Neuroscientists talk about how we have one brain but two minds. We have a mind that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and we have another mind that controls our impulses and delays gratification to fulfill our long-term goals. We face willpower challenges when the two minds have competing goals. Learn what influences us to procrastinate or why we fail to resist temptation, and learn about small interventions that can have large, positive outcomes.

Author and Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, PhD, talks about strategies from her new book "The WillPower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It" as part of the Authors@Google series. Topics include dieting/weight loss, health, addiction, quitting smoking, temptation, procrastination, mindfulness, stress, sleep, cravings, exercise, self-control, self-compassion, guilt, and shame. For more from Kelly McGonigal, visit http://kellymcgonigal.com/. This event took place on January 26, 2012 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

I'm delighted to welcome to the Googleplex, Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University and the author of a new book, The Willpower Instinct.

So in life sometimes We struggle with choices and accomplishing goals and we often believe that sheer willpower will get us there.

But much of what we believe and know about willpower could actually be wrong.

Or that's what Kelly discovered in working with students at Stanford University where she teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Center for Compassion.

So she created a course called the Science of Willpower at Stanford School of Continuing Studies and it became 1 of the most popular courses at the school and went on to become a hugely successful blog at Psychology Today.

And now a book, which you can get your hands on at the end of this talk.

And Kelly says if she has her way, it'll soon be an action figure and an action movie, too.

So today, Kelly's going to talk about how we can accomplish the array of goals that we often struggle to get done.

It might be a healthier lifestyle, it might be a life of greater productivity, or sometimes something as simple as having waited for 6 months, finally, finally clearing out the closet.

So please help me welcome Kelly McGonigal.

Well, I've been giving a lot of talks this last month and a lot about New Year's resolutions.

I have to say this is the first place I've talked where there was apparently a healthy code resolution going on.

So who's still keeping their healthy code resolution?

Why don't you tell me, just so to get things rolling, tell me something that has challenged your willpower today.

Okay, so we've got 2 kind of I will power challenges.

Something you have to make yourself do even though it would be a little bit easier just not do it.

Were you at my talk 2 years ago about yoga for pain?

Yeah, so an example of I won't power, there are all these links you could follow.

You could just click and get lost down the link hole and you have to find the ability to resist that temptation.

Great, yeah, so we make lots of decisions every day about what to eat and what to do.

Okay, well these are all great examples of willpower challenges.

And I want to just start with a little definition, my definition of willpower, willpower challenge.

And I define a willpower challenge as something that is basically a competition between 2 parts of yourself.

Neuroscientists are famous for saying that even though we have 1 brain, we actually have 2 minds.

We are completely different people depending on which mind is active or which systems of the brain are more active.

And so willpower challenge is anything where those 2 versions of yourself have competing goals.

So, for example, there may be part of you that really wants to eat a candy bar for your snack And then there's a part of you that actually has some longer term goals.

You're thinking health, you're thinking weight loss, you're thinking bikini season, whatever.

And maybe the banana seems like the better snack.

And again, both of these choices you might be drawn to by different parts of your mind or 2 different versions of yourself.

And 1 of the things that has really influenced my work with willpower is thinking about it in terms of what's going on in the brain.

And we're gonna talk about that a little bit today.

The fact that you could be the very same person, but depending on your mindset, depending on your energy, depending on your stress levels, your brain is going to meet this willpower challenge in a different way and you're going to end up making 1 choice today and 1 choice tomorrow.

So as mentioned, this book is based on a class that I teach at Stanford called the Science of Willpower.

But those are actual Science of Willpower students.

And I created this course because I was going around trying to teach people how to be more productive, how to improve their health, and everywhere I went people said, oh, we know we're supposed to do that stuff already.

And there was this really interesting fundamental gap between what people wanted and what they thought they wanted.

That is people were very identified, you could say, with this version of the self.

People felt like deep down they were the person who wanted the candy bar.

And this other person who wanted the banana, like who is that?

And I realized that People didn't just need to know what is the right thing to do or the healthy thing to do or tips for stress management and productivity.

They needed to feel like this person and they needed to know how to be that person as the default rather than walking around always feeling like they had to resist this core self that only wants immediate gratification or never wants to do anything difficult.

Okay, so that's how the class came about.

So I thought today, since this is a class based on science, that I would share with you 5 of my favorite experiments from the class and from the book.

And I chose experiments that I like because they use tiny interventions, really, really small interventions to shape people's behavior and they have very large outcomes.

And I think this is the kind of thing many of us are looking for.

1 small change we can make, whether it's a change in how we think or a change in the way that we're approaching a willpower challenge, that can have huge payoffs down the road making it easier to do what it is we really deep down want even when it's sometimes difficult or part of us doesn't want.

Okay, so let's start with the first experiment.

How many of you guys sometimes feel like this guy?

I know at least 1 of you only had 3 hours of sleep last night.

So it turns out that when you're this version of yourself, every willpower challenge is more difficult.

And the first intervention that I want to tell you about is actually a sleep intervention.

The main intervention was trying to help people sleep more or sleep better.

And it was people who had a very serious willpower challenge.

These are people who were recovering from addiction to drugs and they were in a substance abuse recovery program.

And half of the people in the standard care were assigned to take a mindfulness meditation training that was designed to help them improve their sleep or sleep more.

So the first thing I want you to take a look at on this graph, this is minutes of sleep per night and you're going to think this is insanely optimistic, I know, But everyone's starting around 7 hours and we're gonna improve on 7 hours.

So everyone in the group was starting around 7 hours and what the researchers found was that just doing a little bit of meditation every day, breath focused meditation, increased sleep time to just over 8 hours a day.

And the control group had a little bit of deterioration to slightly less than 7 hours of sleep a night.

I mean it is nice to know that if you meditate for a few minutes a day, you will sleep better, get more sleep.

But what's interesting is how that change in sleep time then made these recovering addicts impervious to relapse.

And this is a very high correlation, .70.

The increase in sleep time predicted resistance to relapse, a correlation of .70.

Getting 1 more hour of sleep a night suddenly made it a lot easier for these recovering addicts to resist the temptation of falling off the wagon.

And interestingly, the number, I never know, it's gonna bounce off the screen, right?

The number of minutes per day that people meditated also predicted resistance to relapse.

So there were really 2 things going on in this intervention.

There was getting more sleep and there was also something about the actual practice time.

And it wasn't a lot, but it was something like 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day.

And both of these things, sleep and meditation, were giving people more willpower for 1 of the biggest willpower challenges.

So I want us to think together a little bit about why those 2 small interventions, an hour more sleep or 10 minutes of meditation a day, might actually give us more willpower for any willpower challenge.

What you're looking at here is an image from an fMRI study of what happens to the brain when you're a little bit sleep deprived.

Most studies use less than 6 hours of sleep a night as sleep deprived, which may seem normal to you, but for most of us that's actually functioning far suboptimal.

What you're looking at here is a composite of a lot of different people's brains, some who are sleep deprived and some who are not.

We're going to slice the brain, so imagine me standing this way and we're going to have 1 of those neat slicers and we're gonna slice down the head and just start taking sections off and look down the middle.

And so where you see these yellow spots, that's the front of the brain right about here or right about here.

And yellow means that this area of the brain is under activated when you have less than 6 hours of sleep at night.

This area of the brain is unable to do its job as efficiently.

And the red areas are areas that are more activated, sort of mid brain regions that are associated with basic impulses and instincts.

So when you're getting less than 6 hours of sleep a night, your brain is actually unable to recruit the systems of the brain that you need to be that better version of yourself.

This area of the brain, I love this image because it's like here's where the balance is weighed.

Do I want the weight loss or do I want the chocolate bar?

And this area of the brain right here is basically keeping track of your goals.

And it's sort of a hard job, it's heavy lifting it needs to do is to remember long term goals, core values, and when it is unable to do that, when it's under-fueled or when it's under-active, your brain thinks all it really wants, all you really want is the chocolate bar, or to procrastinate, or to follow that link through, or to not bother doing your yoga exercises.

And so in some key way the ability to remember who you are and what your big goals are is dependent on the ability of this area of the brain to use energy well and sleep deprivation is 1 of the main things that can get in the way of that.

I think that's 1 of the reasons why this small sleep intervention ended up helping people resist relapse to drug addiction because they now had brains that were better fueled to remember their goals to stay clean and sober.

And it's not just sleep that impacts the physiology of your brain, how well your brain uses energy.

There are a couple of other things that seem to really strengthen the ability of the brain's frontal regions to do what they're supposed to do to help you control impulses and find your motivation.

And here are the 4 things from the research that seem to do it to make your brain a kind of willpower machine.

And hopefully there's going to be 1 thing on this list that you're not currently doing that you're willing to do.

So getting a little bit more sleep really makes the prefrontal cortex better able to regulate those systems of the brain that direct you towards temptation and immediate gratification.

And both Meditation and physical exercise have been shown not only to make your brain more efficient at using these self-control systems, but they actually make these systems bigger and better connected to the regions that they are supposed to be controlling.

And again, it can be a very quick time course to see these benefits.

People who meditate maybe 10 minutes a day, after a couple of months their brains look different.

These regions are bigger and better connected.

People who work out on a regular basis who used to be sedentary, again studies show that in as little as a couple of months of regular workouts, their prefrontal cortices are bigger and denser and better connected.

And so these are 2 of the things you can do that actually train the physiology of your willpower.

And the last thing that the research suggests is what you eat has a very big influence on whether or not your brain is able to be this better version of yourself.

There's something about having big spikes in blood sugar levels and then big drops in blood sugar levels that really screws up how the brain uses energy.

And you need your brain to be an energy efficient machine if you're gonna be walking around the world in that kind of better you mindset rather than that kind of basic impulse you.

And so research shows that shifting to eating a more plant-based diet actually changes the way the brain functions and has a lot to do with what's going on with your blood sugar levels.

So, these are all things that we sometimes think of as requiring willpower.

We think, okay, I have to sit down and force myself to meditate.

I have to say no to the donut and eat something that has fiber in it for breakfast.

But we rarely think about the fact that actually not doing these things may be part of what makes it so difficult to begin.

And there's a kind of a curve where when we first start it feels like we're using willpower.

But everything on this list that takes a little bit of willpower to begin with ends up giving you back far more willpower than they take.

It's not just that exercising makes it easier to exercise.

Studies show that exercising makes it easier to eat right, to not spend too much money, to stop procrastinating, to pay better attention.

All of these things have a kind of global training effect on what you could think of as your willpower muscle.

Was there a question up front or a comment?

So the question is why does it say low glycemic and plant based?

There's actually more evidence that a vegan diet does this better than a diet that is low glycemic and includes animal products, but I'm not sure that that's entirely realistic for everyone.

So I think you can kind of pick which way you're willing to go with that.

But if you look at just the physiology of it, there's more evidence for the plant-based diet.

So the first experiment was just get some more sleep.

Second experiment, I want you to think about a recent setback you had, or kind of a willpower failure.

Maybe it was not eating the healthy thing at lunch.

Maybe it was not doing your exercise in the morning.

Maybe it was spending all morning long following links that had nothing to do with your project.

So I want you to think of a recent time when you had some kind of willpower failure.

So my question for you is do you think that feeling bad about that, presumably feeling maybe a little bit of regret, a little bit of guilt about it, a little bit of self-criticism about that.

Does that, can that be a real source of future willpower?

Raise your hand if you think that feeling bad can actually be a real source of willpower to improve next time.

And how many of you think that that feeling bad is actually gonna be a further drain on willpower?

Maybe some of you have read that chapter in the book.

So I wanna talk now about some of the research that tends to surprise people the most.

When I first started teaching this class, this was the research people argued with.

Like literally I couldn't get them to be quiet in the classroom because they were so convinced this couldn't possibly be true.

This is a study looking at whether it's better to let yourself off the hook for your mistakes in terms of preventing future willpower collapses.

And so this particular study I'm going to talk about in a little more detail brought in people who were trying to manage their weight and eat healthy.

And they gave them an immediate willpower failure.

They showed up for the study and they were forced to eat a donut.

And they even had to choose the flavor of donut they were going to eat so they would feel really complicit in this willpower failure.

And they had to drink a whole glass of water too so they'd feel a little bit uncomfortably full.

Okay, so we have everyone, dieters here, having now a willpower failure.

And the next part of the study is a taste test where they are given a lot of different types of candy and they are said, you know, we want you to evaluate all of these candies so please just eat as much as you need to, as much as you want, so that you can evaluate these candies.

And of course, these candies were all pre-weighed so that experimenters could find out exactly how much candy the dieters ate after they had blown their diet with a donut.

In this particular study, the researchers had a hypothesis.

They thought that the guilt that dieters experience when they fall off their diet actually really undermines future self-control.

They wanted to create an intervention that would basically get rid of the guilt and shame that people feel when they make a mistake.

And so in this study, half the dieters were randomly assigned to receive a special letting themselves off the hook message.

So between the donut eating and the taste test, an experimenter came in and said something very simple.

They said, by the way, we've realized now that some people in this experiment feel guilty after eating the donut.

So there was an opportunity for people to recognize they might be feeling guilty.

Second part of the message, we want you to remember that actually everyone indulges sometimes and we ask you to do it.

So there's a kind of putting it in a broader perspective.

And the last part of the message was a simple plea.

Please don't be too hard on yourself about it.

And what the researchers found was that the women who had been given the self-forgiveness message ate less than half as much candy as women who had not been told, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal.

Which is exactly the opposite of what most people think.

Most people think you make a mistake, you have a willpower failure, and you start saying nice things to yourself about it, that this could only lead to disaster.

It would lead to licensing even more indulgence.

And yet that's exactly the opposite of what was found in this study and not just this study.

But in a lot of different studies now, This is 1 of the strongest pieces of theory we have in willpower research right now.

That is the harder you are on yourself when you have a willpower failure, the more likely you are to have the same failure again and the bigger it's gonna be when you do.

For example, 1 study took a look at problem drinkers and had them keep track of how much they were drinking and how bad they felt the morning after.

What they found is that the people who were the most self-critical and felt the most ashamed or guilty about drinking the night before wanted to drink more immediately when they woke up, and also drank more that night and the next.

There was something about the self-critical nature, the shame and the guilt that was driving people back to the very thing they felt bad about.

Same has been shown for addictions including quitting smoking.

You have that first relapse and the more you beat yourself up about it, the more you now need to be comforted with something, probably the very thing that you're feeling bad about because that's probably why you do it in the first place.

The more people feel guilty and self-critical about losing money, the more likely they are to borrow money and try to win it back and end up losing more.

And even for procrastination, so you may not have any kind of addictions, but even for procrastination research shows that the harder someone is on themselves for putting something off, the longer they procrastinate the next time.

And all of this has to do with the basic fact that when we are feeling stressed out and guilty and ashamed, that is a state that puts us into the version of ourselves, the mindset that is much more susceptible to immediate gratification, temptation and anxiety.

It's basically the biological opposite of what needs to be happening in your brain and body to remember your long term goals and to be that other version of yourself, what we would call the willpower version of yourself.

And as soon as you start piling on the guilt and the shame, your brain switches into that other mode in which now everything's gonna be more tempting, including procrastinating or including smoking or drinking.

So I just wanted to give you a sense of what it would be like to give yourself a self-compassion message.

Again, I said this was a tiny intervention, this donut study, and this is basically all it was.

And there are a number of programs now that are teaching people how to write these messages for themselves and to literally have them scripted for the moment they fail, for the moment that they procrastinated and they're late again, or for the moment they had that cigarette when they hadn't smoked in a week and to be able to whip this message out as a way of not falling down that hole that we often fall into.

So the 3 steps of this message is the first is mindfulness of what you're thinking and feeling.

Noticing that you're feeling guilty or noticing that you're feeling self-doubt or self-critical, maybe angry at yourself, and actually allow yourself to see those feelings.

Because a big reason that people go from feeling guilty to giving in again is that They just want to get rid of that feeling.

It's so kind of overwhelming and they want to distract themselves from it with something that is going to get them into further trouble.

And then the second step is this common humanity.

1 of the reasons that it is hard to find our motivation and our willpower is we start to feel like there's something uniquely broken with us.

There's something about who we are that is wrong and weak.

And that mindset makes it very difficult to tap back into your motivation or your strength.

And so this message of common humanity is basically saying to yourself, you know what?

And to recognize that this is not saying anything about who you are, it's saying something about the process and what matters is how you respond afterward, not the fact that it happened at all.

And then this last step is encouragement over criticism.

And if you were to think about someone you were mentoring, you know Some of you probably have mentees here or interns or you think about a child that you care about or a dear friend.

What would you say to them when they had a setback?

And to say that to yourself, it might be reminding yourself of your goal.

It might be reminding yourself of the big picture rather than the micro picture in which you feel like a failure.

And to do that rather than the voices we often have in our head that are saying things like, why did you do that again?

You're so stupid, you're never going to change.

And to actually start to talk to yourself a little bit in the second person as if you were a good friend.

And research shows that this particular approach, learning how to talk to yourself in this way, is more effective, for example, at quitting smoking than nicotine replacement therapy.

That's how powerful being able to respond to setbacks with self-compassion can be.

I want you to take a look at these circles which go from being totally non-overlapping to extremely overlapping and you're going to decide Which of these sets of circles best represent how you feel about who you are today and who you're gonna be, let's say, 30 years from now, 30 years in the future.

Or pick a time period that feels right to you.

This is your current self and this is your future self 30 years from now.

This means who you are today is really very different than who you're gonna be 30 years from now.

Some overlap, but actually a lot of change is gonna be happening between now, who knows.

And then This last set of circles, this is like, you know what, who I am today is probably who I'm gonna be in 30 years.

So you're gonna pick for yourself, take another few seconds and think where you are on this graph.

Actually, let's do like a kind of rolling wave, because I'm actually curious if there's a trend being here at Google.

So just put your hand up when you see your circle highlighted.

Okay, so it turns out where you put yourself on this map has a lot to do with some very important willpower challenges related to health and money and even moral behavior.

Don't feel too bad if you're at an extreme tail that is not associated with willpower because I'm gonna show you some strategies for being able to get to the end that is associated with willpower if you need it.

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