We all have goals, and we all face temptations that get in the way. So what's happening in the brain when we act in a manner that isn't in accordance with who we want to be? Computers don’t have these problems, but being human can be tough. In the previous two episodes we exposed the rivaling networks battling it out under the surface. Today we’re going to talk about the gap between what you intend to do and what you actually do when temptation is there.
So you're committed to being healthy and in shape, and then someone offers you a cupcake and you take it, and you hold it in your hand and you know that part of you doesn't want to eat it, but then you take a bite and then another bite. Now, from the brain's point of view, why did you do that? Because you know you didn't want to do that, but obviously some part of you did want to do that. So we see this kind of thing all the time. You don't want to give into some craving that maybe has been costly to you, whether that's cupcakes or alcohol or social media scrolling or drugs or gambling or whatever. And then you find yourself in a situation where a temptation is available and you take it, and you later suffer regret and you get mad at yourself or you cuss it yourself. Who is talking with whom when you argue with yourself like this? The weird part is that it's all you. So we're going to unpack this today because we all have goals and we all face temptations. So what exactly is happening under the hood in the brain when we act in a manner that is not in accordance with who we want to be. I mean, computers don't have these problems. They make their calculations and boom they're done. But being human is tough. So once we understand what's happening under the hood, we'll see how it becomes just a little easier to steer the ship. In the last two episodes, we talked about all the systems battling it out under the surface in your brain, and today we're going to talk about the gap between what you intend to do in some situation and what you actually do when the temptation is there. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford in California, and on this podcast we journey deep into the beautiful and complex three pound universe that underpins your perceptions and your behavior. We saw in the previous episodes that we typically have little to no awareness about the factors that influence our choices. So if someone asks you why you did this or that, you'll reference your conscious decision like I chose this brand because it tastes better, when in fact, you may have been heavily influenced by marketing that you can't even consciously remember, or by what your friends think is cool, or by other associations you have with that product that you're not even aware of. In other words, we don't always have access to our real preferences why we really chose what we chose. We only have our expressed preferences, which is what we say we want, and that doesn't always give us the full picture. So, for example, you might say that you want to spend more time working on a project that's important to you, like building your new website or getting new tires, or hitting some work deadline, But then you click on your social media app and you scroll through meaningless stuff for hours, and then it's too late and you fall asleep. So people do this all the time. They think they want one thing, but they act in a different way. They want to stop drinking alcohol, but they think, fine, it's just one drink. Or they want to stay loyal in their relationship, but they think, okay, just this once, and on and on. What we say we want, who we say we want to be doesn't always match up with what we do. So why is it so hard to navigate ourselves? And we need to understand this because if we want to express our best desires in life. It's critical that we get to the core of the issue about what gets in our way, and this requires an understanding of what's happening in the brain. As we saw in the previous episodes, the brain is made up of many subparts, like a society of mind. You can't think about the brain as being one thing. Instead, there's a neural parliament happening inside the skull, with lots of political parties voting for different things, and these networks in the brain battle to control your decisions, and the outcome of the battle determines what you do. So imagine that the waiter puts a basket of warm bread on your table at the restaurant. Part of your brain sees that as a rich source of energy. A different part of your brain wants you to not eat the whole thing so that you can keep your appetite for the meal and more generally, avoid unnecessary weight gain. And this is the sense in which humans can be conflicted. Now, in the past couple of decades, neuroscientists in my lab and hundreds of other labs have used brain imaging also called neuroimaging, to peer inside and pease out the details of this neural parliament. And the bottom line is that we find networks in your brain that care about different things like social pressure or financial loss, or the emotional experience that's predicted from something and so on. But today we're going to concentrate on two networks that often find themselves in conflict with one another, short term decision making versus long term decision making. Now, sometimes these are aligned, like both want good things and they want to avoid pain and so on, but sometimes they end up facing off with one another, like do I hit the gym or do I eat the cupcake. So let's take an example of this. Let's say I offer you one hundred dollars right now or one hundred and ten dollars in one week. So think about which choice you'd take. Okay, so remember your decision on that. Now here's a new game. I'm going to offer you one hundred dollars one year from now, or you can choose one hundred and ten dollars a year and a week from now. So which are you going to choose? Most people take the one hundred and ten dollars in fifty three weeks, because why wouldn't you wait seven more days to get ten percent more money. But what I want you to notice is that these two offers are exactly the same. What I'm saying is, if you wait one more week, you get ten percent more. But in the first scenario, which is one hundred dollars now or one hundred and ten in a week, most people will take the one hundred dollars right now, and in the second scenario they'll wait the extra week, even though there's no difference in the economics of the offer. Now. The way to understand this is with the notion of delayed discounting, which means that things right now have more value to you than things that are in the future. So, for example, when you have something right in front of your face, like a slice of pizza or a dessert, or a cigarette or a lottery ticket, those things have more power than things that are not right in front of you now. When my colleagues Sam McClure and Jonathan Cohen asked people these sorts of now versus later decisions in the brain scanner, they found separate brain networks, some of which care about the short term and others of which are involved in the long term. And these networks short and long are often in a situation where they're battling it out, and the problem is that the war is biased because the short term networks are more powerful. A temptation that is right in front of us tends to have more power than something that is in the distant future, and as a result, it's very easy to get seduced by short term reward. And this understanding about the power of the now, as we'll see, allows us to interpret many things in the world around us and in our own lives. So here's an example. Near the beginning of this millennium, about eighty percent of mortgages were subprime, which means these were loans to customers who didn't have very good credit scores. And by two thousand and seven, many of these borrowers found their interest rates going up as the initial low rates expired, and suddenly they couldn't manage the payments anymore. So delinquencies soared and credit tightened up, and the economy melted down in two thousand and seven. In two thousand and eight, Now, what does that have to do with the brain. These loans were perfectly optimized to plug into the I want it now systems in the brain. The short term, the idea is this, take this house, now, live better than you thought you could afford, impress your friends and family. At some point the rates will go up, but that's a long way away that's obscured in the mists of the future. So by directly plugging into these short term networks, the lenders tanked the entire economy, and in this sense, housing bubble bursts can be understood as a neural phenomenon, and what happens on the large scale of society also happens at the scale of the individual. Consider athletes who take anabolic steroids. They know that this is going to shave years off their life, and taking the drugs comes at the risk of losing all of one's acol if you ever get caught. But the game is this, you can stay alive in extra five years when you're old, or you can win the race right now. The trophy is going to feel really good while your death is almost infinitely far away, and so the powerful short term networks typically make a hands down win. Here. It's easy to take these sorts of deals. In fact, it's so common that it has a name in our mythology, a deal with the devil. In a deal with the devil, you get all sorts of good things right now, and you know that there will be consequences later, but that's so far off that you go for the temptation. And you can see why it's easy to take these sorts of deals because things that are distant are hard to really mentally simulate, whereas with things that are right in the now, you can just taste them, and so it's very difficult to care about long term consequences over the short term gain. Gambling addictions are a good example of this. People lie about their gambling habits, they gamble more than they can afford to lose, They borrow money to pay for their gambling, and some people steal to fund their habit, and it's easy to see why people can fall into these traps. It's because the short term is so addictive. You feel like you're just about to win this hand. You know you're about to get the ace dealt to you, or the cigarette's going to taste so good, or the drink or the infidelity or whatever, and the long term consequences are far away. In any sort of addiction, the short term wins more often now often When we talk about an addiction, there's a question about is this a disease or is it a choice? And the answer is it involves both. Typically, someone with an addiction is perfectly able to list the reasons why they don't want to be doing that. For example, in one of my projects, I worked with people who were addicted to cocaine, and they're perfectly able to list the reasons why their addiction has cost them in terms of relationships, in terms of employment, in terms of their money reserves, in moments of reflection. They're totally aware that they want to make different choices for the long term. It's just that the short term networks are so powerful that they beat out the long term when the temptation is there. So we've all seen in our own lives that it's easy to get seduced by the short term And the question is is there a way that we can manage this aspect of ourselves. There is, and to explain it, we're going to step back to nineteen oh nine. In nineteen oh nine, there was a banker named merkle Landis, and he was the treasurer of a bank in Pennsylvania, and he came up with a new financial idea, and he called this a Christmas Club. And the idea was this, to see if my patrons will give me their money all throughout the year, and that way the bank will have capital to work with. I'll hold onto their money all year, and I'll charge them in early withdrawal fee, and then just in time for holiday shopping, I'll let them have their money back. Now, this seemed like an unlikely idea that anybody would be willing to give up their money all year, but he tried it, and the idea worked like gangbusters. Patrons began socking away their money with the bank, and soon enough all the banks were doing it. Now what surprised land Is is that people wanted to give him their money all year. Why because note that if they held onto their own capital, they could get higher interest or invest in emerging opportunities, but instead their money was now locked in the bank with early withdrawal fees. The answer to why people gave him their money should be obvious. They wanted him to stop them from spending their money during the year. If they held on to their money, they knew they were going to blow it. So people saw this as a way to protect themselves from their own bad decision making. Now, by the way, a lot of people use the IRS in this way. You claim fewer deductions on your paycheck, and you have the IRS hold on to your money, and then you get a big check back in April, and it feels like free money. But it's not free money. It's your money, and you've simply had the government hold on to it for you and they get to earn interest on your capital instead of you. And any economist will tell you this is a bad idea, But it depends on the person doing it, because some people correctly into it that if they have the money, it's going to burn a hole in their pocket and they're gonna spend it. So they are granting responsibility to someone else to protect them from themselves. Now there's a framework to explain this fascinating human behavior. And to explain it, I'm going to step back even further to a story that you may be familiar with. We're gonna go back three thousand years to the King of Ithaca and the hero of the Trojan War Ulysses Ulysses or Odysseus in Greek. He was coming home from the Trojan War and on the way back, he suddenly realized that his ship was going to pass the island of the Sirens. Now this was an incredible opportunity because the sirens were these beautiful creatures that sang these incredible songs. But the songs were so beautiful that they had the effect of hypnotizing the passing sailors, and no mortal man could resist the sirens song. So Ulysses knew that every ship that ever passed this way before ended up steering toward the island and crashing into the rocks. And he knew that he was just as susceptible as any other man, and that he would end up dying that way if he heard the sirens song. Now, what he could have done is steered wide of the island, but he really wanted to hear what the sirens sounded like, so he came up with a plan to deal with his future self. He was still at a great distance from the island, but he wasn't thinking about his present rational self. He was instead thinking about the future. Prazed short term decision making, Ulysses and he considered who he was going to be in that situation. So what he did is he had his men lash him to the mast with ropes, and he said, no matter what I do and how much I scream and beg and cry, just keep rowing whatever you do, don't listen to me. And he had them fill their ears with beeswax. Now, Ulysses did this because he care directly surmised that he would be kicking and screaming and that future Ulysses would be in no position to make any good decisions. In other words, the Ulysses of sound mind structured things so that the future Ulysses couldn't do the wrong thing. It was a deal struck between the present and the future Ulysses, and it worked. It saved his life and the life of all his sailors. That he saw how he was going to act in that scenario, and he put up barriers to protect himself against himself. This sort of freely made decision that binds us in the future is what we call a Ulysses contract. And this sort of Ulysses contract explains the Christmas Club. You lash yourself to the mass at the beginning of the year so that your summertime self doesn't listen to the sirens songs of commercialism and blow all your money So let's return to what happens when you're having dinner at someone's house and they put a delicious piece of chocolate cake in front of you, but you're trying to train for a marathon, and part of you is trying not to eat that. It's not just eat or don't eat the cake. It can be more interestingly complicated than that, because you can make you lyss's contract with yourself. What I always do when there's a dessert put in front of me is I have a couple of bites, and then in the moment before I get weak, I pour table salt all over the cake to drown out the siren songs. It's the me of sound mind taking a temptation out of the way that I know my future self will do badly with. And there are lots of versions of this. You can say, you know what, I'll eat the cake, but I'm going to text my buddy right now to meet at the gym tomorrow morning, because you know that your future self will feel lazy and not want to go, and so you're buying yourself into a contract with your friend who's going to show up at the gym, so you have to be there, so here's where we are so far. We know that there's great seduction in the now in short term decision making. So if you want to accomplish something in the future, but you know there's going to be temptations that will pull you off the road along the way, it can be helpful to lock down a Ulysses contract with yourself. So take something like New Year's resolutions. These rarely last past January. Why because voluntary controls just aren't enough. If they were, everyone would be exercising every day. But everyone's not. And that's because it's not enough to make a resolution with good intention. There's a difference between good intention and a meaningful contract with yourself. So instead, when you're full of fire at the moment, that's when you need to think about structuring a contract with your future self. So I'm going to suggest five actionable steps for implementing these sorts of Ulysses contracts in your life. The first step is to minimize temptation. You have to build fences around you so that you're not drawn in by the sirens song. Take as an example alcoholics Anonymous. They teach you all sorts of steps to resist temptation, but one of the things they teach you right away is to get all the alcohol out of your house. Why it's because on a festive Saturday night or a lonely Sunday night, the mere presence of the bottle can be enough to put you over the edge into short term decision making. And the point is if if it's not there, then it can't happen. This is a Ulysses contract that you're making with yourself to get it out of the way. And it's the same thing with programs that help you to quit smoking. One of the first things they tell you is not to hang out with other smokers, because you're pretty sure you're going to say no when they offer you a cigarette, but you won't, and so the better idea is to not tempt temptation. And this is the same thing with drug rehabilitation programs. One of the first things they teach you is that you shouldn't carry more than twenty dollars of cash in your pocket because at some point you're going to run into somebody who tries to sell you drugs, and if you simply don't have any cash with you, you can't take them up on the offer. These rehabilitation programs also advise you to get rid of your ATM card and to entrust a friend or a family member to control your spending for you. In other words, don't tempt temptation. These programs expect that at some point a person with an addiction will learn to modify his or her decision making, even when faced with powerful cravings. But until then, a person in recovery needs to protect themselves from themselves. I'll give you another example. I was speaking on a college campus recently, and I found out that when finals week comes around, many of the students will do this. You log into TikTok or Instagram, and you hand your phone to your friend, and you have that person change your password and not tell you what the new password is, and then they log you off and you can't get back on, and you're doing the same thing for your friend's account, So now you're both locked out of your accounts for the week and you can't waste time that way. Then after finals are over, you tell each other the new passwords so you can log in again. So the theme here is to remove temptation, and this sort of thinking can also apply to the products that you buy. I recently saw an Architectural magazine with a review of refrigerators with clear glass doors. Now, these look great, but I suspect that for some people these are a terrible idea because it's a constant temptation. Imagine you have a chocolate cake on the middle shelf when you shut the door. On a regular fridge that's out of sight, but in the glass door fridge, the cake is constantly staring at you. So if you're trying to stick to a diet, don't get stared at by a cake. I'll give one more example of minimizing temptation. You may have heard of the marshmallow test. This was a study run by Stanford psychologists some decades ago. The idea is that you bring a child into a room and you offer them one marshmallow on a little plate, and you tell the kid you can eat this marshmallow or you can wait for five minutes, and if you do that you don't eat that marshmallow, then I'll give you two marshmallows. So then you leave the room and the child is left alone, just the kid and the marshmallow. So some kids eat their marshmallows immediately, but about a third of them were strong enough to resist the temptation and wait for the larger reward. So years later, the study team followed up with the participants and found that children who had waited for the second marshmallow generally were doing better in life in terms of having higher high school scores, or lower likelihood of obesity, or more rewarding jobs. Now, their ongoing debates about the details of the study, but I just want to draw your attention to one important point that's typically not even discussed, which is that the kids who did better didn't always do so by having a naturally stronger capacity to resist. Instead, several of them just had better strategies for resisting. Those who resisted it often did so because they clapped their hands over their eyes, or they turned their chair around so that their back was to the marshmallow. So the first lesson when you're trying to act in accordance with your long term interests is to do whatever you need to do to minimize the temptation. Now, that is a foundational strategy, but it's not always enough, and that leads us to the second strategy, which is to put money on the line. Why, because the loss of money stings, and even the prospect of losing money stings, and that sort of anticipated regret can steer you appropriately. As one example, there's a gym in Denmark where you pay for a membership but they refund your money as long as you show up once a week. Now, that's a terrific idea, but most gyms aren't going to offer this. They're of course happier if you pay for a membership and then you don't sweat all over their equipment. So how do you motivate yourself? Well, here's one way to get yourself to the gym. Do a financial reality check to consider the cost of not going each month. Not going means that you've wasted your membership money without getting anything in return, and any additional costs like private training session or workout clothes that you've already bought, that's even more cost and those come without any benefits gained by you. So tally up the total amount that you've spent for a little bit of shock effect that gets you over there. And in this context, I think that pre committing yourself to a personal trainer is a great idea. It's not great despite the cost of money, it's actually great because of the money that you put on the line, and you can put money on the line. Even more explicitly. Some colleagues of Miny Yale started a website called Stickka with two k's. Now here's how it works. Define your own goal, like let's say I want to lose ten pounds by the end of April. Then you load, say two hundred bucks onto the site with your credit card. Then if you don't meet your goal, they keep your money, and if you do meet your goal, the money gets returned to you. Now this is a great idea because you're putting something on the line, money that things if you lose it. Now there's a closely related idea here that's fascinating. So there was a woman who was featured on Radio Lab a few years ago because she really wanted to quit smoking. She was socially very liberal and had participated in a lot of the foundational civil rights movements and had founded the Congress on Racial Equality in the nineteen sixties. But she couldn't quit smoking and felt so terrible that she had smoked through her two pregnancies. And so she told her best friend, here is a check for ten thousand dollars, and if you catch me smoking again, I want you to donate this check to the KKK. Now, this was her most despised organization, and this is what's known as an anti charity. What she was doing was pitting these neural networks against one another. Of course, she wants the cigarette, but now she has to counterbalance that with how much it would hurt her if her money funded in group that's so politically offensive to her. And it worked. She didn't smoke anymore. So a financial sting can fence in your behavior. And this works even better when there's social pressure, and that leads us to the third lesson, which is recruit social pressure. All of this works better when your friends and colleagues can be there to make sure that you follow through with promises. Why because we have brain networks that really care what other people think. So, coming back to this website, Stickcay, once you set your goal, let's say you want to lose ten pounds and you set the stakes two hundred dollars. You then add a referee who will judge whether you've met the goal or not, and you add friends to support you. So you're recruiting social pressure this way. And by the way, you know, even though social media gets a bad rap for most things. It has been shown in studies to be really helpful with this issue of recruiting the social support that you need. So a lot of people use social media to good effect. When they're trying to diet. They write things like, Hey, I've passed the two hundred pounds goal and I'm on to my next goal of one hundred and ninety pounds, and all their friends comment and they say things like great job and keep going, and that sort of feedback really helps. Everyone likes to bag on social media, but a recent study out of the University of Georgia concluded that it's really helpful when people are trying to lose weight because when people join social media, they have the impression that they're being constantly watched, and so the self control increases. And this is all related to another strategy that people find success with, which is committing themselves to social embarrassment if they don't do something. So you know these fitness boot camps where you sign up and you run around with a group of other people early in the morning and you get yelled at and you get in great shape. But if you don't show up one morning, everyone jogs to your front lawn and does jumping jacks and push ups and screams your name until you come out. Now, why would anybody sign up for this? It's because it's a really smart idea. You are recruiting social pressure so that you can stick with your goals, so that you can steer your behavior in the direction that you want when you're thinking about the long term about who you want to be. And this is great because it's critical to leverage the different networks in our brain, like what do other people think about me if we want to make a contract that's going to stick? Okay, Now onto the fourth strategy, involve emotion. Something that's interesting is that there are all these terrifically informative websites with information about preventative health screening or stopping smoking things like that. But you know what, the networks in your brain involved in emotion don't care about those websites because they're just full of facts. And that's simply not the language of these parts of the brain. And as we saw in the previous episode, our decisions are not all about logic or rationality. We're not just information processing devices. Instead, our lives are richly painted by emotion. Now, these emotional networks are very powerful drivers of your decision made, so you have to involve them if you want to steer your behavior. For example, if you're trying to lose weight, you have to do things that plug right into your emotions. One strategy is to get out all the clothes that you wish you could fit into, and you lay those out and you use that as a motivator to get yourself back into the gym. Some people take photos of themselves trying to wear those tight clothes and they put those on their fridge where they see them as visual reminders of what needs to happen, and that way, when they unconsciously wander over to the fridge door, they see those photos and that triggers an emotional response, and that gets them to not open the door, or at least one fewer time. For people who are trying to quit chewing tobacco, what they can do is put up pictures of a guy who has had his jaw removed from mouth cancer, or for someone trying to become a vegetarian, they put up pictures of what what happens in a slaughter house. And I suspect there are increasingly sophisticated ways that people are going to be able to do this in the future. So let's say you're trying to quit gambling, and so the important part is to really remember how bummed out you were the last time you lost a bunch of money and came home from the casino. So my idea is this, you take a video of yourself talking to your future self and telling your future self not to do it, and then you set up geo fencing on your phone such that when you go near a casino, your cell phone automatically kicks off that video and you see yourself full of emotion, pleading with your current self not to go in there. Okay, so now I've told you about leveraging negative emotion to fence in your behavior. But how about the flip side, like reward, well, associating something with reward. This is something companies always try to do. They associate their brand with various sorts of positive things they want to make and association like Pavlov's dog. Remember there's nothing rewarding about the bell, but the bell becomes a predictor of future reward, and so companies hope to do that with the right kind of advertising, such that simply seeing their product or even just seeing their logo will make you do the same thing. It'll make you drool at their bell. But how do you leverage this kind of linkage for yourself. Well, the answer is you link some action that you want to do to the reward. So every time I go to the gym, I'll get this delicious smoothie afterwards as a reward, Or after I finish doing this work that needs to get done, I'll go to the beach, or I'll go to that party or whatever. You make that linkage, so the thing that you need to do for the long term is hooked to a reward. And finally, for the fifth strategy, establish habits. There's an old joke about a guy who wants to find enlightenment and he travels for months to find this famed guru. And when he hikes for weeks and fords the streams and climbs the mountains and gets to the top, he finds the guru and asks him to give him the secret to life, and the guru says, by low sell high. Now it works as a joke only because the advice is so batal. If you want to make money in the stock market, you just have to follow the rule, and that should be easy, right, but it's not. Lots of studies show that the majority of investors can't follow that advice. And it's clear why the guru's advice is difficult to follow because bitcoin rises into the thousands and tens thousands, and everyone thinks I'm buying now because of the fear of missing out. So the solution is to set up rules in advance when the sirens songs are not deafening. You can do this on stock websites where you say, okay, if it rises to this amount, then automatically sell or automatically buy this stock, but only if it drops to this amount. More generally, we can set habits throughout our lives to accomplish the things that we want. For example, you can just be the kind of person who says, I don't eat dessert and that way, when the waiter comes around to take the order, you just say, that's not my identity. Or here's another habit you can establish. You eat fifty percent of your meal always and you throw out the rest When you get to the halfway point, you say, I'm the kind of person who only eats half their meal, and you have the way to take it away. That's similar to what I mentioned about the way I cover my chocolate cake in salt after a few bites, and this is a good way to preclude the possibility of future temptation. Or A closely related method is to get in the habit of splitting portions with your partner. So you both order one meal and you split it, and that's just what you do. There's another useful habit, which is to link a particular reward with something you have accomplished, but only after the thing is accomplished. So, for example, you always treat yourself to a fratpucino after you finish a gym workout, but that's the only time you ever get to enjoy the fratpuccino. So you're nailing down the habit in your mind that if you want that reward, you have to earn it first. You make it contingent. I mentioned earlier that a person trying to battle drugs needs to not carry more than twenty dollars in their pocket. This has to be converted into a habit to wield power. It has to be something automatic, not something that in person thinks about every time they're going out. Same with the person battling alcohol addiction. It has to become a habit to not have alcohol in the house. It's not something that's just considered consciously every time. And I want to point back to an earlier lesson, which is that rules and habits aren't always binding without social pressure, because if you can break the rule and not get caught, then eventually you're going to break it. So once you've made a rule, get your friends into it, make promises where if you break it you can be caught. And ask your friends not to be nice, not to be charitable, but to really hold you to it. And one more thing, there are tricks for making the rules you set more followable. The main thing is don't over commit. I heard a guy named Graham Hill give a talk at TED a few years ago in which he said, really, there are many of us who want to be vegetarian. We all know the reasons, from health to pollution, energy to animal cruelty, but we find it's so difficult to follow through. So here's the solution. Just become a weekday vegetarian. It's not as difficult. Or some people do meatless mondays. These are ways of easing into something without it being overwhelming. So in summary, we have many drives, all of whom want to be in control, and these systems are always battling it out under the surface. And understanding this about yourself is critical for how you think about the complex nuances of your behavior and how you can captain your ship much better. It's not just about knowing thyself, it's about knowing thyselves and our job is to learn how these systems work and how to outwit them. And I think the way to do that this is to take inspiration from another captain who got the memo Ulysses. He realized that if he wanted to get something accomplished, he would have to do something in the present in order to successfully constrain his future behavior. He didn't just hope that he'd make it in the face of the sirens. He lashed himself to the mast. And there are several ways to do this. Minimize temptation, put money on the line, recruit social pressure, get your emotions involved, and establish habits. So think about one thing that you know that you want to be doing better in the future and ask yourself how you can leverage these lessons to get there. Because the only person who can steer the ship for your life is you, and i'd wish you good luck, but it's not about luck. It's about strategy. So let's figure out how to set a contract yourself for the future. That's all for this week. To find out more and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel so you can follow along each week for new updates until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.