WHOOP Podcast - What Motivates Us: Cognitive Scientist Dr. Maya Shankar on the Power of Change, Habit Formation, And Behavioral Science

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

On this week’s episode, Dr. Maya Shankar – a cognitive neuroscientist and creator and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans – sits down with VP of Performance Kristen to how to change our patterns of behavior when it comes to our health. Maya shares the secrets of staying motivated, what the fresh start effect is, and how we can handle setbacks when we're not making the progress we want towards our goals. Maya shares her story of studying violin under Itzhak Perlman (2:22), how a hand injury spurred what she calls identity foreclosure (5:41), her transition to neuroscience (8:48), how she changed her plans and found herself on her career path (10:31), what the endowment effect is (17:14), the benefits of the fresh start effect (18:22), how to think about restarting after your goals have been derailed (23:44), the best ways to cement new habits (25:29), the power of data and behavioral science (29:43), how to make good decisions (31:11), and the illusion of control (34:15).Resources:Maya's podcast, A Slight Change of PlansSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top performers and dive deep on all things human performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, we're joined by WOOP VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, and Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and creator and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans. Meyer was a senior advisor in the Obama White House where she founded and shared the first ever social and behavioral sciences team. She also served as the first behavioral science advisor, the United Nations. She has focused much of her career on observing how behavioral science insights can be used for social good. Maya and Kristen sit down to discuss behavior change as it relates to our health and they cover what motivates us and the secrets to staying motivated, how we can improve our health using tried and true behavioral science techniques,

how to balance instant gratification with longer-term goals, how framing your goals in a negative or positive light can make a difference, what gets in the way of making good decisions, what it takes to inspire change in others, what the fresh start effect is and how we can use it to our advantage, how to handle setbacks, and how to set and follow through on goals. This is really a great conversation to better understand what motivates us.

If you're a new member interested in Whoop, I've got a good offer for you. You can use the code Will. That's WI-L when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories, new bands, battery packs, Woop Body Apparel, and more. Head to join.Woop.com to get started. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Maya Shankar. today I have the tremendous opportunity to sit down with behavioral scientist and host of the wildly popular podcast, a slight change of plans, Dr. Maya Shanker. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me,

Kristen. I'm so excited for this conversation. We really want to try to get tactical to leverage all of your expertise and just the kind of science around behavior change. But before we kind of dig into that, we'd love to understand, you know, what inspired you to begin or pursue a career as a behavioral scientist? Yeah, it was not a straightforward path. I'll start there. I was trying to be this budding concert violinist as a kid. So when I was six years old, I started playing the violin. And then when I was nine, obviously the intensity really picked up when I started studying at Juilliard. And then when I was a teenager, that's when things really crystallized. And I thought maybe I will actually try to become a professional violinist.

because this was the moment where it's like Perlman asked me to be his private violin student, and that was the vote of confidence I felt I needed to really go full force ahead. For our listeners, who might not be aware of who Perlman is. Just give a quick one, too, about his background. I mean, he's the goat, as it relates to all things violent. Yeah, he's the goat. I mean, yeah, he's widely considered, you know, the best violinist of our time. He had a handful of students at the time, and I was so technically inferior to my peers.

So I'm not sure what went on. in terms of his decision-making, but I think we just had an emotional connection and we just really liked each other and we really liked this process of like creative discovery. And so I was just, yeah, so honored to be part of his studio. And then I had my own slight change of plans. Very unexpectedly, I had a sudden hand injury in which I ended up tearing tendons in my left hand and it was this long drawn-out saga because I was a teenager and I was very impatient and was like, I can beat out any injury and I'm going to play through all the pain and eventually doctors told me that I could could never play again. I was totally heartbroken because, you know,

when you're on your ascent, which is such a rare thing in life, right? And when you're really starting to feel everything's starting to gel and all the pieces coming together, it's just particularly heartbreaking to then have the cord ripped out, right? And so I was at a loss for what to do. And it took me a long time to figure out what could come next because up until that point, my identity had been almost exclusively defined by the violin. And so what ended up happening is the summer before college, I was supposed to be in China with my violin classmates touring and being in the world of music. And instead I was at home in Cheshire, Connecticut with my parents. And I was perusing their bookshelves in the basement. And my sister had a course book that she left there.

Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. And I opened that book. And I was just, you know, expecting to kind of like, you know, skin the pages, no big deal. But when I started to learn about the human mind and what it was capable of, I just was completely in awe of what I was reading. I had never before thought about our human capacity to learn and comprehend and produce language. And when I learned about just how sophisticated the cognitive machinery was that was operating behind the scenes, I think I was just enamored and could not wait to learn more. And so that's actually what got me interested in the science of human behavior and the science of change. God, that's incredible. What year were you in school at that time?

I was a senior in high school when I discovered this book. Yeah, the injury happened when I was about 15. How did you shift your perspective, I suppose, from just, okay, I'm not a violinist anymore. Like, literally, like, you're never going to be able to play again. Like, how did you, what was that next process for you? Yeah, it definitely took a while. And I think now that I've studied cognitive science, I understand better what was going on in my mind. But there's a concept in cognitive science called identity foreclosure. And it refers to the fact that we can prematurely lock ourselves into a specific identity without having been exploratory about all the other identities that we could have taken on. And I absolutely fell prey to identity foreclosure. I mean,

I was first and foremost a violinist before I was even Maya. You know, like if you found me in an airport without a strap around my shoulder with my violin case, I felt like I was missing a part of my body. And, you know, in many ways my body grew around the ergonomics of the instrument. You know, my right shoulder is slightly elevated compared to my left because I spent so many hours. in that violin position practicing. And so I did not know who I could be without the instrument. And I think the biggest realization that I had

coming out of that was I expected to mourn the loss of the violin when I first lost it. And I did not expect to mourn the loss of myself. That was my biggest discovery. And I'm sure many people who are listening to this can relate to that where you lose something, but actually because it was so, such a critical part of your identity,

you actually lose yourself in the process. And so what I learned from that experience was that I just had to see my identity as more malleable than I did before. I had to see my identity as something that could change over time that could be defined by many other things. and in case this is helpful, the particular lesson that I learned from the whole experience of losing the violin and then having to discover other passions was to try and identify the traits of the pursuits that I loved that really got me to tick and to attach my identity to those features to those traits rather than to the pursuit itself because as I learned at any moment you can lose something like the violin, you can lose your ability to be a field happy star. You can lose, you know, all of these things can feel particularly. precarious in a sense, like to attach one's full identity to things. But when I stripped away the superficial features of the violin and tried to figure out what remained when you got rid of that, what I realized was that a desire and thirst for human connection was really at the heart of what I loved about playing the violin. So I loved the fact that I could go on a stage in front of a bunch of strangers and

potentially have these incredible moments of emotional connection with people, again, that I'd never met before. And that was so intoxicating to me as a kid to be able to have that experience. And so once I realized, oh, it's human connection that makes me tick. That allowed me to develop a through line through all of my experiences. So even though it looks like I've had a very diverse set of experiences, right, it's, oh, she was a violinist, and then she was a cognitive scientist, and then she was a White House policy advisor, and then she was at the UN, and now she has a podcast, a slight change of plans, there actually is a central through line, which is each of those career steps have been motivated by this underlying love for human connection and a deep curiosity about how

it is that we as humans operate and work and connect with one another. And so for those listening who are maybe at these junctures or at these inflection points or having their own changes of plan, ask yourself what it is that made you love the thing that you used to love and then see if you can find that trait in something else that is still accessible to you. So you had, at that point, you were a senior, you had gotten into Yale, but did you expect to be playing the violin there? Did they expect you to be playing the violin there? That was my hope. I was expecting definitely to be like a music performance major. I was delighted to have been accepted at Yale because it's a New Haven, which meant it was

just, you know, a driving distance to New York. I could get to New York in an hour and a half by car and hopefully keep studying with Pearlman through my college years. And so that was the plan. And then, you know, as I mentioned, things did not go according to plan. And so now coming into college, you know, again, at a loss for what to study, I was like, should I try to be a history major? Like, I did love history in high school. I don't know what else is out there. I discovered that Yale offered this cognitive science program. And it's really fascinating this program because it's very interdisciplinary, Kristen. So you study the mind from multiple percent. So I had to take classes in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science,

and the idea is that you ask these big questions about the human mind, but you're approaching them from multiple disciplines to get a more well-rounded understanding of the human mind. And so I completely fell in love with COGSI when I was an undergrad and then ultimately ended up getting my PhD in cognitive psychology and then a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience where I ended up studying the science of decision-making and behavior. And, yeah, all of it just felt like, I mean, it was really hard work. And, you know, the grind of day-to-day research is definitely very taxing. But nothing excites me more than thinking about the brain.

So I was finding that same kind of enthusiasm and excitement that I felt for the violin. Was there a very clear career path for you, you know, as you kind of emerged from your post-doc and you've got all this knowledge, like, how did you decide what was next? Yeah, so there was a really clear career path that I did not take, which also was very disorienting. So for most people who are getting a postdoc and cognitive neuroscience, there's like one path, which is you become a professor or researcher, right? You just continue to do science. And I had this like kind of, oh, crap moment when I was a postdoc, when I was, you know, scanning people's brains and realizing that this was just not a good fit for my personality. Because as much as I loved and was so curious about human behavior, I didn't think the lab setting was the right one for me.

You know, I wanted more teamwork. I wanted more human connection. I wanted to like know about the people I was scanning before I looked into their brains and peered at their amygdalas. And so I just felt like the sequencing was off. And I remember calling my dad, who's a professor. And I looked up to and admired for so long and wanted emulate, you know, he's a professor, as I mentioned of physics. And he very much was like, Maya, you should totally change paths because given what I know about your personality, this might not be a good fit for you. And so I ended up calling my undergrad

advisor. Her name's Laurie Santos. Maybe some of your listeners have heard her podcast, The Happiness Lab, but she's been my mentor since I was 17 years old. I adore her to bitch. She's guided me at every major point in my life. So, you know, shout out to mentors everywhere for changing lives. Laurie definitely changed my life. I said, look, I'm thinking of, you know, jumping shift when it comes to this academia thing. Should I become a consultant? Like, what are my other options? And she shared this extremely compelling story about how the federal government, and in

particular the Obama administration, was using insights from behavioral science to meaningfully improve people's lives. So long story short, the government offers a school lunch program for low-income kids. And despite the fact that it was offered to millions of students, millions of students were still going hungry every single day at school. When they did a behavioral audit, I'll say, of the program, what they realized is that they identified two behavioral barriers that were preventing parents from signing up their kids for the school lunch program. The first is that it was an extremely burdensome application form. So, you know, put yourself in the shoes of a single mom

who's working three shifts to make ends meet. And we're asking her to fill out this extremely complicated form that requires referencing multiple tax documents and going to the post office at a certain day in order to get in on time. And oh, by the way, if you make a mistake, there could be a financial penalty for you and your family on the form. So be extra careful. So that was one huge burden. And then the second behavioral barrier is that there was a stigma associated with signing kids up for a public benefits program, right? Parents were working really hard and they didn't want to feel like they were depending on the government to allow their kids to eat every day. And so the government ended up using it in a very well-studied insight from behavioral science,

from behavioral economics known as the power of the default option. And they basically changed the program from an opt-in program where parents had to take an affirmative set of steps and actions in order to sign their kids up for the program to an opt-out program. And by changing it to an opt-out program, now all eligible kids were automatically enrolled in the program. And parents only had to take a proactive step if they wanted to actively unenroll their kid from the school lunch program.

And so as a result of this policy change, which essentially removed all the friction associated with getting kids access to lunch every day, 12.5 million kids were now eating lunch at school, which was incredible to hear because it's a very simple, elegant policy change, but it changed the game for all of these kids, right? It could completely change their success at school. I was so moved by this story. And I told Laurie, I was like, I want to do that. Like, that's the work I want to be doing. I want to be a practitioner of behavior. science and like leave the ivory tower and be on the ground actually trying to make some of these changes. And there was no job available. They weren't hiring for a behavioral scientist. So I had to send a bunch of cold emails to above officials and basically pitch them on the idea of creating a new position for a dedicated behavioral scientist to systematically apply these insights from our field to public policy. And eventually was able to pitch them and they created this position and thankfully they hired me to fill the role, which I started in the subsequent year. I would imagine with any kind of government type of position, you're at the mercy of the turnover.

How did you think about that? And then if you can talk about some of the projects that you took on while you're there. I was really interested in building a dedicated team of behavioral scientists because I wanted to have a lot, I wanted to see a lot more impact than what I could individually do. And so if I could create an institution in the government that could outlast my tenure, that would mean that this work was being applied well beyond whatever administrations I stayed for. But the challenge, Kristen, to your point, was I had no budget, I had no mandate to build a team, I was given no resources. And as you said, there's a lot of turnover in government too, so leadership is constantly leaving. And so what I did is I worked really closely with the

civil servants in government. So people have been working at the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, who had been there for, you know, decades. working really closely with the populations that we're trying to serve and seeing if we could generate some pilots, right, some early wins that could show and create a proof of concept that behavioral science could actually improve outcomes. And so to give you a couple of examples of what these early wins look like, I worked with my partners at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They were really eager to try and get more vests to sign up for an educational and employment benefit upon leaving active service. And as you can imagine,

that period of time is really fraught with a lot of challenges physically and psychologically as they're transitioning from military to civilian life. And so similar to the school lunch program, you know, the VA was offering this educational employment benefit, but not enough veterans were taking advantage of it. And they were very resource constraints. So the only option they had was just to tweak this one marketing message about the program, this one email message. So my teammates came in and we ended up taking. changing just one word in the email message to veterans. Instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of

service. And that one word change led to a 9% increase in access to the benefit. And it utilizes a behavioral principle called the endowment effect, which says that we value things more when we own them or in this case have earned them. Because now we have something to lose, right? This is our thing that we own. And if we don't take advantage of it, it's our thing to lose. And so That was a great example of how just this very light-touch, low-cost tweak could have a huge impact on, you know, people that we really want to health and we really care about. Do you feel like that's generalizable in terms of behavior change more broadly? Yeah, I mean, they're generalizable to some extent, right?

So they speak to an underlying bias that we might have as humans. But as is the case with anything in behavioral science, all of these insights are very context-specific. That's why we try and run experiments when, we possibly can to validate our hypotheses and make sure that the insights worked in the particular context, given the particular psychology of the population that we were serving. As you know, we've got a lot of our listeners use WOOP, our product, a physiological monitoring device to really better understand their health and the trajectory of their health. And, you know, behavior change is a big piece of that.

I would love to get your insight on kind of the fresh start effect. You know, so when you're starting something new, for example, like what, you know, what are the positive and negative impacts of that kind of a framework? And would you have a recommendation on, you know, people are starting a new effort related to their health? What would be the best framework for folks to approach that with? Yeah, I love the fresh start effect. It's created by my friend and colleague, Katie Milkman, who's a professor at the Wharton School. And the fresh start effect refers to the fact that when we have these milestone moments, or any kind of fresh start, that could be a Sunday, it could be the first day of spring,

it could be your birthday. It's a wonderful moment to seize upon when it comes to introducing behavior change into your life. And that's because there's some psychological parting between past and present, right, that feels meaningful, like a new set of behaviors that you might be willing to encourage because maybe you've left some behind. So a good example of this might be, okay, let's say you're moving apartments or you're moving to a new house. A lot of your behaviors are going to change as a result of moving to this new place, right? Your commute to work is going to change, where you go to get your coffee in the morning is going to change. Your friendship group might change. So it's fertile soil for introducing other changes because you don't

have as built in routines and habits that you're really stuck to, which can make behavior change hard. So I love seizing upon these moments because, for example, when I moved from D.C. to California, that was a nice moment for me to reset and think, okay, what are the thing that I want to encourage in my life that I'm not currently doing in my D.C. life that I can introduce as part of all of the wild changes that I endure just as a result of moving to a new location and having a new job and all of that. And so one of them was like, okay, when I get up in the morning, I really care about taking a walk, which is not something my D.C. life afforded me the opportunity to do. And as long as I put that into action very quickly upon

arriving here, that became a habit that was much more easily kept up. And so I, I, I would encourage folks to think about these fresh start moments. Again, they don't have to be as monumental as, like, moving across the country or getting married or whatnot. They can even just be, you know, your birthday. Like, as you think about, what do I want my, you know, 24th year to look like or my 47th year to look like? We do know from research that they can be powerful motivators and you can psychologically

wipe the slate clean, so to speak, as you try to introduce these new set of behaviors. Maybe talk a little bit about the process and how someone can pull that technique into their life and be more conscious about the behavior that they really want to change. Yeah, and no doubt everyone who listens to your show is inherently like motivated and ambitious to improve their lives, right? You're almost self-selecting for that population of people who's very eager to, yeah, to achieve some sort of goals, right? And I think the important thing that we want to bridge, and this is where behavioral science comes into play, is the, what we call the intention action gap. So we have all these intentions. We have all these lofty, big goals that

we have for ourselves. But acting on all the micro steps that are required to get us to that final step can be very challenging. And so what we're trying to do is break these really audacious goals like, you know, I want to run a marathon by the end of the year. I want to eat healthier or I want to get my cholesterol down or whatever it is that we want to make sure we're almost parsing it into these micro milestones, these easier steps to make sure that we're more likely to actually go from point A to point B. And so what you want to do is you absolutely want to have that abstract goal. You need to concretize it at some point. You need to actually make these concrete plans that are implemented day to day. Because ultimately, when it comes to long term goal pursuit,

what is long term goal pursuit? It is just the execution of that long term goal on any given day. It's actually like a very ordinary thing you're doing. It's committing every single day to doing a relatively small piece of that. And so it feels extraordinary at the finish line, but it can actually be very manageable if you think about it day to day. So things like temptation, bundling, things like the fresh start effect can get you started. We also know that motivation changes over the course of goal pursuit. So we know that there's at the outset of a goal, you'll see an increase in motivation. And then when you get to the middle point, there's a decrease of some kind. And your motivation wanes. And then as you're about to approach the

finish line, again, you see a boost in motivation. So one of my friends, her name is Ayelet Fishbach. She's a professor at the University of Chicago. She calls us the middle problem. Right? So she's like, let's say you have a year-long goal, there's going to be this multi-month middle stretch where you're just not feeling as high motivation as you did before. And so her advice is to actually keep the middles really short. So rather than thinking about it as a year-long project, think about it as a quarterly project. So now you're in three-month increments and you have these micro-milestones that you're trying to hit.

And now the middle is only a couple weeks versus the multi-month middle that it used to be. And so, yeah, I love the research on kind of motivational states. and how they wax and wane. And I think it's just understanding, to your earlier question, when we understand the science of human behavior and motivation and decision-making, then we can just make sure that our daily choices, the rituals we set for ourselves,

the way that we regimen our schedules, it reflects our best understanding of our pitfalls, of our human biases, of our natural tendencies, which, if not managed, might not always lead us towards that long-term goal. And what happens when we're pursuing this goal, and we're actually doing pretty well, and then like some kind of life event happens. And it knocks us

on our butts. And how do we move through that? What are some maybe techniques we can use to move through that? And how do we actually restart, you know, get ourselves back and on track? So one area where I would actually recommend is thinking about this exact situation, because I think as humans, we can tend to be all or nothing people. It's like I'm either going to the gym six days a week, but if I don't go one day, I've fallen off the wagon and to hell with the whole pursuit, right? We, we almost have this purity complex when it comes to goal pursuit. And I say this as someone who's engaged in this behavior before where I said a really audacious or ambitious goal, naturally life gets in the way of achieving the perfect version of that goal. And then I basically retreat and say, okay, this wasn't a

sustainable goal anyway. Why am I even doing this in the first place? Researchers have looked at this and they say that you should bake in what's called an emergency reserve to your goal pursuit. So I plan to go to the gym six days a week, but I'm going to give myself five days where life is going to get in the way. I'm not going to be able to achieve that goal. And that's okay because I'm going to tap into my emergency reserve for these five days. And of course, you just use whatever units make the most sense, right? Obviously, you've like lost a loved one. That's going to derail you for a very long time as you're grieving. And so you have to be reasonable about what the parameters are. But I think when we can lift the all

nothing, purity, success versus failure, mindset when it comes to goal pursuit, that can actually lead us to not even thinking about as a restart, but actually as a continuation of the goal, as a continuation of a previous state, because we actually did allow ourselves that reserve. What was the best way behaviorally to really cement new habits? Yeah, so some of the research I really love in this space comes from Angela Duckworth. These are all science guests that I've had the pleasure of interviewing on a slight change of plan. So if listeners want like deep dives on any of these topics, you will get 30 to 40 minutes of the whole treatment.

So I recommend you check out those episodes. But one thing that she talks about is self-control. And self-control is often something that we feel we're lacking in or we just don't seem to have enough of it to get us through a full day and achieve all of our goals. And so she said rather than seeing self-control is this limited resource that we're tapping into and then finally we've exhausted it, we should just set up our environments so that they don't require self-control.

Okay? so that you don't actually have to exert self-control in order to reach your goals. And that can mean changing what we call the choice architecture of your environment. So let's say you're really prone to having meetings where you're also checking your email. You're also looking at your text messages. You're also looking at WhatsApp or scrolling Instagram. You can literally set up your computer environment so that you just don't have access to any of those distractions. For example, just now, right, we're recording this on Riverside.

I made sure to pull this particular tab out into a fresh browser and to view all of my notifications so that nothing could distract me because I'm not beyond if I see like a WhatsApp message come up I'm not beyond just you know part of my brain being distracted by it and curious and so I'm not having to exert self-control in this moment with you because nothing's on offer there's no distractions on offer similarly if you wake up in the morning and you know you have a really hard time going to the gym because you have to like find your workout clothes and figure out what shoes you're going to wear and oh you also need your work clothes right after pack your bag the night before and literally leave it by the door so that there's no decision-making.

to be made in the morning. And you don't need to use any cognitive efforts to set yourself up for success. So try to figure out in your environment ways that you can subtly change things. I do the ice cream thing after dinner. Okay, well, first of all, don't buy ice cream. And then if you do buy ice cream or you buy something else like hide it somewhere or have a clear set of rules that you can use, because you just don't want to have to constantly be exerting self-control. It's exhausting, right? It's completely exhausting. It's equivalent of like, I'm not going to eat cookies, but I'm going to put the cookies in front of me for the entirety of my workday. Like, that's just painful, right?

And so, like, the metaphor here is, like, remove the cookies from the desk so that they're literally not an option. Let's talk a little bit about complexity. The more complex, the thing we're trying to do, obviously the harder, are there ways, you know, you talked about kind of breaking it down and, like, the kind of the quarterly, thinking about it quarterly, as opposed to kind of an entire year. But if we're thinking about something that going outside and walking, for the most part, in the morning isn't like super complex, but there might be something else that is a change you desire that actually involves more complexity. How does one think about that from a behavioral

standpoint? Yeah, I think the important thing is to be very clear about what your success metric is and to not get fooled by non-revealing success metrics. So for example, I'm going to spend one hour doing X is not a good metric for success because you don't know what the quality was. You don't know whether you actually achieved the goal during that period of time. And so instead you should actually be really clear, what is my goal with this project? What am I trying to produce and create benchmarks or some sort of metric that actually reflects high quality efforts? With these especially complex projects or jobs or tasks, that can be really hard to do because it's like you have lots of objectives, you have lots of goals. But if you can distill it

down to, okay, I want to work, let's say you're writing an article. Okay, it's like, I want to write this article today. I have lots of objectives. I want it to be stimulating. I want it to be intriguing. I want there to be a cliff hanger. I want to just get words on the page, whatever it is. So in any given day, you want to make sure that you articulate what your success metric will be for that day. And it can change over time, but make sure that you're using meaningful ones. Because you can get very fooled by, I put in a couple hours or, you know, I got this many words on the page, but actually maybe the number of words wasn't what you were after. And maybe it was, right? You can just define your metrics however you want. Just make sure

you're really intentional about them. And maybe that can lead into kind of just the concept of data. You know, obviously we're a data analytics company, really at our core. We value data. How do you think about that as a behavioral scientist? And how do you apply that to your work? Yeah. I mean, this is the challenging thing with data, which is we like to believe that our bodies are input output models and what we put in will be reflected in the staff that we see. And it's just never that simple. And so there are cases where you actually want to be focusing on the inputs rather than the outputs. For example, like nutrition is a good example of this, right? You might not actually see the impact reflected immediately or ever in certain blood tests or on the scale or what have

you. And so all you can really focus on reasonably is like what are the things that you're eating and are they nourishing you and are you happy with how you're eating? And so I think it can be a little dangerous sometimes to focus too much on metrics because they might not always reflect in real time the effort that you're putting in and that can be very discouraging or let's say you've done like all the sleep hiding stuff you can and you wake up in the morning and you look at your phone you're like crap and telling me I slept terribly that can cause a lot of anxiety right and so just being really patient and looking at metrics over a longer time horizon when it comes to things that necessarily take longer to express themselves like on average is this making me healthier

not today is it making me healthier tomorrow, but maybe six months from now, do I have lower blood sugar levels or do I have higher sleep quality? I think that can help allay some of the anxiety of like constant monitoring, constant checking, which can again be very discouraging. How do we make good decisions? You know, and what goes into that and what are some landmines that we need to be aware of on this path to trying to make good decisions about just our health and wellness, but just generally speaking just in life? Yeah, I mean, that's a massive question, of course, because it's basically about the human condition. And actually, in many ways, a slight change of plan.

The goal of it is to marry science and storytelling for us to understand all of the human biases that exist in our everyday lives as we're making big decisions and understand what the science can teach us about how to make better decisions, how to make smarter decisions. I'll just mention one for now, though, again, there's hundreds that we cover on the show and hundreds that are covered in the literature on behavioral science. But we really do have a present bias. We're not particularly good at envisioning our future selves or empathizing with our future selves, and we often do favor making decisions that are advantageous to us in the short term. And so what that can mean when it comes to motivation is for exactly those outcomes that do take longer to express themselves, like the ones we've been talking about more recently. It is important to try to give yourself some incentives or positive feedback that exist

in these shorter timeframes, because otherwise it's really hard. to be like, okay, I know this is better for six months from now, Maya, or 10 years from now Maya, but like, how much do I care about 10 years from now Maya? I care a lot about current day Maya, right? So it's really helpful to engage in the mental shift or either you're rewarding yourself with like fun little treats or, you know, rewards things that you enjoy along the way just to make sure that you keep yourself motivated because it's very easy to choose current day self over, over future self, especially when there's, you know, costs and there's pain to investing in your future. The other thing I would share is that we just hate

uncertainty so much. It can actually distort our decision making in ways that aren't super adaptive sometimes. So there's this really compelling research showing that people will actually feel more stressed out when they have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock than when they have a 100% chance of receiving an electric shock. We'd rather be guaranteed that something bad is going to happen than have to live with the uncertainty of the bad thing maybe or maybe not happening. And so I think we can internalize that lesson and just be mindful of ways in which our desire for control and certainty and stability prevents us from making decisions that are actually in our best interests or where if we were to calculate what we call the expected value, right? So like the likelihood that the positive thing happens is sufficiently high that you should actually, you know, plunge, take the plunge. But we just know that we do have these forces that work against us because at least for some personality types, myself included, I really really,

don't love change. It's one of the reasons I started a slight change of plans because I have so much anxiety around change. And I hate uncertainty. And certainty is very destabilizing. And so just being mindful of that as a bias. Like, is there a framework that you would advise people to, to really try to grasp on to, to move through the day a bit better, especially for those personalities you are a bit more anxious and really do struggle with just the notion of, you know, just life being really unpredictable and uncertain? There is a principle in cognitive science called the illusion of control. And that refers to the fact that we reliably overestimate our impact on outcomes, like our causal impact on how things turn out.

And I don't think that's just really a bad thing. I mean, feeling like we're agents over our own experience is what makes life really fun and enjoyable and satisfying, right? And so we don't want to rid ourselves entirely of this desire and need for control. It's what makes us motivated and gets us up every day. It's just, like you said, finding a balance between how much I actually feel I control and how much I maybe don't need to control and how much room I'll create in my life

for the unexpected, right, and to try to show curiosity towards that. I think the piece of advice I give people, again, as someone who doesn't like the uncertainty of life and can feel anxious about that, I have found that introducing a very small, stable ritual into my day has been enormously helpful. So I started this during the pandemic.

I always start off my day with a very traditional cup of Indian style, tea. So freshly cut ginger, boiled milk, cardamom, like the whole shebang. And basically without scale, I try to have this cup of tea or two every single morning because it seems like something that I am able to sustain even when life has like knocked my socks off. I would suggest to everyone that they try to identify something that, you know, even if they're traveling, even if they're grieving, it's something that they could have access to and make sure they commit to doing. Because I think what it does is it signals to your subconscious brain that even though it feels like your

world is on fire. There's at least one thing that has remained stable throughout it all. So as my husband and I were navigating, for example, last year we lost identical twin girls to a surrogacy miscarriage. And this was our second pregnancy loss with our surrogate. We were totally heartbroken. And I remember finding this out. And I forced myself to have this like cup of tea the next day, even though it felt so jarring and so incongruent with what I was feeling internally. Because I think there again was this like soothing element. to that ritual of like, you're totally distraught right now. This is such an awful thing, but like the world is still moving on and there's still

some things that are still true and can be true. But I found again, yeah, in like small moments and big that the commitment to these moments of joy, these moments of these rituals has a really therapeutic quality. Maya, this has been an incredible conversation, just wildly insightful. You know, is there anything that you, you know, want to leave our listeners with in terms of, you know, kind of how to think about behavior, anything we haven't covered? Yeah, I'll end on an uplifting note. One thing that can really increase our resilience in the face of change is seeking out what we call

awe-inspiring experiences. This can be as simple as looking at a sunset, looking at a tree, listening to a piece of music that, like, just sends you to a different place altogether. What we know from those experiences is that they kind of put our problems in perspective because they create some distance between us and our problems as we recognize our relative smallness compared to the vastness of the universe. And that can actually be really helpful. These moments of awe are not, again, that challenging to seek out. You don't have to be like an astronaut looking down on Earth. They can be in really small moments. There was a study showing that when people who were

recovering from a surgery were either in a room that faced a small tree versus another group where their window just looked onto a brick wall, those who were getting access to even a small amount of nature recovered better, had more resilience, they needed fewer medications in their recovery, and they just were better and healthier overall. And so I would just encourage folks, you know, as you're like commuting to work or you're living everyday life,

just find literally one second to appreciate something beautiful around you. Maya, thank you so much. So grateful for all of your insights today. I know our listeners are going to love it, And hopefully we get to chat again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you to Maya for coming on the WOOP podcast. As always a great job by our very own Kristen Holmes.

If you enjoyed this episode of the WIPP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. New members can use the code Will. W ILL to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories when they sign up for a new membership. All right, that's it for this week, folks.

We'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green.