Tools for Developing Self Control | Dr. Kentaro Fujita & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]When it comes to suppression of behavior or it comes to aspirational behaviors like motivating to do something hard over time that when we find ourselves at a friction point like we don't want to do something we should or we're having a hard time resisting something that we shouldn't that we have to go a layer deeper into the lyic system and hypothalamus. Like we just have to come up with contingencies that are much grosser than the than the like like you said like a cockroach on a on a marshmallow. It's like sugar's good. We have an innate circuit for being drawn towards sugary things, fatty things.

[00:00:32]Yum. That's like hardwired. So you So we go towards the vomit reflex a little bit, right? We uh we don't want to get up and go to class because we're exhausted. And fatigue is real. Fatigue is real. Shuts down our forebrain. So the circuits are impaired. Our hypothalamus is driving us to like go back to sleep. But we have to think about the fear of showing up in class for an exam and not knowing, you know, it's the it's the nightmare everybody's had at least once, right? So I feel like the the control strategy seems to be to go to a deeper layer of fear, disgust, etc. How well does the opposite work?

[00:01:10]Like how good is aspiration for good stuff? Because those are also powerful drivers of human behavior. And and I'm curious whether experiments have been done to differentiate between sort of fear and love, if you will, to put it broadly, to allow us to navigate all sorts of circumstances. But I love the idea of chasing love, chasing desire, all these great things. But there are times when we have to be like, "Oh no, I got to imagine the cockroach or else this whole I'll go back to sleep. I'll hit the snooze button."

[00:01:37]>> I think what you're saying, Andrew, is something super profound, more profound than you might think. So, for years, self-control researchers have assumed that the secret to self-control is actually doing exactly the opposite of what you suggested, which is turning off the hot system, right? Because they argue that these liyic systems, these hot systems, these more quote unquote animalistic systems are the things that make the temptation so powerful. And so, by activating those systems, all we're doing is we're upregulating the temptation impulses. And so for years and and this is part of Walter Michelle's fundamental model for example and many many others they talked about making your cognitions cooler. In other words, shutting down the emotional system and thinking very cooly and calmly about the thing in front of you in order to make the right choice. I think what's profound about what you're saying is that you've articulated two alternatives. One is that I fight fire with fire. So if this thing is pulling me, I'm going to find something that's going to push me away. Right. Um, and as you said, the example would be like there's a piece of chocolate cake and I imagine a cockroach calling across it.

[00:02:42]There's not actually very much research on that. The most most of the dominant models in self-control really talk about cooling your cognitions. You're told not to fight fire with fire. That you need to be in a calm and collected state. The reason why I think what you're saying is true is that I have some other work looking at the other strategy which is you said finding love. So, in my own research, we have shown that if we can get people to think about their wise, um, you know, 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 I only think about cake related things, that could be really difficult. But if instead I asked myself like and and even if you said, "Oh, I'm I'm not supposed to eat that because I'm on a diet." That doesn't have much magic to it. It's like it it's kind of sterile. So, it doesn't move me in any way. But if instead I'm saying things like, "I need to do this for my family. I need to do this to get to my children. I want to look good for my children's for my children's wedding photos." Or, you know, my children are looking at me. I 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 healthier, 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.

[00:04:01]It's infusing the moment, as you say, fighting fire, like fighting fire with fire, not with fear, but with love. Like these are these are higher order things that I care about, and these are what's going to motivate me to hold out. What you're highlighting is with your original example something a little bit different than that which is fighting fire by taking the positive and turning it into a negative. And my PhD student Paul Stillman and a colleague of his um Caitlyn Woolly, they did some experiments in which they had people think about it's usually when you think about self-control you think about the short-term or long-term gains. They instead had people think about the short-term losses of indulging. So what are some of the things like what's the like think about the sugar crash that you would experience if you ate the chocolate cake, right? So and they showed that that kind of served much like you were talking about the vomit refunks. It pushes people away far enough. They're in the short-term mindset. They're thinking about short-term things. The short term is pulling them in. So they fight that with a short-term repellent. And they found that that's also very effective for self-control. So your ideas are almost antithetical to what most people would say the status quo in self-control research. But for that reason, I'm super excited because my own work is starting to challenge that idea as is as is Paul Stillman and Caitlin Woolly's that we might be able to use the lyic system. We might be able to use our hot reactions.

[00:05:26]We don't have to assume that they're going to be bad, but or they're going to they're going to pre predispose us to indulgence, but in make us susceptible to indulgence, but instead they might be what inspires us and gives us the motivation to do the right thing. And I think that is really exciting, >> fascinating. Um, and I'm so glad you you're doing that work. Um, you know, we had David Gogggins on this podcast.

[00:05:49]David author of Can't Hurt Me. Um, and famed for doing hard things all day long. I I knew David before he had a book, before he was public facing. And I can tell you, I met him at a meeting and afterwards he said he was running to the airport and I thought he meant like rushing to the airport because that's what that means to me. He was literally running to the airport. We were 16 miles away from San Jose airport. He was he went in the back, changed, and he like ran to the airport with his luggage. So, he's always been that way, at least uh as long as I've known him. And I think one of the reasons David is such a shining example uh of motivation is that he is very open about the fact that he listens to negative comments from social media in his headphones when he when he runs. He's talked about that. He talks he tells himself what a piece of garbage he is if he doesn't do this. I mean he he basically flagagillates himself into into doing these things. And any attempt to suggest to him like oh maybe you could take like a more soft gloves approach like he's not hearing it. It clearly works for him. He's actually right now um I think he went back to the military. He's also in um paramedic school. I think he's he's probably becoming a physician, too. I mean, he's he's a remarkable example of that approach. It's an approach that's very hard for a lot of people and some people would say it's pathological. I don't believe it is because it clearly works for him and the alternative was far worse. He'll tell you that as well. We could even talk about eating disorders, right? Anytime we have a discussion about suppression of the impulse to eat cake, you know, there's going to be a subset of people out there that are saying, "Oh, so you know what you're talk talking about is is eating disorders, right? Switching the contingency. If I can avoid it, that's rewarding." Which is associated with certain eating disorders.

[00:07:28]I love the idea that there's this other side that you could entice yourself with the positive outcome. What I'm hearing you say is that if it's a short-term battle, like right now, think about the downside or the upside right now. If it's a long-term battle, you want to think in terms of long-term outcomes, bad, both bad and good. Is that right?

[00:07:52]Should we have all of those in our toolkit?

[00:07:54]>> I completely agree with you, and I love the fact that you use the word toolkit.

[00:07:57]Um, my colleague Ethan Cross and I, we wrote a paper in which we talked about the self-control toolkit. Basically, we argued we have lots of different ways to enhance self-control.

[00:08:10]We speculate that certain tools might work better for certain people at certain times. We don't currently have a very good framework for predicting what would be the right strategy for this kind of person in this kind of situation. And so if your if your listeners are saying, "Wow, that totally would not work for me." That's okay by me, too. I don't think there's going to be one tool that's going to work for everybody. The self-control toolbox approach spec uh explicitly um embraces the idea that different things are going to work for different people. So, if you're the kind of person who's very reactant, someone who says, "No, I can do it."

[00:08:49]then you might want to think about all the bad things people say about you because you're going to react to it and say, "No, I'm going to do it." But if you're the kind of person who tends to listen to what people say and you incorporate their perspectives and they're saying bad things about you, well then that's probably going to have a demotivating effect, right? So again, the strategy that works so well for one individual may not work for another. It may also be that certain self-control strategies work for certain contexts and not for others. So, for example, you know, for me, getting started with the workout is the hardest part. I have all a litany of reasons why I don't want to do this today. And so, for me, the hardest part is just getting on the bike or starting to lift weights. You know, sometimes it's just putting on the workout clothes. The strategies I use for that, I usually tell myself like, you know, what would my heroes do in this situation? So, the quote unquote, what would Jesus do? I think it's a very effective strategy in those kinds of situations. You imagine someone that you really admire or you imagine someone who looks up to you and you have you want to be you want to be that person that you admire or you want to be that person that people see in you. That for me helps me get going for at the beginning of exercise. But when it comes toward the end when I'm like just pumping out that last rep or I'm the last minute of a really hard climb, these things don't work so well for me. Like for me at that point I just want to grit my teeth and get it done. And so willpower might be a better strategy. So, I think we have to explore the entirety of the self-control toolbox. We have to be and through trial and error, find what works best for us.

[00:10:22]This is another reason why I would like to stress to your listeners that self-control is a skill that you tailor for yourself and it's a lifelong journey, right? I'm not going to be able to get up here and say do XYZ and all of a sudden people are going to be amazing.

[00:10:35]Instead, they have to try and have to fail. And it's in the failure where you actually learn the most because you say, "Oh, that's not for me or at least that wasn't for me at this time." The reason why I find this approach really exciting and also hopeful is that I think a lot of people when they fail at self-control, they just say, "Oh, I'm a terrible person. I'm never going to get this. I just have bad self-control, bad willpower." But instead, the learning approach, the toolbox approach just says, "Okay, that tool didn't work this time." And failure represents an opportunity for self-growth and exploration and discovery, which makes it a lot more positively toned as opposed to, wow, I really screwed up.

[00:11:15]I'm a terrible person. My goal is forever gone. And I think that's a really important implication of understanding self-control not as an innate skill, but something that you grow and cultivate over time with things that you learn.