How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain

Huberman Lab

In this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, neuroscientist Dr. Masud Husain explores the neuroscience behind motivation and apathy, revealing how brain circuits—particularly

Key takeaways

• Apathy is distinct from depression; it involves a loss of motivation despite emotional well-being.
• The basal ganglia, especially the nucleus accumbens, are critical in linking motivation signals to physical action.

Main topics

• Neuroscience of motivation
• Apathy and its neurological basis

Notable quotes

When that circuitry is not working, you can get profound loss of motivation, apathy.

Conclusion

Understanding motivation as a brain-driven process involving effort-reward balance offers powerful

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Almost every drug of addiction, whether we go from nicotine to alcohol to heroin to cocaine to amphetamine, almost every drug of addiction hijacks that dopamine system we were talking about. We find when that circuitry is not working that you can get profound loss of motivation, apathy. When that circuitry is on overdrive because it's been hijacked by these drugs, you get states of hypermotivation. So, of course, this is going to be overly simplistic to think dopamine levels are the only factor that affect our motivation. But it certainly turns out to be a very important factor in graduating the level of motivation we have to seek particular outcomes. Speaker 1 (0:46) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Speaker 1 (0:55) I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Masoud Hussain, who is a neurologist and neuroscientist at Oxford, making key discoveries about the relationship between motivation and pleasure. Today, we discuss what really determines our level of drive and determination to do everything from getting up to go to school or work to pursuing long, hard challenges that last many years. We start off by talking about the opposite of motivation, which of course is apathy. And as you'll learn, perhaps surprisingly, apathy is separate from one's desire for something. We also discuss something very useful, which is how you can change your own perception of your own effort level. Today's discussion really gets to the heart of motivation and procrastination and how anyone, healthy or otherwise, can leverage that understanding to their benefit. As you'll soon hear, Dr. Masoud Hussain is a remarkable scientist, neurologist, and communicator. Indeed, he's the author of a spectacular book. I've read it. It's entitled Our Brain, Ourselves, and it's a terrific read if you want to learn more about how your brain works, how it can change over time, and how it makes you who you are. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Masoud Hussain. Dr. Masoud Hussain, welcome. Thank you for having me. You've worked on a huge variety of topics. Alzheimer's, attention. apathy. We're definitely going to talk about apathy. Spatial neglect, which I'm guessing most of our audience probably doesn't know exactly what that is. I'd like to start with the one that sounds like a bit of a downer, but as a window into understanding motivation and the states of excitement that most of us would like to be in. But let's talk about and really define through your lens, what is apathy? How does the brain bring about this thing that we call apathy? And is apathy just a lack of motivation? Speaker 2 (3:04) Yeah, I mean, these are big questions. And I think the way we've approached them is somewhat serendipitous in the sense that, you know, 15 years ago, I wasn't studying apathy or motivation. Like many people, I might think someone's lazy or they're highly motivated, but that's a sort of psychological state. It's a personality. And it was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware. that there may be an important biology underlying motivation. And when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy. And the way this happened was completely out of the blue. I was then working in London at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square at UCL. And we received a letter from a doctor describing a guy in his 30s. And this guy had been a highly productive person. He was in finance. He was also really liked socially, had a wide network of friends. But suddenly, he had become completely different. From being highly motivated, he went to, I'm not interested. I can't be bothered. And that was both at work as well as with his friends. So people began to think, this is something really different in this guy, David. What's happening? They wondered if he had become depressed. That's why he wasn't really functioning. And he went to see his doctor who started him on an antidepressant, but it made no difference. He was still the same. So he lost his job. He got fired because he had lost motivation. And he was so apathetic that he couldn't be bothered to get Social Security benefit. So his friends said, OK, come and stay with us. And they regretted it almost immediately because David did nothing. He just sat there in a chair all day long, waiting for his friends to come back, do the cooking, clean. They needed to prompt him to have a shower because he literally just sat there. His level of motivation was almost zero. When we got to see him, and it was difficult because he'd never come to his appointments, I had to phone him up to say, look, I am going to be here tomorrow. Please come. And he grudgingly said, OK, I'll try and make it. And he was, of course, late. He came and there was this very sad guy. You know, he was disheveled, really not looking after himself, stains on his shirt. But the one thing he wasn't was unhappy. He was absolutely happy about life, right, which was the perplexing thing. He'd lost his job. He'd lost his apartment because he wasn't paying the rent, couldn't be bothered to get Social Security. But there he was, really happy about what was happening in life, looking forward. to something that he didn't know what, but he was still looking forward to good things in life. So when I asked him, why aren't you doing anything when you're at home? What would you normally do? I would listen to some music. So why aren't you listening to music? Because it would take me some time to put my music system together. How long would it take? Five minutes. So this was really sort of revelatory for me. The effort of putting the cables together for his music system. taking out the loudspeakers, was too much in terms of the pleasure he could obtain from listening to music. It turned out that David had a very unusual neurological problem. His MRI brain scans revealed that he had two tiny little strokes in the basal ganglia. These are deep nuclei in the brain which are evolutionally well-conserved. They go back to the earliest vertebrate that we still have, the lamprey, 360 million years old. And the key thing that we've discovered from the neurophysiology of the lamprey is the basal ganglia are important in linking motivation signals to action. Some people call it motivation to act. So in an organism like the lamprey, motivation signals might be hunger or sex that lead to action to fulfill those goals. In David, these strokes in the ventral striatum... what's called the nucleus accumbens in animals, led to no motivation signals leading to action. Nothing happened. But if you prompted him, go take a shower, come on, he would do it. But of his own volition, he wasn't motivated to act. And that was really something that was extraordinary for us because here was a man who'd been highly motivated. And that motivation had been extinguished by these two tiny little strokes, which didn't affect him physically, but affected his behavior. And the studies that we performed with David to try and understand this led us to the concept that we might be able to deconstruct this nebulous thing called motivation. Speaker 1 (8:06) May I skip? Question is fascinating. And I'm sure everyone, including myself, is also wondering what became of David. But before you tell us, was it the case that he would feel overwhelmed? Like, I want to listen to music, but that five minutes feels like a huge effort. That's a long effort. Or was it the case that he didn't really want it either? Because the way you've described these lesions is a... is a severing of the wanting from the engagement in the process to have. But of course, as you and I know, neural circuits are never that simple. Speaker 2 (8:38) No, of course not. Yeah. And he never expressed it unless we asked him. But he would say that it's too much effort to put this system together. So even if he was asked, what would you like to do? He might say, I'd like to listen to music. Why aren't you doing it? Because it's too much effort to do it. Right. And that became a real insight into how our brains work when we make decisions about is this potential action worth the effort in terms of the reward that will arise from it? Because it turns out that if we look at apathy across many different neurological disorders, one common trait that we found when we ask people, is this particular option worth the reward if it was? requiring this much physical effort, we find that everyone is willing to work for high rewards. But the difference between motivated people and apathetic people is at the level of the low rewards. Apathetic people are more inclined to say, nah, I don't think this is worth the effort, so I won't do that option. That's a really interesting signature that we found when people make their decisions. But in someone extreme like David, almost nothing. incentivized him to put in effort to act unless he was prompted to do so. But going back to what happened to him, one of the things we've learned from the neuroscience of the basal ganglia and motivation to act is that dopamine is a key neurotransmitter, a key chemical in the brain, which is important in the neural circuitry. And that's when we thought, okay, is there anything we can do for this guy to improve his motivation? So initially we tried levodopa, L-dopa, which is the drug that Oliver Sacks describes in Awakenings and many people have seen the film. And it's used a lot in Parkinson's disease for treatment. We slowly ramped up that drug, but seemed to make absolutely no difference behaviorally to David or on our tests of reward sensitivity. We developed some ways of measuring that. So we were about to give up. And then I suddenly thought, look, let's use the other drug that we use for the dopamine system. And that class of drugs acts directly on dopamine D2 and D3 receptors rather than. being a precursor to making dopamine in the brain, like levodopa. And this drug, rapinrol, latches onto dopamine receptors directly and stimulates the dopamine circuitry. So we slowly ramped up this drug, thinking, is it going to be any different or not? But three months after we started this medication, he came back, David came back to see us, and I did not recognize this guy in the waiting room because... First of all, he'd had a shower. He'd had a haircut. He was wearing a suit. He had a new job, and most impressively, he had a new girlfriend. Because in the state he'd been in, he was seeing nobody. But he'd obviously been motivated to get out there and, you know, see if he could find a new partner. I was absolutely delighted for him, but so astonished that we could go in a human biological system where someone has... tiny lesions in the basal ganglia and has their motivation extinguished, we could go from that to recovering motivation by using a drug that we already have that affects the dopamine circuitry. And of course, David is really rare. This kind of bilateral, both sides of the basal ganglia being affected, tiny little strokes. This is extremely rare. It's reported and it leads to pathological apathy. But it turns out that apathy is really common. across neurological disorders. And the way we thought about it is if a pathological process, whether it's a stroke or whether it's Alzheimer's disease or whether it's Parkinson's disease or even some inflammatory disorder affecting the nervous system like multiple sclerosis, if that pathological process is affecting this circuitry, it can lead... to loss of motivation. And that's what we're really interested in, is to think about the circuits that are affected and also trying to deconstruct motivation in terms of what's actually going on in the brain. What is this circuit really doing for us that leads to this behavior we call motivated behavior? Speaker 1 (13:19) I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. I have to say, these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base, and they're covered in chocolate coating, and they're absolutely incredible. I, of course, eat regular whole foods. 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BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a long time, and while it's not always easy, every time I do a therapy session, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. And that's because whenever I finish a therapy session, I come away with a valuable insight or new perspective on something I'm working through, whether that's with work, with relationships in my personal life, or with my relationship to myself. With BetterHelp, they make it extremely easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits that come through effective therapy. They have a short questionnaire that helps match you to a therapist. And while BetterHelp has an industry-leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. Also, because BetterHelp is done entirely online, it's extremely time efficient. There's no driving to a therapist's office, looking for parking, et cetera. If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10 % off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. I'd like to drill into motivated behavior and the dopamine system. And thank you for sharing what became of David because it was nice when medicine can deliver a victory story. Absolutely, yeah. Because as some people may recall, the L-DOPA for the treatment of Parkinson's, had these transient improvements that sometimes can be dismaying for people, right? People get better and then they get worse again. And I'm sure there's additional progress being made there. We still need to do an episode all about Parkinson's, but we'll reserve that for another time. In thinking about motivation and the fact that there's really one system for most types of motivation, this is kind of what the David story suggests, right? That these basal ganglia. nuclei, nucleus accumbens, are underlying all sorts of motivations, to listen to music, to shower, to find a romantic partner, to work, to take care of oneself, as opposed to distributed networks for motivation. That's interesting in its own right, I think. But many people are probably familiar with feeling really motivated to do certain things, but not others. Even if there isn't a pain point associated with doing I don't know, maybe somebody likes arithmetic, but they don't like literature or vice versa. Putting aside individual variation based on family history, psychology, traumatic experiences, is it true that certain people, by virtue of the way that their dopamine system is kind of tuned up, like how willing these neurons are to fire or not fire in different circumstances, are just motivated people? I mean, you see this sometimes like... you know, I've had two different bulldogs. The first one is like, let's go. And it's like, and you have to really coax them along. The other one, let's go. Okay. And just go. Some people are like this. Hey, like, let's go. They pop up, they go. Other people, more reluctant. But I think most of us are somewhere in between. So clinically and outside of the clinic, do you think that some people's dopaminergic neurons are just more willing to fire in response to everyday activities, novel activities, and the super exciting stuff. And I have a very specific reason for asking this, but I'll keep it quiet for now, because I really want to understand, is there a continuum of motivation? And if so, can it exist both between individuals and within individuals? So taking your first question, Speaker 2 (17:55) it turns out that this circuitry we're talking about, it's called the mesolimbic circuitry that links the basal ganglia to the frontal lobes. is almost like a final common pathway for motivation signals to engage with the action systems of the brain. So it could be hunger, it could be thirst, it could be sex. These are primary motivation signals that many animals have. But as you said, there are other motivating signals that we may also want to engage with. We may have other goals, whether it's arithmetic or to learn a new language or to go out into the park, whatever it is. Now, how those different types of motivation signals are weighted or valued within our brains to engage or not engage this circuitry to lead to action is actually a very, very interesting area. So one thing that we've learned is even apathy might be in different domains. The research in this area started with behavioral apathy, what we can measure. Is someone inert or are they active doing something? Then other kinds of work suggested there might also be social apathy. You know, we might know colleagues who seem to be very, very motivated to work, but they don't want to engage with other people or do things like go to a party or something like that. There may also be emotional apathy. So there are people who seem to have very blunted responses to things that you and I might either find, you know, something that we want to congratulate people for or feel sad about if they had a... an issue, these people seem to not have that kind of range of motivational responses. And some people argued that there's also cognitive apathy. So whereas someone might be apathetic to do something physical, they might not necessarily be apathetic for doing something cognitive, being curious about the world, reading the newspaper, finding out what's going on in the world. And there may be dissociations. So someone could be socially apathetic, but... you know, cognitively very highly motivated. So how does that happen? How do these different domains vary if there's one final common system? And of course, this is where we have to think about the fact that brain circuits are complicated and the kinds of signals that are being developed for behavior, cognition, social interaction, or emotion are being formulated in different parts of the brain, even though they might funnel through. this basal ganglia system to engage the action systems in the frontal lobe. And even more granular, if we want to get to that, you know, whether you want to learn a new language or you want to do arithmetic or go to the park or whatever it is, how do you weight these different motivation signals? So one way we've thought about this is, you know, let's imagine today. It's a beautiful day out there. What are the things you could do? And I'm sure, Andrew, you could... Give me 20 things you could do, but you can't do them all at once. So somehow you have to prioritize what's the thing that you value most. And the way we conceive of this is a sort of a neuroeconomic decision making where you look at those 20 things and you go, okay, how rewarding do I think each of these things are? And then you also think, well, how effortful is that going to be? And it could be physical effort. It could be cognitive effort. social effort, emotional effort, whatever it is. And out of that kind of system where you do a calculation, you will find the thing for you that you will value most given the level of effort required. And that's what emerges as your motivated Speaker 1 (21:40) behavior at that time. Do you think people do that computation? Consciously? I Speaker 2 (21:47) don't think they have to do it. We could do it consciously, right? Because Speaker 1 (21:50) I don't wake up, I look at my schedule and I go, I have to do this, this, and this. I actually schedule my workouts. I schedule time with others and things. But it's sort of the constellation of things in my life. I'm not doing a very conscious waiting of this versus that. Although occasionally when there's a conflict in scheduling, I have to select. This is more valuable to me than that. But it's not something that I generally sit back and... I think, and I probably should, we probably all should, sit back and think, okay, what is the best use of my time, effort, reward, payoff? But we sort of just go about life. Speaker 2 (22:21) Yeah. And I think what you're really getting me towards discussing is the fact that each behavior has a kind of activation hill that we have to cross to think, yeah, I could start this. So for some people, let's say learning a new language. is a mountain. That's a huge kind of effort to put in. Whereas for other people, it's barely a mound. You know, I don't think of that as a big burden, a big activation hill that I've got to cross before I get there. So there's the activation barrier before I even think of starting. And these things are not necessarily consciously being considered. It's just you have these biases because you've got experiences. Hey, I wasn't that good at learning Spanish. Do I really want to spend a lot of energy in learning French? Those biases add up and affect the way you do that calculation we were talking about, reward versus effort. And essentially, that's a very important way, I think, that we make a decision. Much of that could be subconscious. Speaker 1 (23:24) I'll tell two brief anecdotes, if I may, to set the texture for the next question. Years ago, I was at a PhD thesis at Stanford, a student, I'll just name her because she did a wonderful job in her thesis. Her name was Lauren Case. She was not my student. I attended because she was working on neural regeneration and she had screened an enormous number of molecules for their ability to inhibit or promote neural regeneration. Super important problem, as you and I both know, that still hasn't been solved. And it was really striking how many molecules she had evaluated. And I will never forget her advisor's introduction. He said, One of the best things about Lauren is that she has very low activation energy, meaning there's the opportunity to do an experiment. She'd get up and do the experiment and say, ah, that was an interesting molecule, move to the next one. And it occurred to me then that having low activation energy, provided the thing that you do doesn't get you injured or killed, is really a spectacular thing in life. you just get a lot more life out of days lived. So you kind of wonder about the Lauren cases of the world. Are these the people where somebody says, hey, you know, we need to do this thing. I'll take out the recycle and it's Speaker 2 (24:33) a Speaker 1 (24:33) ton with the roommates, something back when, you know, and it's like, okay, I'll do that later. There's so much energy lost in the deliberation, in the feeling like the effort-reward trade-off. You don't want to waste your time doing things, but you also don't want to waste your time thinking about whether or not you're wasting your time. So Speaker 2 (24:49) let me take you up on that, because after seeing David, we thought about exactly this problem, and we got a bunch of Oxford students. And believe it or not, at Oxford, just like Stanford, I'm sure, there's a whole range of motivation. amongst the students. There are people who are highly motivated, the Laurens, and then there are people who are actually surprisingly apathetic. They might be very smart people, but they have high activation energy levels. They need to cross that barrier to do something. And we put them into the MRI scanner and we looked at their brain activity when they were given these choices. Is this option with this much reward worth this much physical effort? You just say yes or no. Would you do it or not? We could then look across this neuroeconomic space by parametrically changing the level of reward that we're offering and parametrically changing the level of effort. And it turned out, just as we'd found in patients, the apathetic students were all willing to work for high rewards, but they weren't willing to work for low rewards. Interesting. Now, in the brain, what we find is that the ventral parts of the basal ganglia ventral striatum nucleus accumbens is active, as well as the parts, medial frontal areas, frontal lobe areas, in these healthy students, when they're simply making the decision, is this option worth the reward for this much effort? So they're not doing anything. They're just thinking about it. And we thought, great. This is really fantastic because now we have convergence from the stroke patient that we saw with the basal ganglia lesions. who lost motivation. And now we can see that healthy individuals, when they're having to make this decision, show activation in the same area that was lost in David, as well as the frontal lobes. But the paradox here was that we found greater activity in those regions in the students who were apathetic compared to the students who are motivated. And we were not expecting that. We thought if you lack motivation, your brain activity... when you're being asked to do this, would just be lower. So the way we have resolved this problem is to think, actually, this is showing us something very important. It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that. Now, of course... in the scanner in this sort of experimental situation everyone's willing to do the task they're making those decisions but imagine these people at home if you're confronted with oh my goodness i'm going to have to work hard just to decide whether i should do this option or not maybe i would just won't do it and that's i think a really important insight into what you might do to energize motivation in people who might be apathetic. Because it's showing us that that activation barrier that I was talking about in a way exists in the brain. Physiologically, you can show that these people are working harder to make the same decision compared to motivated people. Speaker 1 (28:09) Fascinating experiment, by the way. So elegant in its simplicity, but the paradoxical piece, more activity in these dopaminergic circuits in the apathetic folks tells me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there's a cost to thinking about the effort required, plus the cost of the actual effort required. That compounds and puts some people out of the game. Speaker 2 (28:30) Exactly. So, you know, Lauren, the... student you were talking about has low activation energy. She obviously doesn't need to burn a lot of brain fuel in terms of thinking, I can do this. I'm going to do it. And, you know, she reminds me of something that happened to me. When I was a PhD student, I was in Oxford and we would sit around having tea, thinking about great studies we could do. Nothing really happened. And then I came to be a postdoc at MIT and was surrounded by these highly motivated people. And I can remember we'd have the same kind of discussion. And then one of them would go, yeah, well, let's do that tonight. And I'd go, tonight? And that was the level of difference. It just blew my mind that there were people who could just go, right, let's do it. And I think that's been a real lesson for me that you can achieve things if you think in this way. Speaker 1 (29:23) Well, the other anecdote, I'll keep this brief, is a slightly humorous one, but it's... designed to illustrate a point, which is I try not to spend too much time on social media unless I'm actively learning on there, because I do find things that are really interesting and educate me sometimes just for entertainment. But there's a post I came across. It's a little parody skit where a woman walks into the room and they're. husband or boyfriend is playing a video game and she says, hey, do you mind hanging up those pictures that are in the hall? They've been there for a few days. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she walks out, shakes her head and she has an idea. She walks back in and she says, hey, do you mind showing me how to hang those pictures in the hallway? I'd love to learn how. And he's like. Boom. And it like, you know, he launches into, you know, so she's tapped into a component of his motivational circuitry where the opportunity to teach clearly gets him around this, this activation energy thing. Like all of a sudden the activation energy required to do the same thing just drops to zero. And Speaker 2 (30:19) it's a very good example because, you know, one thing you got to think about is how can you change that barrier for people? Either you make the effort less, let's say you've got a task to do, you could. break it down into subcomponents so the activation level doesn't seem quite so formidable. Or you could change the incentive. And this is what happened in your example, right? The incentives changed because now the guy is thinking, ah, now the reward here is to show her how I do this. That's the thing I will get the pleasure from, the reward from, right? So I think that's the other insight we got is... How do you change people's motivation in a practical way? Well, you have to think if this is really happening in the brain, that you're making decisions about whether this reward is worth the effort, you can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person, or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start, just initiate the task. And often starting can be a huge motivational pull. Speaker 1 (31:27) You know, this gets to some sticky territory around the actual versus the perceived utility of lots of things that are on the internet, including in the health and, dare I say, wellness space, which is the following. There's this idea that if you do, for instance, a hard run or a hard workout, that you are teaching yourself how to do hard things that can translate to doing hard things in other domains. So as psychologists, neuroscientists, clinicians, we talk about the domain specificity, but that's just nerdy speak for like, does one thing translate to another circumstance? Are you teaching yourself an algorithm of, I did a hard thing this morning, you know, I did the cold shower I don't like, I did the workout I may or may not have wanted to do, but so now I'm more empowered. Or, and I've thought about this quite a bit. Or do we have a finite amount of energy? And the most rational approach is to think, okay, what's actually going to provide me the most benefit today? Like, can we really get momentum and understanding of our underlying motivational circuitries? Or is it the case that we're deluding ourselves? I'm not attempting to undercut a lot of content I've done previously, but I've had plenty of hard workouts and then gotten to the other thing I needed to do and went like, I don't know. do this. I'm tired from that workout this morning. But we are also familiar with the fact that if something really intriguing or exciting to us is presented to us, suddenly it's like we're a different human being. It's a complete state change. So I'm curious, I'm not asking you to editorialize about the health and wellness space, but more globally, can we teach ourselves to lower our activation energy in a way that can serve us well across the board? I Speaker 2 (33:04) think we can because It turns out, obviously, some of these things that people use psychologically to improve their motivation can be framed in exactly the way I put it to you, that what we're doing here is trying to either increase the reward or change the nature of the incentive. You know, if it's something novel and salient that you think, oh, this is really interesting, it's rewarding for me, or we reduce the effort. So just using this simple principle. might be enough for someone to think about how to do it. Planning out your day or week in advance, for some people, makes life better. Because every time they're having to make a decision on the fly, if they're just doing it without planning it out, means that it's costing. Every decision has a cost in terms, as we've seen, the brain having to put in, invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that. So it's a simple thing to do. Dividing up a task. Let's say you're given a project by your manager. It's going to take you three months to accomplish it. It seems absolutely formidable because you have no idea of where to start. What if you could break it down into smaller tasks which bring down that mountain, the activation energy required to get that small thing done? Let's say, first of all, let's research one area of this and get a handle on that. And if we get that done, this is a sort of if-then kind of construct. If we get that done, we can then move on. to a second piece of work. It would also help if your manager said, well done for getting that bit done, right? That's also a motivation pull to think, yeah, actually, I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody Speaker 1 (35:09) identified that as a positive thing to have done. I would love to see an experiment done where the perception of one's effort to do something can be separated from the actual effort and really get to the meat of whether overthinking or even thinking at all about the effort takes us away from having more quote unquote motivation or even better performance and i haven't had time to think this through but as you were describing david and his transformation and this experiment on the undergraduates of valuing different outcomes i wonder if you could put somebody on a stationary bike and put them in a virtual environment and measure the effort required to climb a hill and you could adjust the difficulty But you change the perception of how steep that hill is, right? If we could translate that to the real world, like to