May 8, 2023 • 40 mins
Who do we volunteer to run a gruelling half-marathon? Who do we expect to give up sugar, or quit drinking? Who do we demand clears out the garage in the middle of summer?
Ourselves. Mean, right?
Turns out we make demands on our future selves that our present selves would think are unrealistic or unreasonable. And the reason we do it is because our minds are really bad at anticipating the wants and needs we'll have in a week, a month, or a year from now. And that harms our happiness.
Talking before a live audience in Somerville, MA, Dr Laurie Santos and Harvard professor Jason Mitchell explore how we can be kinder to both our present and future selves.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin a Happiness Lab Listeners, what you're about to hear
will probably sound a little bit different than our usual episodes.
That's because I recorded this show not alone in my
(00:35):
tiny podcast closet at home, but in a huge auditorium
packed with people.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Hello, Hello, Hello, This is so cool everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
That's right, You're about to hear our first ever Happiness
Lab live. The event was held early in April at
the Arts in the Armory Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, just
outside of Boston. I'm a Massachusetts girl.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Myself grew up in New Bedford, just down the way
New Bedford. Folks in the house.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah. The listeners who came to the event got to
experience a top secret sneak preview of one of our
upcoming seasons. Ann had a chance to take part in
a live Q and A after the show. But what
You're about to Hear was the main event of the night.
I did a live interview all about a happiness topic
that I struggle with a lot myself, the question of
how we can be nicer to our future selves. The
(01:21):
happiness we experience in the next few days, weeks, and
months often relies on the decisions that we make today.
But if you're like me, you may struggle with treating
your future self as nicely as you should. Maybe you
sign your future self up for way too many projects
or commitments, or maybe current you doesn't get the rest
or breaks or exercise you need for future you to
feel good. In this special live episode, we explore why
(01:44):
our brains sometimes allow us to treat our future selves
like crap, and what we can do in the present
to make our future a happier place. And we get
to explore all these questions with a scholar that I
regard as one of the most special of our special guests.
Excited to introduce my Happiness Lab Live guest Jason Mitchell.
(02:08):
Jason is a professor's psychology at Harvard University. He did
his undergraduate and master's degrees at Yale University. After the
time at Yale, he came to Cambridge in the late
nineties to do his PhD in psychology at Harvard, where
he had the honor of being in the same incoming.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Graduate class as yours.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Truly, after finishing his PhD, Jason stuck around to become
a professor here, where he had the important distinction of
teaching not only intro to psych psych one, but also
their new course on well Being the Science of Happiness,
which covers a lot of the same topics that I
do in my psychology in the Good Life Class. Jason
is an amazing scholar and teacher. He's also my former
(02:43):
roommate on two different continents. He is one of the smartest,
funniest people I know, and he is one of my
oldest and dearest friends. And I'm so excited that I
get to introduce him to you on our first Happiness
Lab Live event ever. So please put your hands together
and give a warm Happiness Lab Live welcome to Jason Mitchell.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Favor. This is a great audience.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I know they're right.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I hope you feel warmly welcomed. So, Jason, my having
as Lab listeners, are used to hearing from happiness scholars
who are also my friends. I bring a lot of
them on the podcast. But you have the distinction of
knowing me longer than any of my former Happiness Lab guests,
and like honestly most people in my life, my husband's
out there, and you actually have known me longer than
I have known my husband, And so why don't you
(03:40):
start by telling our friendship origin story, And with the
magic of podcasting, if you say anything embarrassed that I
don't agree with, you'll hear it.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
But then what edit? But yeah, what's our origin story?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Our origin story in my mind has two parts, both
of which begin with questionable decisions of twenty.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
One year old Laurie twenty year old Jason.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
We're going to be editing a lot of I can
tell her again.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
So in the first part we had, we were both
undergraduates at different institutions, and we were visiting the University
of California, Berkeley for interview weekend. We were both applying
for graduate school there, and on the last day of
this visit, the agenda was mainly supposed to be fun,
and it centered around some volleyball tournament.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I think it was faculty student faculty.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Versus student volleyball. And as you know, I'm not the
least athletic person, but it turns out I can't play
any sport that involves a round ball, and so you
and I decided we would, instead of doing this, play
hooky and explore the Bay Area. I think it was
the first time either of us had been in California,
and we were twenty one we were both so excited
about all this freedom and this opportunity to do something
(04:47):
on our own. So he's on the whole day, just
kind of wandering around.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
What Jess is not convying is we didn't tell anyone
we decided to do this. We just left and only
later did we find out that the faculty and students were.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Like where did those two people go?
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Like, yeah, they're actually quite worried about it. So then
fast forward a couple months later, we had both decided
to come to Harvard. And again I'm not sure what
I was thinking, obviously not thinking, but I woke up
one morning in July real I had no plan for housing,
like where was I going to live when I moved
in six weeks? And I didn't know a single person
in Cambridge except for you. So I remember writing a
(05:17):
panicked email saying, do you know anybody who's looking for
a roommate?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
And as it.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Happened, you guys, you and Lucy and Kate were one
person short for an apartment in Cambridge, and so I
became the fourth person and we put out.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Student's story and.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
That was a very tame version. We won't have to
add any of that out of the podcast, And so
our origin story started when you decided to come to
Harvard for graduate school. And one of the reasons you
did that was that at the time, Harvard was this
burgeoning department that was studying something that was really cool
in the late nineties, this field called cognitive neuroscience, which
sounds like a mouthful. What is cognitive neuroscience and why
(05:55):
were you so excited about it?
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Yeah, it is a mouthful, So cognitive neuroscience. So let's
think about the different two different parts of that term.
Psychologists use the word cognition or cognitive process to refer
to kind of the recipe that the mind is using
to create our understanding of the world around us and
our thoughts and feelings.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So if you think about what a.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Recipe is, if you were baking, for example, you would
take pretty simple ingredients, say eggs, flour, water, sugar, and
then combine them in some way to create cakes and
cookies and croissants. Cognitive psychologists are interested in the same.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Sorts of issues.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
How do we take very rudimentary thoughts or rudimentary perceptions
and turn those into the complex behaviors that humans engage in. So,
if you think right now, your ears receiving a bunch
of very rudimentary signals, just some air coming in, and
somehow your brain is taking that signal and turning it
into an understanding of the words that I'm saying and
(06:50):
the meaning behind my words. So what's emerged from this
way of thinking is to think about the mind as
a kind of complex machine.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
But think about it.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
If you were just to encounter some machine and you
didn't know how it worked. You know, if I got
some mit folks or some here in the audience I
see and said, you know, I've got this new machine.
I don't know how it works. Can you help me
onderstand it? They'd probably spend some time poking and prodding
and seeing what kinds of behavior and engaged in. But
eventually they'd want to open it up. They'd really want
to see how it was built, where the wires went.
(07:19):
And that's true for cognitive neuroscience. The neuroscience part is
our desire to see, well, how is the actual hardware?
Giving rise to this recipe.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And at the time in the nineties that you started,
you know, this was a really exciting time for actually
doing that, for actually looking at the hardware in a
way that it probably hadn't been ever before in human.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
History, right, Yeah, So before the nineties, there was really
only three ways that you could understand how the brain worked.
One was to look at what other animals' brains did
by doing research on mice or monkeys, which, you know,
you kind of hope that our brains work the same way,
and people were a little queasy of doing that kind
of work. You could look at individuals who were undergoing
(08:01):
surgery for other reasons. For example, they might have brain
tumors or epilepsy, and while their skulls were open, you
could actually poke and prod their brains and see what
kind of behavior that elicited. And the third way was
to wait for individuals who had naturally occurring damage, people
who might have, say a stroke that selectively damage one
part of the brain. Starting in the late eighties, mainly
(08:22):
for medical purposes, researchers began to develop techniques that would
allow us to actually look at the living, healthy brain
as it was doing anything we asked individuals to do.
And this was really a revolution within psychology.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And so tell me a little bit about what that
felt like being like a nerdy, you know, post college
student twenty one year old who gets to like, actually
study what brains are doing in real time.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
In many of our experiments, we ask subjects to perform
some basic kinds of tasks and we're able to see
not in real time, but pretty close sort of how
their brain is actually giving rise to language, to thoughts,
to our ability to understand other people. And to me,
it feels like one of the most intimate things you
(09:06):
can do, actually see inside at people's thoughts.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
And so, when you had this intimate tool to look
at how people were thinking and how their cognition was working,
you decided to study a particular topic, and it turns
out a topic that brains are pretty good at. You
decided to study how brains make sense of other minds.
Why were you so excited about how brains make sense
of other minds?
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
I recall at the time that every one of my
advisors said this was a crazy idea. They said, you
can't possibly hope to look and find specific brain regions
that are involved in something so complicated as social interaction.
What you'll find is just some mess of thousands of
brain regions all participating in this ability. But instead we
found something quite different. So, starting around the turn of
(09:47):
the century, we found that very specific brain regions seem
to be important for human social abilities. When I'm, for example,
interacting with you right now and making sense of your
questions or trying to come up with words that you
will understand, I'm involved in a very elaborate, complex understanding
of what your mind is doing and how I'm able
(10:08):
to affect your mind through my words or through my actions.
And this turns out to be a fascinating aspect of
the kinds of things humans can accomplish and.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
One of the most important things for human happiness, right
because all the things you're talking about, whether you're connecting
with language or making sense of my behavior, like this
is really part and parcel of what we do, and
we're socially connecting, which, as you know, is really super
important for happiness. But it turns out that the brain
doesn't just do this, It kind of does this like
on default too. This was something that neuroscientists also discovered.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Right, Yeah, So it turns out that the story of
the brain regions that are involved in social thought actually
comes from multiple directions. So there were a group of
individuals like us who were looking at what does the
brain do when it's talking to another person or thinking
about another person's mind. And we found this set of
brain regions. I won't go into all the details, but
one of them is called the medial prefrontal cortex, and
(10:59):
it's sort of in line with your nose, just behind
your forehead. Another group of researchers who really weren't fundamentally
interested in psychology at all, were just interesting in the
question about whether all brain regions were sort of equally hungry,
that is, did they use the same amount of oxygen
and glucose as they were doing their thing, or were
some sort of more efficient than others. And what they
(11:22):
found was that it turns out that, yeah, brain regions
really vary in sort of how active they are how
much they require feeding. If you rank order the brain
regions from the most hungry, the ones that are kind
of always on, to the ones that are at least
likely to be on, you find at the very top
of the list the same regions that are involved in
social interaction. So one interpretation of this is that humans
(11:44):
by default have brains that are interested in other people
that we sort of lock on. We're sort of primed
to think about and interact with.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Others, but your work specifically, it started to show that
our brains don't think about all people the same way
that we use different brain mechanisms to think about different
kinds of people. So tell me a little bit about
this work.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
So one of the questions that people within social psychology
you're interested in is how humans make sense of the
behavior of other people. So, for example, imagine that right now,
Laurie jumped up ran off stage. So of course I
would look at that and think to myself, well, there
goes Laurie. But I wouldn't stop there, right. I would
(12:27):
absolutely and you would too. You would absolutely want to
try to understand why she had just engaged in this behavior, right,
So I can come up with some ideas. Maybe you're
angry about something, or maybe a spider just fell from
the raptors. Maybe you really have to go to the bathroom.
So that act of trying to understand why you are
doing something requires me to make reference or understand something
about your mental states. What are you thinking right now,
(12:50):
what are you feeling right now? What are your goals
and intentions as you're engaging in this behavior. So researchers
in the field refer to this often as theory of mind,
that what humans do when they make sense of each
other's behavior is try to make sense of what their
thoughts and feelings are. So one of the questions that
immediately comes to mind is how do I make sense
(13:11):
of someone else's thoughts and feelings. I've never seen one
of your feelings directly. I can't peer into your head
right now, but I'm not completely flummixed by what's going
on inside your mind. And there's something very perverse about
the way humans are doing this, because, in a sense,
I've taken a relatively simple behavior, you getting up and leaving,
and I'm trying to make sense of that in terms
of things that are clearly way more complex and that
(13:34):
I have no immediate access to.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
But here's the trick.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
I've never seen one of your feelings kind of experienced
those directly, but I have experienced feelings directly in my
own head about myself, my own thoughts and feelings and
other mental states.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So one of the tricks.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
That the brain can use in making sense of other
people is to start with their own predictions about how
they would respond in such a situation. What would it
take for me to get up and walk off the stage.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Maybe I wouldn't do it if I just had to
go to the bathroom, right, that would be embarrassing. But
I might if, for example, a snake fell from the rafters.
And so maybe I begin to narrow in on what
you're thinking when you're doing that by using myself as
a kind of starting point. But here's the caveat here.
In order to do that, I have to think that
you and I are governed by similar kinds of rules,
that you and I are going to respond in similar
(14:20):
ways given the same kinds of situations. So, in a sense,
to use myself as a proxy for you requires kind
of assumption that we're a similar kind of person. It
turns out that the brain respects that difference. When we've
looked at how the brain responds to thinking about similar others,
we actually find it very hard to differentiate that act
from simply asking a subject to think about themselves. In contrast,
(14:43):
if the person's dissimilar from me, maybe they have very
different political values or come from a very different cultural background,
the brain will engage in very different kinds of processing
and trying to make sense of what is going on
inside that person's head.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
So it's literally using different brain tissue to think about
someone who's kind of different than you, a stranger than
you would to think about yourself.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Yeah, So the two things that I think are interesting
is that it's hard to tell the difference between thinking
about oneself thinking about similar others, and that we then
cordon off we've used different kinds of recipes when we
think about people who are not like us.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And this, it turns out I has some interesting consequences
for how we think about strangers and kind of the
mistakes we make. And one of those mistakes psychologists referred
to as the fundamental attributioner. What's the fundamental attributioner? How
does it work?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:29):
The fundamental attributioner is a idea that social psychologists have
been exploring since the seventies, and really it goes something
like this. If you, as an audience are listening to
us or watching us, it's very easy to think about
us as in this moment and what you can actually
(15:49):
see about us right now. So it's very easy to
think about us as professionals as we're aerodyite we you know,
to the extent that we are.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
That's the first time but.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Think about what you never see. You never see us
at a party, for example, or you don't see me
playing with my kids and being silly with them. So
it's hard for you to see all the ways in
which I might be different in very different contexts. Right
All that looms large to you is this thin slice
of my behavior right now. And it turns out humans
have a very hard time using or understanding how situations,
(16:24):
how the environments we find ourselves in the contexts we
in habit, how those things constrain and produce our behavior.
We call this the fundamental attribution error because one of
the things that I might want to do is I'm
looking at people's behavior or trying to make sense of them,
is to figure out is this person doing this because
that's who she really is deep down inside, She's just
(16:45):
a really curious, smart person. Or is she doing this
because the situation calls for this behavior right now? Now, Remember,
just a minute ago, I said that humans have brains
that are sort of by default looking to think about
other people's mental states. So one of the consequences of
having a brain like that is humans tend to latch
(17:05):
on to mental states. As the explanation for why people
do what they do. They're doing this because they're a jerk,
or they're doing this because they just are a very
funny person. And what we find difficult to understand, what
remains relatively invisible to us, is all the ways in
which situations might produce certain kinds of behaviors as we're
moving through the world.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
But this means that we sometimes wind up short changing
people because we can recognize those situations when it comes
to ourselves.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I'll use an example that sometimes comes up on the podcast.
I have a borderline road ragie tendency. But I don't
think of that as a tendency in myself. I'm not
like a masshole or anything. I just happen to sometimes
be in situations where I really need to merge and
I'm in a hurry. As a fact occurred this morning
when I was driving to Assembly Square. I was trying
(17:53):
to merge in and I was in a hurry. Yet
a podcast to get to I'm not a bad person.
I was just in a situation, but there was somebody
else merging in at the same time I was, and
that person was a masshole, like they were in the
same situation I was, but you see the fundamental attribution
Eerra at work. Right. It's allowing me to kind of
short change the people around me because I don't think
(18:13):
of what could be affecting them beyond what's going on
in their mental states and their personality. I just assume
they're a jerk or their X, Y and Z. Right.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Yeah, So I think in many cases the context or
the environment can serve as a kind of mitigating factor,
and because those mitigating factors are invisible, we instead attribute
people's behavior to their mental states or who they are
deep down inside, and that can often have negative consequences
for exactly the reasons that you're suggesting.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And so it's obvious that these consequences apply to our
social connection, right, because we might not be connecting with
people in the way that we should. But what's unexpected
is that it also causes problems for how we connect
with ourself because this tendency of the brain to misunderstand
and mispredict.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Others also applies to ourselves.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
In some situations. When we get back from the break,
we'll learn how our brains turn our future selves into strangers.
Jason will explain why that causes big problems for our
happiness also hear some strategies we can use to understand
our future.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Selves a little bit better.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
The Happiness Lab will be right back, Jason. So we're
talking about how we sometimes screw over our future selves,
(19:37):
and I wanted you to start with the story of
procrastination that you sometimes share with your students.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
So it turns out I'm in the middle of procrastinating
on multiple things. I'll just mention too. One of them
is I'm procrastinating on my taxes. So I'm not alone.
It is the beginning of April. Taxes are due in
just a couple of weeks, and yet the IRS tells
us that about a third of Americans don't submit their
(20:06):
taxes until the very last day.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So here I am.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
I've had since January to do this, but I keep
putting it off. And someone just before the show said, well,
that's kind of ridiculous. If you hate doing it so much,
why didn't you just hire someone to do it for you?
And I thought, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous. There are people
who are professionals who get paid to do this, and
I could have asked someone else to do it for me.
So maybe that was a kind of procrastination that.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I didn't need to engage in. But I'm also procrastinating.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
I have been for about a year now on starting
to get in better shape because of the kids, I
would need to get up pretty early in the morning,
and pretty much at the beginning of every month, I
tell myself, this is what I'm going to do, and
then somehow the month comes and goes and I haven't
done it, and part of me thinks that, well, the
problem is that, unlike taxes, there isn't someone else I
can hand this off to, right like I can't just
ask someone else to exercise for me and reap the benefits.
(20:53):
Except I realized recently that there is there is someone
else I can ask to do this, and it's future Jason.
Because I definitely don't want to get up tomorrow morning
to exercise, but I can ask Monday Jason to be
that person to do that. And in a sense, this
is what we mean when we talk about procrastination, this
(21:13):
way in which we offload the things that we're not
crazy about doing now to our future selves, thinking that
they will want to do it more, prefer to do it,
or at least be less miserable in accomplishing those things
even though we ourselves know that we don't want to
do them right right now.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And so as my friend, you know, I fall prey
to this all the time, but despite the fact that
I have experience with it personally, from a psychological perspective,
it should be really weird that we want to offload
this crappy stuff onto our future selves, that we kind
of think of our future selves as this other person.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
That we can offload stuff onto.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But your work has really shown that when we look
in the brain, we get some hints about why we
do that so easily.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Remember before we talked about how the brain seems to
differentiate between thinking about similar others and dissimilar others. So
one question you can ask is, how do we think
about our future self? How do I think about Jason
in a month from now. It turns out that very
often we think about our future self not as us,
not in the same breath or the same way that
(22:17):
we think about our current self, because we don't use
the same brain regions in many cases to think about
what the likes, dislikes, goals of our future self are
going to be.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And that's kind of terrible because it means we're really
treating our future self like a complete stranger, and that
kind of is where a lot of the miseries of
life come up, right.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
That's right, So we seem to have this very strange
theory about who our future self is going to be.
We tend to think that our future self is going
to be the kind of guy who doesn't.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Mind getting up early.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Going for a run on a twenty five degree dark
morning in Boston. On the one hand, we think of
our future self as this sort of aspirational self, this
person who's going to have fixed all of the problems
that currently plague us. On the other hand, we also
think about our future self as somebody who's not particularly
turbed by all that much. We tend to think that
our future selves not going to mind that trip to
(23:13):
the dentist as much as we ourselves would mind that.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Trip to the dentist.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
He's also not going to enjoy things nearly as much
as we would enjoy things. If I'm given a choice
between having some delicious cake right now or an even
better one this time next week, screw that future guy.
He's not going to enjoy that dessert nearly as much
as I'm going to enjoy it right now. And so
we tend to make these decisions that favor our current
self in part because we just simply have the wrong
(23:40):
theories about who we're going to be in the future.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So one of the consequences of seeing our future selves
as strangers is that even though we like to think
of ourselves as nice people, we sometimes kind of treat
strangers like crap, and that sort of means we end
up treating.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Our future selves like crap too.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I know this was something that researcher Emily Pronan and
her colleagues had looked at. Do you want to explain
this study?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Yeah, this is one of my favorite and most diabolical
studies in the field. So Emily is a professor at Princeton.
She and I were actually in the same class in college.
And what Emily did was present her subjects with a
very unpalatable set of choices. She mixed together this concoction
of I think it was soy, sauce and ketchup and
(24:20):
water and then asked her subjects, how much of this would.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
You be willing to drink for me?
Speaker 4 (24:25):
For science and subjects, take a look at this, smell
it your good sports. They say about three tablespoons or so, right,
so not all that much. Then she asked another question.
She said, well, look, we really do need this for science.
So suppose for the next subject, if you had to
decide how much that person was going to drink of it,
and they, without missing a bead, say yeah, that person's fine,
but let's give him half a cup. So people are
(24:49):
not being very nice to this other stranger. But here's
the most amazing part. She also asked some subjects, suppose
you were to come back to the lab in a
month and I asked you to commit now to drinking
some amount of this how much do you think you'd
be willing to drink? And what they say is half
a cup. My future self will be perfectly fine with
doing that, just like that stranger would, as if you
(25:10):
think to yourself, yeah, I'm not going to be bothered
by that.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And this problematic theory of this kind of ideal future
self who's like super rational like it comes with other
biases as well, And one of these is one that
your Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert talks about as a future
and hedonia. What is future and hedonia?
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Yeah, we think about our future self as being a
kind of spock like character who's not going to have
high highs or low lows. My spock like future self
will just very stoically drink the half cup of tomato
soy water mix and be perfectly okay with it. So
in Dan's work, subjects are asked, hey, if you were
(25:50):
to find twenty dollars right now, how good would that
feel to you? Scale from one to nine, and subjects
not surprisingly say, hey, that sounds pretty good. Maybe it's
a seven out of nine to find twenty bucks. Then
he asks other subjects, how would it feel to your
future self if your future self found twenty dollars in
three months time? Imagine that you find twenty dollars, How
(26:11):
exciting is that going to be to you? And what
subjects say is it'll be about a five five and
a half. What a strange thing, right as if your
future self is incapable and willing to experience the same
highs that you know that you yourself right now would experience.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So that's one way that we get our future selves wrong.
We assume that they're this like spock like, truly ideal
moral actor. But there's a second way that we get
our future self wrong, which gets back to this idea
of the fundamental attribution error that we talked about earlier,
which is that we don't understand the extent to which
our future selves are really affected by the situation. We
also don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and
the same way we kind of don't do that for strangers.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So, one of the things that I think is most
difficult about making decisions for your future self is that
it's very hard to imagine in our mind's eye what
all of the situational constraints on our future self might
look like.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
We're bad at that.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
When we think about other people, we don't see the
fact that your merging because you made a mistake. We
just think that you're the kind of person who barges
in in traffic, And I think we do something like
that when we think about our future self. We don't
think about all the ways in which we're going to
be busy this time next month, or all the ways
in which we'll be tired at the end of the day.
And so we can very easily commit ourselves to things
(27:29):
that we might even enjoy without taking into account the
various ways that situations will conspire against us.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And this could have some funny consequences that folks like
economists study, right, even in the purchases that we make
over time, that's right.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
So one of my favorite studies is looking at individuals
who are at a grocery store just about to do
their shopping for the week.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And at the end of when individuals are in line.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
About to buy their groceries, the experimenters come over and
they basically just more or less way how much the
person is buying, and they ask the person another question,
when was the last time how to meal?
Speaker 3 (28:10):
And it turns out that individuals who've.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Gone to the supermarket hungry buy more food for the
whole week than individuals who've gone having recently eaten. As
if we have trouble putting aside our own current state
of hunger in this instance, in order to make proper
decisions for our future self. This is also reminiscent of
studies that economists have done looking at seasonal variation in
(28:34):
the kinds of houses people buy and the kinds of
cars they buy. So, what kind of cars do you
think people buy in the summer? They buy convertibles. There's
a much higher rate of people buying convertibles in the summer,
even in places like New England where there are approximately
ten days a year when it makes sense to use
a convertible. Likewise, if a house has a pool, it's
(28:57):
much more likely to sell and to sell at a
higher price if it's marketed in the summer. In both cases,
people are imagining all the amazing things that they're going
to do with that pool and all the amazing pool
rides they're going to take in that convertible without thinking
about the long periods of time when they're not.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Going to be able to use those features.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And one of the worst ways that we kind of
screw over our future self and this kind of mistake
about paying attention to the situations that are going to
present themselves inevitably, is when we think about the amount
of time that our future selves have. This is something
that researcher gal Zuberman talks about as future time slack.
What's future time slack?
Speaker 3 (29:32):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
So in the same way that we tend to think
about our future selves as having it all together, being
the kind of person who's going to want to exercise,
we also tend to think that our future self is
going to have a lot more free time than they
actually do.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Now. One reason for this makes sense.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
If you look at your calendar for April of next year,
chances are it looks pretty empty.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
So if somebody asks you, for.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Example, to be on their podcast live and a show
in Summerville, do you think, sure, of course I'm going
to of course I'm going to have a great time
doing that. I'm going to have plenty of time this
week to enjoy that. Now, of course, what actually happens
is that as April of next year rolls around, your
calendar gets more and more full, as it always does,
and so when that actual event comes up, you're just
(30:16):
as busy at that time than you would be if
it was happening right now.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
And so we get our future selves wrong because we
think of them as this ideal actor. We get our
future selves wrong because we're not taking into account the situation.
We're not taking into account how much time they're really
going to have. And all of this raises an important question,
which is how do we overcome these biases so we
can stop screwing over our future selves all the time?
Are there strategies we can use to meet our future
(30:40):
selves where they are when we get back from the break,
Jason will share a few key strategies that we can
use to better fight all these biases and simulate our
future selves a little bit better so that future us
can become.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
A friend rather than a stranger.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
The Happiness Lab We'll be right.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So, Jason, I want you to help us fix all
this stuff, and I want you to start with strategies
that I know you use personally to overcome some of
these biases, and one of them involves trying to get
as close to your future self as possible by kind
of bringing your present self there. One of my favorite
strategies you use for this involves kind of simulating this
question of do you want to do something tomorrow? Talk
(31:30):
to me about how this strategy works.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
So, as we've been talking, it's very hard for me
to actually simulate or imagine what my future self is
going to be. Like humans seem, for whatever reason, to
fall short when they try to imagine all the things
that are going to impinge upon their future self or
what kinds of thoughts and feelings and desires their future
self is going to have. So one of the things
that I do in my life is to say, look,
(31:53):
I don't even need to worry about that particular question.
What I should do instead is simply answer the question
about whether I want to do something now. If somebody
asks me, hey, can you attend this wedding next week?
Do you want to take on this work project that's
due in a few weeks. Rather than thinking is this
going to be something that my future self is happy
to do? I say to myself, if I had to
(32:14):
do this right now, would it work for me? Would
it be something that I get enjoyment out of? And
very often the answer is no, I feel too busy
to do that thing. I know that it's going to
be stressful to try to finish out the semester and
also go to this wedding. The fact of the matter
is that if that's true for me now, it's very
likely to be true for me in a month or
this time next year. And so I can answer the
question on behalf of my future self by simply answering
(32:37):
it for myself now.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
And I love the strategy because it really fights this
idea of future time slack that we had before. Because
sometimes if I ask myself, do I want to do
it now? Like it sounds fun, but I absolutely don't
have any time to do it right now, and that
can be the answer too.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
That's right, and you're right that if that's true right now,
if you feel like you've not got the bandwidth to
do this thing that would otherwise be fun, chances are
that's also going to be true in a month or
this time next year.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
So I don't like it though it doesn't feel like that,
well it does. So that's one strategy I love.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Another strategy we can use is sort of the power
of language to better connect with our future self. And
this just comes from the way that we can use
language to connect with any stranger, even our future self.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Right this first strategy is almost as you put it,
sort of bringing yourself to the future, and you can
also reverse the process by bringing the future to you.
One of the things that we know from research on
social interaction or social thought is that there's enormous power
in putting yourself into the shoes of another person. So
(33:39):
you mentioned before that we treat strangers or people who
are dissimilar from us in very different ways than we
treat ourselves and similar others. One way to fix that problem,
or to change that is to simply ask subjects to
spend five minutes writing a short little vignette from the
perspective of that other person using first person pronouns.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
I did this.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
It happened to me, And that very act of simply
seeing through the eyes of another person, using first person
pronouns to really inhabit that person's experience seems to be
sufficient to take somebody who's dissimilar and bring them into
the orbit of similarity. Now I think that that's also
possible when we treat another stranger our future self, rather
(34:21):
than thinking about that person as me in the future,
or a you or that guy, to really think about me.
This is happening to me. This is my choice. I'm
the person who's going to be experiencing these events, and
my sense is that that very act of simply changing
the pronouns that we use and describing our future selves
might be sufficient for ameliorating some.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Of these effects.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
This is one that I'm definitely going to use, because
I really fall play to talking about my future self
in the third person. I'm like, well, that's June Laurie's problem,
Like June Laurie is going to have it together. But
now I'm going to say that's my problem. How am
I going to solve it instantly? Already just in my
brain right now, it's like, oh wait, it's my problem,
it's not some other strangers problem. I also think this
is cool because it reflects the way that we can
(35:05):
use language in the opposite way. So some of you
might have heard our epid with Ethan Cross about how
we can use language to kind of perspective take more right.
Often when we're kind of ruminating, we're like, oh, I've
got to do this, I've got to do this.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
But you can use the.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Strategy of saying, Lari, how would you do this? Let's
think about it, Lauria, how would you solve your problems?
You go third person to try to get some perspective.
This is the same thing, but it's the opposite. It's
going first person to get some perspective on your future self.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
So I absolutely love this.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
But you've also argued that one of the things we
need to do to make sure we're making good decisions
even when we use these other techniques, is to know
what our current preferences are, to make sure we're kind
of aware of what we actually want right now, because
this is another way we go wrong.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
We simulate it.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Oh, our future self would like X Y and Z,
because I like X, Y and Z, but we don't
right now even actually like X Y and Z.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Right.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
I think human social life is very complicated, and maybe
you've had the same experience. But I often find myself
saying yes to things, not really because they're my own preferences,
but because I'm interested in avoiding other social consequences that
might come with saying no. So in a sense, this
is though a way also of being unfair to our
(36:21):
future self. There's some pain that's going to be associated
with this. Either I can say no to someone right now,
and that's going to feel awkward, and you know, I'm
going to feel a little guilty.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
But if I don't.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
Say no, I can avoid that moment of awkwardness. But
I'm going to commit my future self to some event
that maybe he doesn't want to participate in a wedding
or a job, a piece of your.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Job, say podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And so I think I love this suggestion too, because
it to do that well, I think you have to
harness two strategies that we talk about a lot on
the Happiness lab. So one of them is being a
little bit more mindful. We have to actually know and
notice what we like and what we don't like. So
if we're saying yes to something because we kind of
feel a little icky about saying no, or we feel
(37:08):
like it's awkward to say no, that's a moment of
mindfulness where we need to notice, Huh, I'm feeling a
little like kind of regret right now, I'm feeling a
little aversion. We need to acknowledge and notice that, which
I think is powerful. But another strategy that we talk
a lot about in the Happiness lab that's effective here
is that that means that our current selves, which are
hopefully making a good decision for our future selves, are
(37:29):
kind of taking on something that feels a little tough,
that like feels a little tricky or maybe too emotional.
And so what are some strategies that we can use
to help our present selves take on tough stuff, you know,
make the future easier by making the present a little
bit tougher.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. If there's
some evenly distributed unpleasantness, it's probably better to get it
out of the way now than to have to live
with that unpleasantness over some long period of time. Right,
you know, looking forward, what's the word dreading some event
that's coming up. But you're right that that requires us
to interrogate in the present how much we want or
(38:07):
don't want to be doing something and what that's going
to mean for our future well being.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And there's a key way to do that, which is
to find ways to allow those negative emotions. Right, I'm
sitting down to my taxes and I hate this and
I hate this, and I definitely hate it. But I
can allow that, right, I can sit with this on comfort.
You know, I'm procrastinating on something because I'm anxious about
it and I'm scared. I can sit with that fear. Right.
These are all techniques that we know we can engage in.
(38:34):
We just need to do them in the moment to
protect our future self. And So, Jason, knowing more how
the brain works and why we sometimes get into these
situations with our future selves, has that helped you to
do a little bit better and not screw your future
selves over as much?
Speaker 4 (38:52):
You'd be surprised at how at how hard it is
to overcome these tendencies. I think, No, No, I wouldn't
I think, even knowing about them, even studying them, we
are built in a certain way that makes it very
hard for us to take our future selves seriously. And
(39:13):
I find that I constantly have to remind myself that
I am in a relationship with my future self, that
he has feelings too. I would like to think that
I'm a friend, and so I think it's one of
these aspects of life that we have to kind of
constantly refresh and remind ourselves to do better with.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Well, thank you for giving us all some strategies that
we can use to help our future selves out.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Please join me in Gan Gang, Jason Nicholl.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
We're fantastic talk. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilly and the amazing Courtney Guerano. Our
show is mixed by Evan and Viola, and our fantastic
music was provided by Zachary Silver.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Special thanks to.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
The theme at our really great venue, the Arts and
the Armory, and to our lead on site sound engineer
Sarah Bruger and Big Big Thanks to our live studio audience.
Happiness Lab would also like to thank Carrie Brody, Greta Cone,
Eric Sandler, Carl Miguliore, Morgan Rattner, Jacob Weisberg, Ben Davis
(40:23):
and Doug Singer at w E and the rest of
the Pushkin drew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and by me, doctor Laurie Sandrows.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Thank you all.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
That is end of Happiness Lab Lives.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Thank you again for coming.
Speaker 5 (40:39):
Whoo woo
Pushkin a Happiness Lab Listeners, what you're about to hear
will probably sound a little bit different than our usual episodes.
That's because I recorded this show not alone in my
(00:35):
tiny podcast closet at home, but in a huge auditorium
packed with people.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Hello, Hello, Hello, This is so cool everyone.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
That's right, You're about to hear our first ever Happiness
Lab live. The event was held early in April at
the Arts in the Armory Theater in Somerville, Massachusetts, just
outside of Boston. I'm a Massachusetts girl.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Myself grew up in New Bedford, just down the way
New Bedford. Folks in the house.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah. The listeners who came to the event got to
experience a top secret sneak preview of one of our
upcoming seasons. Ann had a chance to take part in
a live Q and A after the show. But what
You're about to Hear was the main event of the night.
I did a live interview all about a happiness topic
that I struggle with a lot myself, the question of
how we can be nicer to our future selves. The
(01:21):
happiness we experience in the next few days, weeks, and
months often relies on the decisions that we make today.
But if you're like me, you may struggle with treating
your future self as nicely as you should. Maybe you
sign your future self up for way too many projects
or commitments, or maybe current you doesn't get the rest
or breaks or exercise you need for future you to
feel good. In this special live episode, we explore why
(01:44):
our brains sometimes allow us to treat our future selves
like crap, and what we can do in the present
to make our future a happier place. And we get
to explore all these questions with a scholar that I
regard as one of the most special of our special guests.
Excited to introduce my Happiness Lab Live guest Jason Mitchell.
(02:08):
Jason is a professor's psychology at Harvard University. He did
his undergraduate and master's degrees at Yale University. After the
time at Yale, he came to Cambridge in the late
nineties to do his PhD in psychology at Harvard, where
he had the honor of being in the same incoming.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Graduate class as yours.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Truly, after finishing his PhD, Jason stuck around to become
a professor here, where he had the important distinction of
teaching not only intro to psych psych one, but also
their new course on well Being the Science of Happiness,
which covers a lot of the same topics that I
do in my psychology in the Good Life Class. Jason
is an amazing scholar and teacher. He's also my former
(02:43):
roommate on two different continents. He is one of the smartest,
funniest people I know, and he is one of my
oldest and dearest friends. And I'm so excited that I
get to introduce him to you on our first Happiness
Lab Live event ever. So please put your hands together
and give a warm Happiness Lab Live welcome to Jason Mitchell.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Favor. This is a great audience.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
I know they're right.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I hope you feel warmly welcomed. So, Jason, my having
as Lab listeners, are used to hearing from happiness scholars
who are also my friends. I bring a lot of
them on the podcast. But you have the distinction of
knowing me longer than any of my former Happiness Lab guests,
and like honestly most people in my life, my husband's
out there, and you actually have known me longer than
I have known my husband, And so why don't you
(03:40):
start by telling our friendship origin story, And with the
magic of podcasting, if you say anything embarrassed that I
don't agree with, you'll hear it.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
But then what edit? But yeah, what's our origin story?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Our origin story in my mind has two parts, both
of which begin with questionable decisions of twenty.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
One year old Laurie twenty year old Jason.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
We're going to be editing a lot of I can
tell her again.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
So in the first part we had, we were both
undergraduates at different institutions, and we were visiting the University
of California, Berkeley for interview weekend. We were both applying
for graduate school there, and on the last day of
this visit, the agenda was mainly supposed to be fun,
and it centered around some volleyball tournament.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I think it was faculty student faculty.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Versus student volleyball. And as you know, I'm not the
least athletic person, but it turns out I can't play
any sport that involves a round ball, and so you
and I decided we would, instead of doing this, play
hooky and explore the Bay Area. I think it was
the first time either of us had been in California,
and we were twenty one we were both so excited
about all this freedom and this opportunity to do something
(04:47):
on our own. So he's on the whole day, just
kind of wandering around.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
What Jess is not convying is we didn't tell anyone
we decided to do this. We just left and only
later did we find out that the faculty and students were.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Like where did those two people go?
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Like, yeah, they're actually quite worried about it. So then
fast forward a couple months later, we had both decided
to come to Harvard. And again I'm not sure what
I was thinking, obviously not thinking, but I woke up
one morning in July real I had no plan for housing,
like where was I going to live when I moved
in six weeks? And I didn't know a single person
in Cambridge except for you. So I remember writing a
(05:17):
panicked email saying, do you know anybody who's looking for
a roommate?
Speaker 3 (05:21):
And as it.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
Happened, you guys, you and Lucy and Kate were one
person short for an apartment in Cambridge, and so I
became the fourth person and we put out.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Student's story and.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
That was a very tame version. We won't have to
add any of that out of the podcast, And so
our origin story started when you decided to come to
Harvard for graduate school. And one of the reasons you
did that was that at the time, Harvard was this
burgeoning department that was studying something that was really cool
in the late nineties, this field called cognitive neuroscience, which
sounds like a mouthful. What is cognitive neuroscience and why
(05:55):
were you so excited about it?
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Yeah, it is a mouthful, So cognitive neuroscience. So let's
think about the different two different parts of that term.
Psychologists use the word cognition or cognitive process to refer
to kind of the recipe that the mind is using
to create our understanding of the world around us and
our thoughts and feelings.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So if you think about what a.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Recipe is, if you were baking, for example, you would
take pretty simple ingredients, say eggs, flour, water, sugar, and
then combine them in some way to create cakes and
cookies and croissants. Cognitive psychologists are interested in the same.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Sorts of issues.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
How do we take very rudimentary thoughts or rudimentary perceptions
and turn those into the complex behaviors that humans engage in. So,
if you think right now, your ears receiving a bunch
of very rudimentary signals, just some air coming in, and
somehow your brain is taking that signal and turning it
into an understanding of the words that I'm saying and
(06:50):
the meaning behind my words. So what's emerged from this
way of thinking is to think about the mind as
a kind of complex machine.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
But think about it.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
If you were just to encounter some machine and you
didn't know how it worked. You know, if I got
some mit folks or some here in the audience I
see and said, you know, I've got this new machine.
I don't know how it works. Can you help me
onderstand it? They'd probably spend some time poking and prodding
and seeing what kinds of behavior and engaged in. But
eventually they'd want to open it up. They'd really want
to see how it was built, where the wires went.
(07:19):
And that's true for cognitive neuroscience. The neuroscience part is
our desire to see, well, how is the actual hardware?
Giving rise to this recipe.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And at the time in the nineties that you started,
you know, this was a really exciting time for actually
doing that, for actually looking at the hardware in a
way that it probably hadn't been ever before in human.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
History, right, Yeah, So before the nineties, there was really
only three ways that you could understand how the brain worked.
One was to look at what other animals' brains did
by doing research on mice or monkeys, which, you know,
you kind of hope that our brains work the same way,
and people were a little queasy of doing that kind
of work. You could look at individuals who were undergoing
(08:01):
surgery for other reasons. For example, they might have brain
tumors or epilepsy, and while their skulls were open, you
could actually poke and prod their brains and see what
kind of behavior that elicited. And the third way was
to wait for individuals who had naturally occurring damage, people
who might have, say a stroke that selectively damage one
part of the brain. Starting in the late eighties, mainly
(08:22):
for medical purposes, researchers began to develop techniques that would
allow us to actually look at the living, healthy brain
as it was doing anything we asked individuals to do.
And this was really a revolution within psychology.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And so tell me a little bit about what that
felt like being like a nerdy, you know, post college
student twenty one year old who gets to like, actually
study what brains are doing in real time.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
In many of our experiments, we ask subjects to perform
some basic kinds of tasks and we're able to see
not in real time, but pretty close sort of how
their brain is actually giving rise to language, to thoughts,
to our ability to understand other people. And to me,
it feels like one of the most intimate things you
(09:06):
can do, actually see inside at people's thoughts.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
And so, when you had this intimate tool to look
at how people were thinking and how their cognition was working,
you decided to study a particular topic, and it turns
out a topic that brains are pretty good at. You
decided to study how brains make sense of other minds.
Why were you so excited about how brains make sense
of other minds?
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
I recall at the time that every one of my
advisors said this was a crazy idea. They said, you
can't possibly hope to look and find specific brain regions
that are involved in something so complicated as social interaction.
What you'll find is just some mess of thousands of
brain regions all participating in this ability. But instead we
found something quite different. So, starting around the turn of
(09:47):
the century, we found that very specific brain regions seem
to be important for human social abilities. When I'm, for example,
interacting with you right now and making sense of your
questions or trying to come up with words that you
will understand, I'm involved in a very elaborate, complex understanding
of what your mind is doing and how I'm able
(10:08):
to affect your mind through my words or through my actions.
And this turns out to be a fascinating aspect of
the kinds of things humans can accomplish and.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
One of the most important things for human happiness, right
because all the things you're talking about, whether you're connecting
with language or making sense of my behavior, like this
is really part and parcel of what we do, and
we're socially connecting, which, as you know, is really super
important for happiness. But it turns out that the brain
doesn't just do this, It kind of does this like
on default too. This was something that neuroscientists also discovered.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Right, Yeah, So it turns out that the story of
the brain regions that are involved in social thought actually
comes from multiple directions. So there were a group of
individuals like us who were looking at what does the
brain do when it's talking to another person or thinking
about another person's mind. And we found this set of
brain regions. I won't go into all the details, but
one of them is called the medial prefrontal cortex, and
(10:59):
it's sort of in line with your nose, just behind
your forehead. Another group of researchers who really weren't fundamentally
interested in psychology at all, were just interesting in the
question about whether all brain regions were sort of equally hungry,
that is, did they use the same amount of oxygen
and glucose as they were doing their thing, or were
some sort of more efficient than others. And what they
(11:22):
found was that it turns out that, yeah, brain regions
really vary in sort of how active they are how
much they require feeding. If you rank order the brain
regions from the most hungry, the ones that are kind
of always on, to the ones that are at least
likely to be on, you find at the very top
of the list the same regions that are involved in
social interaction. So one interpretation of this is that humans
(11:44):
by default have brains that are interested in other people
that we sort of lock on. We're sort of primed
to think about and interact with.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Others, but your work specifically, it started to show that
our brains don't think about all people the same way
that we use different brain mechanisms to think about different
kinds of people. So tell me a little bit about
this work.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
So one of the questions that people within social psychology
you're interested in is how humans make sense of the
behavior of other people. So, for example, imagine that right now,
Laurie jumped up ran off stage. So of course I
would look at that and think to myself, well, there
goes Laurie. But I wouldn't stop there, right. I would
(12:27):
absolutely and you would too. You would absolutely want to
try to understand why she had just engaged in this behavior, right,
So I can come up with some ideas. Maybe you're
angry about something, or maybe a spider just fell from
the raptors. Maybe you really have to go to the bathroom.
So that act of trying to understand why you are
doing something requires me to make reference or understand something
about your mental states. What are you thinking right now,
(12:50):
what are you feeling right now? What are your goals
and intentions as you're engaging in this behavior. So researchers
in the field refer to this often as theory of mind,
that what humans do when they make sense of each
other's behavior is try to make sense of what their
thoughts and feelings are. So one of the questions that
immediately comes to mind is how do I make sense
(13:11):
of someone else's thoughts and feelings. I've never seen one
of your feelings directly. I can't peer into your head
right now, but I'm not completely flummixed by what's going
on inside your mind. And there's something very perverse about
the way humans are doing this, because, in a sense,
I've taken a relatively simple behavior, you getting up and leaving,
and I'm trying to make sense of that in terms
of things that are clearly way more complex and that
(13:34):
I have no immediate access to.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
But here's the trick.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
I've never seen one of your feelings kind of experienced
those directly, but I have experienced feelings directly in my
own head about myself, my own thoughts and feelings and
other mental states.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So one of the tricks.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
That the brain can use in making sense of other
people is to start with their own predictions about how
they would respond in such a situation. What would it
take for me to get up and walk off the stage.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Maybe I wouldn't do it if I just had to
go to the bathroom, right, that would be embarrassing. But
I might if, for example, a snake fell from the rafters.
And so maybe I begin to narrow in on what
you're thinking when you're doing that by using myself as
a kind of starting point. But here's the caveat here.
In order to do that, I have to think that
you and I are governed by similar kinds of rules,
that you and I are going to respond in similar
(14:20):
ways given the same kinds of situations. So, in a sense,
to use myself as a proxy for you requires kind
of assumption that we're a similar kind of person. It
turns out that the brain respects that difference. When we've
looked at how the brain responds to thinking about similar others,
we actually find it very hard to differentiate that act
from simply asking a subject to think about themselves. In contrast,
(14:43):
if the person's dissimilar from me, maybe they have very
different political values or come from a very different cultural background,
the brain will engage in very different kinds of processing
and trying to make sense of what is going on
inside that person's head.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
So it's literally using different brain tissue to think about
someone who's kind of different than you, a stranger than
you would to think about yourself.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Yeah, So the two things that I think are interesting
is that it's hard to tell the difference between thinking
about oneself thinking about similar others, and that we then
cordon off we've used different kinds of recipes when we
think about people who are not like us.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And this, it turns out I has some interesting consequences
for how we think about strangers and kind of the
mistakes we make. And one of those mistakes psychologists referred
to as the fundamental attributioner. What's the fundamental attributioner? How
does it work?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (15:29):
The fundamental attributioner is a idea that social psychologists have
been exploring since the seventies, and really it goes something
like this. If you, as an audience are listening to
us or watching us, it's very easy to think about
us as in this moment and what you can actually
(15:49):
see about us right now. So it's very easy to
think about us as professionals as we're aerodyite we you know,
to the extent that we are.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
That's the first time but.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Think about what you never see. You never see us
at a party, for example, or you don't see me
playing with my kids and being silly with them. So
it's hard for you to see all the ways in
which I might be different in very different contexts. Right
All that looms large to you is this thin slice
of my behavior right now. And it turns out humans
have a very hard time using or understanding how situations,
(16:24):
how the environments we find ourselves in the contexts we
in habit, how those things constrain and produce our behavior.
We call this the fundamental attribution error because one of
the things that I might want to do is I'm
looking at people's behavior or trying to make sense of them,
is to figure out is this person doing this because
that's who she really is deep down inside, She's just
(16:45):
a really curious, smart person. Or is she doing this
because the situation calls for this behavior right now? Now, Remember,
just a minute ago, I said that humans have brains
that are sort of by default looking to think about
other people's mental states. So one of the consequences of
having a brain like that is humans tend to latch
(17:05):
on to mental states. As the explanation for why people
do what they do. They're doing this because they're a jerk,
or they're doing this because they just are a very
funny person. And what we find difficult to understand, what
remains relatively invisible to us, is all the ways in
which situations might produce certain kinds of behaviors as we're
moving through the world.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
But this means that we sometimes wind up short changing
people because we can recognize those situations when it comes
to ourselves.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I'll use an example that sometimes comes up on the podcast.
I have a borderline road ragie tendency. But I don't
think of that as a tendency in myself. I'm not
like a masshole or anything. I just happen to sometimes
be in situations where I really need to merge and
I'm in a hurry. As a fact occurred this morning
when I was driving to Assembly Square. I was trying
(17:53):
to merge in and I was in a hurry. Yet
a podcast to get to I'm not a bad person.
I was just in a situation, but there was somebody
else merging in at the same time I was, and
that person was a masshole, like they were in the
same situation I was, but you see the fundamental attribution
Eerra at work. Right. It's allowing me to kind of
short change the people around me because I don't think
(18:13):
of what could be affecting them beyond what's going on
in their mental states and their personality. I just assume
they're a jerk or their X, Y and Z. Right.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Yeah, So I think in many cases the context or
the environment can serve as a kind of mitigating factor,
and because those mitigating factors are invisible, we instead attribute
people's behavior to their mental states or who they are
deep down inside, and that can often have negative consequences
for exactly the reasons that you're suggesting.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And so it's obvious that these consequences apply to our
social connection, right, because we might not be connecting with
people in the way that we should. But what's unexpected
is that it also causes problems for how we connect
with ourself because this tendency of the brain to misunderstand
and mispredict.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Others also applies to ourselves.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
In some situations. When we get back from the break,
we'll learn how our brains turn our future selves into strangers.
Jason will explain why that causes big problems for our
happiness also hear some strategies we can use to understand
our future.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Selves a little bit better.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
The Happiness Lab will be right back, Jason. So we're
talking about how we sometimes screw over our future selves,
(19:37):
and I wanted you to start with the story of
procrastination that you sometimes share with your students.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
So it turns out I'm in the middle of procrastinating
on multiple things. I'll just mention too. One of them
is I'm procrastinating on my taxes. So I'm not alone.
It is the beginning of April. Taxes are due in
just a couple of weeks, and yet the IRS tells
us that about a third of Americans don't submit their
(20:06):
taxes until the very last day.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So here I am.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
I've had since January to do this, but I keep
putting it off. And someone just before the show said, well,
that's kind of ridiculous. If you hate doing it so much,
why didn't you just hire someone to do it for you?
And I thought, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous. There are people
who are professionals who get paid to do this, and
I could have asked someone else to do it for me.
So maybe that was a kind of procrastination that.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I didn't need to engage in. But I'm also procrastinating.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
I have been for about a year now on starting
to get in better shape because of the kids, I
would need to get up pretty early in the morning,
and pretty much at the beginning of every month, I
tell myself, this is what I'm going to do, and
then somehow the month comes and goes and I haven't
done it, and part of me thinks that, well, the
problem is that, unlike taxes, there isn't someone else I
can hand this off to, right like I can't just
ask someone else to exercise for me and reap the benefits.
(20:53):
Except I realized recently that there is there is someone
else I can ask to do this, and it's future Jason.
Because I definitely don't want to get up tomorrow morning
to exercise, but I can ask Monday Jason to be
that person to do that. And in a sense, this
is what we mean when we talk about procrastination, this
(21:13):
way in which we offload the things that we're not
crazy about doing now to our future selves, thinking that
they will want to do it more, prefer to do it,
or at least be less miserable in accomplishing those things
even though we ourselves know that we don't want to
do them right right now.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And so as my friend, you know, I fall prey
to this all the time, but despite the fact that
I have experience with it personally, from a psychological perspective,
it should be really weird that we want to offload
this crappy stuff onto our future selves, that we kind
of think of our future selves as this other person.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
That we can offload stuff onto.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But your work has really shown that when we look
in the brain, we get some hints about why we
do that so easily.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Remember before we talked about how the brain seems to
differentiate between thinking about similar others and dissimilar others. So
one question you can ask is, how do we think
about our future self? How do I think about Jason
in a month from now. It turns out that very
often we think about our future self not as us,
not in the same breath or the same way that
(22:17):
we think about our current self, because we don't use
the same brain regions in many cases to think about
what the likes, dislikes, goals of our future self are
going to be.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
And that's kind of terrible because it means we're really
treating our future self like a complete stranger, and that
kind of is where a lot of the miseries of
life come up, right.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
That's right, So we seem to have this very strange
theory about who our future self is going to be.
We tend to think that our future self is going
to be the kind of guy who doesn't.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Mind getting up early.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Going for a run on a twenty five degree dark
morning in Boston. On the one hand, we think of
our future self as this sort of aspirational self, this
person who's going to have fixed all of the problems
that currently plague us. On the other hand, we also
think about our future self as somebody who's not particularly
turbed by all that much. We tend to think that
our future selves not going to mind that trip to
(23:13):
the dentist as much as we ourselves would mind that.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Trip to the dentist.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
He's also not going to enjoy things nearly as much
as we would enjoy things. If I'm given a choice
between having some delicious cake right now or an even
better one this time next week, screw that future guy.
He's not going to enjoy that dessert nearly as much
as I'm going to enjoy it right now. And so
we tend to make these decisions that favor our current
self in part because we just simply have the wrong
(23:40):
theories about who we're going to be in the future.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
So one of the consequences of seeing our future selves
as strangers is that even though we like to think
of ourselves as nice people, we sometimes kind of treat
strangers like crap, and that sort of means we end
up treating.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Our future selves like crap too.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I know this was something that researcher Emily Pronan and
her colleagues had looked at. Do you want to explain
this study?
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Yeah, this is one of my favorite and most diabolical
studies in the field. So Emily is a professor at Princeton.
She and I were actually in the same class in college.
And what Emily did was present her subjects with a
very unpalatable set of choices. She mixed together this concoction
of I think it was soy, sauce and ketchup and
(24:20):
water and then asked her subjects, how much of this would.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
You be willing to drink for me?
Speaker 4 (24:25):
For science and subjects, take a look at this, smell
it your good sports. They say about three tablespoons or so, right,
so not all that much. Then she asked another question.
She said, well, look, we really do need this for science.
So suppose for the next subject, if you had to
decide how much that person was going to drink of it,
and they, without missing a bead, say yeah, that person's fine,
but let's give him half a cup. So people are
(24:49):
not being very nice to this other stranger. But here's
the most amazing part. She also asked some subjects, suppose
you were to come back to the lab in a
month and I asked you to commit now to drinking
some amount of this how much do you think you'd
be willing to drink? And what they say is half
a cup. My future self will be perfectly fine with
doing that, just like that stranger would, as if you
(25:10):
think to yourself, yeah, I'm not going to be bothered
by that.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And this problematic theory of this kind of ideal future
self who's like super rational like it comes with other
biases as well, And one of these is one that
your Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert talks about as a future
and hedonia. What is future and hedonia?
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Yeah, we think about our future self as being a
kind of spock like character who's not going to have
high highs or low lows. My spock like future self
will just very stoically drink the half cup of tomato
soy water mix and be perfectly okay with it. So
in Dan's work, subjects are asked, hey, if you were
(25:50):
to find twenty dollars right now, how good would that
feel to you? Scale from one to nine, and subjects
not surprisingly say, hey, that sounds pretty good. Maybe it's
a seven out of nine to find twenty bucks. Then
he asks other subjects, how would it feel to your
future self if your future self found twenty dollars in
three months time? Imagine that you find twenty dollars, How
(26:11):
exciting is that going to be to you? And what
subjects say is it'll be about a five five and
a half. What a strange thing, right as if your
future self is incapable and willing to experience the same
highs that you know that you yourself right now would experience.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So that's one way that we get our future selves wrong.
We assume that they're this like spock like, truly ideal
moral actor. But there's a second way that we get
our future self wrong, which gets back to this idea
of the fundamental attribution error that we talked about earlier,
which is that we don't understand the extent to which
our future selves are really affected by the situation. We
also don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and
the same way we kind of don't do that for strangers.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So, one of the things that I think is most
difficult about making decisions for your future self is that
it's very hard to imagine in our mind's eye what
all of the situational constraints on our future self might
look like.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
We're bad at that.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
When we think about other people, we don't see the
fact that your merging because you made a mistake. We
just think that you're the kind of person who barges
in in traffic, And I think we do something like
that when we think about our future self. We don't
think about all the ways in which we're going to
be busy this time next month, or all the ways
in which we'll be tired at the end of the day.
And so we can very easily commit ourselves to things
(27:29):
that we might even enjoy without taking into account the
various ways that situations will conspire against us.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And this could have some funny consequences that folks like
economists study, right, even in the purchases that we make
over time, that's right.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
So one of my favorite studies is looking at individuals
who are at a grocery store just about to do
their shopping for the week.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
And at the end of when individuals are in line.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
About to buy their groceries, the experimenters come over and
they basically just more or less way how much the
person is buying, and they ask the person another question,
when was the last time how to meal?
Speaker 3 (28:10):
And it turns out that individuals who've.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Gone to the supermarket hungry buy more food for the
whole week than individuals who've gone having recently eaten. As
if we have trouble putting aside our own current state
of hunger in this instance, in order to make proper
decisions for our future self. This is also reminiscent of
studies that economists have done looking at seasonal variation in
(28:34):
the kinds of houses people buy and the kinds of
cars they buy. So, what kind of cars do you
think people buy in the summer? They buy convertibles. There's
a much higher rate of people buying convertibles in the summer,
even in places like New England where there are approximately
ten days a year when it makes sense to use
a convertible. Likewise, if a house has a pool, it's
(28:57):
much more likely to sell and to sell at a
higher price if it's marketed in the summer. In both cases,
people are imagining all the amazing things that they're going
to do with that pool and all the amazing pool
rides they're going to take in that convertible without thinking
about the long periods of time when they're not.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Going to be able to use those features.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
And one of the worst ways that we kind of
screw over our future self and this kind of mistake
about paying attention to the situations that are going to
present themselves inevitably, is when we think about the amount
of time that our future selves have. This is something
that researcher gal Zuberman talks about as future time slack.
What's future time slack?
Speaker 3 (29:32):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
So in the same way that we tend to think
about our future selves as having it all together, being
the kind of person who's going to want to exercise,
we also tend to think that our future self is
going to have a lot more free time than they
actually do.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Now. One reason for this makes sense.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
If you look at your calendar for April of next year,
chances are it looks pretty empty.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
So if somebody asks you, for.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Example, to be on their podcast live and a show
in Summerville, do you think, sure, of course I'm going
to of course I'm going to have a great time
doing that. I'm going to have plenty of time this
week to enjoy that. Now, of course, what actually happens
is that as April of next year rolls around, your
calendar gets more and more full, as it always does,
and so when that actual event comes up, you're just
(30:16):
as busy at that time than you would be if
it was happening right now.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
And so we get our future selves wrong because we
think of them as this ideal actor. We get our
future selves wrong because we're not taking into account the situation.
We're not taking into account how much time they're really
going to have. And all of this raises an important question,
which is how do we overcome these biases so we
can stop screwing over our future selves all the time?
Are there strategies we can use to meet our future
(30:40):
selves where they are when we get back from the break,
Jason will share a few key strategies that we can
use to better fight all these biases and simulate our
future selves a little bit better so that future us
can become.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
A friend rather than a stranger.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
The Happiness Lab We'll be right.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So, Jason, I want you to help us fix all
this stuff, and I want you to start with strategies
that I know you use personally to overcome some of
these biases, and one of them involves trying to get
as close to your future self as possible by kind
of bringing your present self there. One of my favorite
strategies you use for this involves kind of simulating this
question of do you want to do something tomorrow? Talk
(31:30):
to me about how this strategy works.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
So, as we've been talking, it's very hard for me
to actually simulate or imagine what my future self is
going to be. Like humans seem, for whatever reason, to
fall short when they try to imagine all the things
that are going to impinge upon their future self or
what kinds of thoughts and feelings and desires their future
self is going to have. So one of the things
that I do in my life is to say, look,
(31:53):
I don't even need to worry about that particular question.
What I should do instead is simply answer the question
about whether I want to do something now. If somebody
asks me, hey, can you attend this wedding next week?
Do you want to take on this work project that's
due in a few weeks. Rather than thinking is this
going to be something that my future self is happy
to do? I say to myself, if I had to
(32:14):
do this right now, would it work for me? Would
it be something that I get enjoyment out of? And
very often the answer is no, I feel too busy
to do that thing. I know that it's going to
be stressful to try to finish out the semester and
also go to this wedding. The fact of the matter
is that if that's true for me now, it's very
likely to be true for me in a month or
this time next year. And so I can answer the
question on behalf of my future self by simply answering
(32:37):
it for myself now.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
And I love the strategy because it really fights this
idea of future time slack that we had before. Because
sometimes if I ask myself, do I want to do
it now? Like it sounds fun, but I absolutely don't
have any time to do it right now, and that
can be the answer too.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
That's right, and you're right that if that's true right now,
if you feel like you've not got the bandwidth to
do this thing that would otherwise be fun, chances are
that's also going to be true in a month or
this time next year.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
So I don't like it though it doesn't feel like that,
well it does. So that's one strategy I love.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Another strategy we can use is sort of the power
of language to better connect with our future self. And
this just comes from the way that we can use
language to connect with any stranger, even our future self.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
Right this first strategy is almost as you put it,
sort of bringing yourself to the future, and you can
also reverse the process by bringing the future to you.
One of the things that we know from research on
social interaction or social thought is that there's enormous power
in putting yourself into the shoes of another person. So
(33:39):
you mentioned before that we treat strangers or people who
are dissimilar from us in very different ways than we
treat ourselves and similar others. One way to fix that problem,
or to change that is to simply ask subjects to
spend five minutes writing a short little vignette from the
perspective of that other person using first person pronouns.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
I did this.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
It happened to me, And that very act of simply
seeing through the eyes of another person, using first person
pronouns to really inhabit that person's experience seems to be
sufficient to take somebody who's dissimilar and bring them into
the orbit of similarity. Now I think that that's also
possible when we treat another stranger our future self, rather
(34:21):
than thinking about that person as me in the future,
or a you or that guy, to really think about me.
This is happening to me. This is my choice. I'm
the person who's going to be experiencing these events, and
my sense is that that very act of simply changing
the pronouns that we use and describing our future selves
might be sufficient for ameliorating some.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Of these effects.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
This is one that I'm definitely going to use, because
I really fall play to talking about my future self
in the third person. I'm like, well, that's June Laurie's problem,
Like June Laurie is going to have it together. But
now I'm going to say that's my problem. How am
I going to solve it instantly? Already just in my
brain right now, it's like, oh wait, it's my problem,
it's not some other strangers problem. I also think this
is cool because it reflects the way that we can
(35:05):
use language in the opposite way. So some of you
might have heard our epid with Ethan Cross about how
we can use language to kind of perspective take more right.
Often when we're kind of ruminating, we're like, oh, I've
got to do this, I've got to do this.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
But you can use the.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Strategy of saying, Lari, how would you do this? Let's
think about it, Lauria, how would you solve your problems?
You go third person to try to get some perspective.
This is the same thing, but it's the opposite. It's
going first person to get some perspective on your future self.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
So I absolutely love this.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
But you've also argued that one of the things we
need to do to make sure we're making good decisions
even when we use these other techniques, is to know
what our current preferences are, to make sure we're kind
of aware of what we actually want right now, because
this is another way we go wrong.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
We simulate it.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Oh, our future self would like X Y and Z,
because I like X, Y and Z, but we don't
right now even actually like X Y and Z.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Right.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
I think human social life is very complicated, and maybe
you've had the same experience. But I often find myself
saying yes to things, not really because they're my own preferences,
but because I'm interested in avoiding other social consequences that
might come with saying no. So in a sense, this
is though a way also of being unfair to our
(36:21):
future self. There's some pain that's going to be associated
with this. Either I can say no to someone right now,
and that's going to feel awkward, and you know, I'm
going to feel a little guilty.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
But if I don't.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
Say no, I can avoid that moment of awkwardness. But
I'm going to commit my future self to some event
that maybe he doesn't want to participate in a wedding
or a job, a piece of your.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Job, say podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
And so I think I love this suggestion too, because
it to do that well, I think you have to
harness two strategies that we talk about a lot on
the Happiness lab. So one of them is being a
little bit more mindful. We have to actually know and
notice what we like and what we don't like. So
if we're saying yes to something because we kind of
feel a little icky about saying no, or we feel
(37:08):
like it's awkward to say no, that's a moment of
mindfulness where we need to notice, Huh, I'm feeling a
little like kind of regret right now, I'm feeling a
little aversion. We need to acknowledge and notice that, which
I think is powerful. But another strategy that we talk
a lot about in the Happiness lab that's effective here
is that that means that our current selves, which are
hopefully making a good decision for our future selves, are
(37:29):
kind of taking on something that feels a little tough,
that like feels a little tricky or maybe too emotional.
And so what are some strategies that we can use
to help our present selves take on tough stuff, you know,
make the future easier by making the present a little
bit tougher.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. If there's
some evenly distributed unpleasantness, it's probably better to get it
out of the way now than to have to live
with that unpleasantness over some long period of time. Right,
you know, looking forward, what's the word dreading some event
that's coming up. But you're right that that requires us
to interrogate in the present how much we want or
(38:07):
don't want to be doing something and what that's going
to mean for our future well being.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And there's a key way to do that, which is
to find ways to allow those negative emotions. Right, I'm
sitting down to my taxes and I hate this and
I hate this, and I definitely hate it. But I
can allow that, right, I can sit with this on comfort.
You know, I'm procrastinating on something because I'm anxious about
it and I'm scared. I can sit with that fear. Right.
These are all techniques that we know we can engage in.
(38:34):
We just need to do them in the moment to
protect our future self. And So, Jason, knowing more how
the brain works and why we sometimes get into these
situations with our future selves, has that helped you to
do a little bit better and not screw your future
selves over as much?
Speaker 4 (38:52):
You'd be surprised at how at how hard it is
to overcome these tendencies. I think, No, No, I wouldn't
I think, even knowing about them, even studying them, we
are built in a certain way that makes it very
hard for us to take our future selves seriously. And
(39:13):
I find that I constantly have to remind myself that
I am in a relationship with my future self, that
he has feelings too. I would like to think that
I'm a friend, and so I think it's one of
these aspects of life that we have to kind of
constantly refresh and remind ourselves to do better with.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Well, thank you for giving us all some strategies that
we can use to help our future selves out.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Please join me in Gan Gang, Jason Nicholl.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
We're fantastic talk. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilly and the amazing Courtney Guerano. Our
show is mixed by Evan and Viola, and our fantastic
music was provided by Zachary Silver.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Special thanks to.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
The theme at our really great venue, the Arts and
the Armory, and to our lead on site sound engineer
Sarah Bruger and Big Big Thanks to our live studio audience.
Happiness Lab would also like to thank Carrie Brody, Greta Cone,
Eric Sandler, Carl Miguliore, Morgan Rattner, Jacob Weisberg, Ben Davis
(40:23):
and Doug Singer at w E and the rest of
the Pushkin drew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and by me, doctor Laurie Sandrows.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Thank you all.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
That is end of Happiness Lab Lives.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Thank you again for coming.
Speaker 5 (40:39):
Whoo woo
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