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what advice would you give me to make sure that my relationship stays fresh and new and spicy actually there's a great study that when people their sexual desire for the partner goes up Dr tally Sher she's a neuroscientist author one of the world's leading researchers On Emotion decision making and how to change our brains for the better this is negatively affecting your life and you don't know it we have a study where we asked people what was your favorite part on your vacation and we found the peak of enjoyment was 43 hours into the vacation and people used one word more than any other word and it was the word first the first view of the ocean the first cocktail and then the joy goes down and down and down why it's because the input into your neurons is constant and when things are not changing our brain just stops responding and the problem is that even if you're living your absolute best life great relationship a good job comfortable home after a while those things don't bring us the joy that they should cuz when something is always in front of you you stop attending to it that's true also for the not so great thing around us sexism racism cracks in our relationships after a while we don't notice them and if we don't notice them we don't change them one reason why happiness is low in midlife is because things are a little bit more routine the problem is we really don't like Risk taking so how do we change that two main things one is quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the Subscribe button I just wanted to ask you a favor it helps this channel so much if you choose to subscribe helps us scale the guest helps us scale the production and it makes the show bigger so if I could ask you for one favor if you've watched the show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching could you please hit the Subscribe button thank you so much and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a
[Music] deal tell welcome back thank you for having me back to be here for those people that aren't familiar with your career can you give us a little bit of an overview of your academic background but really I guess the summary of the mission that you're on and the work that you've done what are you trying to understand what is it that you're you're trying to do with your professional life so in very general terms I'm trying to understand human behavior why do people do what they do why do they feel the way that they do um and I use a lot of different methods to try to understand that so I use Neuroscience method I really kind of try to look inside people's brains also I look at Behavior so I'm kind of combining psychology brain science I also combine economics to try to understand motives to try to understand needs um and hopefully use that not only for us to understand human brains better but also to make our life better perhaps make better decisions for anyone that's listening to this right now that is has a vision of who they want to become and it's different from who they currently are in some way habits behaviors they want to adopt is step one awareness is that step one awareness of your own CES and thoughts and patterns one thing you should concentrate on and be aware of is what is already good about yourself right so not only what do I want to become which I'm not but what am I which is great what already great skills I have right personality traits I have because those are things that you can build on right and so look at it not only in this kind of negative way but look at it in a positive ways and so once once you've that yes then we can say okay this is my goal right and the next thing is how do I go from where I am to this goal and if you have a specific plan and you you're not necessarily going to follow that exact plan right but if you have a plan and you kind of really think through the details what happens is that if you can imagine that vividly that will then create your belief that it's more likely to happen right if we have a specific plan concrete that makes a feel it's more likely to happen and if we think it's more likely to happen we're more likely to follow through and then
there's a lot of little tricks of how to get us to follow through uh one really important one is looking at your progress so say you want to go to the gym and at the first week you only go once a week and then the next week you go twice a week or maybe when you're go you go the first time you go you're only running on the treadmill for 10 minutes right and then next time 20 minutes but put down those numbers so you can actually see them cuz when people can actually see their progress that is extremely motivating right you always want to be a little bit above from where you were so that's that's one thing that's hugely important is there sort of scientific research that supports this idea that progress has a very sort of motivational impact on people yes absolutely there are great studies one study that I'm thinking of um was where people had to do a task which required them to learn the rules and they would get money um rewards for doing it well and every so often they ask people how are you feeling right now what they found is yes when people got rewards when they got money they were feeling good but turns out that they felt the best when they learned something new right when they progressed that's when they were really feeling the best and there was there's another study in which people could play one of two games one game all the rules were clear it was really easy for them to do the best that they could do in another game there was a bit of uncertainty they had to learn it wasn't clear right it was challenging to some some respect and they could play those two games and then every every few minutes they said okay you could stay in this game or you can move to the other game what they found is people liked to play the game where they had to learn where there was uncertainty they did not like to play the game where they always did well where there were not progressing where there's nothing to learn so progress is really something that we strive for and when it happens that really makes us feel better right it makes us feel like we're moving forward we don't like this St even if where you are is great right really really great after a while it's not enough right you want to expand you want
to progress those subject matters appear in your new book look again when you're talking about the import of variety in our lives and it really shows up in all aspects of Our Lives this need for variety um which you're kind of talking about there people want to try something new they want to learn something new they want to be stimulated in some way it's very true in work you talk about that a lot and as an employer really kind of hit me that one of the most effective things I could do to keep my team members motivated would probably be to like change their jobs quite often or at least add new elements to their responsibilities quite often yeah what the book is about is about habituation and habituation is basically the phenomena which governs basically every part of our brain which is we don't respond to things that don't change when things are constant where they're not changing our brain just stops responding and once you do change things around even a little bit then we start responding again and at work you know it's often the case in in big companies for example that people will take employees and will let them rotate through different divisions once in a while right because if you're staying at the same place doing the same thing over and over and over and over again you become complacent to some extent right but once you change you're now talking to maybe a little different people maybe the projects are a little bit different then you start you start encoding again it also enhances your creativity the word habitu is quite a long word I'm sure most people won't be familiar with the word probably never heard it before I didn't hear about habituation until I was doing a lot of research ahead of my book and came across a lot of your research but a really interesting way to illustrate what habit habituation is is with images like this now tell me tell me what's going on here we're going to put this image on the screen and also for those that of you that are listening on audio there will be a link to this image in the description of this episode but essentially when you look at this image in the center of this image for 30 seconds especially when you're looking at it on a computer screen all of the
colors disappear if you stay focused on that black dot in the middle of this image for 30 seconds so this was a discovery by um a Austrian physi physician in 1804 what he discovered is that if you look you have to not move your eyes so fixate on the black cross and don't move your eyes the colors fade away they become gray and if you're really good at this I've done this a few times and I was I was able to do this actually the gray goes away and the whole thing just becomes white why is that it's because the input into your neurons if you're not moving your eyes um is constant so the neurons are just getting the same input so they stop responding they're like well there's nothing new here you know let's save our resources for something else that's going to come along so you stop noticing the color all together and that that is habituation now once you move your eyes color comes back right or if anything moves in the background like yeah well you do yeah yeah so then um if you're moving your eyes then the input into different norns change and then you consciously perceive the colors again and I think it's the same in our life if everything is constant we don't perceive the good and we don't perceive the bad but if we move our eyes enough you know metaphorically then we'll start noticing and Feeling Again do all animals do this habituation thing yeah so it's something really fundamental you see this in every living creature um and I think to me that's what's so interesting about this right because something that seems to affect every part of our life from our relationships to our mental health to our ability to innovate you can actually track it down and you can see it's in every living animal there's this habituation the fact that neurons respond less and less to things that don't change right and that's true for things just like sound if you hear the same sound again and again and again and again you're no longer conscious of it you're no longer responding to it so that's just perceptual habituation but habituation is also true for the fundamental things in our life that we really care about and this is why people can have really great things in their life and I'm sure you do right maybe like a great relationship a good job or
a comfortable home but what's interesting is that after a while those things don't bring us the Daily joy that they should right because we kind of habituate it to it sort of like what what is thrilling on Monday becomes boring on Friday and the interesting thing is that's true also for the not so great thing around us so there might be bad things around us like uh sexism RAC RAC ISM cracks in our relationships or inefficiencies at work but if they're there all the time after a while we don't notice them and if we don't notice them we don't try to change them where does this come from this this idea that once we're exposed to something we kind of phase out and can't see it anymore it's because if something is in front of us for a while and we're still alive nothing bad happened right then the brain doesn't really need to respond to it anymore because the brain's trying to conserve resources right right we need the resources to be ready for the new thing that is coming your way right which can be threatening or it could also be really great like you know food or something that you should grab um and that's that's basically why we stop responding of course if someone something is hurting you right you will continue responding to that which is why it's it's it's a little bit difficult to habituate to pain that's one to pain yeah mhm what are some of your um your favorite examples of everyday habituation of everyday habituation yeah like things that yeah yeah I told you mine before we started recording which was um if I go to the gym and then I come home I can no longer smell myself because you can I can smell myself for maybe a couple of minutes when I'm working out that I'm like getting hot and sweaty but then once I'm around myself for like 10 minutes I guess my brain is just no longer sending the signal from my armpits to my through my nasal recept is to my brain yeah so smell is is really a good one CU that happens really really fast right so if you put a perfume in yourself it really smells strongly but then you put the same perfume a day later you don't smell it as much a week later you don't smell it that much so those are really easy to see around us but I think to me the more interesting ones are habituating to
things that we um enjoy a lot and then we enjoy less and less and less and things that are really bad but we stop noticing so for example there's a great study in which uh people were asked to think about a song that they like tell me a song that you like or even an artist that you like oh gosh there's one I'm listening to at the moment house Gospel Choir angels watching over me okay would you prefer to hear that song from beginning to end no interruptions or would you prefer to hear it with breaks with breaks yeah I don't want to hear it with breakes okay you want to hear it the the full thing the full thing right and you think you would enjoy it more correct yeah okay 99% of people say exactly what you say right I'm going to enjoy the song more if I just hear I listen to it continuously with no breaks but counterintuitively when the study was conducted it was shown that people actually end up enjoying a song more if there are Breaks by breaks you mean they just put gaps in it gaps in it and in fact what's more interesting is not only did they put caps for different groups of people they did different things doing the gaps maybe there's quiet it maybe there's an annoying noise and it didn't matter what they did in the gaps when you had gaps in the song people enjoyed it more which is really counteractive right and they were willing to pay twice as much to hear that song in concert so why is that so if you hear a song that you really like it's really joyful but it turns out that over the whatever two minutes three minutes four minutes of the song The Joy kind of goes down you habituate a little bit right if you have a break your the joy is quite High and then it starts going down there's a break and so then you go back up right right and so you habituate a little bit but then you go back up so overall you're enjoying the music more and they did the same with massages so what do you prefer a 1 hour massage or 20 minutes massage break 20 minutes massage break 20 minutes massage break the 1 hour massage why again everyone says I prefer the one hour massage but again when they did the study and they ask people how much did you enjoy it the group who had breaks ended up enjoying it more so what you're saying is we need to put more bloody
adverts in this podcast that's exactly what I this was exactly what I was thinking people are loving the adverts because you think you're you know intellectually you think oh these ads are annoying but I think what's happening and you know no one's actually done this this exact experiment but they should I think that in fact people may enjoy your podcast more with the ads even if you kind even if they go through it like that it's Gap it is possible and that was my thought exactly comments now like we [ __ ] don't want anymore yeah they're so interesting and one of my favorite examples is actually vacation so holidays um so I did um I was working on this project with a big uh tourism company in the UK and they wanted to know what makes people enjoy holidays the most right when do they enjoy the holiday the most and why so we did survey and we went on these resorts to interview people and we found two interesting things the first was that the peak of enjoyment was 43 hours into the vacation and why is that well we think the reason is that first you get to the resort and then you have to unpack you know all of that and then you start really enjoying it and then the joy goes down and down and down over time you're still enjoying your holiday a lot but the peak is with in 43 hours and then the related second uh bit of data that we saw is that when we asked people what was your favorite part of the vacation people used one word more than any other word and it was the word first so they said the first view of the ocean the first dip in the water first cocktail right they enjoyed the second time they went into the pool the third time but they enjoyed the first the most because firsts are kind of Novel right and then you habituate the second time you enjoy it a little bit less than the third time enjo late you're still enjoying it but not as much as the first time so does that mean that for holidays in I think you argue this point in the book you do yeah about instead of doing you know four week holidays it's much better to do weekend breaks because if it's 42 hours or so that's optimal enjoyment right so you're trying to think about how can I maximize my enjoyment right and when it comes to Vacation maybe one one good idea is
instead of going for a twoe vacation during the year maybe you know have a few long weekends vacations now of course if you're flying somewhere far then you might not be able to do it it's a cost and so on but you might consider instead of going to the farway vacation for two weeks maybe you want to go somewhere closer to home but have more of them because then you get more firsts you Al also get more afterglows so that's when you coming back from vacation and you're still happy because you were just on vacation and you're also getting more of the anticip a of the vacation interesting which is hugely beneficial for your wellbeing the anticipation part before um you're actually even there at the resort or wherever you're going I mean this begs the question about the other thing we habituate to which a lot of us don't want to admit which is our partners and our sex lives two things I've talked a lot on this podcast about um as it relates to things that we kind of get used to and then no longer can get the same level of I don't know pleasure happiness appreciation gratitude from um does it apply to relationships and sex yeah so I think it does and I think the solution is very similar breaks and I don't mean like a relationship break right what I mean is have you know an evening for yourself go on a weekend perhaps on your own and then when you come back everything kind of resp sparkles is there any data to prove this CU it's a feeling something that we all know intuitively like and my partner both know that when we're spending time apart is good for our relationship every relationship knows that it's good for our sex life it's good for our our appreciation of each other but is there any data that supports this yes and I I'll tell you what the data is which is so obvious you think is like why do people even do a study about this but there's one study and it simply shows that when people are away from their partner their desire their sexual desire for the partner goes up what is it about our partner going away that makes us want the it's related to habituation right but it's also related to where your attention is when something is always in front of you you sort of stop attending to it because it's always there and so your brain then goes okay
what else do I need to get right but if they're not there then your attention can go back to them and then there is a more basic level of how pleasure works there's this great quote by the econ Tyber kovski and he says that pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires right incomplete yes so the idea is that you always wanting a little bit more okay right intimidate meaning there's breaks and then you always and it's incomplete because you always want a little bit more and I think that quote is you can apply it to almost everything right even to food there's an another um fun experiment where they have two groups and one group was given mac and cheese to eat which they really liked every day for you know a few weeks and of course they like the mac and cheese of the first day they liked it in the second day but after a while they couldn't you know they couldn't see mac and cheese anymore they really did not want mac and cheese um while the other group got mac and cheese just once a week and they enjoyed the MC and cheese much more right and so it's true for food it's true for music it's true for our relationships it's rof fications what's that type what's that restaurant where they the chef brings you I don't know like 13 different courses of food oh that's too much so that's not good okay so here's here's what I think about choices um you first of all you don't want to give people no choice at all right so if there's a restaurant where you get no choice at all I don't think that is overall a good idea I mean what you could do for example if you want if you want to have a restaurant where there's an option that the chef decides still make it a choice right so you can have on the menu Chef's Choice but I'm still you know sitting there and deciding okay the chef is going to choose for me but that's still my choice why does that matter because um it is well known that first having a choice is really important for people's sense of control and for for their enjoyment and once they choose something they like it better than if someone else Cho for them they really you know one thing that we really don't like humans really don't like and actually other animals as well is having no agency having no choice that causes
anxiety so we do want to make sure that people have a choice at the same time you don't want to have too many options because that can be overwhelming right there's the um famous uh experiment where people are given an option to choose between 60 different jams and some people are so overwhelmed they just leave the store empty-handed so you don't want to go to right too much choice that could be just overwhelming because there's you know for like too much cognitive resources right anything that that we do that requires an amount of cognitive resource that is above some kind of threshold can feel aversive right so having a choice where you have to choose too many things that's not good on the other hand not being able to choose any that's not good either so you want to be somewhere in in the middle going back to this this subject matter of relationships what advice would you give me based on everything you know about habituation to make sure that my relationship stays spicy and uh we go the long term what things can I you know what do I need to be aware of what what things can I do okay so just thinking about like habituation related things yeah I would say two main things one is breaks meaning having some distance once in a while right okay and the second is doing new things together okay right because if you're always doing the same thing over and over and over which couples sometimes do there are like a few things that they like to do right because it's hard because each person has their own preferences of what they like and then you find an overlap and that overlap is not necessarily huge so then you just you know do the same thing over and over so I think as a couple it is good to explore and I don't don't necessarily mean like sexually but just everything like what type of movies you're going to watch and you know what type of activities and that can also expand your experiences together right on the point of sex so I do think sex can get boring if you don't constantly try new things it's just it's if you plan to be with someone for 50 years finding new things to try is work to be honest and I guess life is work so it's work worth doing you know
I'm almost almost I know almost five years into my relationship with a little bit of a gap in between and it's a conversation we've had a lot which is how do we keep things fresh and new and interesting and spicy because like any couple or like any people you fall into as you say like Comfort habits we go to this restaurant because we know it and they know us you know you go to this place because you know the place and you that's your favorite restaurant there or whatever you watch this thing on TV you follow this okay this cycle of Monday to Monday to Sunday Monday we do this then Saturday and Sunday we do this you know and it can be it can the monotony can seem to take a joy out of life right yes and I think you want a little bit of balance so some of this kind of routine and things you're familiar with there's something nice about that as well right so it's not I'm not saying every weekend do something completely new right but just so you have your kind of routines and then you know you insert some novel activities or something something new so it's it's kind of a BAL a balance between exploring new things but also exploiting the things that you enjoy do you think there's a because I was thinking about it as you were speaking about men and women if there's a difference in their ability to habituate and in my experience maybe that's just because I've always been the man in the situation um I'm less likely to seek spontaneity I think in terms of like coming up with new ideas for places us to go my girlfriend she's so like let's go to this flower thing let's go to this then let's go to this play Let's go over here she's very explorative so I was just wondering if there was a variance you'd ever seen in any research about a man's ability to habituate versus a woman's no I haven't so I don't necessarily think there is and I don't necessarily think that it is a case that men are more explor explorative or more um exploring but and this is not Based on data this is just my observation I often hear that people say I like to explore but my partner yeah likes to do the same or I like to just do the same all the time but my partner likes to explore I hear this again and again it's true in my own relationship my my co-author C Einstein who wrote the book
with me um he also says exactly the same right so for him he likes to exploit and his wife likes to explore for me it's like I like to explore my husband likes to exploit and I hear this again and again and that makes me think that it is not a coincidence um that is perhaps the case that people who like to explore end up with people who like to exploit because to do the best that we can in life we need to do bothh so maybe it is you know this balance interesting to individuals because if you're left on your own and just exploring all the time you might not get to the optimal balance in life MH if you're exploiting all the time then you're unlikely to find these new things right that will actually be great for you you will learn gain you pleasure and so on so um it may not be a coincidence and I think in in a lot of these traits almost every psychological trait that you can think of they are individual differences you can go all the way from one extreme to The Other Extreme right if we're talking about optimism all the way to pessimism exploration all the way to exploitation right and everything in the and normally it's kind of a bell curve of sorts um and I think it's not a coincidence right because if you think about a society a group a team working together you do need these variations for people to push each other in different directions such that as a team we get to the best that we can we can get we talked about learning a little bit earlier on and about the importance of of change and Novelty I'm someone that's just Fallen back into the habit of reading books again and writing about them and it's brought a huge amount of lost joy to my life and I and I had almost lost sight of it through becoming so busy in my professional life I'd lost the um Joy of learning new things and because I do this podcast as well and it seems to I learn so much from speaking to the people I speak to but just recently getting back into reading books again has brought this new sort of excitement to my life and your book has is provides a lot of evidence as to why that might be yeah I think it is it is a case that probably you know in recent years people are reading less right um and we kind of forget the joy of reading whether it is fiction or
non-fiction I think the difference between reading a book than watching a video is when you read a book there's an extra mental activity that you're doing which is you're imagining you're visualizing right it's also in your own pace so you read something and maybe that elicit triggers some kind of Association in your mind right so you might like stop for a little bit and then continue so there's so much more going on and I think because of that when you read a book you can relate that more to yourself and to your own life right versus I mean watching I mean films like that that's great as well but that that is a difference right it's more about you and your inner experiences and memories coming more alive and then it also ties to what you already know the midlife crisis is this a real thing yeah absolutely it is well known that stress is the peaks in your midlife and happiness um goes down in your midlife suicide for example Peaks especially for male um in midlife definitely like something that we should think of and notice um and we don't really know for sure why it happens but one thing that happens in midlife is that you have a lot of stressors coming your way um so we're talking about 40s and 50s so you have you might need you have little kids that you need to take care of maybe you have elderly parents that you're worried about uh professional life has a lot of stressors in midlife so that's really a time where we see the midlife crisis but one thing that we think is that perhaps this is also a time that you're not progressing as much right so kind of in your 20s and so on you learn a lot you gain G skills you get to perhaps a good position and then it's sort of plateauing right for a lot of people it can kind of plateau in midlife perhaps they have a good job right but they're kind of stuck they're not really moving as much they're not learning as much less variety right things are a little bit more routine and that could be one reason why happiness is relatively low in midlife it's also hard to see like what is next sometimes right while you're climbing up it's you're kind of well this is my goal but once you get there it's a little bit disappointing to some extent even if you've done really well right because as
we talked before one thing that is really important for our happiness is kind of us believing that we have something to gain something to go forward to now why does then happiness go back up after midlife right so we don't know but here is one speculation that at at a certain point in time uh maybe you're retiring then actually Life Changes again right in an odd way there can actually be more variety and CH and change and learning you need to learn how to live life again with this new context of not going to work every day and you know and you might make decisions all sorts of decisions of what to do with your time which will require you to learn again when you get to so say 40 40 50 years old you're probably in a relationship which you've been in for a while there's not that there's not that Pursuit your job your career your profession your identity your geography your house friendship circles are probably all well established at that point and your hypothesis is that the lack of forward motion and the abundance of routine means that you lose something in life yeah so things are less new right it's kind of same same same imagine the best day of your life you wake up in the morning and you eat like the best breakfast that you can think of right choose and then you you interact with the people that you love the most and you go do the best activity like what you want and you see your favorite movie so the whole day is your favorite favorite favorite favorite things really great and then you wake up the same the next day and you do the same and then you wake up the next day and you do the same right a weekend a few few weeks in the best day of your life just doesn't elicit as much joy right and also there's nothing to learn anymore so even if you're living your absolute best life if it is the same again and again and again and again it will eventually be a little bit even depressing I would say so that's by definition not our best life right so so then it is what is our best life so I think when people think about what my best life is what they're thinking about is oh I want that great house right I want that great partner I
want money or you know and then you can get all of these things but if they remain constant that's just not going to be your best life and you can engineer this I mean even if it's like midlife and everything is set and you're in one house and so on for example you can go take a course learn something new right a new fields that is not your own you can go a new sport right there's things that you could do go visit places that you haven't been try to um make connections with people that are a bit different from your regular crowd that you're interacting with it's a little bit hard to do because it's going to require effort the easiest thing to do is just continue same same same same same we assume that happiness will be derived from us um I almost don't know how to say this like from us being on autopilot like if we do what Society said you work a job you get a partner you create a house you we assume that will lead to happiness but what you're saying is the research shows that we actually need to keep almost dismantling or disrupting our own experience to to find happiness or to be happy I guess we can't find happiness we be happy yeah they did a whole bunch of surveys to figure out what are the factors that are most associated with people's happiness and the number one was meaning right people who could say I have meaning in my life that was number one number two was control people who felt they have control over their life um and I don't remember what number income was but it wasn't especially high oh I think social so social connections was really high as well right so a lot of these things were these psychological things not necessarily material things that really induced uh people's happiness and satisfaction from their life somewhat linked to that studies show that after getting married people report to being happier on average yet about two years after their honeymoon period happiness levels tend to be the same as their pre-marriage levels yeah so this is a well-known What's called the hedonic treadmill oh yeah so the hedonic treadmill means that we sort of have a basine level of Happiness which is determined a lot is genetic it might be determined by early childhood experiences and we can move from that Baseline we can go up if something good
happens maybe you have a good Rel relationship marriage uh you get a promotion it can go down if something bad happens even bement but it turns out that it in most cases you climb back to your Baseline level of Happiness so these things they can go up and they can down and then you kind of adapt right um and at you end up trying you know and this goes back to this idea that we're trying to get all these things we think of once I get this promotion then I'll be really happy and then you get the promotion and it's great but then after a while you just go back to your Baseline now on on one hand this actually is not a bad thing because imagine you get your first entry level job and people are really happy with their first entry level job great but imagine I just continue being really happy with my first entry-level job right I won't be motivated to move forward right so this is why habituation is there because it's moving us forward as an indiv ual and and as a society on the other hand it also reduces our joy um and it also sometimes causes us not to see some of the bad things around us because we habituate to that as well another reason why habituation is important is for your mental health right and that's kind of related to what we just talked about where bad things happen and slowly slowly slowly we adapt and we go back to Baseline we are able to recover right it's kind of our superpower our IM immense ability to just bounce back for most individuals and what's interesting is that you actually see that people with depression they habituate much slower so there was a great study that was conducted in the University of Florida by a professor Aaron heler where he had students um who just got exam results and he asked them how they were feeling and then he asked them how they were feeling after every 45 minutes for the whole day and what he found is when people bad results they were feeling bad right they're not happy and that's true for people who never had depression episodes in their life and people who were experiencing depression or had depression before so everyone was feeling bad at the beginning those people who did not have any history of depression they slowly slowly slowly started feeling better from this bad
grade those with depression also started feeling better but much slower right so in other words depression is related to slow slower habituation slower recovery from negative events in your life and one reason we think this is is because depression is related to going over these bad events in your mind again and again not letting go right you're kind of like chewing over them again and again and again and that is something that is preventing you from recovering and bouncing back from these um aversive events if if um habituation is causes us to lose the joy of our current situation then how come as you say in Chapter 2 the chapter about variety you say that up to 40% of employees resign within the first six months of their new job you'd think their new job would bring them Joy because it was different but up to 40% of employees resign within the first six months so new things can bring a joory because they're different yeah however at the same time and this kind of goes back to the vacation example that I gave you which was people are not the happiest when they just get to the resort it takes them time right it takes them 43 hours to get to the peak Joy why because they still need the time to adapt right they need to unpack they need to get used to this new routine same thing with a new job for example so on one hand getting a new job you're going to learn things and that's great and eventually it will get you Joy but when you f when you're there for the first first day or the first few days there's a lot of getting used to things around you right you need to like figure who's who right who's on top who's in the bottom like where is a cafeteria what am I going to eat there's so many different things that you need to figure out it can be stressful it can be overwhelming and you often want to just like run back to your old life run back to your new job and do a U-turn and the problem is that often people don't predict this they can't see ahead right they think it's like well I'm unhappy with my new job on my first day or my second day or even the first week that means that this is not a good job for me you know perhaps it's not a good job for you or perhaps you just need to allow it some time to adapt so you know my recommendation is whatever it is that
you're trying that's new can also be something like a new relationship right give it some time because you're going to have to get used to the things that are also not great you will also get things you get used to things are great but you have to get used to those things that are not great and then after a while you won't see them anymore right so not going to affect you as much so give a time now if you gave it time and still you're unhappy sure yeah make a change there's a clear message in here for managers employees CEOs Founders about how to keep their team motivated and engaged and the message that I'm hearing is the importance in creating Variety in their work because I always think in businesses I'm involved in if someone's doing this same thing for like 12 months we're going to have a have to have a conversation within the next 3 months because they will typically come to me and say like something's not something's not right and it's typically that people need a bit of variety in their work I guess because that gives it a little kick of meaning again you know I I think I've always hypothesized that people need like five things to really like their jobs number one is a sense of Forward Motion towards a a goal so that's progress I guess feeling like you're go make making forward motion number two challenge they need to be like sufficiently challenged not too challenged because then there's lots of issues underchallenged lots of issues lose motivation like in game psychology number three is control and autonomy so feeling like you've got control over your life your work number four is meaning in the work you're doing subjective meaning Jack's reason for doing this podcast will be entirely different from someone else in the team for example and then the last one is working in like a supportive group of people there's a lot of studies about this that you want a situation where you're learning something because if you're learning nothing people are not engaged right but if it's like so difficult that you can't learn right people aren't happy as well so you have to be like in this the spot in the middle right that's a sweet spot and again it's different for everyone right where it's not too easy but it's not too difficult so you have something to learn
but you're still progressing and that's very important there's a great study showing that if you put people in a room and there's absolutely nothing for them to do except to shock themselves they will shock themselves like little shock I don't mean you know um this this paper was actually in science a few years ago so meaning that boredom can be so aversive to people they would actually prefer physical pain than to just not do anything at all so that's on the one hand and then of course on the other hand is when you're sitting in in a you know in a class or you're listening to Electra and you have no idea what's it's too much right because you haven't gotten there maybe you'll take the steps eventually you'll get there but but you know you started off by saying for employees you need to kind of change right give them different projects and so on and what's interesting not only will they enjoy it more they're more likely to get to Creative Solutions start with the fact that what what has been found is that people who habituate slower are more creative um so there's different ways to measure how fast you habituate what they did in this study is that they had a sound the same sound again and again and again and they measured Kink conductance which shows um so it is how aroused you are when you're aroused you sweat more okay and that is measured by the skin conductance right and so when there's like a sound there's a response so if a sound is the same sound again and again and again most people habituate there's no longer response you know long skin conductance but for some people they continue responding right because they're not habituating and what was found is those those people who continue responding those were the people who already showed creativity in their life they had a patent under their name they had an exhibition in an art gallery they had a book that they wrote they had um got prizes for Innovative work and the question is why is that and I think the reason is that because of habituation we filter a lot of information right and you know it makes sense information is not important but if you don't habituate you're going to have a lot of bits of information in your mind simmering objects sounds bits and pieces of knowledge that are not important on
their own but they're just going to stay in your mind they're going to simmer and once in a while they will create something new and that's where Innovation comes in and really if you think about the most Creative Solutions that people come up with it's usually they take something from one field something really boring unimportant mundane and that bit of mundane piece of information then solves a problem in this other completely different field and or there's like this part of knowledge here that is boring and this other part of knowledge in this other field that also seems very mundane but you put them together and suddenly you create something that is really really interesting uh and creative right I mean often you see for example people taking what they know from biology which you know on its own doesn't seem so important but then they take that and they use it to solve a problem in a different field technology for example right that is like the most Creative Solutions so how do we facilitate that how do we facilitate dishabituation in order to enhance creativity and the answer is change changing your environment and it could be simple things there studies showing that if you just change your environment let's say say you're working in the office for a few hours and you go work for in a coffee shop for a few hours right that change can actually also enhance creativity um you're sitting and working and then you're going out and walking or going out for a run um studies show for the first six minutes you're going to be more creative and also vice versa so if you are out walking out running and then you come back and you sit in your office for the next 6 minutes you're going to be more creative now six minutes may sound like that's not a lot of time but sometimes there's just enough for you to get the aha moment I can remember those instances where I came up with an idea that would then change my course of research for a long time those ideas that were really important so if I think about these examples like one example was I was in the office trying to solve this problem and I couldn't find a solution so I decided to go to the gym and then so I walked to the gym and then before while I was walking while I was
getting to the gym that's when you know the solution came about and I remember like calling my student and like sharing that and that would then change years of what we we were going to do right so just all I did was changed my physical activity change just my physical surrounding and that's exactly what these studies show um or another example was again I was in my office and I took a break and I was reading the New York Times science section so not hugely different but still different right and then I read something about monkeys and I do humans and that again that was ooh that I an idea came about by taking a break and doing something that was a little bit different and I think every single example of this it's always like that it's never me trying to think of something new me trying to find a solution it's always doing something else which then something unusual not something that I do like 90% of the time in a day and that doing those times is when these kind of new ideas came about you know the brain generally having spent so much time studying it what are the the fundamental surprises you've come to learn about humans that you think most people just don't understand or agree with like the things that we don't want to believe about ourselves that are unfortunately true things that are unfortunately true I see this I read this throughout your work things where you go humans wouldn't say they're like that if you ask them but clearly they are because of the research right yeah I mean it is true that we're not conscious of most of these kind of systematic mistakes that we make and the biases that we have for example I mean maybe our belief system is a great example of why we believe what we believe I think that if you'd ask people why do you believe a certain thing they would probably give you some kind of rational explanation right I believe this thing because you know here's all the evidence and so forth but in fact most of the times the reason we believe believe something is that we were brought up in an environment where that belief was a popular one or people around us Believe it or we've heard it again and again you know one interesting thing is this is a huge effect where people are are not aware of it as long
as you hear something um repeatedly even twice the likelihood that you believe it goes way up versus something that you hear once it's called the illus truth effect you just there's so many studies showing this you let people you you tell people something twice they don't remember that they've heard it twice and they're going to believe it way more than something that they just heard once um the reason for this is that the brain process information that it's heard before less right okay so let's say I tell you that um a shrimp's heart is in its head right so when you hear that that sounds really surprising and your brain takes a lot of resources to process this you might think about the last time I ate a shrimp um right or just imagine the shrimp's heart is in his head but the second time I'm going to tell you this a shrimp's heart is in his head your brain's not going to processes at much right and the third time it's not going to process at all now when your brain takes less effort in processing things that causes um a signal of familiarity and as a result we're more likely to believe something when something requires less effort and less energy to process we believe it more so anything that you hear again and again and again as you hear it more and more and more it takes less energy to process and if it takes less energy to process our brain then concludes that is as likely true and for good reason because most of the time when you hear something again and again again most of the time it's true so if you heard something from you know your aunt and then you heard it from your friend and then you heard it from your doctor why do all the people tell you all these things because on average it's true but sometimes it's not going to be true right it's going to be false beliefs right and even even things like it takes you less energy to process a large front 14 font bold it takes us less energy to process it versus like small font yeah we see that across the board in all of our marketing companies is that if we just make the font a little bit bigger we get more clicks so it just a tiny bit click yeah not only are people more attentive they're going to believe it more so there's studies showing that you show people two sentences um one is in
big fonts bold and one is in small and you ask them you know How likely is this to be true How likely is that to be true those sentences that are in big bald fonts people are more likely to believe they're true because the brain requires less energy to process it which then makes us conclude that it's likely to be true and it's true for like for example if you do it with like red color right anything that makes it easier for for us to process if we hear things more clearly we're more likely to believe that's true than if you put a little bit of noise um people are less likely to believe things are are true anytime that it's hard for us to process so what that means is if you want people to um if you want to help them believe what you're saying right take on your recommendations you want to make it easier for them to process it so you could do that visually big fonts red so on but the other things you can do is you can relate it to things that they already believe in what we call priors right so if I I want to convince you of something it might be a good idea for me to think about what are you what do you already believe right and then try to tie that to what you already believe because that will require less processing or I could tell you something twice of threee times now of course this does it's not like I'm going to tell you something really really crazy right the Earth is flat three times and you're going to believe me right but I'm talking about these things where like it could be true right and so I tell you that a few times and then eventually you you more likely to believe it and you don't know it's because you've heard it a few times so if I said salad and sugar are good for you versus just sugar is good for you maybe more people are more likely to believe the first sentence because I've included a statement that you know from prior knowledge is true which is cabbage is good yeah that that is a great example that is a great example okay because our brain goes yeah salad is good for you and then you know by the time we get to Sugar We're like okay that could be true and also it makes you be more believable and just to say you need a little bit of sugar sugar is not only bad yeah little bit so you talk toone about DEH
habituating Our Lives why why and where do we need to DEH habituate Our Lives what where do we need to change things and introduce novelty I'm almost wanting to come away with a little bit of a little bit of a checklist for my own life here I feel like I'm I understand the part in relationships which is take breaks from my partner try new things with them you said as well so go to new restaurants go to new places do new things on the weekend in work um quit my job I guess that's what you're saying no absolutely not no do not quit your job you know change role add new responsibilities yeah but you could it could even be something as I mean you don't have to completely change what you're doing but you could at the same time try something new and in fact you know from from you know I'm sure you do that because you have different things that you're doing right and so that means you have Variety in your day because you do your podcast but then you also have your companies and your companies are different right so this is a good example but not everyone has that right A lot of people just have the one job but if you can take on you know learn something new right induce variety into your day in that way that is great that will cause you to start being on kind of a learning mode right I take also from that that as an employer it's really important that we have all of our team members on a personal development plan which means making sure that they've got intellectual Forward Motion in their lives they're always learning something new they're always striving for something new and that every team member in like my company should have something they're currently learning about outside of their core responsibilities right so sometimes it's it would look like they're going sideways yeah right so sometimes it doesn't look like the the path is like just progressing forward but sometimes perhaps the plan is to go a little bit sideways what you mean sideways which means like it's not the obvious thing yeah that they're going to learn right for their role see something's not going to become a better editor or producer or whatever he's going to learn music almost anything different that you learn is probably going to feedback yeah right yeah I
guess it's it comes right down to even the route you cycle on the way to work in the morning or small things right small decisions you make hotels you stay at the airline you choose to use is is there any other ways that you've dehab sit in your life Having learned about this yes but I I want to just say something about you said use different airlines and so on so on one hand yes but on the other hand if something is not super enjoyable but you still have to do it so for example maybe flying maybe travel like when you're traveling for business it can be painful right so in those cases in fact you want to do the same thing again and again why because you you habituate to the negative you see so if you think about things that you don't like to do um you may actually want to do it in the same way over and over okay right because I mean unless you think like you get on a plane and you're super enjoy it but like you know for me I just like want it to be over with right so it's easier actually to use the same airline to do the same thing so in some parts of of life actually you want to choose to do the same thing and in fact in some parts of life you want to um do these things that you don't enjoy in one chunk you know how we talked about the good things you chop up MH the bad things you want to swallow whole so if you think about things that you don't like to do but you really need to do like I don't know I need to grade papers I need to do house household chores when you ask people like would you rather do this thing that you need to do but you don't like would you just get it over with um in one go or do you want breaks in between for a breather M people like breaks for a breather right um if it is like I don't know washing the floor or whatever there is doing their taxes they want the breakes but in fact they suffer less if they just get it over with because then they habituate to the negative yeah right yeah makes sense so for the positive you want variety and so on and but the things that you're not going to learn a lot from you just need to get them over and done with just get them over and done with and even do it at exactly the same way that you've over always done it is social media going going to make me vicariously habituate I.E through looking at other people's
lives and experiences they're having it's moving my bar up like my my own perception of expectations in my life up in an unpleasant way so that when I go to that same place that Jenny went to on Instagram it's less enjoyable for me because I've already kind of experienced it through the lens of Jenny's Instagram stories right so this has a lot to do with what do you what do we expect from life and how do those expectations impact us um so I think obviously social media is causing us to have unrealistic expectations we always I don't know for most of us we feel kind of disappointed with ourselves we go online is because of course a lot of people go online and they post the good things right oh I'm on vacation I got this award and then you go online and you're like oh all the people all of this good things are happening constantly and so you feel disappointed about your own life you have unrealistic expectations um and it it shifts what we call adaptation level so basically we adapt to um our daily life and then things that are better than our daily life we feel good and things are worse we feel worse but sometimes our adaptation level can shift not based on our reality but what we expect maybe will happen and also what we see other people are doing doing so let's talk about expecting what will happen so it's there's a study showing that when prisoners are about to be released they are still in prison but in their mind they're already like thinking about the release which is great and so now their expectations are kind of higher and that makes them feel worse right so they're actually very close to release but in fact they're feeling really bad because their their daily life is much worse from what they expect their daily life to be that's kind of like social media isn't it you're satting your house looking out at people partying in some hot Sunny Country having the time of their lives you feel like you're in prison your expectations are being raised because you're watching them have the time of their lives so suddenly your house feels like you know a prison yeah so your expectations can be based on what you just expect for yourself and also what other people are doing now I'm not saying that um high
expectations are bad right because there's two things happening at the same time one thing is when um the outcomes so this is related to dopamine neurons so basically dopamine neurons in your your brain are firing all the time right and then when outcomes are better than expected they fire even more burst more right so you expect to get this amount of salary you get a higher salary dopamine goes up you expect the steak to taste quite good it tastes even better they fire more and when things are worse than expected they start um quieting down right so they're quieting down when things are worse than expected and that is highly correlated with your mood when there's big burst of dopamine you feel good when the dopamine is quiet you're feeling bad but that quiet is important because that quiet says things are not as good as I expected them to be and it signals to your brain I need to learn something I need to change this right there's two things you can change you can change your expectations you can lower them or you can change the reality right and so this negative mood that is associated with outcomes not being um as good as you expected them can actually lead to progress so it's a bit of a delicate kind of balance right and so often I mean there's this really counterintuitive finding which is when people don't have certain things in their life for example in countries where the Health Care system is quite bad the Health Care System doesn't affect people's daily happiness as much as in countries where the Health Care system is good so when the healthare system is good you expect it to be good so then any variation can impact your your kind of satisfaction but if you're living in a country where like well I know the healthare system is bad I'm it's not going to even affect how I'm feeling right you have no expectations and you're kind of that's not going to impact your happiness how much do you really know about your health for me that answer was simple the answer was very little until whoop came along as you guys know they sponsored this podcast but even before then whoop was integral for me to know what's going on inside my body most of my friends my family and my team now use [ __ ] but I still have a few friends that are on the fence about getting on board
and what I hear from some of those friends is that they're a little bit worried about what they might see in the data and they might feel uncomfortable about knowing what's going on inside their body if I learned anything it is that knowledge is power and once I finally started to look at the data and understand how getting less sleep was affecting my body and how my old lifestyle was actually hurting my long-term Health everything changed for the better so if this is something that you'd like to try out head over to join. whoop.com CEO and you'll get to try whoop for 30 days risk-free with zero commitment try it and let me know how you get on let's talk about Zoe who you may know because they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company you guys know health is my number one priority Zoe's growth story has been absolutely incredible so far they're doing science at a scale that I've never seen before because of their members and recent breakthroughs in research they can now continue to offer the most scientifically Advanced gut health test on the market previously the test allowed them to analyze 30 bacteria types in your gut but now thanks to new science they've identified a 100 bacteria types this is a huge step forward and there's nothing else that's available even close to it on the market at all so to find out more and to get started on your Zoe Journey visit zoe.com stepen you can use my exclusive code ce10 for 10% off don't tell anybody about that okay just for you guys I remember you had a TED Talk didn't you which did uh 15 million views on how to motivate yourself to change your behavior okay yeah what can I take from that Ted talk to achieve my new year new me goals okay so um I talk about a few principles there and one is a lot of time our goals are in the future so I want to go to the gym because eventually I want to lose weight I'm not going to lose weight that very second right I'm not going to like get into my jeans that very day eventually I know that if I go to the gym I will become healthier right so it's all a lot of times about the future or you say I want to get a promotion so I'm going to
work really hard today so I can get promotion in the future the problem is that it's really hard to motivate yourself to do something immediate for a reward that's going to come a time from now so what you need to do is you need to figure out what can I get now I'm going to the gym because I want to be healthier and you know thinner or whatever in the future but is there anything that I can get at the very moment um I've heard people tell me that the way that they motivate themselves to get the gym is they say when I get to the gym and I get on the treadmill I'm G to allow myself to watch some trash TV or uh read like you know a magazine that I don't always allow myself to read so that's one thing right think about what the immediate rewards that you can give yourself or someone else maybe you're helping someone else to to achieve their goals what can we get immediately not only in the future for for example another person told me that their husband um they really wanted their husband to go to the gym and so the husband went to the gym and they got back and the wife um said to the husband ooh I can feel you're like I can see your muscles right so it was immediate right they gave him like immediate rewards so try to think about I call it like um Bridge the temporal Gap because there's an action happening today and there's this like goal in the future but you have to bridge the temple Gap to try to think about okay what can I also get now it could be an emotional response right I mean a lot of times when we do something like we work hard we solve a problem we go to the gym we feel good it could be the emotional response so maybe one way you can do is make that Salient right maybe like track your your emotions track your mood and you can say okay this is what I did today right I went to the gym today this is how I was feeling right and so that's also an immediate reward I was thinking about this idea of discipline and what creates discipline and I was hypothesizing if there were to be a discipline equation what it might look like and I kind of concluded that there's three parts to the things and areas in my life where I've been able to maintain discipline and the equation looks something like this the start of the equation would be the why like
however much I valued that goal so it could be going to the gym or whatever Plus the reward that I got from the pursuit of the goal so the perceived reward I got from the pursuit of the goal so that's actually like going to the gym doing the exercise being on the treadmill the feeling after walking home like the you know and then minus the cost of the pursuit of the goal so that's like having to like leave the house get in the Uber put my shoes on travel for 45 minutes wa you know use lose two hours and if you want to be disciplined in any are of your life you need to therefore increase the why in whatever way you can get really really clear on why that matters and in your case create those packs like a social pack a financial pack whatever to make it really important to you do whatever you can to make the reward of the pursuit of the goal more enjoyable might be going with a friend or something going to a gym that's closer I don't know and then do everything you can to reduce the cost of the pursuit of the goal so right and the problem is that the costs are often immediate yeah right and then we we fall into What's called the present bias or sometimes it's called temporal discounting which is that often we value what's happening in the moment more than the same thing if it was to happen in the future right um and that's true for both like bad things and good things things that are just happening now our brain is like oh I'm going to decide what to do based on this immediate thing and the problem is that the costs are often immediate right to go 100% go yeah they come first right so you have to overcome those costs and I think one and as you're saying one thing you could do is to try to get those rewards closer in timee right so if I go to to the gym I have to like walk to the gym I might tell myself okay I can listen to a podcast while I'm walking so exactly exactly while I'm running yeah Simon synic threw a really when I was at his house talking to him about this he threw objection at me he was like yeah but this morning in La I got out of bed and went and emptied the bins at 7: a.m. because I knew if I didn't and there would be repercussions so I ran that through this framework and I was like well your y was strong because the repercussions of you not getting out of
bed are the been overflows you probably get fined by the local Council the reward of the pursuit of the goal really wasn't there and the cost fortunately was lower than the Y so discipline occurred right and and that's because we're sophisticated creatures right we're not only driven I mean those things immediately are are strong but we're not only driven by them we have these frontales right we're sophisticated creature we can value things that are in the future so when I'm saying and I say you know immediate is important I'm not saying future isn't important for us and we don't use that we do right and we're able to do that um another thing that people do is they act actually put in artificial costs for not doing the right thing like a social pack is one where announced it to the world world on my Instagram that I'm going to do it yes then there's a reputational cost if I don't right right and uh for example you know there's there's silly things where people say I've heard this when uh for writers and they tell I tell the friends you know I'm going to send you my chapter Monday at 700 a.m. and first of all that's that's a pack right I mean I have to send it because I told you not because you're even going to read it right but if I don't then I am you know $100 is going to come into your account like maybe you even already put it you know as like a future thing which you can stop right so there's a cost you put a cost to what will happen if you don't do that immediate thing just goes to show I think fundamentally that we're just driven by incentives you know we think it's something else but really at the very fundamental level everything just seems to be about incentives in business and work in relationships in life absolutely I mean every decision every action conscious or unconscious is very much about incentives right the good and the bad I think what's interesting to me is that those incentives are quite variable they can be money um they can be food they can be like social interactions variety they can be variety yeah so the what the incentives are is very variable what you know what the good that I'm getting also the bad right what what feels bad a lot of different things can feel bad so interesting so if you go if you go down to like creatures low in The
evolutionary scale I think for them things are more basic right for them it's just like food temperature right things like that that are really about survival but as we go up and up and up the ladder and we get to humans for us there's a lot of different things that can be incentivizing I was saying to one of my colleagues the other day in a business that I'm like a an investor in he was telling me about one of his team members who was like just a bit had lost the love of the her work MH and he told me the list of reasons she had said in the like exit interview as to why she wasn't enjoying her work and I looked at the list of things and intuitively it felt like the person didn't actually know why they weren and drink their work anymore and so I had a conversation with this person who was leaving this company and um we got the very bottom of it and at the very heart of it was just a loss of meaning in the job they were doing they couldn't answer um why it mattered anymore they thought the work they were doing no longer mattered and when you'd asked them they would have said a lot of other things you know they would have point to small little things in this and that and the office and whatever else and the music that's playing and the but at the very heart of it was actually just an absence of meaning and people aren't I don't think very good at understanding that they've lost meaning or that meaning is so important or that what it is yeah and that goes back to the survey that I mentioned um where they found that the number one thing that was important for people's happiness was meaning and what does meaning mean does mean um I guess is that what you're doing is valuable right to um yeah two so that's a good question I think it's probably Beyond yourself I don't know maybe it is even something about immortality right wanting to feel that what I'm doing is going to changed something Beyond Myself um and it's it's not necessarily about generosity although you know generosity and could be part of it but it's more about making of a difference right Steve Job had had this um saying that he he said something like a dent in the universe right making a dent in the universe I think a lot of
people want to do that and it you know it don't have to invent the Mac to do that it could also be how you affect your family how you raise your children right and that thing that those are the kind of things that can continue to be even when you're not there I've noticed this trend gen Z and the younger Millennials are the change the world generation and what I mean by that hit me out is that I have so many young kids coming up to me especially over the last what of 10 years generally that would say to me I want to change the world and you'd ask them like what do you mean that say like I want to change the world um they can't tell you necessarily what they want to change about it but they want to be the person that had that impact on the world and I I think that sits in contrast to what my father would have said as a 65y old man if you had asked him at 20 years old what do you want to do in your job I don't think my dad would have said change the world I think he would have said I want to be a structural engineer you know what I mean and I think the going back to your point about um habituation and people's desire to like I don't know for immortality is it plausible that because of social media because we've seen a lot of world changes we've adjusted our own I don't know expectations of what are our own contributions to now that this Young Generation if they're not changing the world or if they're not having such a profound impact on things they don't have the level of meaning has habituated to now the base minimum of impact they need to have is to change the world you see what I mean you can't just get a job right and when I when I said about a dent in the world I did not mean as as I said before I don't mean like inventing the Mac it could just be making a nice meal that people enjoy right or something it could be it could be things that are quite small and you know thinking about your father he wants to be an engineer but he wanted to be an engineer but why right he said that's what he wanted to do but why did he want that right so he probably I don't know but maybe he wanted to be that because that would enable him to create new things MH right and so in just creating new things you're changing
the world so I think I don't think he was aiming at that though whereas the young kids that come up to me they're like aiming at that so they want to like they want to change the world and they haven't figured out how whereas my dad wants to be like an engineer and the consequences he ends up changing the world yes but he probably wants to be an engineer for some reason right I could guess um and think he doesn't you know people don't think about it change I mean it's just we're using the same words but I think these perhaps different Generations have different aspiration right um because changing the world I when we say those when I say the words I don't mean like changing the world right I'm just saying saying doing something that creates a change in your world I mean maybe that's a better way to do it better way to say it some kind of change in your world not necess I'm doing Global change like like Steve Jobs but in some way this is a luxury and that's true also even for your father's generation and for this new generation right wanting to have meaning is a luxury that we have because we have our basic needs right because we have food and shelter um and you know just like safety the very very basic we can then start thinking about meaning but on the the other hand you can say well just being able to care for my family and keeping them safe that also has meaning um risk in order to to change our lives we have to sort of lean into risk in K is for those people that are you know thinking about changing their lives but they're looking forward into uncertainty and they're seeing risk um what advice would you give them based on what you know about habituation but more broadly from the brain that's going to encourage them to take that step into the unknown where they believe risk lives yeah so we quote the rock climber Alex Herold in in the book and what he says is that that he has a comfort zone which is kind of a bubble around him and as he tries more and more things that bubble just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger he pushes those boundaries and what happens is that those things that seemed crazy to him absolutely crazy then suddenly become within the real of possibility right I think the takeaway here is you have to start you have to try and what
is helpful to know is that when even if you try small so let's say there's you their goal is quite up there it's like a huge risk right yes but just try small right and then suddenly The Next Step wouldn't seem so crazy right and so on and so forth we see that you know risk habituates and it helps us explore different things it helps us try new things it can also go in a bad direction right because of risk habituation what is risk habituation risk habituation is you do risky things when what we find is that when people do risky things let's say gamble we have a study where we let people gamble um without letting them know if they want or lost they just gamble gamble gamble and we tell them at the end okay they gamble they start gambling just a little bit and then they the next they gamble more and more and more and more right they feel more comfortable with gambling less anxious right they also feel less excited so they need to gamble more and so risk really escalates because our emotions in response to risk habituate so would risk escalate so that's financial and I mean that could be a bad thing right so it's again it's like both things are at the same time because you might take huge risks because that that are you shouldn't really take we do this with um virtual risk as well so uh we want to put we what we wanted to do is test people's physical risk-taking but of course we can't put them in danger so what we did is we used virtual reality and what we did is we used this game where you put the headset on and then you go up the elevator to a skyscraper and you walk on a plank up up up up in the air right it's all virtual have you done this I have yes I did it in New York City it was terrifying okay yeah yeah it's tering terrifying it's such a puz it's it's really interesting experience because you know that you are on the ground right I know that I'm in my office I know that I'm safe but at the same time my brain is completely tricked yeah it's such you know it really makes you feel quite humble and how easy it is to trick your brain you're feeling really scared and when we let people do that they start off by maybe taking one little step and two little steps right and then the more they do it they feel more comfortable with it right they walk more and more
and more take more virtual risk until you know 10 trials in they're jumping right and we actually measure their their anxiety we measure skin conductance response and the more they do it the less anxious they feel so they take more risk and the less excited they feel so they need more risk to take to feel you know the same level of excitement um yeah and I mean on one hand they're exploring more in some cases it could be dangerous for you and you said in the book that people later in their careers are more likely to have accidents right um I think you said athletes later in their career um have accidents more and people on con construction sites um have more accidents later on in the project than at the start of the project because they start to take more of those risks it made me think about you know the the study you talked about where you get people to gamble but they can't see the results yet of their Reckless Behavior there's many areas of all of our lives where we're gambling with something but we can't yet see the results of that behavior whether it's like with our health or whether it's habits we have like smoking I'm smoking I'm uh eating this this junk crap over here and because I haven't yet had the results come in the doctor hasn't yet called me and told me there's a problem I just keep going and my um behavior Can escalate in those departments until I get that phone call which is like you've lost all your money or your your health is you know you've got something bad that's happened yeah with long-term Investments right a lot of the Investments financial investments that we make are long-term mhm right so we may start small and then we grow grow grow grow and we don't know the outcomes until years later so something collapses what do you want people to to come away from this conversation with what is the uh the key takeaway a lot of time people may not feel so much joy in their life and then they look around them and they conclude that maybe I'm not feeling so much joy because my relationship isn't that good or you know my um job isn't that good and you know maybe it is but maybe they are good but they've just been the same for a while so we have to be really careful right and one way you know we
mentioned what you could do is just like spice it up a little bit shake it up a little bit right and see what happens and and vice versa a lot of times they are things that are negatively affecting your life and you don't know it because they're always there social media is one example that you might you might a lot of people may suspect that social media Instagram Twitter is causing them a little bit of an anxiety a little bit of of stress but they don't really know for sure you can't measure it until you take a break right it's a bit like the Acy noise looming in the background you don't notice it but when you stop when you turn it off you're sound like that's so much better I didn't even realize that this thing is causing me anxiety so I think you know experiment I think that you know the last chapter in the book we We call we call it experiments in living experiment in living because it's really heart to know what are the things that are that are really good in your life and what are the things that are not so good in your life until you make some changes take a break from social media for a few weeks do something different for you and then you will see you write about people taking a break from social media don't you yes there's a great um experiment that was conducted by The Economist hunt Alcott where he took 1,000 people he gave them $100 to get o um off Facebook for a month and he took another 1,000 individuals and they he gave them $100 to just continue what they're doing at the end of the month he came and he measured their well-being on every single measure that he had those people who quit for a month were happier they were less anxious less depressed less sad so in every measure they were in a better state right and they were surprised they had no idea that this was going to have such a huge effect on them but here's the even bigger surprise they said that they were happier right they fully admitted it but most of them straight away at the end of the month went back to Facebook right um which is really interesting because you acknowledge that that thing is causing you you know a negative effect on your health so when do you go back I think there's two reasons one is you gain information and knowledge that knowledge may you know it may not make you feel good but we value knowledge and
information and that's perhaps one reason why the people went back um it could also be something like addiction I mean a lot of things um in life that you're addicted to you kind of know they're not good for you you know they're not causing you have but there's need right there's something pushing you there was this crazy stat I read in your book about the impact that leaving social media had had on people equated to getting a $30,000 pay rise at work something like that so that that yeah it was a study that was conducted by um an Italian uh scientist and what he he did he noticed that when Facebook first started in 2004 it just started at Harvard right and then a while later L they went on to you know a lot of IV league universities one by one very slowly and then 2008 they opened up to the world and what he found is that in every University that it Facebook was introduced mental health went down what was the reason he could do the study is that the university had measures of people's well-being they you know because they actually measure it quite often and he can see in every University mental health went down every University and then in the population um Facebook was roduced in 2008 in the next 10 years the EP depression episodes were increased by 80% now you don't know quation none of this tells you cation it is only correlational right interesting but you know he so he's claiming that using statistical methods he estimates that potentially a quarter of this decline in mental health can be due to uh social media again you can't really it's not a this is why the other experiment is a little bit better because it's he the other experiment hunt alcot manipulated whether people were online or not so he could actually do a control experiment and measure it right um so he could show cation this other study that suggests 25% of mental health um decline was caused um due to social media that's a correlational um result but you know there could be some truth in it we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they leaving it for and the question left for you is what is one thing that people who are listening could do that you know about that would improve their
lives how about something simple how about people just now email call turn to someone and tell them they love them it would not you know doesn't completely change your life but it will change your feelings at that very moment Ty thank you really enjoy the conversation and I'm uh so fascinated by your work and it's a real service to humanity what you do so thank you so much it's been a pleasure thank you a quick word on hu as you know they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company after years and years and years and years of work and literally I remember being in the boardroom about two to three years ago at hu when they were working on this product finally hu have nailed the Complete Nutrition bar honestly it's been one of the most popular conversations at H for the last 3 years how do we make a bar that is nutritionally complete that has 27 minerals and vitamins and that is low in sugar taste good I would have more of them to show you had I not eaten them all I mean they arrived at the office yesterday and my team just uh scoffed them all down and the last one you can see it's actually ripped here because as one of our team members went to eat it some some shouted no we need that tomorrow for the hu ad check it out I know people are loving hu greens at the moment because you guys have just plastered my DMs asking for hu Greens in the UK but in the meantime before hu Daily Greens comes to the UK you've got to check out the bars they've just dropped because they are delicious do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy it [Music]