The Science of Making — and Keeping — New Year’s Resolutions | Hal Hershfield
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2024
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A leading behavioral psychologist reveals practical strategies to help you actually make the changes you want to make this new year (and beyond).
Hal Hershfield is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making, and psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and the author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. His research on future selves has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, as well as the Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today.
In this episode we talk about:
- What he means by a future self, and why thinking about your future self will help you make better decisions
- How to think about your future self without neglecting the present moment
- The importance of commitment devices, and what they are — including some which you can even adopt right now
- The importance of breaking down big goals to make them achievable
- How to reframe commitments so that you actually stick to them
- The role of mental time travel to help you actually do what you say you want to do
Related Episodes:
How to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody happy new year. |
| 0:21.0 | Happy New Year. You may be waking up today contemplating how to make and keep |
| 0:26.2 | New Year's resolutions. The bad news, I'll lead with this, but there is good news. The bad |
| 0:31.6 | news is that human beings are notoriously bad at this. |
| 0:35.4 | Most of us will have bailed on our resolutions by February. The good news though is that |
| 0:40.8 | there's a ton of research into how best to make and keep your |
| 0:45.4 | resolutions and today we've got one of the leading thinkers in the field here to |
| 0:50.5 | walk us through it all. You can make and actually keep your resolutions |
| 0:54.7 | but you have to do it in the right way and we're going to get some expert advice |
| 0:58.5 | today. Hal Hirschfield is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making, and psychology at |
| 1:04.0 | UCLAs Anderson School of Management, he's also the author of your future self, |
| 1:08.6 | how to make tomorrow better today. We talk about the research that Hal has personally done as well as the work |
| 1:14.8 | done by his peers in this field. Among other things we cover what he means by a |
| 1:19.2 | future self and why thinking about your future self can actually help you make better decisions |
| 1:23.7 | right now. How to think about your future self without neglecting the present moment, |
| 1:28.3 | what commitment devices are, the importance of breaking down big goals into manageable parts to make them achievable, |
| 1:35.3 | how to reframe commitments so that you actually stick to them, |
| 1:38.8 | and other behavioral strategies such as temptation bundling |
| 1:42.4 | and tangential immersion. |
| 1:46.0 | But first, BSP, blatant self-promotion. |
| 1:48.8 | Starting this week on the podcast, we've got a special New Year series featuring some of the smartest people we know |
| 1:53.8 | talking about the advice they can't live without. You're going to hear from the |
... |
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