Speaker 1: Pushkin. The big reason I make this podcast is to
Speaker 1: let you in on all the scientific research that can
Speaker 1: help you lead a happier life. We're currently working super
Speaker 1: hard on the next full season of the show, which
Speaker 1: will have the same mix of experts, empirical data, and
Speaker 1: real life stories that you've come to expect. Season two
Speaker 1: will be out this spring, but I wanted to mark
Speaker 1: the passing of twenty nineteen and the beginning of a
Speaker 1: whole new decade with at least a few tips for
Speaker 1: how to make the most of the new Year and beyond. Now.
Speaker 1: You're going to hear the phrase new Year Knew You
Speaker 1: a lot this January, and you probably think it's a
Speaker 1: marketing gimmick, one that's there to guilt you into signing
Speaker 1: up for some new gym or enrolling in a class
Speaker 1: you know you'll stop attending before we even reach February.
Speaker 1: But the Sun says this doesn't have to be the case.
Speaker 1: So over these next four special shows, I'm going to
Speaker 1: do something a little different. I'm going to talk to
Speaker 1: four different experts and have them talk us through some
Speaker 1: practical tips that will allow us to harness the power
Speaker 1: of the New Year in order to make positive changes
Speaker 1: in our lives. So if you're ready to feel better,
Speaker 1: then join me doctor Laurie Santos for the Happiness Lap
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. So what are my New Year's resolutions for
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. Well, I'm certainly going to try to improve
Speaker 1: some of the habits we covered in the first season
Speaker 1: of this podcast, because there's good scientific data to suggest
Speaker 1: doing these things will make me happier. But the one
Speaker 1: phrase this stands out from all these amazing interviews we
Speaker 1: recorded last season came from my friend Nick Epley. He's
Speaker 1: the one that said happiness is like a you know,
Speaker 1: a leaky tire on your car. You know your tiregoes
Speaker 1: flat a little bit, you got to do something else
Speaker 1: to pump it back up. Happiness is like a leaky tire.
Speaker 1: We can't pump up and forget it. We need to
Speaker 1: keep attending to our happiness levels. So, for better or
Speaker 1: for worse, I know that making resolutions to be happier
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty will come to nothing if I don't
Speaker 1: find ways to put those goals into practice. And I
Speaker 1: know from past experience that I've made and broken a
Speaker 1: bunch of promises to myself about forming new habits and
Speaker 1: so like in most episodes of The Happiness Lab, I
Speaker 1: decided to ask for help, and I knew just the
Speaker 1: scientist who could come to my rescue. Hi. I'm Katie Milkman,
Speaker 1: and I'm a professor at the Wharton School of the
Speaker 1: University of Pennsylvania, and I'm also the host of Choiceology,
Speaker 1: which is a podcast about how we make decisions and
Speaker 1: the biases that sometimes lead us astray. Katie's research explores
Speaker 1: scientifically validated ways we can stick to our new goals
Speaker 1: by hacking our self control. First off, what is self control?
Speaker 1: Because I think people hear that term and they don't
Speaker 1: really know what it means. Yeah, Well, when I talk
Speaker 1: about it, I mean the ability to resist temptation. So
Speaker 1: whenever we're exercising self control, we're resisting some temptation in
Speaker 1: our environment. Whether it's the muffin that I brought with
Speaker 1: me to this interview that I probably shouldn't be eating
Speaker 1: and I failed to resist, or resisting the temptation to
Speaker 1: set at home when you should be getting some exercise,
Speaker 1: or resisting the temptation to impulse by something when you
Speaker 1: should be saving Those are all examples of exerting self control.
Speaker 1: I mean, if all psychological phenomena, I feel like avoiding
Speaker 1: temptation is one that I experience a lot, Right, why
Speaker 1: are we so bad at it? Why are we so
Speaker 1: bad at as such a great question my read of
Speaker 1: the literatures that were so bad at this, because probably evolutionarily,
Speaker 1: it made sense, like a bazillion years ago, right to
Speaker 1: react to instant gratification stimuli in your environment, and thinking
Speaker 1: about the long term when you needed to make sure
Speaker 1: that you had food tonight and that you weren't attacked
Speaker 1: by a lion and so on, thinking about those long
Speaker 1: term things was just less critical. But of course things
Speaker 1: have changed, and evolution probably hasn't kept up with the
Speaker 1: fact that in our new environment it is actually pretty
Speaker 1: wise if you could day for retirement and not eat
Speaker 1: the muffin that's sitting in front of you, but rather
Speaker 1: you hold off for the smoothie and so on. We
Speaker 1: often think we can just crush temptation if we try
Speaker 1: hard enough, no matter how many times we failed to
Speaker 1: resist the pull of that muffin in the past. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we are consummate optimists, or consummate over optimists, I should say.
Speaker 1: But Katie's work has shown that our overconfidence can actually
Speaker 1: be a hidden strength if we can harness it. And
Speaker 1: that's the reason that I wanted to talk to Katie
Speaker 1: now as we start this new decade. You see, she's
Speaker 1: an expert on why our optimism seems to be especially
Speaker 1: high on significant dates like the start of a new year.
Speaker 1: So I've done some research on the bizarre ability we
Speaker 1: have to wake up at certain moments that feel like
Speaker 1: fresh starts and convince ourselves. You know, that was the
Speaker 1: old me who failed so many times to get home
Speaker 1: in time to spend time with my family and cook
Speaker 1: fresh meals, to get to the gym, whatever those things were.
Speaker 1: That was the old me. I'm turning forwardy now I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be able to do it this time. Katie first
Speaker 1: became interested in this question when she was asked about
Speaker 1: it by some Silicon Valley executive types. I was in
Speaker 1: a session with the VP of human Resources at Google,
Speaker 1: and he asked a question after we'd been talking about
Speaker 1: their struggles to get employees to exercise more and you know,
Speaker 1: save more for retirement, all the classic self control stuff.
Speaker 1: He said, does anybody know when it's ideal to roll
Speaker 1: out programs that are aimed at tackling these problems like
Speaker 1: are there good times to do that? And I said,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, that is such a great question, and
Speaker 1: I don't think the literature has anything to say about it.
Speaker 1: My initial reaction when I got that question was like, well,
Speaker 1: obviously New Year's, right. I think most people have that intuition, like,
Speaker 1: obviously New Year's we know about New Year's resolutions. But
Speaker 1: then as I started thinking about that, the intuition grew
Speaker 1: to like, that's not the only moment when we feel
Speaker 1: kind of fresh. And so we started thinking, like, what
Speaker 1: are those other new beginnings? What are those moments? And
Speaker 1: we started listing, you know, Monday's birthdays, you know, some
Speaker 1: of the holidays that we celebrate feel like fresh starts,
Speaker 1: particularly some religious holidays like Yamkapor for people who are
Speaker 1: Jewish as a big fresh start, your sins are behind you,
Speaker 1: Easter right in Christianity, so like, pick your religion, many
Speaker 1: of them have these fresh start moments. So we started
Speaker 1: thinking about that and we said, let's collect some data.
Speaker 1: It turns out that most people don't start new habits randomly.
Speaker 1: There are specific times when our minds are prone to
Speaker 1: making a fresh start, and our first step on that
Speaker 1: fresh start journey towards our new goal is usually to
Speaker 1: google it. We looked at when people search for the
Speaker 1: term diet, which it turns out, by the way, as
Speaker 1: a number one new Year's resolution, So that was like
Speaker 1: an obvious one to look at. And we also got
Speaker 1: data from a website called stick dot com where people
Speaker 1: go and create goals and put their money on the
Speaker 1: line that they'll forfeit if they fail to achieve those
Speaker 1: So we saw over and over again that people are
Speaker 1: more likely to create goals or search for the term
Speaker 1: diet on Google, or go to the gym at the
Speaker 1: beginning of a new week, at the beginning of a
Speaker 1: new year, following birthdays, following some holidays that feel like starts,
Speaker 1: so think more Labor Day than like Valentine's Day. But
Speaker 1: that pattern just leaped out of every data set and
Speaker 1: so that was really interesting. And then we said, like,
Speaker 1: can we actually experimentally cause people to experience fresh starts?
Speaker 1: And so we said, okay, think of a goal you
Speaker 1: want to pursue to a bunch of undergrads and they said, okay,
Speaker 1: I've got a goal. I've got a goal I want
Speaker 1: to start pursuing of the future, and we said, great,
Speaker 1: you can pick the date to kickstart your pursuit of
Speaker 1: that goal. We're gonna send you a reminder. We're gonna
Speaker 1: help you get on track. When would you like it
Speaker 1: to be? And we gave them a menu of options.
Speaker 1: And what we did then is we flipped a coin
Speaker 1: and randomly assigned some of them to get a menu
Speaker 1: of options that included the first day of Spring labeled
Speaker 1: as such, and others got exactly the same menu of options,
Speaker 1: and the first day of Spring was included, but instead
Speaker 1: of labeling at the first day of spring, we just
Speaker 1: labeled it the third Thursday in March. So it always
Speaker 1: had a label. It always was like called out as
Speaker 1: a special day. But in one case the special day
Speaker 1: was a fresh start and the other was arbitrary. Think
Speaker 1: about when you might want to start a new habit
Speaker 1: would you want to start on March twentieth, some random Thursday,
Speaker 1: or the first day of spring that season of new
Speaker 1: life and new opportunity. Katie found that three times as
Speaker 1: many subjects wanted to get her a reminder on March
Speaker 1: twentieth when it was labeled the first day of spring.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you think about it, this is a
Speaker 1: pretty weird effect. In reality, time is a continuous quantity,
Speaker 1: and so you might think that that's how our mind
Speaker 1: see it as continuous and relatively linear, but it turns
Speaker 1: out that's not how our minds work. We tend to
Speaker 1: break up time into different categories or mental accounts. We
Speaker 1: think in terms of different temporal chunks that represent different
Speaker 1: times in our life. For me, I have one temporal
Speaker 1: chunk before I met my husband, and then after we
Speaker 1: started dating. I even have pre launching this podcast and post.
Speaker 1: In an objective sense, there was no real moment in
Speaker 1: my life that separated each of those events. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the big scheme of things, everything was pretty much
Speaker 1: the same the day before I started my podcast to
Speaker 1: the day after. But psychologically, these moments represent huge breaks
Speaker 1: in my life, spots where I feel like I really
Speaker 1: changed as a person. I bet your life has a
Speaker 1: lot of these psychologue chapter breaks too, which leads to
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why our mind is so prone
Speaker 1: to the fresh start effect. So we think those were
Speaker 1: the college years, that those were my thirties. You have
Speaker 1: these different periods, and that's how we construct memories of time.
Speaker 1: We create this narrative that makes our life feel like
Speaker 1: it flows, but that means our chapter breaks, and those
Speaker 1: chapter breaks provide an opportunity to capitalize on that feeling
Speaker 1: of a fresh start and get people to really pursue
Speaker 1: their goals with more vigor. When we enter a new decade,
Speaker 1: or hit a big birthday or start a new job,
Speaker 1: it can feel like we're entering a totally new phase
Speaker 1: of our lives. We end up separating our past self
Speaker 1: from our present self, and that psychological distance that feeling
Speaker 1: like we're a totally different person now, it means we
Speaker 1: can forget the flaws of our past. We have the
Speaker 1: sense that we really do have a clean slate, and
Speaker 1: since we don't want to mess up that clean new slate,
Speaker 1: we're more motivated to stick to our goals and not
Speaker 1: screw things up. But there's a second reason that temporal
Speaker 1: boundaries help us make a fresh start. Research shows that
Speaker 1: the big events in life can lead to big picture thinking.
Speaker 1: We start to gain some perspective and spend more time
Speaker 1: self reflecting, and all that self reflection can push us
Speaker 1: to make big changes. In one study, researchers Adam Alter
Speaker 1: and Hal Hirschfeld tested people who were coming up on
Speaker 1: a new decade participants who are say thirty nine years
Speaker 1: old and about to turn forty, They ask them how
Speaker 1: often do you question the meaning or purpose in your life?
Speaker 1: On a scale from one never to four. Often, people
Speaker 1: who were about to switch birthday decades reported a score
Speaker 1: of three point two a out of four, which was
Speaker 1: higher than any other age. Alter and Hirschfeld also found
Speaker 1: that people at those transition ages were more likely to
Speaker 1: engage in new meaning building behaviors like running a marathon
Speaker 1: for the first time, and feeling motivated to try new
Speaker 1: behaviors often leads to successfully adopting those behaviors. Basically, what
Speaker 1: we have shown is people try to pursue goals more,
Speaker 1: but did those goals actually stick? Almost by definition, that
Speaker 1: means they achieved more, because if you don't pursue a goal,
Speaker 1: you can't achieve a goal. So ask yourself, how do
Speaker 1: I want to harness this fresh start effect? What kinds
Speaker 1: of goals do I want to put into place? We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
Speaker 1: We've just entered not just a new year, but a
Speaker 1: whole new decade. So what kinds of goals do you
Speaker 1: want to achieve? With this new fresh start as usual.
Speaker 1: I think that's a question for science. For the rest
Speaker 1: of the short mini series, we'll focus on four goals
Speaker 1: that science shows can improve your happiness. The one we'll
Speaker 1: tackle today with Katie's help, is a pretty common one
Speaker 1: during the new year, getting in a bit more exercise.
Speaker 1: A lot of my research of late has actually been
Speaker 1: focused on gym attendance. I've learned a lot about how
Speaker 1: much exercise matters for well being, and it seems that basically,
Speaker 1: if we could get everyone to exercise and sleep, it's
Speaker 1: about as close as we've come to finding the fountain
Speaker 1: of view. We'll talk about sleep later in this series,
Speaker 1: but let me walk you through the evidence showing that
Speaker 1: exercises connected to well being. One study had subjects due
Speaker 1: twenty minutes of cardio on a stationary bike and tested
Speaker 1: whether that burst of exercise protected the subjects against the
Speaker 1: whole suite of negative moods things like tension, anger, depression,
Speaker 1: and even fatigue. The researchers also tested how long that
Speaker 1: mood boost lasted. They found that just twenty minutes of
Speaker 1: heart pumping not only reduced negative mood states, but the
Speaker 1: reduction lasted for over twelve hours. But exercise doesn't just
Speaker 1: bump up our mood. One study found that a half
Speaker 1: hour workout three times a week was as effective at
Speaker 1: reducing the symptoms of major depression as a prescription of Zoloft,
Speaker 1: one of the most common anti depression drugs. Exercise also
Speaker 1: reduces anxiety. Ten weeks of regular running exercise decreases panic
Speaker 1: disorder symptoms as much as some of the best anti
Speaker 1: anxiety medications. There's also research showing that exercise increases cognitive performance,
Speaker 1: and of course it also makes our bodies healthier. And
Speaker 1: that's why Katie's focused on exercise and a lot of
Speaker 1: her own work. But she's done so in a way
Speaker 1: that's different than that of most experimenters. I tend to
Speaker 1: be really excited about doing what science nerds call field experiments,
Speaker 1: which means, instead of doing studies where we bring undergraduates
Speaker 1: into a laboratory environment and have them make stylized choices,
Speaker 1: I try to capture people in their natural environment and
Speaker 1: see if I can change their behaviors. There sometimes sounds
Speaker 1: a little silly, like, wait, you're trying to get people
Speaker 1: to go to the gym, But anyway, I think we
Speaker 1: can make a big difference there. When most people think
Speaker 1: about their self control failure is like, oh I have
Speaker 1: to get to the gym or all I have to
Speaker 1: diet more. I think people's intuition is they just need
Speaker 1: to like suck it up and get some woolpower and
Speaker 1: just do it. What is wrong? K he has really
Speaker 1: heard us? Yeah, just do it right? You know, people
Speaker 1: like literally like buy these t shirts that say just
Speaker 1: do it, but when they're thinking about going to the gym,
Speaker 1: and then they don't get to go to the gym.
Speaker 1: So so what's wrong with this woolpower approach? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: the science suggests it's really hard to just do it.
Speaker 1: And so actually what research points to is that the
Speaker 1: best solutions take temptation out of the equation and timely,
Speaker 1: so you don't ever even have to have that struggle internally.
Speaker 1: So live next door to the gym and leave your
Speaker 1: gym clothes out or a heck, sleep in them, so
Speaker 1: that there are fewer decisions to make in a moment
Speaker 1: when you might make the wrong choice. So the ideas
Speaker 1: we're using, we're trying to use the situation to take
Speaker 1: temptation away. Is that exactly? So the further away temptation
Speaker 1: is from the decision maker, though less likely you are
Speaker 1: to fall victim to it. So really the research suggests,
Speaker 1: rather than trying to just do it, you need to
Speaker 1: set yourself up for success by creating environments where you'll
Speaker 1: never face temptation in the first place. That is the
Speaker 1: first best solution from my rate of the literature and
Speaker 1: from all the studies I've done. There are lots of
Speaker 1: other intermediate solutions, because sometimes you can't change the environment,
Speaker 1: like maybe you live next door to Dunkin Donuts and
Speaker 1: like you're not going to move, so you have to
Speaker 1: find other solutions. But whenever possible, it seems the first
Speaker 1: best is just get the heck away from temptation, because
Speaker 1: it's a pain to fight it and just do it.
Speaker 1: But there's another very counterintuitive way to fight temptation, and
Speaker 1: that's to use it your advantage. It's a technique that
Speaker 1: Katie first figured out how to use in her own life.
Speaker 1: Came to me when I was an overstressed a graduate
Speaker 1: student who was trying to fit it all in and
Speaker 1: I was really struggling with a couple of self control problems.
Speaker 1: One of them was that at the end of a
Speaker 1: long day, when I'd been taking complex econometrics classes and
Speaker 1: had homework waiting for me. All I really wanted to
Speaker 1: do was like binge, watch TV and read novels and
Speaker 1: just indulge. But what I knew I should be doing
Speaker 1: is getting in a workout because that always made me
Speaker 1: energized and it made me healthier overall. So I had
Speaker 1: these sort of two struggles. One was I should have
Speaker 1: been doing my homework actually, and I came home and
Speaker 1: I just wanted to do entertainment stuff. And the other
Speaker 1: was I couldn't get myself to the gym. And I
Speaker 1: came up with a solution, which I called temptation bundling.
Speaker 1: Once I realized what I was doing actually sort of
Speaker 1: did it innately, and then I was like, wait, this
Speaker 1: is a trick. It's working. And that was I only
Speaker 1: let myself actually indulge in audio novels. I really love novels,
Speaker 1: so it's like Harry pot or things like the Da
Speaker 1: Vinci Code. I only let myself listen when I was exercising,
Speaker 1: and so at the end of a long day, I
Speaker 1: would be worn out, but I'd get all excited to
Speaker 1: go to the gym because I knew I could hear
Speaker 1: the next chapter in my latest thriller and find out
Speaker 1: what happened next to my favorite characters. Some people do
Speaker 1: it with TV. I realized this is working super well
Speaker 1: for me, and I decided one to run a study
Speaker 1: and try to see, Hey, is this like a universal
Speaker 1: thing or am I just a weird grad student. And
Speaker 1: so just across the street at the University of Pennsylvania Gym,
Speaker 1: we recruited staff and students here and we said, hey,
Speaker 1: do you want to exercise more? And it wasn't hard
Speaker 1: to find like five hundred people who raise their hands,
Speaker 1: and we said do you own an iPod? If you
Speaker 1: own an iPod, you're eligible. And also most people had
Speaker 1: like an iPhone or an iPod of some sort. Then
Speaker 1: we brought them into the lab and we randomly assigned
Speaker 1: them to different experimental conditions to see if this idea
Speaker 1: of temptation bundling could actually add value. One group was
Speaker 1: in our treatment condition and what happened to them is
Speaker 1: they were given a menu of eighty two audio novels
Speaker 1: that people had pre rate it as like super fun.
Speaker 1: So these are books just like the ones I like
Speaker 1: Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, John Grisham books, you get
Speaker 1: the picture. So people picked the four they wanted to
Speaker 1: listen to most, and then they loaded them onto a
Speaker 1: loaned iPod actually, and we took them to the gym
Speaker 1: and they did a thirty minute workout while listening to
Speaker 1: the first thirty minutes of whichever of those novels they
Speaker 1: were most excited about. And the workout ended and we said,
Speaker 1: we hope that was fun for you. If you want
Speaker 1: to hear what happened next in the novel, you'll have
Speaker 1: to come back to the gym. We're gonna keep this
Speaker 1: loaned iPod in a locked, monitored locker and you can
Speaker 1: only access that when you exercise. So, as you might imagine,
Speaker 1: people were pretty excited to come back to the gym
Speaker 1: and find out what happened next. We had another group
Speaker 1: that also came to the lab also had iPods. We
Speaker 1: actually gave them a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble
Speaker 1: of equal value to those loaned iPods, so they could
Speaker 1: have gone and bought them, but we didn't give them
Speaker 1: this idea to only listen while exercising, and we took
Speaker 1: them to the gym. They did a thirty minute workout
Speaker 1: and we said, you know, do more of this. This
Speaker 1: is great. And those were the groups. We had one
Speaker 1: other group in the study that's sort of a little
Speaker 1: less interesting. We just told them the idea and we
Speaker 1: were like, try to self restrict and see how that goes.
Speaker 1: So here's the key contrast. The group that we gave
Speaker 1: the tempting audio novels that could only access them at
Speaker 1: the gym ended up exercising about fifty six percent, not
Speaker 1: about they ended up exercising fifty six percent more than
Speaker 1: the people in our control group who didn't have this opportunity.
Speaker 1: But it suggests that like, by doing this activity where
Speaker 1: you're bundling to temptations, you get people to kind of
Speaker 1: kill two birds with one stone, right, They solve their
Speaker 1: problem of the too much indulgence, and then they also
Speaker 1: solve the problem of not going to the gym. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and that's sort of what I think the magic is
Speaker 1: of temptation bundling. That's a little different than some of
Speaker 1: the previous ways we've tried to solve these problems. And
Speaker 1: it can be taken to places besides the gym, even
Speaker 1: though that's where we started with it. To solve two
Speaker 1: problems at once in many domains, so for me, I
Speaker 1: now use it all over the place. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: I only let myself get pedicures. I'm catching up on
Speaker 1: manuscript reviews, which is a tough part of our job
Speaker 1: as faculty. Two birds with one stone there, I try
Speaker 1: to only let myself go to my very favorite, very
Speaker 1: unhealthy burger restaurant when having meetings with sort of that
Speaker 1: are a little bit more difficult. So that gets me
Speaker 1: over the hump to like schedule that meeting with the
Speaker 1: person who's maybe a little bit of a challenge, but
Speaker 1: it also means that I'm not going to that restaurant
Speaker 1: and eating bad food too often. I also do things
Speaker 1: like only listen to my favorite podcasts while doing household chores.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of different ways you can use this.
Speaker 1: Some of my students have told me they do things like,
Speaker 1: you know, only get that Starbucks frappuccino they're craving when
Speaker 1: they're heading to hit the library. I just got a
Speaker 1: funny one yesterday from a friend. She said she told
Speaker 1: someone about temptation bundling who's working on her dissertation, and
Speaker 1: this is a person who loves scented candles, and so
Speaker 1: this young woman now only lets herself burn scented candles
Speaker 1: while she's writing her dissertation, and so she gets that
Speaker 1: like aromatherapy experience, and she said it's just really transformed
Speaker 1: her productivity. So I thought that was one of the
Speaker 1: more creative ones. I'd her. That's awesome. My own temptation
Speaker 1: bundling story was that I was living in Boston for
Speaker 1: a brief period when I was on sabbatical, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to start going to the gym, and the gym
Speaker 1: had these like TVs on the thing, which I didn't
Speaker 1: actually have at my house. I didn't have cable TV.
Speaker 1: But I started watching the Jerry Springer Show, which was
Speaker 1: like deeply embarrassing but kind of fun for me to watch,
Speaker 1: but it became awesome. It was like I worked out
Speaker 1: for the whole hour because I get to watch this
Speaker 1: really terrible thing, but it was beautiful because like they
Speaker 1: only had the cable TV at the gym, I didn't
Speaker 1: have it at home, so that's amazing. I actually I
Speaker 1: have a number of friends who told me the way
Speaker 1: they do it is by not paying for cable or
Speaker 1: not buying TV's in their homes, but then signing up
Speaker 1: for a gym that does have TV, So that's that's
Speaker 1: a way you can basically enforce it without having to
Speaker 1: pay somebody for a service exactly. So I think those
Speaker 1: kinds of tricks are ways that we can create temptation
Speaker 1: bundles where it's less willpower required to like stick to
Speaker 1: some goal of pairing these things. It also feel like
Speaker 1: that one worked for me because the Jerry Springer was
Speaker 1: particularly embarrassing temptation for me, right, So it's like wound,
Speaker 1: admit it, right, And so it's like it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: something that I would watch or I would feel too
Speaker 1: guilty to just like randomly binge watch it on my own.
Speaker 1: So it's like the special extra temptation e temptation that
Speaker 1: work too. It's perfect. Yeah, it's perfect because I would
Speaker 1: like to run the study. In fact, once upon a
Speaker 1: time when we designed the original study, I was like,
Speaker 1: we should really vary the extent to which the things
Speaker 1: people are bundling with exercise are tempting, right, Like give
Speaker 1: some people ulysses to read and other people, you know,
Speaker 1: can read the Devilwar's product and we'll see like it's
Speaker 1: all bundling created equal. Like I'm pretty sure it's the
Speaker 1: things that we really feel guilty about that work best
Speaker 1: because we really don't want to do them elsewhere. But
Speaker 1: there's such a great enticement to go and do the
Speaker 1: things that are good for us. So there you have it,
Speaker 1: your first official tip from the Happiness Lab twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: You're now entering a new decade, so why don't you
Speaker 1: embrace this new life chapter? What goals do you want
Speaker 1: to achieve? Whatever it is, temptation bundling might be a
Speaker 1: great way to make that new habit stick. I hope
Speaker 1: you'll join me over the next few weeks, and I
Speaker 1: hope you'll spread the word. Tell your friends about temptation bundling,
Speaker 1: and if they're looking for attempting podcast to listen to
Speaker 1: while they exercise, I'd be honored if you told them
Speaker 1: to check out The Happiness Lab for doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Speaker 1: The show was mastered by Evan Piola and our original
Speaker 1: music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis,
Speaker 1: Miila Lavelle, Julia Barton, Carli mcgliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought
Speaker 1: to you by Pushkin Industries