How to get out of bed. (forreal)| Dr. David Eagleman

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]If I was currently someone that couldn't get out of bed, I didn't have a lot of discipline or motivation and I wasn't very good at committing myself to hard things.

[00:00:09]With everything you know about the brain, is it possible to take a set of actions that will fundamentally change my brain and make me that type of person who runs marathons, who does hard things, who's motivated and disciplines, and who has high agency and attacks the world.

[00:00:23]>> Yes. Yeah. But it's much more than simply resolve because I mean just look at New Year's resolutions. you know, by by February, most people have dropped most of them. So, it's really a psychology problem about figuring out, okay, what are the things that motivate me? So, let's say you want to become a marathon runner. You've got that distant dream. You figure out like, what actually motivates me in the short term?

[00:00:46]Who am I trying to impress? What am I trying to accomplish in my life? How [clears throat] can I structure things like this Ulyses contract that I talked about earlier where I'm actually locking myself into a contract? Like, you know, I call Bob and I say, "I will meet you every morning at 7:00 and we're going to run until we drop." Like once I've committed to those sorts of things, that's how you set things up so that you do the right