The One You Feed - Why You Keep Falling Off Track—and the Tools That Help You Start Again with Katy Milkman

Starting point is 00:00:00 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. Career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, a mother who needed care. That's when I stumbled into something I now call the Stillpoint method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while doing it. So I built something I wish I'd had back then. Overwhelm is optional, tools for when you can't do less. It's an email course that fits into moments that you already have less than 10 minutes total a day.

Starting point is 00:00:34 It's not about doing less. It's about relating differently to what you do. Holiday price is $29. Check it out at one you feed.net slash overwhelm. If you encourage people to find a way to pursue their goals that they actually enjoy, they persist much longer. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.

Starting point is 00:01:12 And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Starting point is 00:01:44 One of the quietest reasons people don't change is they stop believing they can. Because they've started and they've stopped so many times that hope feels expensive. It feels painful. This is a re-release, and I'm bringing it back now because, as we think about 2026, I want this idea to be out there. Confidence isn't a personality trait. It's something you build through the right strategy and a few early wins. Katie Milkman, Wharton, Professor and Author of How to Change, shares research that surprised me, including how given advice can strengthen your own follow-through and how smart commitment devices can help when motivation wobbles.

Starting point is 00:02:25 We also talk about one of my favorite subjects. The best habits aren't brittle, they're flexible. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Katie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. These are some of my favorite kinds of conversations with scientists of how we make changes. I'm a behavior coach, so I do a lot of this type of work.

Starting point is 00:02:48 I'm a recovering heroin addict, so I've had lots of change in my life. And I just love these conversations. I loved your book, which is called How to Change. change, the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. But before we jump into the book, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. And she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he

Starting point is 00:03:24 thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandmother, he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's actually such a perfect parable for the work that I do because the research I've done, the book I've written are about the internal obstacles to change and how we can overcome them and how important it is to understand what you're up against and that the strategy you take to try to overcome the challenges you face is the key to success. And that parable highlights the importance of recognizing there's options, there's choices that if we make the right choices, if we make choices that are

Starting point is 00:04:12 strategically wise, then we'll end up with outcomes we'll be pleased with. And if we make choices that are less advisable, then we can end up in a place that won't make us as happy. Yeah, I love that. And I love the book. You really start off by saying, look, you can apply a one-size-fits-all strategy to behavior change. And there are some things that we know, some general principles that are very helpful. There's been some great books written about general principles. We've interviewed many of those authors on this show. But that if you really want to get where you want to be, you need to learn to customize your strategy for you and your life. Say a little more about that. Yeah, this is, I think, the most important thing I've learned over the course of my career

Starting point is 00:04:58 studying behavior change is that too often we look for sort of the one-size-fits-all shiny strategy that it sounds great, you know, set big audacious goals. How could you go wrong with that? That's what I need to do. And too rarely do we actually step back to diagnose what is specifically holding me back and make sure that the approach we're using is going to attack that challenge. I see this with organizations. I see it with individuals trying to create change. Too little time goes into that diagnosis phase because there's an assumption that, you know, if this method that sounds good has been proven, it will work for us too. It will work for me to. And the answer is it depends. It depends if the barriers that let it to work in one situation,

Starting point is 00:05:45 because this was a salve for that problem are also the ones you face. So that's really what I mean by that. And the book is structured around and a lot of my work is structured around trying to identify, okay, here are the most common barriers. And here's what science has to say if you're facing that challenge about what you can best do to achieve greater success. Yeah, I love that idea. And I have certainly discovered that in the work that I do with people. Again, there are some general principles we can use, but everybody is different. their emotional structure and background is different. The sorts of things that motivate them are different. The structures of their lives are very different.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Single mother with three children is a very different behavior change challenge than an 18-year-old man. Right. I mean, there are, again, commonalities that we can look at, but we've got to really look at each of those and their lives individually to know what's going to work best. Right. Absolutely. And there's sort of multiple levels of tailoring that I think are critical, including, you know, maybe both the 30-something woman and the 18-year-old man who are facing challenges, maybe what's holding them back literally is the same thing.

Starting point is 00:06:53 It's possible, right? They could both be struggling with, you know, I hate doing the thing that I need to do. It's literally towards a burden in the moment, and so I constantly delay. But what would make it less of a burden in the moment would make it a joy is going to be incredibly different for each of them, right? So it's the same barrier, but even with the insight they might need to get through it, they're going to have to apply it differently. Yep, yep.

Starting point is 00:07:16 And I'm going to use what you just said there to circle around to kind of the tail end of the book. And the tail end of the book, you talk about one of the big barriers to people is confidence. They don't believe they can change. I mean, this is, I think, one of the most common things I see is people say, well, I've just started and stopped so many times. The reason I want to go kind of tail around to that is that what we were just talking about, which is that if we can have confidence, it's in that we know our own life and we know what we like and we know some things about us and we know some things that might have worked for us in the past maybe in different situations that we have at least part of the recipe that we need and only we can provide part of that

Starting point is 00:08:00 recipe so say a little bit more about the role of confidence in our ability to change yeah i love that you jumped to confidence because i think actually this is one of my favorite chapters in the book where I focus on this research and some of my favorite insights and some of the most counterintuitive ones about what can be effective. There's a lot of evidence that if we believe we can achieve something, if we have what legendary psychologist Albert Bandura has called self-efficacy. We think, you know, I have the tools. I have the ability. We get much farther. It's part of the reason, by the way, that the placebo effect is so powerful, a well-known effect where if your doctor prescribes a sugar pill, it actually makes you better when it comes to almost just a remarkable

Starting point is 00:08:44 range of different disease states and kinds of pain because you believe it will improve your outcomes. It literally does. It has physiological benefits as well as simply changing your expectations. So our beliefs are really important. Once we recognize that, then we have to figure out how can I get myself to believe that I can change. What are the tools? What are the tactics? One of my favorite insights on this topic comes from work that was led by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and she had this great insight, and it relates to what you mentioned, which is that a lot of people know more than they appreciate about what will take to help them change. She was interviewing people who were

Starting point is 00:09:28 struggling in all different walks of life, you know, from salespeople to students, to try to understand what were commonalities in their experience, what did they know about change? And she was startled to find actually how many had really great insights when they were pushed and when she probed them for what they thought might be an effective tool for them. And she started to wonder if the way we typically encourage change and approach change when someone comes to us and tells us they're struggling might be backwards and actually harmful given what we know about the importance of confidence. Specifically, she noticed normally when someone comes to you and says, you know, this isn't going right in my life. We sort of put our arm around them. We start giving them

Starting point is 00:10:09 advice just off the cuff because we think, gosh, I must know things that'll be useful to them. That kind of unsolicited advice can actually be really demotivating. It can just reinforce the message people have already been hearing internally that they just don't have what it takes. This person who I just met and just told my story immediately thinks they know something I don't know and is going to solve my problem. Gosh, they must think I'm so foolish. She wondered if we should actually flip the script. And she thought, what if instead of offering advice when someone is struggling, we put them on a pedestal and ask them what they think would work to help someone else who's facing a similar challenge? What if we turn them into a mentor, a coach, an advisor to others in a

Starting point is 00:10:52 similar position, ask them for their own advice? Maybe that would be actually really valuable because she'd figured out they actually know a lot if they're pressed to dredge up those insights. It's going to boost their confidence to be told, I think you know something and can help others. It's going to cause them to introspect more than they would usually. And again, she knew that from her background research, that introspection would lead to great insights. And finally, once you have given coaching, advise someone else on how to change, you're going to feel hypocritical if you don't follow that advice yourself. I think it's a really brilliant formula she realized would be so. potent. Of course, there's lots of mentoring programs in the world, but normally we think of them as

Starting point is 00:11:32 helping the mentee, not the mentor. And Lauren has done a series of brilliant studies showing the mentor benefits. When I'm put in the position of advice giver, it improves my own outcomes on everything from, you know, different goals I might be working to in my personal life to student achievement. And I think that the linchpin there is largely that it boosts confidence. So we can think of lots of other ways that we might boost confidence as well. We can talk about others if you'd like, but I thought that was a good one to begin with because it's truly one of my favorites on the most counterintuitive. Yeah, as I was reading that, I was thinking very much about my experience in 12-step programs. And 12-step programs, when done right, they encourage somebody who's even a week sober to start

Starting point is 00:12:18 helping somebody who's a day sober. And I think that that's happening, right? What's happening is that person a weak sober, saying, well, here's what I did. And here's some things, here's what I think. You know, immediately they are in that role. And one of the things that I think A.A. stumbled on and was, was so right about was the reciprocal nature of help in a 12-step program. The person who was a weak sober talking to the person a day sober, they both got equal benefit. Absolutely. Right away, they saw that. They saw right away, like, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're the giver or or the receiver, you get equal benefit in this. And that was an insight, I think, that they had right and certainly was, you know, in my case, so true. I can just think to early in recovery,

Starting point is 00:13:06 the more that I talk to other people who were new coming in, the more convinced I was that, A, I knew what I was doing, B, that I was going to stay sober. I mean, it really does work. I love that example. And I do think AAA is such a powerful example of an organization that takes this principle and applies it. It hadn't been tested. proven specifically, believe it or not, that this tool was effective, even though lots of organizations were implicitly relying on it. And so that's one of the things I think is so wonderful about Lauren's work. But, you know, I think the insight is more of us and more parts of our lives, not just when it's a crisis, should be relying on the power of advice giving and recognizing

Starting point is 00:13:47 that we can do things like forming advice clubs, just, you know, even for simple life goals. other people who have similar objectives who both mentor each other and get wisdom from each other. So we've got that back and forth going. And you benefit from both sides of the equation. Yeah. I'm going to take us back around towards the front of the book a little bit. And I want to talk about one thing that most of us do recognize is indeed a common problem. If you asked people, why can't you stick with the things you want to do or why can't you make the changes you want to make? most people, they may not use this word, but they would describe this phenomenon, which is impulsivity, or as it's known, more in the literature, you know, present bias, right? So talk to me a little

Starting point is 00:14:34 bit about impulsivity, and then let's talk about what's a little counterintuitive in some of what you're saying and how we can work with impulsivity. Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics, too. So you're just sort of going from one of my favorite areas to another. Present bias is I think one of the most pernicious barriers to change. Econs speak for it. Economists call it present bias. The tendency to value whatever we'll get right now, you know, the experience we'll have right now from biting a chocolate donut, from screaming at a friend who's irritating us, you know, from driving too fast. That instant hit of gratification, we overvalue that relative to the downstream consequences, which we tend to undervalue. And this obviously has all sorts of

Starting point is 00:15:20 important implications and leads to lots of mistakes made in life if you look more globally. But it's also a major barrier to behavior change is the fact that we value so much what we're getting now and discount so much what we'll get later. Can I ask you a question about that? Yeah. The way you were just describing it, it's sort of as if I'm thinking about the current reward, I'm thinking about the possible future reward, and I'm making a decision that balances this one, right? And while that's sometimes the case where it's actually a conscious thing, so often it's not conscious. Absolutely. And I think you're headed in this direction, but I was sort of thinking, you know, how much is even recognizing we're making a choice important in the overall equation? Yeah, it's a great

Starting point is 00:16:06 question. Well, we can't be strategic if we don't start to understand the choice and if we don't start to understand the tradeoffs and recognize that we want to tip the balances in order to facilitate choices will be prouder of in the long run. So I do think recognizing you're making a choice is really key, and that's important to being able to start using some of these tactics that I'll talk about to affect positive change. But you're absolutely right. Often this choice, most of the time, I would say it's implicit rather than explicit, right? You're not, at least I'm not when I'm reaching for dessert. Maybe I feel, I might feel a little guilt, right? I mean, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't eat the whole thing and then I just eat the whole thing. But I'm not literally

Starting point is 00:16:45 thinking most of the time, like, let me calculate the probability that this will increase the difficulty of fitting into my favorite pair of G's. You know, it's not, it's not that kind of calculation, but of course, economic modeling abstracts away from all of that and just tries to capture a descriptive model of behavior. And it's descriptively shown in study after study that roughly 60% of downstream value is sort of captured in the decisions we make now, and 40% we just sort of throw right away. So we discount pretty dramatically anything in the future. As soon as I have to wait a day for it, it's worth 60% as much.

Starting point is 00:17:24 That's kind of a rough ballpark statistic. But again, this is all boiling down a very complex phenomenon to a really simple mathematical equation, which is losing a lot of richness. The simple fact remains, whether we're doing it implicitly or explicitly, that we're impulsive. And then we face a challenge, which is, okay, If we recognize that in ourselves, we want to make choices that are better, but impulsivity, the desire for instant gratification often overrides our tendency to do the things that we know will add long-term value. How do we solve for that? What can we do better? And there's really two approaches that research points to, I think, as most useful. One of them, and they're both involved changing the calculus of the choice, one of them is to try to make the behavior that you know is good for you in the long run more instantly gratifying.

Starting point is 00:18:13 So there's not attention anymore. And this is something that I yell at Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Caitlin Woolley of Cornell University, I think, have done absolutely brilliant research on showing that most of us don't get that it's important to make it fun to do whatever aligns with our long-term goals. We think I should just find the most effective way to hit my goal, right? You know, if I want to work out more and get fit, I'm going to do the toughest, most efficient workout possible.

Starting point is 00:18:39 That's how I'll get to my goal. But a small fraction of people appreciate, you know, maybe I should. do what's most fun. Maybe I should go to Zumba class with my friends and I'll really enjoy the workout and I'll burn fewer calories, say, and I'll get fit a little slower, but I'll keep doing it. And what their research has shown is those people have got it right. Yeah. If you encourage people to find a way to pursue their goals that they actually enjoy, they persist much longer. So that's, I think, a critical insight. And I've done some research on a very specific way to do that, which I call temptation bundling. And that's literally linking something you love, something you

Starting point is 00:19:11 crave with a behavior that you know is good for you in the long run to create a hook so that you'll do that chore. So for me, I'm using a lot of exercise examples and you can get away from that if you want, but at least now there's continuity. I'll go back to the gym. You could imagine only letting yourself binge watch your favorite TV show while you're on the treadmill. And now all of a sudden you're looking forward to finding out what happens next in that show while you're exercising time flies at the gym. And maybe if you feel a little guilt watching that show out of the Jim, well, now that's gone because you're not allowed to anymore. You're only getting that temptation while doing something else. You could do it with your favorite podcast and household chores,

Starting point is 00:19:47 drinking a glass of wine while cooking a meal for your family and, you know, favorite treat heading to hit the books at school. There's all these different ways you can combine temptation. But that's with a chore and that's one way we can overcome impulsivity is actually leaning into it, recognizing I just actually need to harness impulsivity so that it's pulling me in the right direction instead of the wrong one. love that for a while. I did some of that temptation bundling, like you said, where I would only allow myself to watch a certain show when I was on the treadmill, and I would do my run, and then I would be on the treadmill walking for like an additional hour. I don't want to turn

Starting point is 00:20:22 it off. I mean, I blogged. My problem became getting off the treadmill. It's a better problem than getting off the couch, at least. That speaks to its efficacy as a solution. Exactly. Exactly. That's great. I'm glad you used it yourself and found it helpful. So temptation bundling is one, you know, I love this idea that you talk about. And I think what you said there that I want to highlight is that we really underestimate how important this is to try and make what we're doing fun. It's why I feel like my exercise life has been a history of like 40 different types of fitness over the last 20 years. It's because after I get bored, I'm like, well, what can I do? Oh, boxing. That sounds fun. Currently, it's rock climbing. You know, but I'm always looking for how can I do this, move my body in a way that I enjoy and find stimulating and fun. And I think, you know, asking ourselves those questions around everything we're trying to do is really helpful. How do we make this better? The other thing that I found, and I wonder if you can speak to this either in the literature or your experience, is if we can't quite get to making the activity

Starting point is 00:21:32 itself enjoyable. Can we bring the reward in as close to the event as possible? And so for me, what I've done with exercise is it's gone from being something that I'm like, well, it will help me when I'm 60, which is true. And it makes me look better if I do it consistently, which is true, to the very concrete, I feel better immediately when I'm done. I feel better in my body right now. So I'm not waiting on a reward that I have to visualize a month, three months, three years, ten years. I've at least brought it in closer. Are there studies that talk about ways to do that? Yes, absolutely. There's a couple of things that come to mind. One is just actually, and the importance when we have a big goal of breaking it into subgoals so that we can see progress more clearly. So for instance, if you have the big goal of getting fit, then breaking that down into sort of, you know, well, then I want to go to the gym three times a week.

Starting point is 00:22:29 week or, you know, you can break it down in different ways. That becomes more useful for a number of reasons that's more concrete. You have a plan, et cetera. But one of them is that you start to see progress and you can give yourself a pat on the back for those sub-goals that you've achieved. Instead of having to wait for the reward, you'll feel when you get to the end of the super goal. Another thing, though, that I think is related, which is sort of wrapping paper, just like this goal achievement, hurrah, is wrapping paper, is gamification. And so there's research suggesting that some of the bells and whistles of gamification, like being able to collect points and move up to another level if you're achieving more or, you know, see a streak, get a badge, get a star,

Starting point is 00:23:09 those things, especially when it's something we're intrinsically motivated to do. It's a little different when an employer is trying to use these and it feels like a coercion tactic to get us to change our behavior. But if we are interested in changing this behavior, I want to exercise more. I want to learn a foreign language on my own time. I want to meditate more regularly. And And we're struggling to feel those milestones on a daily basis are meaningful. Then these kinds of gamification bells and whistles do seem to actually motivate us. And there's this wonderful study I talk about in the book about Wikipedia volunteers who are obviously very intrinsically motivated to be getting on Wikipedia, editing, adding their knowledge and improving this encyclopedia. But a lot churn, so meaning they join the platform, they start editing, and then they decide, well, you know, yes, I'm intrinsically motivated.

Starting point is 00:23:58 to do this, but it's a little bit of work to edit an encyclopedia, and maybe I'll do something else that's even more fun in the moment. Interestingly, in one randomized controlled trial led by UCLA's Jana Gallus, just giving people a small award, like a star, an Edel vice flower. In this case, it was a study she did in Switzerland to acknowledge their contributions. She randomly assigned some people to get that acknowledgement, others who were doing equal work, didn't. They didn't learn that Others had gotten it. That's a really important component, right? So they weren't like, oh, no, I lost out. It was just some people were alerted that there was a special thing and they'd gotten it and others never learned there was such a thing in the first place. Getting that little

Starting point is 00:24:38 reward, that little sort of pat on the back, a tiny bit of gamification increased how much time they spent on the platform for up to a year later and pretty substantially. So I think that's another important thing we can think about some forms of gamification, even small tokens that we give ourselves or others who are trying to encourage can help bring rewards forward and make us stay more engaged with the things that have mostly long-term benefits. When you run a small business, hiring is one of those things you need to do, but never actually have time for. For us, it always takes longer than we think, and another week slips by without the help we needed. And that's why LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant is so valuable.

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Starting point is 00:26:53 Book a visit now at 905.947. 999 or at amica.ca.ca.ca slash unionaville. This makes me think of a area of discussion in behavior change about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. There's this basic idea that intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation. And by intrinsic, I mean you do the thing because you simply want to do the thing. and that extrinsic motivation, getting an award, being recognized, all these other things is less good and can actually be harmful to people who are intrinsically motivated. And I think that's a superficial reading of the science.

Starting point is 00:27:39 So from your perspective, and this may be too broad of a question, but I'm wondering if you could speak to how we combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in wise ways so that we're getting the best of both. I love that you ask that question. And actually, I want to also take a moment to say that I think there's been some misunderstanding of the literature on what's called intrinsic motivation crowd out. I think a couple of books have written about this idea. It's gotten very widely believed that if you add an extrinsic reward, like cash payment for something, suddenly it crowds out intrinsic motivation. And if that cash reward is removed, people won't actually want to keep doing it because they've relabeled. I wasn't doing it for myself. I was doing it for the

Starting point is 00:28:23 money. There is almost no evidence that that's real. So there's one really good study with kids who didn't really know yet whether or not puzzles they were doing were something that was work or fun. And when they get paid, that signals to them, okay, I get it. It's work. Kids weren't getting paid. You know, they're getting stickers or little rewards. And that was very clear. When there's ambiguity, and you really don't know why. am I doing this, which is rarely the case as adults, I think. Then there's some evidence in child development studies that it can be harmful to add bells and whistles in these extrinsic motivators. That's really the only finding that points to this outside of a laboratory

Starting point is 00:29:05 environment. And there's a really interesting study by UChicago's Oleg Arminski that came out recently that points to a potential reason that we've mixed things up and that when we look at behavior in the field, out in the wild, instead of in like survey studies with undergraduate. We almost never see any evidence of this intrinsic motivation crowd out from incentives. And yet psychologists are sort of obsessed with the idea because they sometimes think they find it in the lab. What he thinks is going on is if I pay you a lot to do something in a really controlled laboratory environment, you do a lot of it because, wow, you're getting rewarded. And then you get tired.

Starting point is 00:29:40 And so then I take away the rewards and you tend to be more tired than the person who wasn't rewarded. So for a little while, you actually don't get quite as much done because you're so exhausted. But then if you, you know, watch for long enough, you kind of pick back up and you catch up because you get through that exhaustion. So he thinks it's just a burnout effect in the lab. We don't see it in the field. So anyway, that was a long tangent. But I do think it's really important because I think there's this common misconception that if I add bells and whistles, if I'm not doing it for the purest of reasons, if I'm not doing it for the purest of reasons. if there's money attached to it, it's going to ruin this sort of beautiful balance and I'm

Starting point is 00:30:14 not going to do it for the right reasons anymore. And happily, we can, it seems, actually add the bells and whistles, you know, link the exercise with the TV watching, give ourselves badges and stars, and still be just as motivated on the other end for almost all of these behaviors that we care about because they're the ones that we're intrinsically motivated to do. And we don't have to worry about that nasty side effect that has been, I think, overblown. Oh, thank you. That's very good to hear. It's always seemed common sense to me, and I know common sense is not always a good indicator in human behavior. Not always, but very often. Common sense, maybe when you get to quantum physics is no good. But it's always seemed to me that

Starting point is 00:30:59 if you can stack incentives, that seems positive. It seems to be the more reasons I have to do something. Like, I work out because, A, I feel better right away. B, I get a fancy badge. C, I'm going to be healthy when I'm 65. D, my girlfriend likes the way I look. Like, all those, like, seems to me and in my life have always been helpful to make something more lasting. I feel like the more motivations I have the better versus trying to, as you've said, seems very strange to pare it down to only the pure one. I couldn't agree more. I guess the one, like, bit of subtle I would add to that is that, unfortunately, it does seem like not always are the benefits additive when we layer on 27 different things. They aren't just purely the sum of their parts

Starting point is 00:31:46 because sometimes you have decreasing marginal returns. Say, if you're already, if you're already pretty motivated and motivation isn't your biggest barrier, it's say time, you know, you just don't have time. So you just like keep layering on the extra reasons to be motivated, but you haven't solved the underlying problem. You're going to start hitting a wall on how much value you get out of it. So I do think one of the most useful things to think about when we're trying to, you know, throw the whole kit and caboodle at a problem is the more diversity we deploy in terms of the parts of the problem, which is almost always multiply determined that we solve, as opposed to trying to just solve one part of it really, really well with a bunch of

Starting point is 00:32:26 different tools, that diversity seems to add more value than throwing everything at one element of the problem. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It's why I've always loved BJ Fogg's behavior change model. I don't know if you're familiar with it. What I like about it is it talks about prompts, it talks about motivation, it talks about ability. It really just makes it clear like you've got to work on all these different areas. And I think that's the other thing that your book does really, really well is it points out, you know, again, you've got to look for where is your weakness. If your problem is not motivation to your point that you just made, adding more motivation is not going to get you the result.

Starting point is 00:33:05 because that's not where your problem is. Well, B.J. Fogg certainly has a lot of common sense. And as you said, I think common sense is a really important part of this equation. It's not we need sort of a combination of common sense and science guiding us in this domain. Oh, boy, that makes me want to completely redirect this conversation. But I'm not going to do it. I'm going to resist the temptation. I'm going to resist the impulsivity to ask a ton of questions about that because I want to stay focused on your work, not someone else's work.

Starting point is 00:33:33 Let's talk about, we've sort of hit on this a little bit by talking about adding these other devices. But in your chapter on procrastination, you talk a lot about commitment devices. And I'd like to talk about commitment devices because I love the idea. But I particularly want to start there with the discussion you have about people who are either sophisticates or naifs. I don't know if I'm saying that word right. I would never have known either, except for having taken a class where someone else pronounced it and I assume they were right. They say naifs. Naifs.

Starting point is 00:34:04 Okay. Thank you for that. But we now may all be wrong. I've often remarked that as somebody who did way more reading than anything else and still does more than I listen to podcasts, more than I see video, every once in a while when I'm doing this show, I come across a word that I've read that I feel very confident in it. But I'm like, I have never heard it spoken before. How on earth do you say that? I have the same thing all the time. And anyway, we have some famous examples in my family.

Starting point is 00:34:32 my favorite is my grandmother said placebo instead of placebo and actually just this week my dad was talking about an emeritus professor and I was like do you mean emeritus which is what you call a professor after they retire anyway there you go there's some classic examples so naifs versus naifs as I said it let's talk about sophisticates and naifs I think this is such a fascinating topic and And I should note that I'm borrowing from Matt Rabin and Ted O'Donohue of Harvard and Cornell, respectively, who wrote about this in an economics journal 20 some years ago. And I think the idea is just so interesting and important. What they noted is that pretty much everybody, I'm sure there's some weird example we could

Starting point is 00:35:20 find somewhere in the world, but pretty much all of us are present bias, right? We've talked about present bias. We all overweight the now and underweight the later. But we have different degrees of awareness of this problem. And by the way, I think we could extend this from talking about present bias to other barriers to change and other limitations of the human mind. But present bias was the topic they were interested in. And so those of us who are aware of our present bias and interested in fixing it, like taking

Starting point is 00:35:48 steps to actually resolve the conflicts that arise so that we make good decisions. So we save for retirement so we don't smoke so that we, you know, stay fit. and healthy and don't have awful arguments with loved ones that could be avoided. We're sophisticated. So everybody listening, you're officially sophisticated. You should feel really good about yourselves. But that there is a subset of people who, while they still are subject to this bias, this present bias, they're still impulsive.

Starting point is 00:36:15 They don't recognize it in themselves. They have more of an expectation that the next time will be different. You know, the next time I won't eat the whole Ben and Jerry's pint that I put in the refrigerator, one sitting. be able to resist that temptation the next time I won't scream at my kid. So they're not looking for ways to solve for inevitable present bias. They're just, you know, hoping for better in the future naively. What's really interesting about this is as soon as we recognize that at least some subset of the population, probably a decent subset, everyone on this, listening to this podcast, has some

Starting point is 00:36:49 sophistication. That sets us up to think about, okay, well, what will a sophisticate do? What will a sophisticated value to get around these problems. You know, they're going to be looking for solutions to present bias and actually want to create constraints on themselves to help provide a higher probability of a good outcome in the future. So we're very used to society, you know, our manager at work, our parent, our government, creating structures that set us up to succeed in the face of temptation that sort of slap our hand if we do the wrong thing. So the incentives are aligned to do the right thing. So think about like speeding tickets, for instance, right? We all might be tempted to speed. It's not really good for us. It's certainly not good for others if we do because there's

Starting point is 00:37:32 this risk it imposes. But we might be tempted to do it, but we know we'll get slapped on the hand because there's a constraint. You're going to get a speeding ticket if you get caught. So a sophisticate is going to look to set up the same kind of structure on themselves that government has set up with speeding tickets. Look for a way to prevent themselves in the future from giving into temptation and will be interested in things like a bank account that you can't take money out of until you've reached a predetermined savings goal. That would be interesting to a sophisticate. To someone else, they'd say you'd better give me a higher interest rate if you're going to not let me at my money, but someone who recognizes they might be tempted to take money

Starting point is 00:38:09 out early may say, I would love a bank account that I can't get into until I've reached a goal. That sounds great. It's going to help me. So you'd start seeing products pop up. That's the prediction of their model that cater to people eager for this kind of commitment. Another product famously predicted by this model that, of course, it does exist in many states, is gambling self-exclusion lists. People can sign themselves up to not be allowed into casinos if they know they have a challenge with gambling and, you know, to be walked off their premises. And that's a very funny thing.

Starting point is 00:38:42 Why would you want to prevent yourself from going in? Well, because you're sophisticated. You know you have a problem and you want that temptation to be taken away. There's a drug you can take called antibuse that alcoholics sometimes choose to take that makes you nauseous at the smell of alcohol, vomit if you have a sip. Why would you do that? Well, because you recognize you might be tempted to start drinking if you haven't and you want to prevent your future self from giving into that temptation. So commitment devices are tools that sophisticates find appealing that anyone else would look askance and say, why would you do that? Why would you take something that's going to make you vomit?

Starting point is 00:39:15 Why would you restrict your access to a gambling establishment that's just giving you. yourself less places to have fun, right? Why would you do these things? But a sophisticate has a rationale. So commitment devices are really powerful. I think we underuse them. And my favorite kind is just a really simple cash commitment device where you can penalize yourself with money if you don't achieve your goals. And there are various websites where you can put money on the line that you'll forfeit and declare a referee who will hold you accountable for achieving those goals. And they work. So there's a great study actually on smoking showing that when people who wanted to quit smoking randomly assigned to one of two groups. One gets sort of the traditional here are the tools for

Starting point is 00:39:53 quitting. Another gets those tools plus is told you can put money into this account, your own money for the next six months. As much as you want, if you fail in nicotine or cotanine urine test, then in six months, though, that money is going to just disappear. We're going to take it away. And having just access to that opportunity to put money on the line that they would forfeit if they didn't achieve their goal, help people quit smoking. They quit at a 30% higher rate in that group than in the group that only had traditional tactics. So that's where sophisticated and naive's lead. I think it's a really valuable insight.

Starting point is 00:40:28 And the more sophisticated we can get, the more strategic we can get, the more we can recognize we can manage ourselves and help ourselves succeed when we face present bias by building some constraints and incentives that align with our long-term goals, the better off will be.

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Starting point is 00:41:57 We're tackling myths and misinformation so people living with diabetes don't experience blame and shame. Because diabetes isn't simple, it's complex and relentless. Every day, more than 4 million Canadians living with diabetes show incredible resilience. Let's match their resilience with understanding and support. win the movement at diabetes.ca slash change the conversation. As you said, if you are a sophisticate, you should intentionally lead yourself to commitment devices. And yet, given how many people actually do, leads to the conclusion that we may be

Starting point is 00:42:34 more naive than we think we are. I think that's right. Well, there's something in between two, which is, I know I have these challenges. I know they're real. But maybe I don't think I need this strong of a commitment. Maybe I think if I just tell my friends I'm going to do it. Maybe if I just post on social media, that's enough that we aren't willing to put the teeth, the incentives behind it maybe at as higher rate as we should, given the huge added benefit of making those kinds of hard commitments because backing out is tougher when it's a hard commitment. I think we over-rely on soft commitments tools like shame where we, you know, tell other people and then we're embarrassed that we didn't follow through, and maybe not often enough do we plonk down $10,000 that'll

Starting point is 00:43:18 go to a charitable organization we hate our life savings if we don't achieve a goal. And, you know, of course, that could have really bad consequences. Right. You may not be that committed. You might not be committed enough that's a good idea, actually. It depends how important this goal is. Exactly. I think it points to the two things you talked about there. I think one is that I'm not yet certain of how much support I need. You know, and then the other being, I'm not that. committed yet. I think that first point is a really important one, because I have seen this over and over in recovery from addiction, which is that it to me sometimes seems like, I don't know that the nature of behavior change science would support this, which is how do we get

Starting point is 00:44:00 better at changing over time as we've tried to change something multiple times. I've seen this in, again, this is anecdotal watching people in recovery and also working with people in coaching is that in recovery, I think for me, I came in and I was like, all right, this is a problem. Clearly, I've got a problem. I'm going to do this thing. It seems like a pretty big step. And then I do that thing and maybe it works for a little while, doesn't work for very long, whatever. I have some mixed degree of success, which then leads me to go, oh, well, maybe I need to do a little bit more. And then the next time I realize I need to do a little bit more. And so it sometimes seems that the process of trying to change can lead us from a naive to a

Starting point is 00:44:40 sophisticate, right? Where we realize over time, like, oh, I thought this was going to be easier to solve than it is. I need more support. I need more help. Whether it's commitment devices, whether it's external people helping us. Is there anything in the science that sort of talks about this, we get better at making the change the more we try it? Yeah, it's a wonderful question. There is certainly evidence of learning around so many settings and change, I think, is no different than many others where experience builds wisdom and better outcomes. I'm trying to think of specific examples that I can point to where we have sort of large longitudinal studies and see people achieving better outcomes over life.

Starting point is 00:45:21 There's certainly evidence that with age, many temptations aren't as alluring, right? And so, you know, and just like thinking about research on adolescence. Of course, there's other things going on there, too, besides wisdom. literally your prefrontal cortex is not fully formed. It's my friend, Angela Duckworth, who actually has some training in this area, likes to remind me until you're like 25, which is mind-boggling, but also helps me understand college better and all the things that I did wrong. And all the things going on for my students.

Starting point is 00:45:56 Anyway, so there's wisdom, there's prefrontal cortex development. It's a little bit compounded. But we do know that with age, we see better outcomes than so many walks of life. and in general that there are strong learning effects from experience. So I resonate very strongly with everything you just said. You said something really important about the nature of change that I just want to double click on, which is it's not a linear. If anyone expects, I'm going to decide I will make a change.

Starting point is 00:46:24 I will deploy a tactic that is science-backed, maybe from Katie's book. And then I will get straight to the finish line. They're going to be sorely disappointed because the nature of change, as you said is, you know, maybe you like make a little progress. Then you stumble. You need something else. You need something more. This wasn't quite right. You need to adjust. Change is really hard. Even with all the best science available at your fingertips, even when you know everything there is to know, you know, human nature is working against us in a lot of ways. And there's going to be missteps and it's not always just up to you. You're embedded in a social context. There's temptations

Starting point is 00:46:56 that come up that truly may be impossible for a human to resist sometimes. You're going to make mistakes. And so recognizing that, being forgiving to yourself and being ready to step back up to the plate, one of my favorite things that I've studied is the concept of fresh start that there are moments in life when we're more motivated to make change. And they're actually new beginnings, moments that signal new beginnings. But one of the coolest things about them, that may sound intuitive. And you might say, like, yeah, I know, I make New Year's resolutions. One of the coolest things we've found is they come up really frequently. Like every Monday is a fresh start. And it comes with this renewed optimism in a sense that, okay, last week I didn't do it. But this week, I'm more likely

Starting point is 00:47:36 to be able to. Every time we can, even a small chapter break in life gives us that renewed optimism. And I'm really glad we have that because there are all these stumbles. I think it's probably really adaptive to be built with this resilience that shows us a new opportunity and the ability to give ourselves a clean slate. And we need to do that, I think, even more often than we do naturally. I couldn't agree more. I say to coaching clients all the time, like, you're going to get off track. The question is just when and how are we going to respond and how long will you be off track? And I think with myself and things that I try and do very regularly, I still get off track. It's just that my degree of variance is smaller. It's instead of being off track for a week,

Starting point is 00:48:16 a month, six months, it's like I'm off track for a day or two and then I'm back on. And those things sort of come out. They're sort of rounding errors in the long run. But I think you see, speak to something that I kind of want to emphasize here that you emphasize in the book, which is that we need to keep working on behavior change. There's an idea we have. I think it's why habits sell so well, because there's an idea that if I can form a habit, then I will never have to think of this thing again, and it will be solved, and it will be on autopilot. And it seems that while some things may be that way, things that are very small, like brushing my teeth perhaps, bigger things like move my body for 45 minutes, five days a week, those things, while

Starting point is 00:49:03 I think habits are very helpful and make it easier, you talk very much in the book and I think it's so important that in a life that isn't predictable and routine, building a set it and forget it habit forever just isn't going to happen. And if we think it is, we actually can hinder our change. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, I love that you brought that up. We did this research actually trying to create exercise habits with about 2,500 Google employees. They all wanted to kickstart a lasting workout habit. And we tested two tactics for doing that, sort of competing hypotheses about the best way to help set someone up for a long-term change. We basically had a month to kickstart this habit, and then we were going to look and see what happened after the

Starting point is 00:49:46 month was over. So with different reward schemes, we got both groups to exercise at the same. same frequency, but one group went in a more consistent fashion, meaning their workouts were more likely to be always at the same time. So actually, in this particular group, 85% of their workouts were at the same time. So they maybe pick 7 a.m., that's when I go to the gym, and 85% of their workouts over this month were at that time. The other group, they go at the same frequency, but they mix up the timing more. So in that case, 50% of their workouts only were at that sort of ideal time for them, say 7 a.m. So the question is, which of those groups, right, has a more sustained habit. Will it be the people who've built this really consistent routine? Or will it be the

Starting point is 00:50:25 people who've been more flexible in the way they approached habit formation? And 80% of psychologists at top universities who we surveyed and asked to make a prediction said, it's the routine. You want that consistent cue, the consistent time. It's what we thought too. And when we dug into the data, we were surprised to find we were wrong. It was actually the group that had formed a more flexible habit. And when we looked at why, like, how could this be that those people who were less consistent in the way that they exercised ended up going more often after this month long period, this sort of kickstart period, were out of their hair, they're on their own, they just had formed this lasting habit around exercise. What we saw was that the people who'd been

Starting point is 00:51:04 so routine had really brittle habits. So if it's a 7 a.m. exerciser, that was what they'd gotten used to. They're still going at 7 a.m. a decent frequency, but if they ever miss their 7 a.m. workout, that's it. They don't go. There's no hope for them. The folks who were more flexible, who were, say, a 7 a.m. normal workout person, they still go at 7 a.m. in a. pretty decent clip, actually. But when they miss 7 a.m., they have a fallback plan because they've built flexibility into their routine. So, okay, 7 a.m. didn't happen, but I'll go at noon or I'll go at 5. And that led to more consistency in their actual exercise habit. because they understood life throws you curveballs and they were prepared for it,

Starting point is 00:51:44 whereas these other folks had these rigid, brittle habits that weren't robust to life, frankly. And I think it's just a really important lesson in general about the fact that our environments are not certain. They are not stable. And we need to have flexibility built in when we're trying to create something that will be sustained and have recovery plans when the first best option doesn't pan out. Yeah, I think that's so true. I always say to clients, to build any sort of. of behavior that lasts over time. You need a particular blend of stubbornness and flexibility.

Starting point is 00:52:15 Like there has to be a certain stubbornness. Like, I'm going to do this. Right. And no matter what habit, as opposed to an only if habit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you've got to be really flexible in how it happens. Particularly, again, this gets to the nature of different people's lives, kind of taking us back to the beginning. A 19-year-old male may be able to structure his environment in such a way that he can make it to the gym most every day at 7 a.m. A single mother of three children, on the other hand, almost assuredly is going to have interruptions to whatever routine she sets up. And so, you know, knowing the nature of your life and your circumstances speaks a little bit also, I think, to which type of routine works better for you. Yes. No, that almost certainly has to be true.

Starting point is 00:52:59 I will say we couldn't identify the single mothers and 18-year-old men in our study well enough to prove that. We actually did want to see, are there sort of different job types that have more or less flexibility and where we would maybe see a reversal of this pattern? And at least among the Google employees in our study, there wasn't enough variability. We never saw a reversal. But it almost has to be true that at some extreme in the life that's truly really, really rigid, that you might expect those consistent routines could have a different impact. Yeah. Well, I think the other thing, and I know we've got to wrap up here in a second, so I'm going to just, this will kind of be our last piece.

Starting point is 00:53:37 I think the other nuance to that and why behavior people were confused by this study is that I think when we're trying to start something and absent other motivation, and this study you did had motivation that I think rewarded people to make it to the gym. So when you're trying to start something and with different motivations,

Starting point is 00:53:58 in general, you're going to have more success if you're specific about what you're going to do, when, but you have to evolve from that into the flexibility. So specificity, at least seems to me, a good starting tool. Absolutely. But then you've got to evolve into being flexible. And to be fair, actually, everyone in both groups in the study had a plan around their ideal time to exercise, got reminders at that ideal time. And it was just a question of basically how much sort of pressure was put on always doing it at that ideal time versus sometimes doing it at that ideal time, but having other times they tried as well. So absolutely, this is in no way an indictment

Starting point is 00:54:36 of the importance of planning. And I am such a fan of planning. And if you read my book, you'll discover an entire chapter devoted to that. Yes. It's really important. But as you said, after the plan, you need a backup plan, really. Yep. And we have jumped around a lot. The book is wonderful. I mean, I just found it really brought a lot of different studies together in a really helpful way. So I'd encourage listeners to check it out. And Katie, thank you so much for taken the time to come on. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me. This has been tremendously fun. I really appreciate the invitation. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it

Starting point is 00:55:16 with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

The One You Feed - Why You Keep Falling Off Track—and the Tools That Help You Start Again with Katy Milkman

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