No.1 Neuroscientist: NEW Research Explains Why Life, Work & Your Sex Life will eventually get Boring! (HOW TO STOP THIS HAPPENING) Dr. Tali Sharot

Is new always better? Instead of always chasing the newest thing, is there not a way that you can appreciate the people and possessions already in your life? In this new episode Steven sits down again with leading neuroscientist, Dr. Tali Sharot. Dr. Tali Sharot is the director of the Affective Brain Lab and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Sharot’s research combines neuroscience with the study of behaviour and psychology to examine how emotions and motivation lead to people’s beliefs and decisions. She is the author of the award-winning books, ‘The Optimism Bias’ and ‘The Influential Mind’. In this conversation Dr. Sharot and Steven discuss topics, such as: How to shake up your life Ways to break the feeling of being in a repetitive cycle Why people become immune to joy How to see what you’ve always missed How to have the best holiday Why you should take a break from your partner to improve your relationship How to keep a relationship spicey Why humans need the feeling of being in control The secrets of motivation Why the midlife crisis is real and the ways to beat it How VR can help people overcome fear Why happiness is low in midlife How to increase productivity Why humans get bored of happiness Why the idea of living your best life doesn’t exist Why people need to disrupt their life How to increase your levels of happiness Why 40% of people quit a new job How to use change to improve your life The ways that social media is like prison Why social media is ruining expectations Ways to make people believe you How changing incentives can change your life Why Gen Z will change the world People becoming addicted to risk Why risk can help get rid of anxiety The brain trick image Dr Tali refers to - https://bit.ly/3sMa86R You can pre-order Dr. Sharot’s new book, ‘Look Again: The Power of Noticing What was Always There’, here: https://amzn.to/3SEbVp5 If you enjoyed this episode, I recommend you check out my first conversation with Dr. Tali Sharot, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZK1nawEXQ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  What advice would you give me to make sure that my relationship stays fresh and new and spicy?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Actually, there's a great study that when people the sexual desire for the partner goes up.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  Dr. Tali Sharot. She's a neuroscientist, author, one of the world's leading researchers on emotion, decision-making. And how to change our brains for the better.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  This is negatively affecting your life and you don't know it. We have a study where we asked people, what was your favorite part on your vacation? And we found the peak of enjoyment was 43 hours into the vacation. And people used one word more than any other word, and it was the word first. The first view of the ocean, the first cocktail. And then the joy goes down and down and down. Why? It's because the input into your neurons is constant. And when things are not changing, our brains just stops responding. And the problem is that even if you're living your absolute best life, a great relationship, a good job, comfortable home, after a while, those things don't bring us the joy that they should.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Because when something is always in front of you, you stop attending to it. That's true also for the not so great thing around us. Sexism, racism, cracks in our relationships. After a while, we don't notice them. And if we don't notice them, we don't change them. One reason why happiness is low in midlife is because things are a little bit more routine. The problem is, we really don't like risk-taking.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  So how do we change that?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Two main things. One is...

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  Tali, welcome back.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me back. Lovely to be here.

• 1:44Steven Bartlett?

  For those people that aren't familiar with your career, can you give us a little bit of an overview of your academic background? But really, I guess, the summary of the mission that you're on and the work that you've done. What are you trying to understand? What is it that you're trying to do with your professional life?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  So in very general terms, I'm trying to understand human behavior. Why do people do what they do? Why do they feel the way that they do? And I use a lot of different methods to try to understand that. So I use neuroscience method. I really kind of try to look inside people's brains. Also, I look at behavior. So I'm kind of combining psychology, brain science. I also combine economics to try to understand motives, to try to understand needs.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  And hopefully use that not only for us to understand human brains better, but also to make our life better, perhaps make better decisions.

• 2:37Steven Bartlett?

  For anyone that's listening to this right now, that is has a vision of who they want to become. And it's different from who they currently are in some way, habits, behaviors they want to adopt. Is step one awareness, is that step one awareness of your own cycles and thoughts and patterns?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  One thing you should concentrate on and be aware of is what is already good about yourself. Right? So not only what do I want to become, which I'm not, but what am I, which is great? What already great skills I have, right? Personality traits I have, because those are things that you can build on. Right? And so look at it not only in this kind of negative way, but look at it in a positive ways. And so once, once you've done that, yes, then we can say, okay, this is my goal. Right? And the next thing is how do I go from where I am to this goal? And if you have a specific plan and you're not necessarily going to follow that exact plan.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Right? But if you have a plan and you kind of really think through the details, what happens is that if you can imagine that vividly, that will then create your belief that it's more likely to happen. Right? If we have a specific plan, concrete, that makes us feel it's more likely to happen. And if we think it's more likely to happen, we're more likely to follow through. And then there's a lot of little tricks of how to get us to follow through. One really important one is looking at your progress. So say you want to go to the gym and at the first week you only go once a week. And then the next week you go twice a week, or maybe when you're you go the first time you go, you're only running on the treadmill for 10 minutes, right?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  And then the next time 20 minutes, but put down those numbers so you can actually see them. Because when people can actually see their progress, that is extremely motivating. Right? You always want to be a little bit above from where you were. So that's that's one thing that's hugely important.

• 4:39Steven Bartlett?

  Is there sort of scientific research that supports this idea that progress has a very sort of motivational impact on people?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. There are great studies. One study that I'm thinking of was where people had to do a task which required them to learn the rules. And they would get money, rewards for doing it well. And every so often, they asked people, how are you feeling right now? What they found is, yes, when people got rewards, when they got money, they were feeling good. But it turns out that they felt the best when they learned something new, right? When they progressed. That's when they were really feeling the best. And there was, there's another study in which people could play one of two games. One game, all the rules were clear. It was really easy for them to do the best that they could do.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  In another game, there was a bit of uncertainty. They had to learn. It wasn't clear, right? It was challenging to some terms of respect. And they could play those two games. And then every, every few minutes, they said, okay, you could stay in this game or you can move to the other game. What they found is people liked to play the game where they had to learn, where there was uncertainty. They did not like to play the game where they always did well, where they were not progressing, where there's nothing to learn. So progress is really something that we strive for. And when it happens, that really makes us feel better, right? It makes us feel like we are moving forward. We don't like to stay, even if where you are is great. Right? Really, really great. After a while, it's not enough, right?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  You want to expand. You want to progress.

• 6:19Steven Bartlett?

  Those subject matters appear in your new book, Look Again, when you're talking about the importance of variety in our lives. And it really shows up in all aspects of our lives, this need for variety, which you're kind of talking about there. People want to try something new. They want to learn something new. They want to be stimulated in some way. It's very true in work. You talk about that a lot. And as an employer, it really kind of hit me that one of the most effective things I could do to keep my team members motivated would probably be to like change their jobs quite often, or at least add new elements to their responsibilities quite often.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, what the book is about is about habituation. And habituation is basically the phenomena which governs basically every part of our brain, which is we don't respond to things that don't change. When things are constant, where they're not changing, our brain just stops responding. And once you do change things around even a little bit, then we start responding again. And at work, you know, it's often the case in big companies, for example, that people will take employees and will let them rotate through different divisions once in a while, right? Because if you're staying at the same place, doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, you become complacent to some extent, right?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  But once you change, you're now talking to maybe a little different people, maybe the projects are a little bit different. Then you start encoding again. It also enhances your creativity.

• 7:52Steven Bartlett?

  The word habituation is quite a long word. I'm sure most people won't be familiar with the word, probably never heard it before. I didn't hear about habituation until I was doing a lot of research ahead of my book and came across a lot of your research. But a really interesting way to illustrate what habituation is, is with images like this. Now, tell me, tell me what's going on here. We're going to put this image on the screen and also, for those of you that are listening on audio, there'll be a link to this image in the description of this episode. But essentially, when you look at this image, in the center of this image for 30 seconds, especially when you're looking at it on a computer screen, all of the colors disappear if you stay focused on that black dot in the middle of this image for 30 seconds.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  So this was a discovery by Austrian physician in 1804. What he discovered is that if you look, you have to not move your eyes. So fixate on the black cross and don't move your eyes. The colors fade away, they become gray. And if you're really good at this, so I've done this a few times and I was able to do this, actually the gray goes away and the whole thing just becomes white. Why is that? It's because the input into your neurons, if you're not moving your eyes, is constant. So the neurons are just getting the same input, so they stop responding. They're like, well, there's nothing new here. You know, let's save our resources for something else that's going to come along. So you stop noticing the color altogether.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  And that is habituation. Now, once you move your eyes, color comes back.

• 9:27Steven Bartlett?

  Or if anything moves in the background.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you do, yeah, yeah. So then if you're moving your eyes, then the inputs into different neurons change, and then you consciously perceive the colors again. And I think it's the same in our life. If everything is constant, we don't perceive the goods and we don't perceive the bad. But if we move our eyes enough, you know, metaphorically, then we'll start noticing and feeling again.

• 9:54Steven Bartlett?

  Do all animals do this habituation thing?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's something really fundamental. You see this in every living creature. And I think, to me, that's what's so interesting about this, right? Because something that seems to affect every part of our life, from our relationships to our mental health to our ability to innovate, you can actually track it down and you can see it's in every living animal. There's this habituation. The fact that neurons respond less and less to things that don't change, right? And that's true for things just like sound. If you hear the same sound again and again and again and again, you're no longer conscious of it.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  You're no longer responding to it. So that's just perceptual habituation. But habituation is also true for the fundamental things in our life that we really care about. And this is why people can have really great things in their life. I'm sure you do, right? Maybe like a great relationship, a good job, or a comfortable home. But what's interesting is that after a while, those things don't bring us the daily joy that they should, right? Because we kind of habituate to it. Sort of like what is thrilling on Monday becomes boring on Friday. And the interesting thing is that's true also for... The not so great thing around us. So there might be bad things around us like sexism, racism, cracks in our relationships

• 11:24Speaker 01

  or inefficiencies at work. But if they're there all the time, after a while, we don't notice them. And if we don't notice them, we don't try to change them.

• 11:32Steven Bartlett?

  Where does this come from? This, this idea that once we're exposed to something, we kind of phase it out and can't see it anymore?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  It's because if something is in front of us for a while and we're still alive, nothing bad happened, right? Then the brain doesn't really need to respond to it anymore.

• 11:52Steven Bartlett?

  Because the brain's trying to conserve resources.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Right, right. We need the resources to be ready for the new thing that is coming your way, right? Which can be threatening, or it could also be really great, like, you know, food or something that you should grab. And that's, that's basically why we stop responding. Of course, if someone, something is hurting you, right? You will continue responding to that, which is why it's, it's, it's a little bit difficult to habituate to pain. That's one, to pain, yeah.

• 12:24Steven Bartlett?

  What are some of your, your favorite examples of everyday habituation?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Of everyday habituation?

• 12:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, like things that, yeah, yeah. I told you mine before we started recording, which was if I go to the gym and then I come home, I can no longer smell myself because you can, I can smell myself for maybe a couple of minutes when I'm working out, that I'm like getting hot and sweaty. But then once I'm around myself for like 10 minutes, I guess my brain is just no longer sending the signal from my armpits to my, through my nasal receptors to my brain.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so smell is, is really a good one because that happens really, really fast, right? So if you put a perfume in yourself, it really smells strongly, but then you put the same perfume a day later, you don't smell it as much. A week later, you don't smell it that much. So those are really easy to see around us. But I think to me, the more interesting ones are habituating to things that we enjoy a lot, and then we enjoy less and less and less, and things that are really bad, but we stop noticing. So for example, there's a great study in which people were asked to think about a song that they like. Tell me a song that you like, or even an artist that you like.

• 13:33Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, gosh, this is what I'm listening to at the moment. House gospel choir, angels watching over me.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Okay. Would you prefer to hear that song from beginning to end, no interruptions? Or would you prefer to hear it with breaks?

• 13:46Steven Bartlett?

  With breaks?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:48Steven Bartlett?

  I don't want to hear it with breaks.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Okay, you want to hear it?

• 13:50Steven Bartlett?

  The full thing.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Right, and you think you would enjoy it more, correct?

• 13:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Okay, 99% of people say exactly what you say, right? I'm gonna enjoy the song more if I just hear, I listen to it continuously with no breaks. But, counterintuitively, when the study was conducted, it was shown that people actually end up enjoying a song more if there are breaks.

• 14:12Steven Bartlett?

  By breaks, you mean they just put gaps in it?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Gaps in it, and in fact, what's more interesting is, not only did they put gaps, for different groups of people, they did different things doing the gaps. Maybe there's quiet, maybe there's annoying noise, and it didn't matter what they did in the gaps. When you had gaps in the song, people enjoyed it more, which is really counterintuitive, right? And they were willing to pay twice as much to hear that song in concert. So why is that? So if you hear a song that you really like, it's really joyful, but it turns out that over the, whatever, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes of the song, the joy kind of goes down, you habituate a little bit, right? If you have a break, the joy is quite high, and then it starts going down. There's a break, and so then you go back up, right?

• 14:58Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  And so you habituate a little bit, but then you go back up. So overall, you're enjoying the music more. And they did the same with massages. So what do you prefer? A one-hour massage or 20-minute massage break? 20-minute massage break, 20-minute massage break?

• 15:14Steven Bartlett?

  The one-hour massage.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Right, again, everyone says, I prefer the one-hour massage. But again, when they did the study and they asked people, how much did you enjoy it? The group who had breaks ended up enjoying it more.

• 15:25Steven Bartlett?

  So what you're saying is, we need to put more bloody adverts in this podcast?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I was... This was exactly what I was thinking.

• 15:33Steven Bartlett?

  People are loving the adverts.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Because you think, you know, intellectually, you think, oh, these adverts are annoying. But I think what's happening, and you know, no one's actually done this, this exact experiment, but they should. I think that, in fact, people may enjoy your podcast more with the ads. Even if you can't, even if they go through it like that, it's a little gap, it is possible. And that was my thought, exactly.

• 15:55Steven Bartlett?

  All the comments now are like, we fucking don't want any more. That's so interesting.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And one of my favorite examples is actually vacation. So holidays. So I did, I was working on this project with a big tourism company in the UK. And they wanted to know what makes people enjoy holidays the most, right? When do they enjoy the holiday the most and why? So we did surveys and we went on these resorts to interview people. And we found two interesting things. The first was that the peak of enjoyment was forty three hours into the vacation.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And why is that? Well, we think the reason is that first you get to the resort and then you have to unpack, you know, all of that. And then you start really enjoying it. And then the joy goes down and down and down over time. You're still enjoying your holiday a lot, but the peak is within forty three hours. And then the related second bit of data that we saw is that when we asked people, what was your favorite part of the vacation? People used one word more than any other word, and it was the word first. So they said, the first view of the ocean, the first dip in the water, first cocktail. Right? They enjoyed the second time they went into the pool, the third time, but they enjoyed the first the most.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Because firsts are kind of novel, right? And then you have it right. The second time you enjoyed a little bit less than the first time in July. You're still enjoying it, but not as much as the first time.

• 17:30Steven Bartlett?

  So does that mean that for holidays, I think you argue this point in the book, you do, yeah, about instead of doing, you know, four week holidays, it's much better to do weekend breaks. Because if it's forty two hours or so, that's optimal enjoyment.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Right. So you're trying to think about how can I maximize my enjoyment, right? And when it comes to vacation, maybe one, one good idea is instead of going for a two week vacation, During the year, maybe, you know, have a few long weekends, vacations. Now, of course, if you're flying somewhere far, then you might not be able to do it. It's a cost and so on, but you might consider instead of going to this far away vacation for two weeks, maybe you want to go somewhere closer to home, but have more of them. Because then you get more firsts. You also get more afterglows. So that's when you're coming back from vacation and you're still happy because you were just on vacation. And you're also getting more of the anticipation of the vacation.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Which is hugely beneficial for your wellbeing. The anticipation part before you're actually even there at the resort or wherever you're going.

• 18:34Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, this begs the question about the other thing we habituate to, which a lot of us don't want to admit, which is our partners and our sex lives. Two things I've talked a lot on this podcast about as it relates to things that we kind of get used to and then no longer can get the same level of, I don't know, pleasure, happiness, appreciation, gratitude from. Does it apply to relationships and sex?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it does, and I think the solution is very similar. Breaks. And I don't mean like a relationship break.

• 19:06Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  What I mean is have, you know, an evening for yourself. Go on a weekend perhaps on your own. And then when you come back, everything kind of resparcels.

• 19:17Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any data to prove this? Because it's a feeling, something that we all know intuitively. Like me and my partner both know that when we're spending time apart is good for our relationship. Every relationship knows that. It's good for our sex life, it's good for our appreciation of each other. But is there any data that supports this?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yes, and I'll tell you what the data is, which is so obvious. You think it's like, why do people even do a study about this? But there's one study and it simply shows that when people are away from their partner, their desire, their sexual desire for the partner goes up.

• 19:48Steven Bartlett?

  What is it about our partner going away that makes us want them more?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  It's related to habituation, right? But it's also related to where your attention is. When something is always in front of you, you sort of stop attending to it. Because it's always there. And so your brain then goes, okay, what else do I need to get, right? But if they're not there, then your attention can go back to them. And then there is a more basic level of how pleasure works. There's this great quote by the economist Tiber Skitovski. And he says that pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires. Right?

• 20:31Steven Bartlett?

  Incomplete?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yes. So the idea is that you're always wanting a little bit more.

• 20:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Right, intermittent meaning there's breaks. And then you always, and it's incomplete because you always want a little bit more. And I think that quote is, you can apply it to almost everything. Right? Even to food. There's another fun experiment where they have two groups. And one group was given mac and cheese to eat, which they really liked every day for, you know, a few weeks. And of course, they liked the mac and cheese of the first day. They liked it in the second day, but after a while, they couldn't, you know, they couldn't see mac and cheese anymore. They really did not want mac and cheese. While the other group got mac and cheese just once a week and they enjoyed the mac and cheese much more. Right? And so it's true for food. It's true for music.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  It's true for our relationships. It's true for vacations.

• 21:24Steven Bartlett?

  What's that type, what's that restaurant where they, the chef brings you, I don't know, like 13 different courses of food?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  That's too much. So that's not good. Okay. So here's, here's what I think about choices. You, first of all, you don't want to give people no choice at all. Right? So if there's a restaurant where you get no choice at all, I don't think that is overall a good idea. I mean, what you could do, for example, if you want, if you want to have a restaurant where there's an option that the chef decides, still make it a choice. Right? So you can have on the menu chef's choice, but I'm still, you know, sitting there and deciding, okay, the chef is going to choose for me, but that's still my choice.

• 22:05Steven Bartlett?

  What is that, Matso?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Because it is well known that first.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Having a choice is really important for people's sense of control and for their enjoyment. And once they choose something, they like it better than if someone else chooses for them. They really, you know, one thing that we really don't like, humans really don't like, and actually other animals as well, is having no agency, having no choice. That causes anxiety. So we do want to make sure that people have a choice. At the same time, you don't want to have too many options because that can be overwhelming. Right? There's the famous experiment where people are given an option to choose between 60 different jams. And some people are so overwhelmed, they just leave the store empty handed.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  So you don't want to go to, right, too much choice, which could be just overwhelming because there's, you know, for like too much cognitive resources, right? Anything that that we do that requires

• 23:09Speaker 01

  an amount of cognitive resource that is above some kind of threshold can feel aversive. Right? So having a choice where you have to choose too many things, that's not good. On the other hand, not being able to choose anything, that's not good either. So you want to be somewhere in in the middle.

• 23:27Steven Bartlett?

  Going back to this this subject matter of relationships, what advice would you give me based on everything you know about habituation? To make sure that my relationship stays spicy and we go the long term? What things can I, you know, what do I need to be aware of? What what things can I do?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so just thinking about like habituation related things.

• 23:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I would say two main things. One is breaks, meaning having some distance once in a while, right?

• 23:56Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And the second is doing new things together.

• 24:00Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Right, because if you're always doing the same thing over and over and over, which couples sometimes do, there are like a few things that they like to do, right? Because it's hard, because each person has their own preferences of what they like, and then you find an overlap, and that overlap is not necessarily huge. So then you just, you know, do the same thing over and over. So I think as a couple, it is good to explore, and I don't necessarily mean like sexually, but just everything, like what type of movies you're gonna watch and, you know, what type of activities, and that can also expand your experiences together.

• 24:36Steven Bartlett?

  On the point of sex, though, I do think sex can get boring if you don't constantly try new things. It's just, if you plan to be with someone for 50 years, finding new things to try is work, to be honest. And I guess life is work, so it's work worth doing. You know, I'm almost, I don't know, almost five years into my relationship with a little bit of a gap in between. And it's a conversation we've had a lot, which is how do we keep things fresh and new and interesting and spicy? Because like any couple or like any people, you fall into, as you say, like comfort habits. We go to this restaurant because we know it and they know us. You know, you go to this place because you know the place and there's your favorite restaurant there or whatever.

• 25:20Steven Bartlett?

  You watch this thing on TV, you follow this, okay, this cycle of Monday to Sunday. Monday we do this, then Saturday and Sunday we do this. You know, and it can be, the monotony can seem to take a joy out of life, right?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think you want a little bit of balance. So some of this kind of routine and things you're familiar with, there's something nice about that as well, right? So it's not, I'm not saying every weekend do something completely new, right? But just, so you have your kind of routines and then... You know, you insert some novel activities or something, something new. So it's, it's kind of a balance between exploring new things, but also exploiting the things that you enjoy.

• 26:04Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there's a, because I was thinking about it as you were speaking about men and women. If there's a difference in their ability to habituate. And in my experience, maybe that's just because I've always been the man in the situation. I'm less likely to seek spontaneity, I think, in terms of like coming up with new ideas for places us to go. My girlfriend, she's so like, let's go to this flower thing, let's go to this thing, let's go to this plant, let's go over here. She's very explorative. So I was just wondering if there was a variance you'd ever seen in any research about a man's ability to habituate versus a woman's.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  No, I haven't. So I don't necessarily think there is, and I don't necessarily think that it is a case that men are more explorative or more exploring. But, and this is not based on data. This is just my observation. I often hear that people say, I like to explore, but my partner likes to do the same. Or I like to just do the same all the time, but my partner likes to explore. I hear this again and again. It's true in my own relationship. My, my co-author, Cass Einstein, who wrote the book with me, he also says exactly the same, right? So for him, he likes to exploit and his wife likes to explore. For me, it's like, I like to explore, my husband likes to exploit. And I hear this again and again.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And that makes me think that it is not a coincidence. That is perhaps the case that people who like to explore end up with people who like to exploit. Because to do the best that we can in life, we need to do both. So maybe it is, you know, this balance.

• 27:42Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Two individuals. Because if you're left on your own and just exploring all the time. You might not get to the optimal balance in life. If you're exploiting all the time, then you're unlikely to find these new things, right, that will actually be great for you. You will learn, gain you pleasure and so on. So it may not be a coincidence. And I think in a lot of these traits, almost every psychological trait that you can think of, they are individual differences. You can go all the way from one extreme to the other extreme, right? If we're talking about optimism, all the way to pessimism, exploration, all the way to exploitation, right, and everything in the business. And normally, it's kind of a bell curve of sorts. And I think it's not a coincidence, right?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Because if you think about a society, a group, a team working together, you do need these variations for people to push each other in different directions, such that as a team, we get to the best that we can, we can get.

• 28:41Steven Bartlett?

  We talked about learning a little bit earlier on and about the importance of, of change and novelty. I'm someone that's just fallen back into the habit of reading books again and writing about them. And it's brought a huge amount of lost joy to my life. And I, and I had almost lost sight of it through becoming so busy in my professional life. I'd lost the joy of learning new things. And because I do this podcast as well, and it seems to, I learn so much from speaking to the people I speak to. But just recently, getting back into reading books again has brought this new sort of excitement to my life. And your book is, is, provides a lot of evidence as to why that might be.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it is, it is a case that probably, you know, in recent years, people are reading less, right? And we kind of forget the joy of reading, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. I think the difference between reading a book than watching a video is when you read a book, there's an extra mental activity that you're doing, which is you're imagining. You're visualizing, right? It's also in your own pace. So you read something and maybe that elicited triggers some kind of association in your mind, right? So you might like stop for a little bit and then continue. So there's so much more going on. And I think because of that, when you read a book,

• 30:00Speaker 01

  you can relate that more to yourself and to your own life, right? Versus, I mean, watching, I mean, films of that, that's great as well. But that that is a difference, right? It's more about you and your inner experiences and memories coming more alive. And then it also ties to what you already know.

• 30:20Steven Bartlett?

  The midlife crisis. Is this a real thing?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It is well known that stress is the peaks in your midlife. And happiness goes down in your midlife. Suicide, for example, peaks, especially for male in midlife. Definitely like something that we should think of and notice. And we don't really know for sure why it happens. But one thing that happens in midlife is that you have a lot of stressors coming your way. So we're talking about 40s and 50s. So you have, you might need, you have little kids that you need to take care of. And maybe you have elderly parents that you're worried about. Professional life has a lot of stressors in midlife.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So that's really a time where we see the midlife crisis. But one thing that we think is that perhaps this is also a time that you're not progressing as much, right? So kind of in your twenties and so on, you learn a lot. You gain skills. You get to perhaps a good position. And then it's sort of plateauing, right? For a lot of people, it can kind of plateau in midlife. Perhaps they have a good job, right? But they're kind of stuck. They're not really moving as much. They're not learning as much, less variety, right? Things are a little bit more routine. And that could be one reason why happiness is relatively low in midlife.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  It's also hard to see like what is next sometimes, right? While you're climbing up, it's you're kind of, well, this is my goal. But once you get there, it's a little bit disappointing to some extent, even if you've done really well, right? Because as we talked before, one thing that is really important for our happiness is kind of us believing that we have something to gain, something to go forward to. Now, why does then happiness go back up after midlife, right? So we don't know, but here is one speculation that at a certain point in time, maybe you're retiring, then actually life changes again, right? In an odd way, there can actually be more variety and change and learning. You need to learn how to live life again

• 32:36Speaker 01

  with this new context of not going to work every day, you know? And you might make decisions, all sorts of decisions of what to do with your time, which will require you to learn again.

• 32:49Steven Bartlett?

  When you get to say forty, forty, fifty years old, you're probably in a relationship.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Which you've been in for a while.

• 32:57Steven Bartlett?

  There's not that, there's not that pursuit. Your job, your career, your profession, your identity, your geography, your house, friendship circles are probably all well-established at that point. And your hypothesis is that the lack of forward motion and the abundance of routine means that you lose something in life.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so things are less new, right? It's kind of same, same, same. Imagine the best day of your life. You wake up in the morning and you eat like the best breakfast that you can think of, right? Choose a, and then you, you interact with the people that you love the most and you go do the best activity like what you want and you see your favorite movie. So the whole day is your favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite things. Really great. And then you wake up the same, the next day and you do the same. And then you wake up this next day and you do the same, right? A week in, a few weeks in, the best day of your life just doesn't elicit as much joy, right? And also, there's nothing to learn anymore. So even if you're living your absolute best life,

• 34:03Speaker 01

  if it is the same again and again and again and again. It will eventually be a little bit even depressing, I would say.

• 34:12Steven Bartlett?

  So that's by definition not our best life.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Right. So so then it is what is our best life. So I think when people think about what my best life is, what they're thinking about is, oh, I want that great house, right? I want that great partner. I want money or, you know. And then you can get all of these things, but if they remain constant, that's just not going to be your best life. And you can engineer this. I mean, even if it's like midlife and everything is set and you're in one house and so on. For example, you can go take a course, learn something new, right? A new field that is not your own. You can go a new sport, right? There's things that you could do, go visit places that you haven't been, try to make connections

• 34:58Speaker 01

  with people that are a bit different from your regular crowd that you're interacting with. It's a little bit hard to do because it's going to require effort. The easiest thing to do is just continue. Same, same, same, same.

• 35:09Steven Bartlett?

  We assume that happiness will be derived from us.

• 35:15Steven Bartlett?

  I almost don't know how to say this, like from us being on autopilot. Like if we do what society said, you work a job, you get a partner, you create a house, we assume that will lead to happiness. But what you're saying is the research shows that we actually need to keep almost dismantling or disrupting our own experience to to find happiness or to be happy. I guess we can't find happiness, we be happy.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, did a whole bunch of surveys to figure out what are the factors that are most associated with people's happiness. And the number one was meaning, right? People who could say I have meaning in my life, that was number one. Number two was control. People who felt they have control over their life.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  And I don't remember what number income was, but it wasn't especially high. Oh, I think social. So social connections was really high as well. Right? So a lot of these things were these psychological things, not necessarily material things that really induced people's happiness and satisfaction from their life.

• 36:17Steven Bartlett?

  Somewhat linked to that, studies show that after getting married, people report to being happier on average, yet about two years after their honeymoon period, happiness levels tend to be the same as their pre-marriage levels.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is a well-known, what's called the hedonic treadmill. So the hedonic treadmill means that we sort of have a baseline level of happiness, which is determined, a lot is genetic, it might be determined by early childhood experiences, and we can move from that baseline, we can go up if something good happens, maybe you have a good relationship, marriage, you get a promotion, it can go down if something bad happens, even bereavement, but it turns out that in most cases, you climb back to your baseline level of happiness. So these things, they can go up and they can down, and then you kind of adapt, right?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And you end up trying, you know, and this goes back to this idea that we're trying to get all these things, we think, oh, once I get this promotion, then I'll be really happy, and then you get the promotion and it's great, but then after a while, you just go back to your baseline. Now, on one hand, this actually is not a bad thing, because imagine you get your first entry level job, and people are really happy with their first entry level job, great, but imagine I just continue being really happy with my first entry level job, right? I won't be motivated to move forward, right? So this is why habituation is there, because it's moving us forward as an individual and as a society.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  On the other hand, it also reduces our joy, and it also sometimes causes us not to see some of the bad things around us, because we habituate to that as well. Another reason why habituation is important is for your mental health, right? And that's kind of related to what we just talked about, where bad things happen, and slowly, slowly, slowly, we adapt, and we go back to baseline, we are able to recover, right? It's kind of our superpower, our immense ability to just bounce back for most individuals. And what's interesting is that you actually see that people with depression, they habituate much slower. So there's a great study that was conducted in the University of Florida by a professor Aaron Heller,

• 38:38Speaker 01

  where he had students who just got exam results, and he asked them how they were feeling. And then he asked them how they were feeling after every forty-five minutes for the whole day. And what he found is when people got bad results, they were feeling bad, right? They're not happy. And that's true for people who never had depression episodes in their life, and people who were experiencing depression or had depression before. So everyone was feeling bad at the beginning. Those people who did not have any history of depression, they slowly, slowly, slowly started feeling better from this bad grade. Those with depression also started feeling better, but much slower, right? So in other words, depression is related to slower habituation,

• 39:22Speaker 01

  slower recovery from negative events in your life. And one reason we think this is, is because depression is related to going over these bad events in your mind again and again, not letting go, right? You're kind of like chewing over them again and again and again. And that is something that is preventing you from recovering and bouncing back from these aversive events.

• 39:50Steven Bartlett?

  If habituation is, causes us to lose the joy of our current situation, then how come, as you say in chapter two, the chapter about variety, you say that up to forty percent of employees resign within the first six months of their new job? You'd think their new job would bring them joy because it was different. But up to forty percent of employees resign within the first six months.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  So new things can bring us joy because they're different. However, at the same time, and this kind of goes back to the vacation example that I gave you, which was people are not the happiest when they just get to the resort. It takes them time, right? It takes them forty-three hours to get to the peak joy. Why? Because they still need the time to adapt, right? They need to unpack, they need to get used to this new routine. Same thing with a new job, for example. So on one hand, getting a new job, you're gonna learn things and that's great. And eventually it will get you joy. But when you're there for the first day or the first few days, there's a lot of getting used to things around you, right? You need to like figure who's who, right? Who's on top? Who's in the bottom? Like, where is the cafeteria?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  What am I gonna eat? There's so many different things that you need to figure out. It can be stressful. It can be overwhelming. And you often wanna just like run back to your old life, run back to your new job and do a U-turn. And the problem is that often people don't predict this. They can't see ahead, right? They think it's like, well, I'm unhappy with my new job on my first day or my second day or even the first week. That means that this is not a good job for me. You know, perhaps it's not a good job for you or perhaps you just need to allow it some time to adapt. So, you know, my recommendation is whatever it is that you're trying that's new. It can also be something like a new relationship, right? Give it some time because you're gonna have to get used

• 41:46Speaker 01

  to the things that are also not great. You will also get things, you get used to things that are great, but you have to get used to those things that are not great. And then after a while, you won't see them anymore, right? So it's not gonna affect you as much. So give it time. Now, if you gave it time and still you're unhappy, sure. Yeah, make a change.

• 42:04Steven Bartlett?

  There's a clear message in here for managers, employees, CEOs, founders about how to keep their team motivated and engaged. And the message that I'm hearing is the importance in creating variety in their work. Because I always think in businesses I'm involved in, if someone's doing the same thing for like 12 months, we're gonna have to have a conversation within the next three months because they will typically come to me and say like, something's not, something's not right. And it's typically that people need a bit of variety in their work. I guess because that gives it a little kick of meaning again. You know, I, I think I've always hypothesized that people need like five things to really like their jobs. Number one is a sense of forward motion towards a goal. So that's progress, I guess.

• 42:48Steven Bartlett?

  Feeling like you're going to make, making forward motion. Number two, challenge. They need to be like sufficiently challenged, not too challenged because then there's lots of issues. Under-challenged, lots of issues, lose motivation, like in game psychology. Number three is control and autonomy. So feeling like you've got control over your life, your work. Number four is meaning in the work you're doing, subjective meaning. Jack's reason for doing this podcast will be entirely different from someone else in the team, for example. And then the last one is working in like a supportive group of people.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  There's a lot of studies about this, that you want a situation where you're learning something. Cause if you're learning nothing, people are not engaged, right? But if it's like so difficult that you can't learn, right? People are unhappy as well. So you have to be like in the, the spot in the middle, right? That's a sweet spot. And again, it's different for everyone, right? Where it's not too easy, but it's not too difficult. So you have something to learn, but you're still progressing and that's very important. There's a great study showing that if you put people in a room and there's absolutely nothing for them to do, except to shock themselves. They will shock themselves, like little shock. I don't mean, you know, um, this, this paper was actually in science a few years ago.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  So meaning that boredom can be so aversive to people. They would actually prefer physical pain than to just not do anything at all. So that's on the one hand. And then of course, on the other hand, is when you're sitting in, in a, you know, in a class or you're listening to a lecture and you have no idea what's, it's too much, right? Because you haven't gotten there. Maybe you'll take the steps, eventually you'll get there, but, but you know, you started off by saying for employees, you need to kind of change, right? Give them different projects and so on. And what's interesting, not only will they enjoy it more, they're more likely to get to creative solutions. Start with the fact that what has been found is that people who habituate slower are more creative.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  So there's different ways to measure how fast you habituate. What they did in this study is that they had a sound, the same sound again and again and again, and they measured skin conductance, which shows, so it is how aroused you are. When you're aroused, you sweat more.

• 45:01Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  And that is measured by the skin conductance, right? And so when there's like a sound, there's a response. So if a sound is the same sound again and again and again, most people habituate. There's no longer response, you know, long skin conductance. But for some people, they continue responding, right? Because they're not habituating. And what was found is those people who continue responding, those were the people who already showed creativity in their life. They had a patent under their name. They had an exhibition in an art gallery. They had a book that they wrote. They had got prizes for innovative work. And the question is, why is that? And I think the reason is that because of habituation, we filter a lot of information, right? And, you know, it makes sense.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  The information is not important. But if you don't habituate, you're going to have a lot of bits of information in your mind simmering, objects, sounds, bits and pieces of knowledge that are not important on their own. But they're just going to stay in your mind. They're going to simmer. And once in a while, they will create something new. And that's where innovation comes in. And really, if you think about the most creative solutions that people come up with, it's usually they take something from one field, something really boring, unimportant, mundane. And that bit of mundane piece of information then solves a problem in this other completely different field.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  And/or there's like this part of knowledge here that is boring. And this other part of knowledge in this other field that also seems very mundane. But you put them together and suddenly you create something that is really, really interesting and creative, right? I mean, often you see, for example, people taking what they know from biology.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Which, you know, on its own doesn't seem so important. But then they take that and they use it to solve a problem in a different field. Technology, for example, right? That is like the most creative solutions. So how do we facilitate that? How do we facilitate disequituation in order to enhance creativity? And the answer is change, changing your environment. And it could be simple things. There are studies showing that if you just change your environment, let's say you're working in the office for a few hours and you go work for in a coffee shop for a few hours, right? That change can actually also enhance creativity. You're sitting and working and then you're going out and walking or going out for a run.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Studies show for the first six minutes, you're gonna be more creative and also vice versa. So if you were out walking, out running, and then you come back and you sit in your office for the next six minutes, you're gonna be more creative. Now, six minutes may sound like that's not a lot of time, but sometimes it's just enough for you to get the aha moment. I can remember those instances where I came up with an idea that would then change my course of research for a long time. Those ideas that were really important. So if I think about these examples, like one example was I was in the office trying to solve this problem and I couldn't find a solution, so I decided to go to the gym. And then, so I walked to the gym and then before, while I was walking, while I was getting to the gym, that's when, you know, the solution came about.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  And I remember like calling my student and like sharing that. And that would then change years of what we, we were gonna do, right? So just all I did was changed my physical activity, changed just my physical surrounding. And that's exactly what these studies show. Or another example was, again, I was in my office and I took a break and I was reading the New York Times Science section. So not hugely different, but still different, right? And then I read something about monkeys and I do humans. And that again, that was, ooh, that, and idea came about by taking a break and doing something that was a little bit different. And I think every single example of this, it's always like that.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  It's never me trying to think of something new, me trying to find a solution. It's always doing something else, which then something unusual, not something that I do like 90% of the time. In a day and that doing those times is when these kind of new ideas came about.

• 49:18Steven Bartlett?

  You know, the brain generally, having spent so much time studying it. What are the the fundamental surprises you've come to learn about humans that you think most people just don't understand or agree with? Like the things that we don't want to believe about ourselves that are unfortunately true.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Things that are unfortunately true.

• 49:37Steven Bartlett?

  I see this, I read this throughout your work, things where you go, humans wouldn't say they're like that if you ask them, but clearly they are because of the research.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I mean, it is true that we're not conscious of most of these kind of systematic mistakes that we make and the biases that we have. For example, I mean, maybe our belief system is a great example of why we believe what we believe. I think that if you'd ask people, why do you believe a certain thing? They would probably give you some kind of rational explanation, right? I believe this thing because, you know, here's all the evidence and so forth. But in fact, most of the times, the reason we believe something is that we were brought up in an environment where that belief was a popular one, or people around us believe that, oh, we've heard it again and again.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  You know, one interesting thing is, this is a huge effect where people are not aware of it. As long as you hear something repeatedly, even twice, the likelihood that you believe it goes way up versus something that you hear once. It's called the illusory truth effect. You just, there's so many studies showing this. You let people, you tell people something twice, they don't remember that they've heard it twice and they're going to believe it way more than something that they just heard once. The reason for this is that the brain process information that it's heard before, less, right? Okay, so let's say I tell you that.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  A shrimp's heart is in its head, right? So when you hear that, that sounds really surprising and your brain takes a lot of resources to process this. You might think about the last time I ate a shrimp, right? Or just imagine the shrimp's heart is in his head. But the second time I'm going to tell you this, a shrimp's heart is in his head, your brain's not going to process this at much, right? And the third time, it's not going to process it at all. Now, when your brain takes less effort in processing things, that causes a signal of familiarity. And as a result, we're more likely to believe something. When something requires less effort and less energy to process, we believe it more.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  So, anything that you hear again and again and again, as you hear it more and more and more, it takes less energy to process. And if it takes less energy to process, our brain then concludes that it is likely true. And for good reason, because most of the time when you hear something again and again and again, most of the time it's true. So if you heard something from, you know, your aunt, and then you heard it from your friend, and then you heard it from your doctor, why do all the people tell you all these things? Because on average, it's true, but sometimes it's not going to be true, right? It's going to be false beliefs, right? And even, even things like, it takes you less energy to process a large font, 14 font, bold, it takes us less energy to process it versus like small font.

• 52:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, we see that across the board in all of our marketing companies is that if we just make the font a little bit bigger, we get more clicks.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  So it turns out, yeah, not only are people more attentive, they're going to believe it more. So there's studies showing that you show people two sentences. One is in big fonts, bold, and one is in small. And you ask them, you know, how like these is to be true, how like these are to be true? Those sentences that are in big, bold fonts, people are more likely to believe they're true because the brain requires less energy to process it, which then makes us conclude that it's likely to be true. And it's true for like, for example, if you do it with like red color, right? Anything that makes it easier for us to process. If we hear things more clearly, we're more likely to believe that's true than if you put a little bit of noise. People are less likely to believe things are true anytime that it's hard for us to process.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  So what that means is if you want people to, if you want to help them believe what you're saying, right, take on your recommendations, you want to make it easier for them to process it. So you could do that visually, big fonts, rent, so on. But the other things you can do is you can relate it to things that they already believe in. What we call priors, right? So if I, I want to convince you of something, it might be a good idea for me to think about, what are you, what do you already believe, right? And then try to tie that to what you already believe, because that will require less processing. Or I could tell you something twice or three times. Now, of course, this does, it's not like I'm going to tell you something really, really crazy, right, the earth is flat three times and you're going to believe me, right?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  But I'm talking about these things where like it could be true, right? And so I tell you that a few times and then eventually you, you more likely to believe it. And you don't know it's because you've heard it a few times.

• 54:15Steven Bartlett?

  So if I said salad and sugar are good for you versus just sugar is good for you. Maybe more people are more likely to believe the first sentence because I've included a statement that you know from prior knowledge is true, which is cabbage is good.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that is a great example. That is a great example because our brain goes, yeah, salad is good for you. And then, you know, by the time we get to sugar, we're like, okay, that could be true. And also it makes you be even more believable. And just to say, you need a little bit of sugar. Sugar is not only bad.

• 54:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, a little bit. So you talked earlier about de-habituating our lives. Why, why and where do we need to de-habituate our lives? What, where do we need to change things and introduce novelty? I'm almost wanting to come away with a little bit of a, a little bit of a checklist for my own life here. I feel like I'm, I understand the part in relationships, which is take breaks from my partner. Try new things with them, you said as well. So go to new restaurants, go to new places, do new things on the weekend. In work, um, quit my job, I guess. That's what you're saying.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. No, do not quit your job, you know?

• 55:25Steven Bartlett?

  Change role, add new responsibilities.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but you could, it could even be something as, I mean, you don't have to completely change what you're doing. But you could, at the same time, try something new. And in fact, you know, from, from, you know, I'm sure you do that because you have. Different things that you're doing, right? And so that means you have variety in your day because you do your podcast, but then you also have your companies and your companies are different, right? So this is a good example, but not everyone has that, right? A lot of people just have the one job. But if you can take on, you know, learn something new, right? Induce variety into your day in that way. That is great. That will cause you to start being on kind of a learning mode, right?

• 56:09Steven Bartlett?

  I take also from that, that as an employer, it's really important that we have all of our team members on a personal development plan, which means making sure that they've got intellectual forward motion in their lives. They're always learning something new. They're always striving for something new. And that every team member in like my company should have something they're currently learning about outside of their core responsibilities.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Right, so sometimes it would look like they're going sideways.

• 56:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Right, so sometimes it doesn't look like the path is like just progressing forward. But sometimes perhaps the plan is to go a little bit sideways.

• 56:48Steven Bartlett?

  Which means sideways.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Which means like it's not the obvious thing.

• 56:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  That they're gonna learn, right? For their role.

• 56:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Jack's not gonna become a better editor or producer or whatever. He's gonna learn music.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Almost anything different that you learn is probably gonna feed back.

• 57:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. I guess it comes right down to even the route you cycle on the way to work in the morning or small things, right? Small decisions you make, hotels you stay at, the airline you choose to use. Is there any other ways that you've de-habituated in your life, having learned about this?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yes, but I want to just say something about, you said use different airlines and so on. So on one hand, yes, but on the other hand, if something is not super enjoyable, but you still have to do it. So for example, maybe flying. Maybe travel, like when you're traveling for business, it can be painful, right? So in those cases, in fact, you want to do the same thing again and again. Why? Because you habituate to the negative. You see? So if you think about things that you don't like to do, you may actually want to do it in the same way over and over.

• 57:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Right? Because I mean, unless you think like you get on a plane and you're super enjoy it. But like, you know, for me, I just like want it to be over with. Right? So it's easier actually to use the same airline, to do the same thing. So in some parts of your of life, actually, you want to choose to do the same thing. And in fact, in some parts of life, you want to do these things that you don't enjoy in one chunk. You know how we talked about the good things you chop up? The bad things you want to swallow whole. So if you think about things that you don't like to do, but you really need to do, like, I don't know, I need to grade papers. I need to do house household chores. When you ask people, like, would you rather do this thing that you need to do, but you don't like?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Would you just get it over with in one go? Or do you want breaks in between for a breather? People like breaks for a breather, right? If it is not, I don't know, washing the floor or whatever there is doing their taxes, they want the breaks. But in fact, they suffer less if they just get it over with, because then they habituate to the negative.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Right?

• 59:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  So for the positive, you want variety and so on. And but the things that you're not going to learn a lot from, you just need to get them over and done with, just get them over and done with, and even do it in exactly the same way that you've always done it.

• 59:22Steven Bartlett?

  Is social media going to make me vicariously habituate? I through looking at other people's lives and experiences they're having, it's moving my bar up, like my my own perception of expectations in my life up in an unpleasant way. So that when I go to that same place that Jenny went to on Instagram, it's less enjoyable for me because I've already kind of experienced it through the lens of Jenny's Instagram stories.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Right? So this has a lot to do with what do you, what do we expect from life? And how do those expectations impact us?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  So I think obviously, social media is causing us to have unrealistic expectations. We always, I don't know, for most of us, we feel kind of disappointed with ourselves. We go online, because of course, a lot of people go online and they post the good things, right? Oh, I'm on vacation, I got this award. And then you go online and you're like, oh, all the people, all of these good things are happening constantly. And so you feel disappointed about your own life, you have unrealistic expectations. And it shifts what we call adaptation levels. So basically, we adapt to our daily life. And then things that are better than our daily life, we feel good. And things are worse, we feel worse. But sometimes, our adaptation level can shift, not based on our reality,

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  but what we expect maybe will happen, and also what we see other people are doing. So let's talk about expecting what will happen. So there's a study showing that when prisoners are about to be released, they are still in prison, but in their mind, they're already like thinking about the release, which is great. And so now their expectations are kind of higher, and that makes them feel worse, right? So they're actually very close to release, but in fact, they're feeling really bad because their daily life is much worse from what they expect their daily life to be.

• 1:01:25Steven Bartlett?

  That's kind of like social media, isn't it? You're sat in your house, looking out at people parting in some hot sunny country, having the time of their lives. You feel like you're in prison. Your expectations are being raised because you're watching them have the time of their lives. So suddenly, your house feels like, you know, a prison.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so your expectations can be based on what you just expect for yourself, and also what other people do. Now, I'm not saying that high expectations are bad, right?

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Because there's two things happening at the same time. One thing is when the outcomes. So this is related to dopamine neurons. So basically, dopamine neurons in your brain are firing all the time. Right? And then when outcomes are better than expected, they fire even more, burst more. Right? So you expect to get this amount of salary. You get a higher salary, dopamine goes up. You expect the steak to taste quite good. It tastes even better. They fire more. And when things are worse than expected, they start quieting down. Right? So they're quieting down when things are worse than expected. And that is highly correlated with your mood. When there's big bursts of dopamine, you feel good.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  When the dopamine is quiet, you're feeling bad. But that quiet is important because that quiet says, things are not as good as I expected them to be. And it signals to your brain, I need to learn something. I need to change this. Right? There's two things you can change. You can change your expectations. You can lower them. Or you can change the reality. Right? And so this negative mood that is associated with outcomes not being as good as you expected them can actually lead to progress. So it's a bit of a delicate kind of balance. Right? And so often, I mean, there's this really counterintuitive finding, which is when people don't have certain things in their life.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  For example, in countries where the healthcare system is quite bad, the healthcare system doesn't affect people's daily happiness as much as in countries where the healthcare system is good. So when the healthcare system is good, you expect it to be good. So then any variation can impact your kind of satisfaction. But if you're living in a country where like, well, I know the healthcare system is bad. It's not going to even affect how I'm feeling. Right? You have no expectations and you're kind of, that's not going to impact your happiness.

• 1:03:52Steven Bartlett?

  I remember you had a TED Talk, didn't you? Which did 15 million views on how to motivate yourself to change your behavior.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:59Steven Bartlett?

  What can I take from that TED Talk to achieve my new year, new me goals?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Okay. So I talk about a few principles there. And one is. A lot of time, our goals are in the future. So I want to go to the gym because eventually I want to lose weight. I'm not going to lose weight that very second, right? I'm not going to like get into my jeans that very day. Eventually, I know that if I go to the gym, I will become healthier, right? So it's all a lot of times about the future. Or you say, I want to get a promotion. So I'm going to work really hard today so I can get promotion in the future. The problem is that it's really hard to motivate yourself to do something immediate for a reward that's going to come a long time from now. So what you need to do is you need to figure out, what can I get now?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  I'm going to the gym because I want to be healthier and, you know, thinner or whatever in the future, but is there anything that I can get at the very moment? I've heard people tell me that the way that they motivate themselves to get the gym is they say, when I get to the gym and I get on the treadmill, I'm going to allow myself to watch some trash TV or read like, you know, a magazine that I don't always allow myself to read. So that's one thing, right? Think about what the immediate rewards that you can give yourself or someone else. Maybe you're helping someone else to to achieve their goals. What can we get immediately, not only in the future? For for example, another person told me that their husband, they really wanted their husband to go to the gym. And so the husband went to the gym and they got back and the wife said to the husband,

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  oh, I can feel you're like, I can see your muscles, right? So it was immediate, right? They gave him like immediate rewards. So try to think about, I call it like, bridge the temporal gap because there's an action happening today and there's this like goal in the future. But you have to bridge the temporal gap to try to think about, okay, what can I also get now? It could be an emotional response, right? I mean, a lot of times when we do something like we work hard, we solve a problem, we go to the gym, we feel good. It could be the emotional response. So maybe one way you can do is make that salient, right? Maybe like track your your emotions, track your mood and you can say, okay, this is what I did today, right? I went to the gym today, this is how I was feeling, right?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  And so that's also an immediate reward.

• 1:06:22Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about this idea of discipline and what creates discipline. And I was hypothesizing if there were to be a discipline equation, what it might look like. And I kind of concluded that there's three parts to the things and areas in my life where I've been able to maintain discipline. And the equation looks something like this. The start of the equation would be. The why, like however much I valued that goal. So it could be going to the gym or whatever.

• 1:06:49Steven Bartlett?

  Plus, the reward that I got from the pursuit of the goal. So the perceived reward I got from the pursuit of the goal. So that's actually like going to the gym, doing the exercise, being on the treadmill, the feeling after, walking home, like the, you know, and then minus the cost of the pursuit of the goal. So that's like having to like leave the house, get in the Uber, put my shoes on, travel for forty five minutes. Wait, you know, lose two hours. And if you want to be disciplined in any area of your life, you need to therefore increase the why in whatever way you can, get really, really clear on why that matters. And in your case, create those packs, like a social pact, a financial pact, whatever, to make it really important to you. Do whatever you can to make the reward of the pursuit of the goal more enjoyable.

• 1:07:34Steven Bartlett?

  It might be going with a friend or something, going to a gym that's closer, I don't know. And then do everything you can to reduce the cost of the pursuit of the goal. So.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Right. And the problem is that the costs are often immediate.

• 1:07:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Right. And then we fall into what's called the present bias, or sometimes it's called temporal discounting, which is that often we value what's happening in the moment more than the same thing if it was to happen in the future. Right. And that's true for both like bad things and good things, things that are just happening now. Our brain is like, oh, I'm gonna decide what to do based on this immediate thing. And the problem is that the costs are often immediate, right?

• 1:08:12Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  To go to the gym. Yeah, they come first, right? So you have to overcome those costs. And I think when, and as you're saying, one thing you could do is to try to get those rewards closer in time. Right. So if I go to the gym, I have to like walk to the gym. I might tell myself, okay, I can listen to a podcast while I'm walking. So that's enjoyable. Exactly, exactly. While I'm running. Yeah.

• 1:08:32Steven Bartlett?

  Simon Sinek threw a really, when I was at his house, talking to him about this, he threw an objection at me. He was like, yeah, but this morning in LA, I got out of bed and went and emptied the bins at seven AM because I knew if I didn't, and there'd be repercussions. So I ran that through this framework and I was like, well, your why was strong because the repercussions of you not getting out of bed are the bin overflows, you probably get fined by the local council. The reward of the pursuit of the goal really wasn't there. And the cost fortunately was lower than the why. So discipline occurred.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Right, and that's because we're sophisticated creatures, right? We're not only driven. I mean, those things immediately are are strong, but we're not only driven by them. We have these frontal lobes, right? We're sophisticated creature. We can value things that are in the future. So when I'm saying, and I say, you know, immediate is important, I'm not saying future isn't important for us and we don't use that. We do, right? And we're able to do that. Another thing that people do is they actually put in artificial costs for not doing the right thing, right?

• 1:09:33Steven Bartlett?

  Like a social pact is one where if I've announced it to the world on my Instagram that I'm gonna do it, then there's a reputational cost if I don't.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. And for example, you know, there's there's silly things where people say, I've heard this when for writers and they tell, I tell the friends, you know, I'm gonna send you my chapter Monday at seven AM. And first of all, that's that's a pact, right? I mean, I have to send it because I told you, not because you're even gonna read it, right? But if I don't, then I am, you know, a hundred dollars is gonna come into your account. Like, maybe you even already put it, you know, as like a future thing which you can stop, right? So there's a cost. You put a cost to what will happen if you don't do that immediate thing.

• 1:10:16Steven Bartlett?

  Just goes to show, I think fundamentally, that we're just driven by incentives. You know, we think it's something else, but really at the very fundamental level, everything just seems to be about incentives in business and work and relationships in life.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, every decision, every action conscious or unconscious is very much about incentives, right? The good and the bad. I think what's interesting to me is that those incentives are quite variable. They can be money. They can be food. They can be like social interactions, right? They can be variety, yeah. So what the incentives are is very variable. What, you know, what the good that I'm getting, also the the bad, right? What feels bad? A lot of different things can feel bad.

• 1:11:02Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  So if you go, if you go down to like creatures, low in the evolutionary scale, I think for them, things are more basic, right? For them, it's just like food, temperature, right? Things like that that are really about survival. But as we go up and up and up the ladder and we get to humans, for us, there's a lot of different things that can be incentivizing.

• 1:11:25Steven Bartlett?

  I was saying to one of my colleagues the other day in a business that I'm like an investor in, he was telling me about one of his team members who was like just a bit, had lost the love of her work. And he told me the list of reasons she'd said in the like exit interview as to why she wasn't enjoying her work. And I looked at the list of things and intuitively, it felt like the person didn't actually know why they weren't enjoying their work anymore. And so I had a conversation with this person who was leaving this company. And we got to the very bottom of it. And at the very heart of it was just a loss of meaning in the job they were doing. They couldn't answer why it mattered anymore. They thought the work they were doing no longer mattered.

• 1:12:08Steven Bartlett?

  And when you'd asked them, they would have said a lot of other things. You know, they would point to small little things in this and that and the office and whatever else and the music that's playing in there. But at the very heart of it was actually just an absence of meaning. And people aren't, I don't think, very good at understanding that they've lost meaning or that meaning is so important or that what it is.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that goes back to the survey that I mentioned, where they found that the number one thing that was important for people's happiness was meaning.

• 1:12:33Steven Bartlett?

  And what does meaning mean?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  I guess is that what you're doing is valuable, right? Yeah, two. So that's a good question. I think it's probably beyond yourself. I don't know. Maybe it is even something about immortality, right? Wanting to feel that what I'm doing is gonna change something beyond myself. And it's, it's not necessarily about generosity, although, you know, generosity and could be part of it, but it's more about making of a difference, right? Steve Jobs had this saying that he said something like a dent in the universe, right, making a dent in the universe.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people want to do that and you know, you don't have to invent the Mac to do that. It could also be how you affect your family, how you raise your children, right? And that thing, that those are the kind of things that can continue to be even when you're not there.

• 1:13:37Steven Bartlett?

  I've noticed this trend. Gen Z and the younger millennials are the change the world generation. And what I mean by that, hear me out, is that I have so many young kids coming up to me, especially over the last one of 10 years generally, that would say to me, I want to change the world. And you'd ask them like, what do you mean? They'd say like, I wanna change the world. They can't tell you necessarily what they wanna change about it, but they want to be the person that had that impact on the world. And I, I think that sits in contrast what my father would have said. As a 65 year old man, if you'd asked him at 20 years old, what do you wanna do in your job? I don't think my dad would have said, change the world. I think he would have said, I wanna be a structural engineer.

• 1:14:22Steven Bartlett?

  You know what I mean? And I think that going back to your point about habituation and people's desire to like, I don't know, for immortality, is it plausible that because of social media, because we've seen a lot of world changes, we've adjusted our own, I don't know, expectations of what our, our own contributions to now that this young generation, if they're not changing the world, or if they're not having such a profound impact on things, they don't have, their level of meaning has habituated to now the base minimum of impact they need to have is to change the world. Do you know what I mean? They can't just get a job.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Right. And when I, when I said about a dent in the world. I did not mean, as I said before, I don't mean like inventing the Mac. It could just be making a nice meal that people enjoy, right? Or something. It could be, it could be things that are quite small. And, you know, thinking about your father, he wants to be an engineer, but he wanted to be an engineer. But why? Right? He said that's what he wanted to do, but why did he want that? Right? So he probably, I don't know, but maybe he wanted to be that because that would enable him to create new things. Right? And so in just creating new things, you're changing the world. So I think, I think that-

• 1:15:39Steven Bartlett?

  I don't think he was aiming at that, though. Whereas the young kids that come up to me, they're like aiming at that. So they wanna like, they wanna change the world and they haven't figured out how. Whereas my dad wants to be like an engineer and the consequences, he ends up changing the world.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Yes, but he probably wants to be an engineer for some reason. Right?

• 1:15:55Steven Bartlett?

  I could guess.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  And I think he doesn't, you know, people don't think about it. Change, I mean, it's just, we're using the same words, but I think these perhaps different generations have different aspiration. Right? Cause changing the worlds, I, when we say those, when I say the words, I don't mean like changing the world, right? I'm just saying, saying, doing something that creates a change in your world. I mean, maybe that's a better way to do it, a better way to say it. Some kind of change in your world, not necessarily I'm doing global change like, like Steve Jobs. But in some way, this is a luxury. And that's true also even for your father's generation and for this new generation. Right?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Wanting to have meaning is a luxury that we have because we have our basic needs. Right? Because we have food and shelter and, you know, just like safety, the very, very basic. We can then start thinking about meaning. But on the other hand, you can say, well- Just being able to care for my family and keeping them safe, that also has meaning.

• 1:17:08Steven Bartlett?

  Risk. In order to to change our lives, we have to sort of lean into risk in key areas. For those people that are, you know, thinking about changing their lives, but they're looking forward into uncertainty and they're seeing risk. And what advice would you give them, based on what you know about habituation, but more broadly from the brain? That's going to encourage them to take that step into the unknown, where they believe risk lives.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we quote the rock climber Alex Honnold in in the book. And what he says is that that he has a comfort zone, which is kind of a bubble around him. And as he tries more and more things, that bubble just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. He pushes those boundaries. And what happens is that those things that seemed crazy to him, absolutely crazy, then suddenly become within the realm of possibility. Right? I think the takeaway here is you have to start, you have to try. And what is helpful to know is that even if you try small, so let's say there's you, their goal is quite up there. It's like a huge risk, right?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Yes, but just try small, right? And then suddenly, the next step wouldn't seem so crazy, right? And so on and so forth. We see that, you know, risk habituates. And it helps us explore different things. It helps us try new things. It can also go in a bad direction, right? Because of risk habituation, what is risk habituation? Risk habituation is you do risky things. What we find is that when people do risky things, let's say gamble. We have a study where we let people gamble without letting them know if they won or lost. They just gamble, gamble, gamble, and we tell them at the end. Okay, they gamble, they start gambling just a little bit. And then they the next they gamble more and more and more and more, right?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  They feel more comfortable with gambling, less anxious, right? They also feel less excited, so they need to gamble more. And so risk really escalates because our emotions in response to risk habituate. So would risk escalate. So that's financial. And I mean, that could be a bad thing, right? So it's again, it's like both things are at the same time because you might take huge risks because that you shouldn't really take. We do this with virtual risk as well. So we want to put, what we wanted to do is test people's physical risk taking. But of course, we can't put them in danger. So what we did is we use virtual reality.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  And what we did is we used this game where you put the headset on and then you go up the elevator to a skyscraper and you walk on a plank up, up, up, up in the air, right? It's all virtual. Have you done this?

• 1:19:55Steven Bartlett?

  I have, yes. I did it in New York City. It was terrifying.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, it's terrifying.

• 1:19:58Steven Bartlett?

  Absolutely terrifying.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  It's such a, it's really interesting experience because you know that you are on the ground, right? I know that I'm in my office. I know that I'm safe. But at the same time, my brain is completely tricked. It's such, you know, it really makes you feel quite humble at how easy it is to trick your brain. You're feeling really scared. And when we let people do that, they start off by maybe taking one little step and two little steps, right? And then the more they do it, they feel more comfortable with it, right? They walk more and more and more, take more virtual risk until, you know, 10 trials in, they're jumping, right? And we actually measure their anxiety, we measure skin conduct and response. And the more they do it, the less anxious they feel, so they take more risk.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  And the less excited they feel, so they need more risk to take, to feel, you know, the same level of excitement. Yeah, and I mean, on one hand, they're exploring more. In some cases, it could be dangerous for you.

• 1:20:56Steven Bartlett?

  And you said in the book that people later in their careers are more likely to have accidents, right? I think you said athletes later in their career have accidents more and people on construction sites have more accidents later on in the project than at the start of the project because they start to take more of those risks. It made me think about, you know, the study you talked about where you get people to gamble, but they can't see the results yet of their reckless behavior. There's many areas of all of our lives where we're Gambling with something, but we can't yet see the results of that behavior. Whether it's like with our health or whether it's habits we have like smoking. I'm smoking. I'm eating this this junk crap over here. And because I haven't yet had the results come in, the doctor hasn't yet called me and told me there's a problem.

• 1:21:41Steven Bartlett?

  I just keep going and my behavior can escalate in those departments until I get that phone call. Which is like you've lost all your money or your your health is, you know, you've got something bad that's happened.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, with long term investments, right? A lot of the investments, financial investments that we make are long term. Right, so we may start small and then we grow, grow, grow, grow. And we don't know the outcomes until years later.

• 1:22:04Steven Bartlett?

  Something collapses. What do you want people to to come away from this conversation with? What is the the key takeaway?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  A lot of time, people may not feel so much joy in their life. And then they look around them and they conclude that maybe I'm not feeling so much joy. Because my relationship isn't that good or, you know, my job isn't that good. And, you know, maybe it is, but maybe they are good, but they've just been the same for a while. So we have to be really careful, right? And one way, as you know, we mentioned what you could do is just like spice it up a little bit, shake it up a little bit. Right, and see what happens and and vice versa. A lot of times, they are things that are negatively affecting your life. And you don't know it because they're always there. Social media is one example that you might, you might, a lot of people may suspect that social media, Instagram, Twitter

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  is causing them a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of of stress. But they don't really know for sure. You can't measure it until you take a break, right? It's a bit like the AC noise looming in the background. You don't notice it, but when you stop, when you turn it off, you're suddenly, oh, that's so much better. I didn't even realize that this thing is causing me anxiety. So I think, you know. Experiment, I think that you know, the last chapter in a book, we call it, we call it experiments in living. Experiment in living because it's really hard to know what are the things that are that are really good in your life and what are the things that are not so good in your life until you make some changes. Take a break from social media for a few weeks, do something different for you and then you will see.

• 1:23:40Steven Bartlett?

  You write about people taking a break from social media, don't you?

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, there's a great experiment that was conducted by the economist Hunt Alcott where he took 1,000 people, he gave them $100 to get off Facebook for a month and he took another 1,000 individuals and he gave them $100 to just continue what they're doing. At the end of the month, he came and he measured their wellbeing. On every single measure that he had, those people who quit for a month were happier. They were less anxious, less depressed, less sad, so in every measure, they were in a better state, right? And they were surprised, they had no idea that this was going to have such a huge effect on them. But here's the even bigger surprise. They said that they were happier, right? They fully admitted it, but most of them, straight away at the end of the month, went back to Facebook. Right?

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Which is really interesting because you acknowledge that this thing is causing you, you know, a negative effect on your health, so when do you go back? I think there's two reasons. One is you gain information and knowledge. That knowledge may, you know, it may not make you feel good, but we value knowledge and information and that's perhaps one reason why the people went back. It could also be something like addiction. I mean, a lot of things in life that you're addicted to, you kind of know they're not good for you, you know they're not causing you happiness, but there's need, right? There's something pushing you.

• 1:25:01Steven Bartlett?

  There was this crazy stat I read in your book about the impact that leaving social media had had on people equated to getting a $30,000 pay rise at work, something like that?

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  So that, that, yeah, it was a study that was conducted by an Italian scientist and What he did, he noticed that when Facebook first started in 2004, it just started at Harvard. Right. And then a while later, they went on to, you know, a lot of Ivy League universities, one by one, very slowly. And then 2008, they opened up to the world. And what he found is that in every university that it, Facebook was introduced, mental health went down. What was, the reason he could do the study is that the university had measures of people's wellbeing, they, you know, because they actually measure it quite often. And he can see in every university, mental health went down, every university.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  And then in the population, Facebook was introduced in 2008. In the next 10 years, the depression episodes were increased by 80%. Now, you don't know causation. None of this tells you causation. It is only correlational, right?

• 1:26:09Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  But, you know, he, so he's claiming that using statistical methods, he estimates that potentially a quarter of this decline in mental health can be due to social media. Again, you can't really, it's not a, and this is why the other experiment is a little bit better, because it's, he, the other experiment, Hunt, Alcott manipulated whether people were online or not. So he could actually do a control experiment and measure it, right? So he could show causation. This other study that suggests 25% of mental health decline was caused due to social media, that's a correlational result, but you know, there could be some truth in it.

• 1:26:52Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left to you is, what is one thing that people who are listening could do that you know about that would improve their lives?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  How about something simple? How about people just now email, call, turn to someone and tell them they love them? It would not, you know, it doesn't completely change your life, but it will change your feelings at that very moment.

• 1:27:33Steven Bartlett?

  Tali, thank you.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:27:35Steven Bartlett?

  Really enjoyed the conversation and I'm so fascinated by your work and it's a real service to humanity what you do. So, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:27:43Steven Bartlett?

  Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So, I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.