250. Temptation Bundling: Your Secret To Success (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 250 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about temptation Bundling. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about temptation bundling. And before we talk about what that is, can we take a minute to celebrate the milestone that is this episode? This is the 250th episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. In the original flow of things, with one episode per week, I don't think we would have hit this until April of this year. But what an amazing way to kick off 2023 with our 250th episode. I would love to say that I planned it that way, but it was more serendipitous than anything. I think that's how we know it was meant to be. And we're also going to be celebrating the 5th year anniversary of the podcast this coming July. It's a really big, exciting year around here. One thing that has allowed me to write and record and set up 250 episodes is temptation bundling, which is, as I said, the topic of today's convers. This episode originally aired as number 136 in January of 2021, and there's a reason I chose to have it back again to kick off this year. This is in the midst of a theme on goals and resolutions and mindset and happiness. Temptation bundling is a great way to help you reach goals by making something mundane or boring or hard, more enjoyable and likely to be completed. Now, don't get me wrong, I love creating the podcast. It is fun to learn and share and I do enjoy it. However, it has plenty of mundane stuff that needs to be done to keep it moving and times where I'm up at 9 o' clock or later having to get things done when I know I have to get up early the next morning. So in those cases, a little temptation bundling is very helpful in getting this and so many other aspects of my life and work moving forward when it might be easier or more tempting to put it off. Before we jump into the ins and outs of temptation bundling and how you can use it for your own life and work, I I want to remind you that your free Temptation Bundling worksheet and links to past episodes and books and articles are all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 250 all right, let's talk about Temptation Bundling.

One of my favorite things about this concept is, as I said, how simple it is. This is actually something I've done naturally most of my life, before I knew that there was a name for it, and actually before there was a name for it. Because the research paper and when it was coined came just a few years ago, which you'll hear about in a minute. As far as the way that I use this myself, when I first started my business I was doing freelance writing and editing work on the side. While I still had my full time job running the marketing department at the credit union. The bulk of the editing work I.

Did was for books.

In case you've never edited a book before, it means completely reading through the entire thing at varying levels of depth and focus at least three and sometimes four times before sending it back to the author to respond to. While I did enjoy the work, it's not something you're always super excited to dedicate your nights and weekends to when you've had a particularly long week or are exhausted from a new product launch. For that reason, it required some extra motivation to get through it. So I gave myself little milestone moments and rewards to keep myself motivated. I specifically remember that during one book I was editing, I had just discovered Orange is the New Black, a truly binge worthy show, and there were days where my subconscious brain wanted nothing more than to settle in and watch nonstop. As a compromise with myself, I would instead say I need to edit one full chapter and then I can reward myself with an episode and I can't watch the next one. And until I do the next chapter, no chapter, no Netflix. This is the essence of temptation bundling. Taking something you should do but may have a longer term reward and not be super appealing in the moment and bundle it with something you really want to do right now. The first study on this topic, which coined the term, was led by Professor Katie Milkman at Wharton. This study has one of my favorite names from an academic paper. It's called holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym, and that's essentially what the study did. Katie had personally struggled with getting to exercise as much as she wanted to, and would prefer to snuggle up with a book in the downtime between classes, meeting, work and Other life obligations, something many of us can relate to. So she decided to bundle them together, making it so she could only read or listen to the audiobooks while exercising at the gym. Any other time they were off limits. When you end on a cliffhanger, it makes you excited to come back to the gym tomorrow to find out what happens. And this is also what they did in their research. Study participants agreed to have their ipods locked up at the gym so they could only access them when they went to work out. And you know what? They exercised more and were happier about it. And after the study was done, many people said they would pay to continue to have their ipod locked up at the gym so so they could maintain that motivation over time even after the study was done. Is that crazy or what? It also shows something about willpower. Any of those people could have said I'm only going to use my ipod while at the gym. But if it was kept at home, they might just succumb to the temptation and break the rules. And that's a slippery slope because once you listen the first time, it's almost impossible to to not do it again. And then there's no reason to go to the gym. As this episode comes out around resolution time. And actually at this point where a lot of people have broken their resolutions already, I do think it's important to note that many participants lost their momentum over Thanksgiving break, which happened to be in the middle of the experiment window. A slight change in routine can upend newly forming habits and make them hard to start up again if you aren't careful. So it's important to keep that in mind as you you set up your own temptation bundling techniques, both to help re motivate yourself and say if you had already let one of those resolutions go, it doesn't have to be a huge milestone moment. You don't have to wait till next year to bring it back and to start working toward that goal again. And also not to get totally discouraged if you have a quick slip up like a holiday weekend, but instead to really plan in advance and see that it's coming so that it's not going to lose all of your momentum and have that benefit of the temptation bundle go away. And as a quick, exciting announcement, I am so happy to share that Katie Milkman has a new book coming out May 4th and is going to be joining me on the show to talk about it soon as well. To say I'm excited to have her on the show is an understatement. She does amazing work beyond Temptation bundling. You are going to be so thrilled to learn from her, so definitely keep an eye out for that episode coming in the next couple of months. Now here's the great thing about temptation Bundling. Pretty much anything can be a candidate for the bundle, and what you set up doesn't necessarily need to be what someone else would want or need to show. The flip of the Hunger Games at the gym example that was for someone who wanted to exercise more but got distracted by books. Listening to the audiobook was the thing that they really wanted to do in the short term that had been keeping them from taking the time time or having the motivation to actually go to the gym even though they knew they wanted to or that they should. Going to the gym was the behavior they wanted to generate, which needed to be bundled with something that brought immediate satisfaction, like an exciting story to get them off the couch. For someone who's super into fitness already and is going to the gym regularly, they don't need that same motivation to exercise. But let's say they have a goal to read more books this year and can never quite motivate themselves to pick one up. If they switch to audiobooks and say they can only listen to audiobooks at the gym from now on, then they would use the same two items but in an opposite way. They want to work out and are already doing it. Maybe to avoid that reading they know they need to do but isn't very motivating to them in the moment. It's they can listen to the book or podcast now when working out to expand their mind while working on their body. The growth is similar but opposite and both ways are using temptation bundling to help use a now activity to achieve a longer term goal and overcome time. Discounting in the case of my book editing, my show on Netflix was the thing I wanted to do now, but I only allowed myself to watch if I did my work. One important note here is that I couldn't do both at the same time, like listening to a book at the gym. My editing work would have been pretty terrible if I had attempted that. So don't feel like you need to bundle things simultaneously. Most multitasking doesn't work well. Our brains aren't really set up for that on a conscious level. And assuming that you're looking for ways to implement this for your work goals at least some of the time, I don't want you to feel limited by needing to overcome. Only use this while doing two things exactly at once because it likely isn't going to turn out well, and for that reason you don't have to have any tie between the two items. Watching this show was a personal benefit that helped me complete my work tasks. Those two things don't have anything to do with each other, except that one can motivate me to complete the other when properly framed and bundled together. To help find your candidates for temptation bundling, start by looking for something you love to do in your spare time. Say if you had a free day and could do anything, what would be at the top of your list? Or what's something you find yourself doing every day that you enjoy? That's a great place to start to find your motivator. I like using the example of scrolling through social media or even finding new things to read online that can be useful for my business. But but if you're anything like me, it's also really easy to get lost in an Internet rabbit hole and lose an entire hour or day that could have been productive. Finding new articles and interesting tidbits is important for my business, but might also be a distraction keeping me from writing a podcast episode or article or lecture for a class. And I am linking to Nir Eyal's episode where he was on the show and his book Indistractable in the show notes so you can learn more about distraction if that's a problem. For Instead of allowing myself to get sucked into the Internet time warp, I can use my time timer, something I mentioned in the episode on how to organize your brain with behavioral economics, which is of course linked for you in the show notes. And I could say that I must write for 45 minutes and then when the buzzer goes off, I get to spend 15 minutes scrolling through Instagram, either for inspiration or to decompress, or reading interesting behavioral articles that I might want to write about or do an episode about in the future. Again, the two items don't have to be related Decompressing on Instagram, or if I wanted to play a game on my phone or whatever that happens to be, doesn't have to have anything to do with the work that I'm needing to get done. But it's important to have that reward that is tied to the action that I need to take now to be successful and have it be something that I really wish I could be doing that my brain enjoys doing, and then I can tie those together. So while I could go on and on with another 25 examples, I'm guessing you get the point and hopefully you're excited to jump in and start working on Setting up your temptation bundling for yourself. There is, of course, a free worksheet for you in the show. Notes you can use to help you along in the process. And if you want a little silly inspiration, my husband just stopped in to ask how it was going and asked if I had used the example of bundling broccoli with cheese to help people eat and enjoy their vegetables. See, temptation bundling is everywhere. You just need to find the cheese to your own personal life broccoli, and you'll be achieving goals left and right.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about temptation bundling today? You know, other than the fun phrasing of the cheese to your personal life broccoli. A funny one that I kind of laughed going back and remembering, you know.

Writing about that a couple years ago.

For me, I like how something so seemingly simple has been proven and found out on a scientific level so that we can use it to help us accomplish more and enjoy the things that we would otherwise avoid or feel miserable while we do it. Whether it's working out when you're too tired or writing that extra episode or reading one more paper or eating your vegetables or cleaning the house or anything else, you can use temptation bundling to make it more appealing. And it doesn't matter if this is in the manufactured happiness category. In many ways, as you heard about in the brainy Benefits of Gratitude episode from a few weeks ago, our brains look at natural happiness and manufactured or synthetic happiness in pretty much the same way. It doesn't matter if we got what we thought we wanted or feel naturally happy with that thing on its own. We can take something that that might have been blah and make it better. As Mary Poppins said, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Sure, in that case, it might be.

Creating a whole other problem, but you get what I mean. One of my other favorite things about temptation bundling is that it allows you to get more done. It's a bit of a life hack in that way. If you combine something you enjoy and would have done solo with something you have to do or should do, but would have spent a lot of time procrastinating on, you get to finish the have to do thing faster with less wasted time and bike shedding, which is a total win. And that means you get to have time for the fun thing and you get to do more of it. And it's one of the only ways that multitasking actually works.

You get to be superhuman and do.

Two things better than you might have done them on their own when you do this right, and that's awesome. So what will you tackle first with Temptation Bundling? What's your tempting item and what will it help you to do? Come share it with me on social media. You can find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere. And be sure to tag Katie as well. She is at Katy Underscore Milkman on Twitter and I'll link to us both in the show notes to make it easy for you. And along with that, you'll find your Temptation Bundling worksheet as well as related past episodes like my interview with Katie, which I mentioned in this episode and it had come out yet when this originally aired, so it's going to be in there as a new one, as well as episodes with Ayala Fishback and Cassie Holmes on setting brainy goals and more. That's all waiting for you in those show notes@the brainybusiness.com 250 and just like that, episode 250 on temptation bundling is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with with Dr. Mike Rucker to discuss his new book which came out today called the Fun Habit. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.