Winning the Battle Against Yourself  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: Winning the Battle Against Yourself - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/79726e90-9c76-42f7-8a5f-78a9aeaf8b6c ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Value System Prioritizes Now** - Our brains run a value system that computes subjective value and often prioritizes immediate rewards over long-term goals. - That system reduces complex trade-offs into quick "would you rather" choices favoring vivid, nearby benefits. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam A will, there's a way. Most of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet something odd and discouraging often happens when we set out to lose weight or exercise more or save money. Somehow we end up polishing off that pint of ice cream in the freezer or skipping our session at the gym or once again spending more than our budget allows. It's not what we set out to do, but it seems as if we are not the ones in charge. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how we make choices and how we can initiate change in our lives. Emily Falk, welcome to Hidden Brain. Emily Falk Thank you so much for having me. Shankar Vendantam Emily, I understand that you recently made a promise to yourself about what you would eat at a graduation ceremony that featured many desserts at the buffet. What was the promise you made to yourself? Emily Falk Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many ([Time 0:04:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f55112e-a452-42bf-8d8e-8af2ef30e787)) - **Dessert Resolution Defeated** - Emily planned to taste many desserts then eat only her favorite, but later ate a big milkshake she promised to avoid. - The immediate pleasure and situational cues overrode her prior resolution. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam What was the promise you made to yourself? Emily Falk Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many desserts that looked delicious. And I was very curious, so I wanted to try all of them. But I knew of course that if I ate many different desserts I would not feel amazing afterwards. So I decided that I was going to get one of each of them, try each one, and then eat the full thing from the one I liked the best. I went and I sat down and I did try each of them and it turned out that they were delicious. I was also in a ceremony that was about an hour long and they were just there in front of me. And so in the moment, it went well in the sense that I had many desserts in front of me and a lot of time. So I ate them and that was really fun for a little while until it wasn't. Shankar Vendantam When Emily got home, she swore to her partner Brett that she was only going to eat healthy foods the rest of the day. Oh, man. Emily Falk Well, I went and I lay down on the couch, and I said, I am so sugared up. I am not going to eat any more sugar today. Shankar Vendantam And what happened? Emily Falk I'm a little embarrassed to tell you what happened. What happened was that evening we went out to dinner with my grandma Bev. And there's a diner in her building called Little Pete's. And we went there and had what my kids considered to be probably the ideal meal, including things like, you know, a griddled grilled cheese and waffles and things that you get at a diner. And at dessert time, the kids said they wanted a milkshake. And my kid Emmett asked the waiter, how big is the milkshake? And the waiter said, it's pretty big. And so I said, why don't you guys split the milkshake? So they agreed to that deal. And the waiter brought out two fairly sizable glasses full of milkshake, which I assumed was half in each glass. But no, he also had one of those large metal containers like you get at a soda fountain. And he handed it to me and that contained just as much milkshake. So he gave me this enormous milkshake. And basically, what was I going to do, right? Like I didn't want to sugar my kids up anymore. Milkshakes are delicious. So despite the fact that directly before coming to this dinner, I had just said to Brett and my kids, I am not going to eat any more sugar today. I am just going to detox and eat all the green vegetables and feel amazing later. ([Time 0:05:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd40c378-5b95-4ca1-bf55-1d092a5c9e9c)) - **Future Rewards Are Less Vivid** - Long-term goals feel abstract and psychologically distant, so the value system underweights them relative to vivid immediate rewards. - Vividness and temporal proximity tilt choices toward short-term gratifications. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam So you raised something really important here just now, which is that the value system is really focused on the here and now. So when Emily says, I don't want to eat too much dessert or too much sugar because that's not going to be good for me in the long run, but then Emily is confronting three delicious desserts That are sitting in front of her on the table, the value system has to make a judgment and it has to prioritize either the short term or the long term. Emily Falk Exactly. So when I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to eat the delicious dessert that's sitting in front of me, the short term reward of how delicious it's going to taste is more salient, that Weighs more heavily in that value calculation than the long term consequence if I do that over and over again over the course of years or even how I'm going to feel tomorrow or later this Evening. Shankar Vendantam And you can see how this works in all kinds of different ways. If I'm making a choice between buying some expensive gizmo or saving for my retirement, the expensive gizmo gives me a joy and a pleasure in the here and now, and saving for retirement Is a very far-off benefit. Right. Emily Falk Not only is it far off, but it's less vivid, right? I can totally imagine how much fun it's going to be to play with that toy right here that's in front of me, whereas who knows what kind of toys are going to be available during my retirement. ([Time 0:19:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/83ad3ea8-9d1e-42e3-b9e1-92560f766676)) - **Social Signals Shape Preferences** - A social relevance system tracks others' thoughts and behaviors and powerfully shapes our own preferences. - Social signals can override private intentions without conscious awareness. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Emily, that we make ourselves vulnerable to losing control of our behavior is that we think of ourselves as independent, autonomous agents. But you say the brain is exquisitely sensitive to what other people think and do by what you call the social relevance system. What is this, Emily? Emily Falk Yeah, the social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel. And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system or a mentalizing system that helps us think about other people's thoughts and feelings. And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people. And it also shapes the decisions that we make. Like it keeps us aligned with other people. It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things like maybe diluting us into resharing a false social media post. ([Time 0:24:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/460ff804-5ca3-4651-8dd4-c7122d79f34e)) - **Swayed By Cumberbatch Hype** - Emily went from indifferent to charmed by Benedict Cumberbatch after friends and media framed him as attractive. - Social endorsement shifted her subjective valuation without deliberate reasoning. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Yeah. Emily Falk So before the story I'm about to tell you, I had really never thought very much about Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean, I think if I saw him and I thought anything, it was like, there's a guy. Like, he's a pretty average-looking guy. And then my friend Rebecca gave me a book called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, in which an Australian author, Tabitha Carvan, spends a few hundred pages talking about How amazing Benedict Cumberbatch is. She thinks he's incredibly attractive. She just, you know, is completely enamored of Benedict Cumberbatch. And so after reading this book, which is really a book about joy and about what we value and about how we spend our time, I loved the book. It made me think, like, I wonder what all the, you know, excitement about Benedict Cumberbatch is. And I said to my partner, Brett, like, maybe we should watch Sherlock. And Brett was like, oh, I've already watched all of Sherlock. I love Sherlock. And I was like, what? Like, when did you watch Sherlock? And but he said he'd watch it again because he apparently also really likes Benedict Cumberbatch. And, uh, he told me that he thought Sherlock was a really hot character. So apparently I was the only, you know, out of line. So, so we watch a couple episodes of Sherlock and with other people's voices in my head, I'm noticing like, yeah, he's pretty charming. Like he's pretty smart. And then I started watching videos of him being interviewed online and, you know, people ask him these questions about like, how does it feel to be named the sexiest man alive? And he's like, charming, right? He says something like, oh, it makes me giggle. Or like, you know, he's totally delightful about it. And my friends, you know, we started talking about this. My friends, it turns out, thought Benedict Cumberbatch was really attractive. And all of this just made me like reconsider my entire position on Benedict Cumberbatch. You should watch the video of where he mispronounced penguins, and then a BBC reporter asks him about it, and he says penguins and penwins. He just keeps mispronouncing it. He can't seem to get it right in filming this documentary, and so then afterwards they ask him about it, and he just totally fesses up. Like, yeah, I was having a hard time. And he's, like, so, like, lovely and self-deprecating about the whole thing. Shankar Vendantam Just try the word penguin again. Emily Falk Maybe, maybe, maybe. Shankar Vendantam Maybe they just gave up. So you got sucked into the Benedict Cumberbatch portal. Emily Falk Yeah, I mean, like the people in the study, It's not like I would necessarily say that I think that he is the most attractive person on the face of the planet. But I went from thinking like, all right, here's an average guy. I don't really know what the fuss is all about to appreciating the charming nature of at least how he comes across on the Internet. Right. And I think that that increased appreciation was motivated almost exclusively by ([Time 0:25:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d47db9fd-e243-487b-bef8-522940e19bce)) - **Frame Goals For Immediate Reward** - Frame desired choices to highlight immediate rewards or tastiness rather than abstract long-term benefits. - Change labels or context so the short-term value aligns with your long-term goal. Transcript: Emily Falk What I mean is that when we think about our bigger picture goals and values, or even small goals that we might have, that the way that we frame those choices can make it easier to make choices That are congruent with what we would ultimately want if we were, let's say, operating as our best selves. So one example that I really like is a study that researchers at Stanford did where they looked at people's decisions in dining halls and they changed the labels of the foods to either Focus on the long-term health benefits of things or the kind of short-term taste. So for example, they might have vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips or balsamic glazed turnips or nutritious green beans or sizzling Szechuan green beans. And the dish itself is exactly the same. But when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer term health benefit. ([Time 0:32:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ae55ae4-cd82-4a74-b6fa-4cfc6249b544)) - **Biking To Grandma Instead Of Driving** - Emily avoided visiting her grandmother because of traffic until a podcast inspired her to bike there and enjoy the trip. - Reframing the activity as enjoyable made the goal feel immediate and enticing. Transcript: Emily Falk I was listening to a podcast called How to Save a Planet, where Kendra Pierre-Lewis made this very delightful episode about biking. And it reminded me that biking doesn't have to be this like sweaty, stressful thing where you're taking your life in your hands, weaving in and out of traffic. Like the people that Kendra interviewed for the biking episode were just having fun. Like they were out there joyfully teetering around on their bikes. And it made me think about the possibility that I could bike to her house instead of driving there. Shankar Vendantam What did you do? Emily Falk Well, I got my bike out of the basement and I biked down my street on a beautiful fall afternoon. And I biked up to the path that takes me to the route along the river, which is really beautiful. So pretty soon I was on this jogging path, but I was just flying past the joggers. And the light was reflecting off of the Schuylkill River. And I just felt amazing. Like I went all the way from where I live in West Philadelphia over to where she lives near the art museum in this kind of state of feeling like this is exactly where I want to be right now. ([Time 0:35:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/037e1a41-2530-447c-9b24-ef31624aa261)) - **Tie Goals To Identity** - Link new behaviors to your existing identity and strengths to make them stick. - Reframe goals so they align with things you already do or value to create a self-reinforcing cycle. Transcript: Emily Falk I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have or the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are, Could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we're already doing. So one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam. And I have two siblings who are much more serious runners. And one day my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts, that I could get faster. And initially I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place? Like growing up, I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock. And it wasn't immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way. And my brother framed it a different way. He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning. Academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term. And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do. He also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which, of course, is very motivating for me. ([Time 0:38:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c719089-815e-45bf-9e26-36c7016e27fa)) - **Work Together On Unpleasant Tasks** - Use social accountability by working on unpleasant tasks together for set time blocks to boost motivation. - Schedule short joint sessions to make chores more rewarding and enforce follow-through. Transcript: Emily Falk Well, that term, the credit goes to Elliot Berkman, who's also a neuroscientist who studies goal pursuit. The idea of Wattie Watt Watt is an acronym for work on that thing you don't want to work on time. There are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to do, you know, things that we don't feel like doing, but that we know we need to do. And what we do in our lab is we try to make those things that we know we don't really want to work on more rewarding by doing them together. So somebody might post on our messaging platform, you know, does anybody want to have a work on that thing session? And then a bunch of other people will get together. And the idea is that there's a set amount of time. You don't have to do a thing that you don't want to do forever. But we give each other support and encouragement and hold each other accountable for the thing. And so having somebody else there kind of helps rebalance the value calculation because it's fun to get to catch up with somebody else. And committing to doing it together with somebody else taps into that idea of social rewards as well and makes it more likely that we'll get it done. ([Time 0:45:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f798caec-37f4-42af-9ff7-0989f9395be8)) - **Learning Guitar Through Personal Meaning** - Emily learned guitar more effectively when her teacher connected practice to songs her father played. - Making practice immediately meaningful replaced bribes and made learning feel like the goal itself. Transcript: Emily Falk And I started trying to figure out how to do that. I watched videos online and I was trying to motivate myself. And I learned that I'm really lucky that at Penn there's a program where they will connect you with a music teacher. And so I got connected with a music teacher who was great. He was really enthusiastic. He was a classical guitarist, but he was also really focused on classical music. And I had this goal to learn how to play the guitar for really personal reasons. And when I asked him about, you know, the kinds of music that my dad liked or that my dad and I would play together, it was sort of something that he was like, yeah, you'll figure that out. But it wasn't central to the practice that we were doing together. And so I would kind of bribe myself through practice sessions, like, all right, if you practice for 10 minutes, then you can eat a chocolate truffle at the end or something. And, you know, again, trying to like bring the reward as close as possible. But it was hard. And the pandemic struck and I paused the lessons for lots of reasons. But then, you know, as the pandemic eased and my kids went back to school face to face, I had a little bit more bandwidth again, and I decided I was going to try again. And I got a recommendation for a guitar teacher who mostly teaches kids. And I think that's key because, you know, a guitar teacher who really teaches kids tells you something about what they're willing to engage with. And I met Gabriel, who's my guitar teacher now, and also my son Theo's guitar teacher. And Gabriel took a totally different approach. So he was very focused on why I wanted to play. And he would take little like audio clips that I had of my dad playing and transcribe them for me and ask me for a list of songs that I was interested in. And then he would write them out at a level that was appropriate for where I was. And so when I was practicing, all of a sudden now it didn't feel like work. It didn't feel like, okay, now I'm doing my etudes and I'm doing the hard thing that's going to get me to this goal later. I was already there, right? I was already doing the thing that was the future goal, just at a level that was appropriate for me. And, you know, that's worked really well for my kids, too, that they get to choose the music that they start with. And, you know, he has them do exercises sometimes as well, but he connects it to their goal, their motivation of the particular song that they want to work on. And then it doesn't make it feel like there's a separation between the repetitions and the practice that we're doing right now and some future abstract, you know, time when we're going To be able to play music. ([Time 0:47:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c7390cf-c153-4db9-a477-63eee78cef26))