作者@Google。Kelly McGonigal (Authors@Google: Kelly McGonigal)

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>>Presenter: I'm delighted to welcome to the Googleplex Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist
at Stanford University and the author of a new book, "The Willpower Instinct." So in
life, sometimes we struggle with choices and accomplishing goals and we often believe that
sheer willpower will get us there. But much of what we believe and know about willpower
could actually be wrong, or that's what Kelly discovered in working with students at Stanford
University where she teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Center
for Compassion. So she created a course called the Science of Willpower at Stanford School
of Continuing Studies and it became one of the most popular courses at the school and
went on to be a hugely successful blog at Psychology Today and now a book which you
can get your hands on at the end of this talk. And Kelly said, if she has her way, it'll
soon be an action figure and an action movie, too.
[Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Willpower! [Laughter]
>>Presenter: So today Kelly's gonna talk about how we can accomplish the array of goals that
we often struggle to get done. It might be a healthier lifestyle, it might be life of
greater productivity or sometimes something as simple as having waited for 6 months, finally,
finally, finally clearing out the closet. [Kelly chuckles] So please help me welcome
Kelly McGonigal. [Applause]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Thank you. Hello. I've been giving a lot of talks in this last month
and a lot about New Year's resolutions and I have to say this is the first place I've
talked where there's apparently a healthy code resolution going on. Is that right? Did
I see these signs right? So who's still keeping their healthy code resolution? Anyone? Good,
congratulations you've got some willpower. Um, why don't you tell me just to sort of
get things rolling, tell me something that has challenged your willpower today, anyone.
>>audience member: Getting up on time.
>>Kelly McGonigal: Getting up on time.
>>audience member: Washing the dishes.
>>Kelly McGonigal: Washing the dishes. Okay, so we've got two kinds of "I Will-Power" challenges.
Something you have to make yourself do even though it'd be a little bit easier to just
not do it. Something else? Yeah?
>>audience member: Doing yoga for back pain.
>>Kelly McGonigal: Doing yoga for back pain, well, I'm glad to hear that. We're you at
my talk two years ago about yoga for pain? That's great. Another "I Will" challenge.
Something else, yeah?
>>audience member: [Inaudible]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Yeah, so an example of "I Won't" power. There's all these links you
could follow and you could just click and get lost down the link hole and you have to
find the ability to resist that temptation. Maybe one or two more?
[Pause] >>Kelly McGonigal? Anything? Back row, any
willpower challenges?
[Audience members shout] >>Kelly McGonigal: Lunch options for today.
Have you had your lunch yet?
>>audience member: [Inaudible]
[Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: So
>>audience member: [Inaudible] [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Great, so we make lots of decisions everyday about what to eat and
what to do. Okay, well, these are all great examples of willpower challenges and I wanna
just start with a little definition, my definition of willpower or willpower challenge. And I
define a willpower challenge as something that is basically a competition between two
parts of yourself. Neuroscientists are famous for saying that even though we have only one
brain we actually have two minds and we are completely different people depending on which
mind is active or which systems of the brain are more active. So, a willpower challenge
is anything where those two versions of yourself have competing goals. So, for example, there
may be a part of you that really wants to eat a candy bar for your snack and then there's
a part of you that actually has some longer term goals, you're thinking health, you're
thinking weight loss, you're thinking bikini season, whatever, and maybe the banana seems
like the better snack. And, again, both of these choices you may be drawn to by different
parts of your mind or two different versions of yourself and one of the things that has
really influenced my work with willpower is thinking about it in terms of what's going
on in the brain. And we're gonna talk about that a little bit today, the fact that you
could be the very same person but depending on your mindset, depending on your energy,
depending on your stress levels, your brain is gonna meet this willpower challenge in
a different way and you're gonna end up making, you know, one choice today and one choice
tomorrow. So, as was mentioned, this book is based on a class that I teach at Stanford
called "The Science of Willpower" those are our actual students I'm not sure what I said
that was funny but those are actual Science of Willpower students. And I created this
course because I was going around trying to teach people how to be more productive, how
to improve their health and everywhere I went people said, "Oh, we know we're supposed to
do that stuff already, we just don't want to do it." And there was this really interesting
fundamental gap between what people wanted and what they thought they wanted. But as
people were very identified, you could say, with this version of the self. People felt
like deep down that they were the person who wanted the candy bar and this other person
that wanted the banana, "Like, who is that? That's not really me." I realized that people
didn't just need to know what is the right thing to do or what is the healthy thing to
do or tips for stress management or productivity, they needed to feel like this person. And
they needed to know how to be that person as the default rather than walking around
always feeling like they had to resist this core self that only wants immediate gratification
or never wants to do anything difficult. Okay, so that's how the class came about. What is
with my clicker? There we go, okay, great. So, I thought today, since this is a class
based on science, that I would share with you five of my favorite experiments from the
class and from the book and I chose experiments that I like because they use tiny interventions,
really, really small interventions to shape people's behavior and they have very large
outcomes. I think this is the kind of thing many of us are looking for, one small change
we can make, whether it's a change in how we think or change in the way that we're approaching
the willpower challenge that can have huge payoffs down the road making it easier to
do what it really is deep down that we want even when it's sometimes difficult, or part
of us doesn't want. Okay, let's start with the first experiment. How many of you sometimes
feel like this guy? I know at least one of you only had 3 hours of sleep last night.
So it turns out when you're this version of yourself, every willpower challenge is more
difficult. And the first intervention I wanna tell you about is actually a sleep intervention.
The main intervention was trying to help people sleep more or sleep better. And it was people
had a very serious willpower challenge, these are people who are recovering from an addiction
to drugs. And they were in a substance abuse recovery program. And half of the people in
the standard care were assigned to take a mindfulness meditation training that was designed
to help them improve their sleep or sleep more. So the first thing I want you to take
a look at on this graph, this is minutes of sleep per night and you're gonna think this
is insanely optimistic, I know, but everyone's starting around 7 hours and we're gonna improve
on 7 hours. That probably seems impossible dream. Okay, so everyone in the group was
starting around 7 hours and what the researchers found was that just doing a little bit of
meditation every day, breath focus meditation, increased sleep time to just over 8 hours
a day and the control group had a little bit of deterioration to slightly less than 7 hours
of sleep a night. Now that's not the interesting finding. I mean, it is nice to know that if
you meditate for a few minutes a day you will sleep better and get more sleep. So what's
interesting is that change in sleep time then made these recovering addicts impervious to
relapse, they were stronger against relapse and this is a very high correlation, .70,
the increase in sleep time predicted resistance to relapse with a correlation of .70. Getting
one more hour of sleep a night suddenly made it a lot easier for these recovering addicts
to resist the temptation of falling off the wagon. And interestingly, the number, I never
know where, it's gonna bounce off the screen right? I should point at the screen?
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: You guys are tech experts.
The number of minutes per day that people meditated also predicted resistance to relapse.
So there were really two things going on in this intervention, there was getting more
sleep and there was also something about the actual practice time and it wasn't a lot,
it was something like 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day. And both of these things, sleep
and meditation, were giving people more willpower for one of the biggest willpower challenges.
So I want us to think together a little bit about why those two small interventions, an
hour more sleep or 10 minutes of meditation a day, might actually give us more willpower
for any willpower challenge. What you're looking at here is an image from an FMRI study about
what happens to the brain when you are a little bit sleep deprived. And most studies use less
than 6 hours of sleep a night as sleep deprived which may seem normal to you but for most
of us that's actually functioning far suboptimal. What you're looking at here is a composite
of a lot of different people's brains, some who are sleep deprived and some who are not.
And we're gonna slice the brain, so imagine me standing this way and we're gonna have
one of those meat slicers and we're gonna slice down the head and just start taking
sections off and look down the middle. So where you see these yellow spots, that's the
front of the brain, right about here or right about here, if that were my brain pointing
that way. And yellow means that this area of the brain is under activated when you have
less than 6 hours of sleep at night. This area of the brain is unable to do its job
as efficiently and the red areas are areas that are more activated, sort of midbrain
regions that are associated with basic impulses and instincts. So when you're getting less
than 6 hours of sleep a night your brain is actually unable to recruit the systems of
the brain that you need to be that better version of yourself. This area of the brain,
I love this image because it's like, here's where the balance is weighed, "Do I want the
weight loss or do I want the chocolate bar?" And this area of the brain right here is basically
keeping track of your goals and it's sort of hard job, its heavy lifting it needs to
do is to remember long term goals, core values and when it is unable to do that, when it's
under fueled or when it's under active, your brain thinks all it really wants, all you
really want is the chocolate bar or to procrastinate or to follow that link through, or to not
bother doing your yoga exercises. And so, in some key way, the ability to remember who
you are and what your big goals are is dependent on the ability of this area of the brain to
use energy well and sleep deprivation is one of the main things that can get in the way
of that. And I think that's one of the reasons why this small sleep intervention ended up
helping people resist relapse to drug addiction because they now have brains that were better
fueled to remember their goals to stay clean and sober. And it's not just sleep that impacts
the physiology of your brain, how well your brain uses energy. There are a couple of other
things that seem to really strengthen the ability of the brain's frontal regions to
do what they're supposed to do, to help you control impulses and find your motivation.
Here are the four things from the research that seem to do it, to make your brain a kind
of willpower machine. One is sleep, as I mentioned, and hopefully there's gonna be one thing on
this list that you're not currently doing that you're willing to do cause you don't
have to do all four. So getting a little bit more sleep makes the prefrontal cortex better
able to regulate those systems of the brain the direct you towards temptation and immediate
gratification. And meditation also, and both meditation and physical exercise have been
shown to make not only your brain more efficient at using these self control systems but they
actually make these systems bigger and better connected to the regions that they are supposed
to be controlling. And, again, it can be a very quick time course to see these benefits.
People who meditate maybe 10 minutes a day, after a couple months their brains look different,
these regions are bigger and better connected. People who work out on a regular basis who
used to be sedentary, again, studies show that in as little as a couple of months of
regular workouts, their prefrontal cortices are bigger and denser and better connected.
So these are two things that you can do that actually train the physiology of your willpower.
The last thing that the research suggests is what you eat has a very big influence on
whether or not your brain is able to be this better version of yourself. There's something
about having big, big spikes in blood sugar levels and then big drops in blood sugar levels
that really screws up how the brain uses energy and you need your brain to be like an energy
efficient machine if you're gonna be walking around the world in that kind of better-you
mindset rather than that basic-impulse-you. So, research shows that shifting to eating
a more plant based diet actually changes the way the brain functions and has a lot to do
with what's going on with your blood sugar levels. So these are things that we sometimes
think of as requiring willpower, right? We think, "Okay, I have to sit down and force
myself meditate. I have to work out. I have to say no to the donut and eat something that
has fiber in it for breakfast." But we rarely think about the fact that actually not doing
these things may be part of what makes it so difficult to begin and there's kind of
a curve where when we first start it feels like we're using willpower but everything
on this list that takes a little bit of willpower to begin with ends up giving you back far
more willpower than they take and not just for these challenges. It's not just that exercising
makes it easier to exercise, studies show that exercising makes it easier to eat right,
to not spend too much money, to stop procrastinating, to pay better attention, all of these things
have a kind of global training effect on what you could think of as your willpower muscle.
Was there a question up front or a comment? [Skips question]
>>Kelly McGonigal: So the question was why does it say low glycemic and plant based?
There's actually more evidence that a vegan diet does this better than a diet that is
low glycemic and includes animal products but I'm not sure that that's entirely realistic
for everyone, so I think you can kind of pick which way you're willing to go with that.
Both low glycemic and plant based help. But if you look at just the physiology of it,
there's more evidence for the plant based diet. Okay, so let me go on to the next experiment.
So the first experiment was just get some more sleep. The second experiment, I want
you to think about a recent set back you had or kind of a will power failure. Maybe it
was not eating the healthy thing at lunch, maybe it was not doing your exercise in the
morning, maybe it was spending all morning long following links that had nothing to do
with your project. So I want you to think of a recent time when you had some kind of
willpower failure. [Pause]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Does anyone need to borrow one of mine?
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: You guys got one? Okay,
so my question for you is do you think that feeling bad about that, presumably feeling
maybe a little bit of regret, a little bit of guilt about it, a little bit of self criticism
about that, does that help us improve next time? Does that, can that be a real source
of future willpower? Raise your hand if you think that feeling bad can actually be a real
source of willpower to improve the next time. Hands up. And how many of you think that that
feeling bad is actually going to be a further drain on willpower? Yeah, great. Maybe some
of you have read that chapter in the book. So I wanna talk now about some of the research
that tends to surprise people the most. When I first started teaching this class, this
was the research people argued with, like literally couldn't get them to be quiet in
the classroom because they were so convinced this couldn't possibly be true. This is a
study looking at whether it's better to let yourself off the hook for your mistakes in
terms of preventing future willpower collapses. So this particular study, that I'm gonna talk
about in a little more detail, brought in people who were trying to manage their weight
and eat healthy. And they gave them an immediate willpower failure. They showed up for the
study and they were forced to eat a donut. And they even had to choose the flavor of
donut they were gonna eat so they would feel complicit in this willpower failure. And they
had to drink a whole glass of water too so they'd feel a little bit uncomfortably full.
Okay, so we have everyone, dieters here having, now, a willpower failure, they just ate this
donut and the next part of the study is a taste test where they are given a lot of different
types of candy and they're said, "You know, we want you to evaluate all these candies
so please just eat as much as you need to, as much as you want so that you can evaluate
these candies." And, of course, these candies were all pre weighed so that experimenters
could find out exactly how much candy the dieters ate after they had blown their diet
with a donut. And in this particular study the researchers had a hypothesis. They thought
that the guilt that dieters experience when they fall off their diet actually really undermines
future self control. So they wanted to create an intervention that would basically get rid
of the guilt and shame that people feel when they make a mistake. So in this study, half
the dieters were randomly assigned to receive a special "letting themselves off the hook"
message. So between the donut eating and the taste test, an experimenter came in and said
something very simple, they said, "By the way we've realized now that some people in
this experiment feel guilty after eating the donut." So there was an opportunity for people
to recognize they might be feeling guilty. Second part of the message, "We want you to
remember that actually everyone indulges sometimes and we asked you to do it." So there's a kind
of putting it in a broader perspective and the last part of the message was a simple
plea, "Please don't be too hard on yourself about it." Okay, so very simple. You might
be feeling guilty, remember everyone does it, don't be hard on yourself about it and
then they went on to the taste test. And what the researchers found is that the women that
had been given the self forgiveness message ate less than half as much candy as women
who had not been told, "Don't worry about it. It's not a big deal" which is exactly
the opposite of what most people think, most people think you make a mistake, you have
a willpower failure and you start saying nice things to yourself about it that this could
only lead to disaster. It would lead to licensing even more indulgence and yet, that's exactly
the opposite of what was found in this study and not just this study but in a lot of different
studies now. This is one of the, sort of, strongest pieces of theory we have in willpower
research right now. That is, the harder you are on yourself when you have a willpower
failure, the more likely you are to have the same failure again and the bigger it's gonna
be when you do. For example, one study took a look at problem drinkers and had them keep
track of how much they were drinking and how bad they felt the morning after. What they
found is the people who were the most self critical and felt the most ashamed or guilty
about drinking the night before wanted to drink more immediately when they woke up and
also drank more that night and the next. There was something about the self critical nature
and the shame and the guilt that was driving people back to the very thing they felt bad
about. The same has been shown for addiction including quitting smoking, you know, you
have that first relapse and the more you beat yourself up about it the more you now need
to be comforted with something, probably the very thing that you're feeling bad about because
that's probably why you do it in the first place. The same has been shown for gambling,
the more people feel guilty and self critical about losing money, they more likely they
are to borrow money and try to win it back and end up losing more. And even for procrastination,
you may not have any kind of addictions but even for procrastination, researchers show
that the harder someone is on putting, the harder someone is for putting something off,
the longer they procrastinate the next time. And all this has to do with the basic fact
that when we are feeling stressed out and guilty and ashamed, that is a state that puts
us into the version of ourselves, the mindset that is much more susceptible to immediate
gratification, temptation and anxiety. It's basically the biological opposite of what
needs to be happening in your brain and body to remember your long term goals and to be
that other version of yourself. What we would call the willpower version of yourself. And
as soon as you start piling on the guilt and the shame, your brain switches into that other
mode in which now everything's gonna be more tempting including procrastinating or including
smoking or drinking. So I just wanted to give you a sense of what it would be like to give
yourself a self compassion message. Again, I said, this was a tiny intervention, this
donut study. And this is basically all it was. And there are a number of programs now
that are teaching people how to write these messages for themselves and literally have
them scripted for the moment they fail, for the moment that they procrastinated and they're
late again, for that moment when they had that cigarette when they hadn't smoked in
a week and to be able to whip this message out as a way of not falling down that hole
that we often fall into. So the three steps of this message are the first is mindfulness
of what you're thinking and feeling. Noticing that you're feeling guilty or noticing that
you're feeling self doubt or self critical, maybe angry at yourself and to actually allow
yourself to see those feelings because a big reason that people go from feeling guilty
to giving in again is they just want to get rid of that feeling, it's so kind of overwhelming
and they want to distract themselves from it with something that is gonna get them into
further trouble. And then the second step is this common humanity. One of the reasons
that it is hard to find our motivation and our willpower is we start to feel there's
something uniquely broken with us. There's something about who we are that is wrong and
weak and that mindset makes it very difficult to tap back into your motivation or your strength.
So this message of common humanity is basically saying to yourself, "You know what? This is
part of the process of change, this is how things get done. Sometimes we procrastinate.
Sometimes we fall off the wagon. Everyone is imperfect." And to recognize that this
is not saying anything about who you are, it's saying something about the process and
what matters is how you respond afterward, not the fact that it happened at all. And
then this last step is encouragement over criticism. And if you were to think about
someone you were mentoring, you know, some of you probably have mentees here or interns
or you think about a child that you care about or a dear friend, what would you say to them
when they had a set back? And to say that to yourself, it might be reminding yourself
of your goal, it might be reminding yourself of the big picture rather than the sort of,
the micro picture in which you feel like a failure. And to do that rather than the voices
we often have in our head that are saying things like, "Why did you do that again? You're
so stupid. You're never going to change." And to actually start to talk to yourself
a little bit in the second person as if you were a good friend. And research shows that
this particular approach, learning how to talk to yourself in this way is more effective,
for example, at quitting smoking than nicotine replacement therapy. That's how powerful being
able to respond to set backs with compassion can be. I want you to take a look at these
circles which go from being totally non overlapping to extremely overlapping and you're gonna
decide which of these sets of circles best represent how you feel about who you are today
and who you're gonna be, let's say, 30 years from now, 30 years in the future, or pick
a time period that feels right to you. Okay, so this is your current self and this if your
future self 30 years from now. This means who you are today is really very different
than who you're gonna be 30 years from now. Some overlap but actually a lot of change
is gonna be happening between now, who knows, then this last set of circles this is like,
you know what, who I am today is probably who I'm gonna be in 30 years, same me. Okay,
so you're gonna pick for yourself. Take another few seconds and think where you are on this
graph. Actually, let's do a kind of rolling wave cause I'm actually curious if there's
a trend here at Google. Just put your hand up when you see your circle highlighted. Who's
over here? Who's over here? Over here? Okay, over here? Oh you guys are normally distributed,
this is great, who's over here? [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Who's over here? And who's over here? Yeah, pretty good, pretty good.
That was great. Okay, so it turns out where you put yourself on this map has a lot to
do with some very important willpower challenges related to health and money and even moral
behavior. Don't feel too bad if you're at an extreme tail that is not associated with
willpower cause I'm gonna show you some strategies for being able to get to the end that is associated
with willpower if you need it. Okay, so let me start with the first intervention and this
was an intervention that was done here at Stanford University and this was using undergraduate
students who are very young and it was a virtual reality experiment where undergraduate students
came into the laboratory and the researchers had carefully created 3D avatars of the student
themselves. So if I came into the laboratory I would be meeting a 3D avatar of myself at
retirement age. It was a really great set up in which you got all their virtual reality
equipment on, hearing and seeing, and it feels like you are sitting across the table from
your future self and it's set up with cameras in such a way that if I move my left hand
like this it looks like my future self is also moving their hand and if I talk it looks
like my future self is talking back. And in the study the college students were invited
to interview their future selves, to say things like, "Hey future Kelly, what's going on right
now? What's really important in your life right now?" And then they had to answer the
question. So they would see their, I would see future Kelly describing what's important
in my life at retirement age. And this went on for about an hour, getting to know their
future selves. And the reason the researchers decided to do this intervention is because
they discovered that most of us feel like our future self is a stranger. And all of
you who are on that first half of the distribution, sort of you're thinking about your future
self and you don't really know who that is, they could be really an improvement on this
model or it could just be an older version of this model, we don't know. But what researchers
found is that the more you feel like your future self is a stranger, is different than
you, the less likely you are to do things to protect that future selves health and happiness.
Because why would you bother saving money for some stranger when you could spend it
today on someone you know and love? [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: So in this particular experiment after they had gotten to know their future
self, there was some time elapsed cause they didn't want it to be totally obvious what
was going on, there's some time elapsed and they brought people back and had them divvy
up $1,000 in a budgeting task. And they pretended like they were interested in how people made
budgeting decisions. But what they found is that the college students who had met and
interacted with their future self ended up allotting more than twice as much money into
a retirement account than college students who had not met their future self. College
students who had not met their future selves were more likely to want allot that money
to their present expenses or just to some fun splurge. And this research has actually
had a lot of impact in the world of retirement savings and banking. I just heard in an economist
recommend last week that we should be trying to Photoshop pictures of people's future selves
on every mortgage application or credit card application
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: So people would really
have to think about the implications of this. I mean, you can imagine an HR setting, right,
where people are a new employee and they're asked to make their retirement allocations,
well, what if they had to interact with their future self first? New college students coming
in to a first job, might make a very big difference in their retirement savings down the line.
Okay, so that was just one, that was the intervention, that was the experiment but I just wanna point
more broadly to some of the research, looking at that circle graph that I showed you, and
it turns out that people who believe that there is more overlap, that they are more
closely related to their future self have a lot more willpower for different types of
willpower challenges. Oops! I didn't mean to do that. The first thing is they're less
likely to procrastinate in general and less likely to be late. One of my favorite findings
from this research is that people who had, who felt like they were less similar to their
future self were also more likely to show up late for the experiment or skip it completely,
to just blow it off. That was a kind of interesting finding. They also are more comfortable, I'm
sorry, are more likely to make ethical decisions at work. So people who think their future
self is more different, like a total stranger, they're actually more likely to feel good
about betraying a colleague at work if it helps them advance in their career. They're
more likely to keep money that they found even when they might have an inkling who that
money belongs to and that's kind of an interesting finding cause we could understand retirement,
you know, future self, but it seems like this ability to disconnect from the long term consequences
of your choices actually primes you to be that more impulsive self even when it doesn't
really have anything to do with your own long term benefits. Then also, looking at real
world outcomes not just an experiment, but you look at what circle people choose and
how much money they have, their assets, their home, their debt, their wealth and people
who feel closer to their future self actually have more assets, are more likely to own their
home outright, more money in the bank, more retirement savings. So this is a real world
finding not just an experiment. And they're also more likely to do things that don't have
a payoff immediately, like flossing and exercising but that would be good to protect their future
self. So with that in mind, one of my favorite willpower boosting strategies that you can
do that doesn't really take any willpower at all, is to get to know your future self.
And there are, you, you, actually here maybe you can do 3D avatars, is that something,
is that a Google project somewhere? [Laughter]
>>audience member: We can't tell you.
>>Kelly McGonigal: Can't tell you. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: So most people can't actually interact with their future self in that high
tech a way but it seems like there are other ways that work as well. One is to write a
letter from your future self to your present self and you can do this in a number of different
ways. One way is just write to your present self about who you are, what you're doing,
where you're living, what you care about. Or you could write a more closely defined
letter that looks at some challenge you're dealing with now. Maybe you're struggling
to quit some addiction or spend time with your family or just something that is seems
like it's just not working the way you would like it to. And you could write a letter from
your future self thanking your present self for doing it and describing what it was you
did and why it mattered. And research suggests that this kind of letter writing from your
future self can actually give yourself more willpower. Yes?
>>male audience member: Does this boomerang if you actually have low self esteem now telling
yourself you're gonna be more like you are now in the future?
>>Kelly McGonigal: That is probably not the letter you should write
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: So just for the people
who are watching this on the video the question was, if you feel really bad about yourself
now could this have the opposite effect where you think, "Oh my God, I'm never gonna change"
and if you're a loser now you're always gonna be a loser so the letter might be like, "Dear
loser, I'm still a loser. You're still a loser. Life sucks."
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: That is not the letter.
Actually, so research suggests it is better to be optimistic in this letter than to be
pessimistic. But at the same time, so the key thing about this finding is not so much
whether you think you're going to be exactly the same, but whether you understand that
it's going to be the same person having the future experience. And that, which actually
comes to the second point here, so that's actually a different thing. It's not like,
are you still going to have all the same problems and all of the same neuroses or have you fixed
them? It's not that kind of same self different self it's do you understand that, like you
know how real pain is right now if I were to come and punch you, how much that would
hurt? Do you understand that 30 years from now it's gonna hurt if someone punches you?
That seems to be the thing that people actually have problems with. When they think about
their future selves they don't have access to those emotions, they don't understand that
that future happiness is going to be as real and as important. So when you're doing this
kind of letter writing or doing this future self imagination, the actual critical part
is getting to feel like that future self is real and that it is in some way you. That
you are going to be the one having this experience. And it's not so much whether you think you're
going to be the identical person still listening to the same music you listened to in 1983
or not like that. Okay, so here's the second future self exercise that gets to that. And
I call this going back to the future. And this is the exercise of just imagining yourself
in the future. Studies show that just imagining yourself grocery shopping in the future, okay,
not like not anything even relevant to your goals but just grocery shopping then ends
up helping people make better decisions in the present moment that's going to lead to
pay off in the future because you can actually imagine it. You can imagine what would be
on the shelf and you know what it feels like to be pushing a shopping cart and there's
something about making the future real that gives us more willpower kind of independent
of the content, what you're thinking about. But there's also studies showing that you
can imagine specific futures related to your willpower challenge and both good sort of
future realities and negative future realities can be very motivating. So in one study they
had people who wanted to improve their health, to imagine the consequences of not making
a change, like really vividly, what's that gonna be like? What's it gonna feel like ten
years from now if you don't make this change? And they had another group thinking about
the positive consequences of making the change and what would that be like and how are you
gonna feel? And both of those sort of future thinking, ended up increasing the good health
behavior in the present. So you guys have seen Back to the Future two, right? You guys
have seen Back to the Future two? You know he goes into the future and there's like a
really bad future and a really good future, okay, at some point that reference is not
going to work anymore. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: Okay, here's, so we got two more interventions and this next intervention
I just wanna take a poll. So we're talking about visualizing things, if you had to guess
which would be more helpful for finding your willpower, do you think it's more helpful
to imagine or visualize yourself failing or is it more helpful to visualize and imagine
yourself succeeding? Raise your hand if you think imaging failure is gonna be more helpful.
Raise your hand if you think imagine success. You guys are such typical Americans.
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: Okay, that's what everyone
thinks. So, actually it turns out imagining failure is way more helpful than imagining
success. Not that imagining success is always bad but imagining failure is better. So let
me tell you about this one intervention and then some of the theory a little bit more
broadly. In this particular study they took women from young adult to middle age, a little
bit older adult all of whom were not exercising at all and all of whom had the goal to exercise
and some of those women were randomly assigned to your typical it's good to exercise, here's
why you should exercise, now think about your goal and imagine yourself doing it, very typical.
And the other half were randomly assigned to what they called an obstacle condition
where they had to imagine themselves failing. They had to ask themselves, "When are you
gonna not exercise? What is the obstacle going to be? When is it gonna happen? What are you
gonna do if that happens?" And they had people write about that every single day. They had
to write out, when are you gonna not exercise? What are you gonna say to yourself that allows
you not to exercise? When's it gonna happen? How's it gonna happen and what are you gonna
do when you start to recognize that stuff happening? So the women were becoming kind
of detectives of their own failure and every day they revised what they were writing based
on what they noticed. "I didn't exercise cause I told myself I'll do it later, I'll do it
later, I'll do it later, now it's time to go to sleep." Or, "I didn't do it because
I go so busy at work then I didn't have my sneakers so I didn't do it." And they became
very clear about how they fail and they were able to predict future failures from that.
Here's what the results were, it had an immediate effect of doubling the amount of time they
were exercising. So the very first week they started to predict their failures in this
way, they doubled to 102 minutes of exercise a week and that's getting pretty close to
the amount of exercise that you need to have very serious health benefits, both mental
health and physical health. There was a much smaller improvement here in the group of women
who were given the standard, "You wanna exercise. Exercise is great, let's do it!" And 16 weeks,
so 4 months after that study, the women who had been predicting their failure had maintained
and were exercising twice as much as the women who were in the basic 'let's exercise, here's
why it's good'. This is the thing that always blows people's minds. There is a lot of studies
that show tracking your success leads people to slack off in the long run but nobody believes
it. So you probably heard how important it is to keep track of your success because we
feel really good when we're able to write down that we did something, right? You know
you feel something really good and you're like, "Yes! Check it off!"
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: Some people make to do
lists just so they can check stuff off. And we know how good we feel when we're able to
write down and record our successes and we mistake that feeling good as motivation to
do more. But a number of studies show that when people are reminded of their success
and take note of their progress they are much more likely to then do something inconsistent
with their goal. So if you are somebody, for example, there's studies of dieters where
people come in and the experimenter says, "By the way, we wanted to let you know how
much progress you've made on losing weight. You're this close to your goal, you've been
doing great." And on the way out of the lab, "Would you like a chocolate bar?" And women
are much more likely to take the chocolate bar if they were reminded of their success.
The same studies been shown for procrastination. You have people that keep track and feel good
about their progress that they've made on a task and they're much more likely to choose
not to work on it. And this is the goal switching hypothesis. The idea is that any willpower
challenge is a competition between these two versions of yourself and they're both you.
And as soon as your mind realizes that one of you is satisfied because you made some
progress, the other goal becomes primed in your brain and it becomes more appealing.
So I don't wanna say don't keep track of your success cause I think, what I really wanna
encourage you to do is both. But let me just, let me point to a couple other ideas along
this line. Okay, so about why pessimism can be so helpful because it's profoundly un-American
to be pessimistic when you have a goal and I just wanna encourage you to think about
using pessimism as actually a source of willpower. So there's this kind of finding floating around
that people who are most optimistic about their ability to make a difficult change,
give up sooner and are most likely to fail and it tends to be because they are shocked
by their setbacks. So one of the ways that predicting failure can be helpful is that
when it happens it's not like some shock to your system where you can't believe it happened,
it must say something bad about who you are or about your likelihood of success in the
future. There's also interesting studies, as I mentioned that optimism, well this is
both progress and optimism, but studies show that if you have people making optimistic
predictions about what they're going to do, they're more likely to then not do it today.
So people who intend to exercise tomorrow are more likely to eat something unhealthy
today and skip the gym. Even just having people think about what they're gonna do in their
future makes people more likely to make a different choice today. So just knowing that
you're gonna be just as tempted tomorrow, you're gonna be just as busy tomorrow, just
as stressed out tomorrow turns out to be an important source of willpower today. Okay,
then this, I just had to throw this in cause I think this is one of the funniest findings
in the willpower research. That 75 percent of corporations that are investigated by the
SEC for fraud can be tracked by to initial optimism that then people were unwilling to
let go of. They were so optimistic about profit, their profit projections, that when they met
their first setback they didn't know what to do and they started to fudge the numbers.
And this is something that we all do with our own goals when we set very high ideals
and then refuse to adjust our expectations based on reality. This is something I run
into a lot at Stanford, people say they wanna make big change or they have a big goal in
mind and they aren't the least bit interested in setting a small goal or a baby step cause
how is that gonna ever get me where I want? So let's go big or go home. And then when
they start to run into problems with that huge level of success, they kind of hang on
to the ideal and yet end up doing nothing. So you can think of yourself as your own little
corporation with goals and if you find yourself hitting setbacks one of the most important
things you can do is adjust your expectations and take a really serious look at the process
of how failures working. So here is, um, here is an example form that exercise study that's
a little broadened out and this is basically the writing exercise those women were doing
that doubled the amount of time they were putting into their goal. And they were supposed
to do this writing exercise every day. The first is to identify your goal and what would
be a really positive outcome of that? So you gotta get your motivation on board, right?
Then what are you gonna do to take it? So you set some clearly defined steps and then
you spend some time thinking about how is this not going to happen. When and where and
why? Is there anything you can do in advance to prevent that failure? And when failure
happens, what are you gonna do about it? You don't actually have to make it 7 full steps
like this but it's a very basic exercise that you can do for any goal. I think of it as
being like stress testing a goal. You have a goal, you say you're gonna do something,
well now put it to the test and find out how it's gonna break, how it's gonna fail. Okay,
last intervention. Let's all do it together unless you have health problems and, you know,
I don't want anyone to pass out or have a stroke. So if you are willing to take this
challenge we're just gonna hold our breath for 15 seconds. Whose got a second hand? Great!
You're gonna time us. Okay, only if you wanna do this. Take a deep breath in. Look at your
second hand, go ahead and take a deep breath out, now exhale, exhale, exhale it out, stop
breathing. Time us. Remember you can breathe anytime you want to if you need to. I just
want you to notice how this feels. 3, 2, 1 breathe. Good, okay, so holding your breath
obviously that's a little bit of a willpower challenge. Some of you maybe need to hold
your breath for two minutes to feel it but I did not want anyone passing out. So would
you believe that this ability to hold your breath is one of the best predictors of people's
ability to succeed at difficult goals? It's kind of interesting. Psychologists call this
distress tolerance. The ability to stay put when things get uncomfortable. So I wanna
tell you now about a small intervention that teaches people how to sort of hold their breath
but not exactly, how to basically ride out physical discomfort that gets in the way of
making a difficult change. I'm gonna tell you about two different studies that are basically
using the same technique. So you can kind of pick your willpower challenge here. The
first I call the torture chamber and this is the study of smokers that wanted to quit
but had been unable to. And the researches asked the smokers to abstain from smoking
for 24 hours, sort of a first challenge and then to come into the laboratory with a fresh
unopened pack of their favorite brand of cigarettes. So all the smokers show up, they've got their
pack, they are desperate for a smoke, and they even like carbon monoxide tested them
to make sure they hadn't smoked, so they had all, they were ready for a cigarette. They
all get, they seated at a long table and asked to put away all distractions except for a
lighter or a match and their cigarettes. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: So you've got a bunch of smokers now they're ready. And then the experimenter
is about to begin the process of allowing them to smoke and she says, actually through
a microphone like that, you hear this voice that says, "Take out your pack of cigarettes"
And everyone does, they're all excited, "Woo hoo!" "Stop!" Okay
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: They have to wait 2 minutes
now and they're not allowed to do anything except look at their pack of cigarettes.
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: "Pull off the cellophane!"
"Okay, great, whew!" "Stop!" Two minutes they have to wait. "Pack it" Oh, there was pack,
I don't smoke so I forget some of these steps, they had to pack the pack, too and they got
the cellophane open, okay. "Take out a cigarette" "Finally!" "Stop!" They have to wait 2 minutes
and this goes on and every two minutes they're writing down how intense their cravings are
and how much they want to smoke but other than that they're not allowed to do anything.
"Take a cigarette out" "Stop!" Two minutes. "Look at the cigarette" "Stop!" Two minutes.
"Smell the cigarette." "Stop!" Two minutes. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: "Put the cigarette in your mouth" "Stop!" Two minutes. "Take out a lighter,
look at it." "Stop!" Two minutes. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: This went on for over an hour.
[Laughter] >>Kelly McGonigal: Nobody was actually allowed
to light the cigarette, okay. So here's what, I didn't tell you what the actual intervention
was yet, half of them before this happened had been taught a technique called surfing
the urge in which you learn to pay attention to the physical discomfort of wanting something,
you give it your full attention and you trust that you can tolerate those physical sensations
and if you just wait with patience they will go away. That any craving, any emotion will
eventually pass if you can just breathe and wait, wait it out. But you don't have to act
on every impulse or emotion. So that's the technique they were taught, they were surfing
the urge, they were imagining those cravings as a wave that they were getting on and they
were just gonna breathe and they knew that would eventually end just like a wave. Before
I tell you the result of this study, let me just give you the food one. The food one's
a little bit different. They took people who have had problems with self control around
food, especially sweets, gave them a clear container of Hershey's Kisses, a transparent
container and they had to carry that box of Hershey's Kisses around with them for 48 hours
and were not allowed to eat a single one and they were all carefully marked, little pin
scratch so the researchers would know if they ate them and restocked it which would not
be cool. [Laughter]
>>Kelly McGonigal: And they were taught the same technique about how to handle cravings.
How to surf the urge, allow yourself to feel the craving and yet remember you don't need
to act on it and the craving will go away eventually. Okay, so the results. In this
study, the smokers who'd been taught how to surf the urge in that one hour torture test,
they ended up reducing their cigarette smoke by 40 percent in the very next week even though
the researchers had not asked them to. The control group did not reduce their cigarettes
at all and interestingly in the people would learn to surf the urge, there was now no longer
a connection between psychological stress and smoking which is actually, that's the
main connection for most people who are trying to quit, they're stressed out, they're anxious
and so they need a cigarette. And in this particular group with this intervention, it
cut that link between stress and giving in probably because they had a tool for dealing
with difficult feelings and emotions. In this study, the people who had trouble with self
control around food, if they were taught to surf the urge, 0 had a single Hershey's Kiss
over the entire 48 hours whereas those who'd been given other strategies including distraction
ended up much more likely to give in and also really stressed out about it. So these are
just two different examples about how surfing the urge can give us a lot of willpower for
the things where we need willpower. You know, a lot of times I hear people talk about how
important it is to build good habits but the reality is sometimes you need strength to
do something difficult and there's no habit in the world that's gonna make you not want
a cigarette when you see it or want a donut when you see it or maybe you wanna avoid something
cause you're anxious. There's a real impulse and a real feeling that you need to deal with
and this power of acceptance seems to be the best strategy for dealing with these difficult
emotions, these difficult thoughts and these difficult cravings. And any attempt to kind
of push them away or get rid of them backfires but being able to ride them out and imagine
them as passing experiences that you don't need to act on has been shown to help a lot
of different willpower challenges including the kind of anxiety that leads us to not do
things we know we should do. Intrusive thoughts, you know, that's a real willpower challenge.
Sometimes our mind goes places we don't want it to go, to memories or to things we're imagining
or to negative thoughts about ourselves and others and research shows you can apply the
same technique to a negative thought without having to act on it. It's been shown to improve
weight loss, it actually, this technique of learning how to accept your own cravings,
tripled the long term one year weight loss success rate among people who were in a really
standard weight loss program. It helped substance abuse and it even helps people with schizophrenia.
I mean, talk about a willpower challenge when you have voices in your own head that you
cannot escape and you're trying desperately to have some kind of normal life and relationship
with the world when you've got these voices in your head that are telling you to do something
or not to do something. And studies show that schizophrenics who learn to accept their own
intrusive thoughts and hallucinations and delusions, like a craving, that's not real
and you don't need to act on it but it's gonna be there and eventually it will pass, they
actually end up being more likely to be out of the hospital, be dehospitalized and function
normally compared to people who have not been taught this technique. Okay, so if you want
to apply this technique to any willpower challenge yourself, here's what that small intervention
would look like for yourself. Here's what people were taught in both of those studies
and the first is this mindfulness to allow yourself to feel what you're feeling or think
what you're thinking and to actually attend to the experience rather than immediately
try to escape it. So if you're hungry, actually notice like, what does hunger feel like in
my body? Or if you're anxious, what does anxiety feel like in my body right now? And then to
actually just breathe, breathe it out, use the breath as a source of stability. You know
what you're feeling, take a few breaths and then broaden your attention out and look for
the first opportunity to recommit to your goal, that's what they were taught in both
the smoking study and in the Hershey's Kiss study and it's a technique that you can practice,
it takes like 30 seconds and it can help with any sort of willpower challenge. Okay, so
just to wrap up, 5 willpower rules and I would just invite you to think if you heard anything
today that might be relevant to your willpower challenge, to give yourself this short dose,
this small dose intervention and see how it works because that's actually the nature of
the class and the nature of the book. It's basically to become a willpower scientist
yourself, to get some ideas from the research and then test it out. I mean, you've got a
hypothesis you can see if it works or not, collect your own data. So those five strategies,
one is to train your willpower physiology by meditating, by sleeping, by exercising
or by eating a diet that's gonna sustain your energy. Forgive yourself the next time you
have a willpower setback. Make friends with your future self, kind of think about the
future in a way that feels real. Predict your failure even though it's really nice to imagine
success, really get interested in the process of how you fail. And then, finally, think
about surfing the urge when you are facing temptation. And thank you, boy you guys, you
waited it out, you showed a lot of willpower sticking around here.
[Laughter] [Applause]