UNCERTAINTY OF THE FUTURE MAY MAKE YOU MORE LIKELY TO INDULGE! Welcome to Vita with Alita

Welcome to the first episode of Vita with Alita and thank you for tuning in! After this episode, you will better know me (Alita), your host, and what you can gain from joining me every week. We also dive into a discussion about the uncertainty of the future and how it can impact some of your decision-making. 

* Paper discussed in this episode: Milkman, Katherine L., Unsure What the Future Will Bring? You May Overindulge: Uncertainty Increases the Appeal of Wants over Shoulds (July 9, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1393535 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1393535

Let's get in touch! You can email any inquiries (or just say hello) at hello@vitawithalita.com

I am happy we can share this journey of levelling up, together.  See you next week! 

- Alita <3 

Transcript

Hello and welcome. My name is Alita Gideon, and I'll be your host for the Vita with Alita podcast. Welcome. Thank you for tuning in.
I am going to use this episode to introduce myself, introduce the podcast, the goal of this podcast. So right off the bat, my name's Alita, and I just graduated from my masters in kinesiology. And now I'm currently in this weird phase in my life, I would call it like a transition period, where I'm applying to jobs, I'm waiting to hear back from applications I've submitted.
Everything feels a little bit out of my control. So like I said, I applied to jobs, and I'm just waiting to hear. And I feel like my future is in the hands of people, of other people.
It's a weird feeling for me. I am definitely somebody who likes to plan, have plan A, B, C, D. And if one thing doesn't work out, go to the next, because I just like to have that sense of control. And that brings this podcast. So the name of this podcast is Vita with Alita. Vita is the fancy way of saying life in Latin.

So basically, this podcast is Life with Alita. And I called it this because I'm going to share personal stories, opinions, ideas, to draw your attention to them, to bring you along the journey with me, and to use those examples to highlight topics, ideas or themes that I think are worth talking about. Through this podcast, I want to just understand that leveling up your life doesn't have to be a whole dramatic transformation where you have to change every single aspect of your life.
It could be as simply as changing the way you think about one thing. So instead of saying, I need to go to work, you get to go to work. You get to get in your car and drive to your job.I plan to use that simple idea in as many aspects in your life as possible. And that's the goal. And it's something I want to use in my own life and that I would like to share with you as well.
And something that I touched upon earlier is the uncertainty of the future. And kind of having no sense of control. And the more I read or listen to other podcasts, the more I realize that control is this illusion.
And it's not really, we don't really have control over everything, especially future outcomes or the way other people might behave or act. You can only control your thoughts and maybe the way you react to things, the way you handle yourself, the way you go about learning and improving yourself. Those are things that you can control.And I am learning to appreciate that, that little amount of control is valuable and it's enough. And yes, I cannot control future outcomes and I have to learn to better trust the universe, people around me. But I think that that's something that comes with practice and just training yourself to feel that way or to think that way, I should say.
And learning to change your thoughts or your core beliefs is not easy. And I'm not going to lie, it's something I've been working on for months. And some days I feel like I've made great progress and I'm over the moon.
I'm this new me and everything's going well, but other days I'm just completely, I get slapped in the face and clearly I did not make that much progress. And that's where self-kindness and self-compassion come in, where you can't be too hard on yourself. And yes, you need to be self-critical in a way to understand where you can improve, but there's a difference between self-critical and just being self-deprecating.These are a lot of big topics that I hope throughout this podcast I can break down, I can cover, I can bring to you in a more digestible form. And wherever applicable, I'm hoping to bring some sort of science. I am a science girlie after all, and like I said, I did just complete my masters.
And one of the cool things about completing my masters is I gained the skill of reading scientific papers and being able to translate what I read so that the information could be relayed to a broader audience. And of course, I am no expert and a masters is just the beginning. I know some people, you go on to do your PhD and years of training after that. So I am not an expert in any way, but it is something that I've dabbled with and I think I can continue honing in on that skill through this podcast and in other ways as well. That's overall the goal and I hope that together we can improve, we could level up. I think one of the greatest things you can do in this life is learn about yourself and truly know who you are and be confident in that.
And I say that because that's a goal I have for myself. I want to really get to know myself, really be able to establish those boundaries and establish what I like and don't like. And that is something I do struggle with. So I hope that through this podcast, as much as I help other people think about things a little bit differently or learn a bit better about themselves, that's something I have, I would like to do for myself as well. It could sometimes feel a little bit isolating or scary when you're on this journey of self-improvement or on the other end of the spectrum where you feel like everybody around you has their life together and you're just floating is the best way I can explain it. And that's something I fear or I feel very much in my everyday life all the time.
For example, my younger sister is super smart and she is only 21 and she's already done her undergrad in engineering. She's a civil engineer. She works for a giant firm and she looks like she has her life together. She's saving up her money. She's killing it at work. She's girl bossing all the way. And sometimes I look at her and I look at myself and I'm like, what are you doing? And other times I remind myself that it's okay. I cannot always compare myself to others.
Everybody's on their own journey. And that's something I'd like you to think about too. You are on your own journey.
You can't compare yourself to others all the time. It can be beneficial sometimes when, let's say you want to know the competition, and you want to know sort of what makes you a competitive candidate in the pool. But then there's a line that has to be drawn where over comparing yourself becomes maladaptive.
It becomes harmful. It can stall progress and just make you lose confidence in yourself, although you are doing great and you're going at your own pace, which is all that matters and that you are trying your best. So I bring that to you to say, I feel those things all the time. And before I sort of end this introductory episode, I wanted to bring up a paper that talked a little bit about uncertainty of the future and how it can affect your decision making. So the study for today that I would like to share is called Unsure What the Future Will Bring? You May Overindulge.

Uncertainty Increases the Appeal of Wants Over Shoulds. This is a super interesting title because they use the word appeal. So you're just more likely to pick those wants over shoulds because they just seem that much sweeter when you may be uncertain about the future.
And as someone who's in this weird phase in her life where the future is anything but certain, this was very interesting to me and I just wanted to share it and bring it to your attention today. In this paper, it was broken down in four studies, but I'm just going to highlight one of the studies. I think it helps to get my point across here. In this study, the authors recruited participants. They had three different groups. For each of the groups, they told them, your roommate is bringing home pizza for dinner.
But in the first group, they said, your roommate is bringing home cheese pizza. I don't think I have the flavours right, but that's not the point here. So in the first group, they told them, your roommate is bringing home cheese pizza.
Now you get to choose the dessert. Do you want brownie or fruit salad? In the second group, they told them that their roommate was bringing home pepperoni pizza. And they asked them again that they get to choose the dessert, so they should choose between brownie or fruit salad. And in the last group, they didn't specifically say what pizza the roommate was bringing home. They just said, your roommate has a choice between cheese pizza and pepperoni pizza.
And you need to choose what dessert you want. Do you want brownie or fruit salad? And the authors wanted to see here the decisions that these participants are going to make kind of around self-control.
And they word it as shoulds versus wants. So in this case, the fruit salad was the should option. I should have a healthier dessert fruit salad. Or the want option, which was the brownie. I want the quote unquote unhealthier brownie. In groups one and two, where the participants knew which pizza was coming home, they were more likely to pick the should option or the fruit salad.
Whereas in the last group, when there were more uncertainty about what pizza was coming home, the group was more likely to pick the want option or the brownie for dessert. I know this is a very simplistic study and it doesn't really represent real life scenarios that we might find ourselves in, especially when thinking about uncertainty in the future. But I think it highlights the fact that a little bit of uncertainty can cause us to make decisions where we have a little bit of reduced self-control.

So we end up making more decisions for our wants or desires versus the shoulds and being a little more disciplined or leaning towards things that might be a little bit better for us in the long run. I bring this paper to kind of highlight that yes, being uncertain about the future is not comfortable and it could actually impact a little bit your decision making. And we become aware of it together through these episodes, then maybe we can reduce those want decisions and more consciously make those should decisions, things that our future selves will thank us for, things that are better for us in the long run, although it may not seem that way now.
Or we are in a time now that that mindless scrolling and wasting time is taking over, and it's becoming a big part of our lives, although it's not beneficial in any way. I hope together we can beat the odds, and we choose our shoulds rather than our wants. That's all for this introductory episode.

Please let me know topics you'd like me to talk about, but I'm very excited for future episodes. I'm excited for delving into different topics together, all revolving around self-improvement. And I thank you very much for your attention. And I'm very excited, and I hope to see you next week. Take care.

From Vita with Alita: UNCERTAINTY OF THE FUTURE MAY MAKE YOU MORE LIKELY TO INDULGE! Welcome to Vita with Alita, Feb 28, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/vita-with-alita/id1799200065?i=1000696793087&r=55
This material may be protected by copyright.

Transcript was automatically transcribed by Apple Podcasts.