feels stuck that maybe feels a little inappropriate? Like if you had full carte blanche to say anything, what would it be? It's okay to look stupid. You probably looked stupid many, many times during your life.

It will happen again. What's one piece of research that you've read that really changed your mind about something? For me, it's been all of the research around intolerance of uncertainty, which shows that the more we can tolerate uncertainty, the more comfortable we are in those in between spaces, the more we flourish in life. So that would mean that every time you're sitting in uncertainty, every time you're sitting in discomfort, you're building towards your best life in a way. you can kind of remind yourself of that? Absolutely. Every time I'm feeling a little bit stuck or I'm

like, oh, this is really uncomfortable. Please get me out of here. I tell myself, you're growing. You're growing. This is what it looks like. And research clearly shows that. Yes. Okay. If you couldn't say run an experiment, what is one rule that's true for almost everybody? Keep it small. Finish this sentence. People would be so much happier if they just stopped. Setting so many goals. It can be in the realm of all of this. I don't want you to say tiny experiment because I do think that we get that that's a habit that's changed your life. But what's one habit that changed your life? Dancing every day. And that could be dancing in my living room for two minutes or actually going to a dance class. But as a cognitive neuroscientist, I've been trying to solve most problems from the shoulders

up and like thinking and being in my head. So having a practice that is more in my body has been life-changing. Wasn't there some research about like dance? It's either the best thing for mental health or longevity or they like tried a bunch of things. I don't do you. It was number one. It was this piece of research where, yeah, they looked at interventions that positively impact mental health and dance was at the very top, I think. That's cool.

We always love to leave people with an action step, something that they can do the second that they turn off this podcast to begin to see real change in their own life. So I assume yours is going to be in the realm of running a tiny experiment, but I would love to get really granular on that. Like, how do we know which one to run? How do we know how long it should be? Can you help us out? The very first step before designing a tiny experiment is to observe your current situation.

So you just don't go and design a random experiment. So the very first step would be to spend 24 hours pretending to be an anthropologist in your old life. And you can do that with your phone or in a notebook, but taking little notes and really asking yourself, how am I spending my time and my energy? What do I care about? Who are the people I love spending time with? Who are the people that drain my energy and just take little notes?

no judgment, you're just observing. Based on that, you can start formulating a hypothesis. And you can use one of my favorite words in the world, which is maybe. Maybe things could be different. Maybe this could work. Maybe I could try this. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Pick one thing you're curious to explore, and then you can turn it into a tiny experiment.

For that, you want to choose one action and one duration. So choose something you're going to try for a specific duration. Keep the duration tiny for you. Again, your tiny is not necessarily my tiny. So keep it small, doable and achievable. And while you're collecting your data, while you're trying the action, you withhold judgment. You're just trying it. Just seeing what happens.

At the end of the tiny experiment, you can ask yourself, what worked? What didn't work? Do I want to do it again? Was that horrible? But now I know, great? Or do I want to tweak some of the parameters? Do I want to try again, but in a slightly different way? And that's it.

You run your first tiny experiment. Amazing. I love it. Thank you so much for this. conversation. Can you tell everybody who surely is going to want more from you where they can find you? I write a weekly news letter at nasslabs.com about a lot of the topics that we discussed today. And my book, Tiny Experiments, is available anywhere books are sold. Thank you, Annlaw. Thank you.

That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening on Apple or watching on Spotify or YouTube. You can subscribe or follow so our next episodes get sent directly to your feed. If you like this episode, leave a comment or better yet, send it to a friend, a coworker, a parent, or somebody else that you think might love it. All right, I love you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing.

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