Master Self Control & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Kentaro Fujita

In my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their whys, the purposes behind their decisions, the broader purposes behind what they're doing, they're much more likely to be able to overcome the temptation. So if there's a piece of chocolate cake in front of me and I'm trying not to eat it, if you said, oh, I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet. That doesn't have much magic to it. But if instead I'm saying things like, I need to do this for my family, I want to look good for my children's wedding photos, or, you know, my children are looking at me or want to be a good example, or all these other kinds of reasons that you might, these higher order reasons that you might have for getting healthy or being fitter or whatever, not eating the cake, we show that that. increases the odds that people will avoid the the cake.

And we think it's because it's giving people meaning. These are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr.

Kentaro Fujita, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and an expert in the science of self-control and motivation. If you're somebody who has ever struggled with procrastination, sticking to a goal, or coming up with the goals for your life, today's episode is for you. We start off today's discussion talking about the famous two marshmallow experiment, the one where they placed kids in a room with a marshmallow and told them that if they delayed gratification for that marshmallow, meaning they didn't eat it, They would then get two marshmallows. Those experiments received a lot of attention in that they were supposed to predict whether people would be successful later in life.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (148 minutes, 29,464 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.