The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #55

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.380 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.940 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.780 | Today, we're talking all about goals

00:00:16.860 | and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals.

00:00:20.820 | There's a tremendous amount of information on the internet

00:00:23.300 | and in books and so forth about how to set goals

00:00:26.120 | and assess your progress towards goals

00:00:28.380 | and update your goals and so forth.

00:00:31.220 | In fact, there are so many programs out there

00:00:33.740 | that include so many different acronyms

00:00:35.720 | that it can be a little bit overwhelming.

00:00:37.660 | Today's conversation about goals

00:00:39.580 | is going to be quite a bit different.

00:00:41.260 | Indeed, we are going to talk about setting goals.

00:00:43.700 | We are also going to talk about

00:00:45.320 | how to assess progress towards goals,

00:00:47.660 | and we are going to talk about goal execution.

00:00:51.060 | However, we're going to do all of this

00:00:53.380 | in the context of neuroscience,

00:00:55.800 | because it turns out that there are not hundreds or dozens

00:01:00.800 | or even several neural circuits in your brain

00:01:03.380 | that control goal setting and movement toward your goals.

00:01:06.920 | There is one.

00:01:08.160 | And while it includes many different brain areas,

00:01:10.620 | that one circuit is the same circuit

00:01:13.080 | that's responsible for pursuing all goals.

00:01:16.440 | And it relates to some very basic neurochemical mechanisms

00:01:19.140 | that are understood.

00:01:20.400 | So while there's a wealth of information out there

00:01:22.280 | about goals and goal setting and goal achievement

00:01:24.860 | and so forth, there's comparatively little information

00:01:27.840 | that's been available to the public

00:01:29.500 | about the neuroscience of goal setting and goal achievement.

00:01:32.940 | So that's what we're going to focus on today.

00:01:35.060 | I promise that we're going to get into the neuroscience.

00:01:37.940 | We're going to touch on a little bit of the psychology

00:01:40.020 | and how the neuroscience relates to what's known

00:01:42.100 | in the psychology literature.

00:01:43.840 | And we are going to establish several,

00:01:45.940 | in fact, four specific protocols

00:01:48.060 | that you can use for goal setting, goal assessment,

00:01:51.020 | and goal execution in an ongoing basis,

00:01:53.680 | regardless of what your personal goals happen to be.

00:01:56.600 | Before we dive into our conversation about goals

00:01:58.660 | and goal setting and goal achievement,

00:02:00.580 | I'd like to highlight some recent scientific findings

00:02:02.780 | that I think are going to be interesting and actionable

00:02:05.100 | for many of you out there.

00:02:07.220 | In earlier podcasts, we talked about neuroplasticity,

00:02:09.980 | which is the brain's ability to change

00:02:11.700 | in response to experience.

00:02:12.820 | In fact, neuroplasticity underlies all forms of learning,

00:02:16.540 | whether or not it's language learning or learning music

00:02:19.140 | or math or a physical skill.

00:02:21.880 | All forms of learning involve the reorganization

00:02:25.120 | of connections in the nervous system,

00:02:26.940 | the brain and spinal cord and body.

00:02:28.700 | One of the key principles of neuroplasticity

00:02:32.340 | is this notion of making errors as a good thing

00:02:35.980 | toward neuroplasticity.

00:02:37.380 | This is a little bit counterintuitive,

00:02:39.020 | but what the scientific literature tells us

00:02:41.340 | is that whenever we're trying to learn something new,

00:02:43.420 | if we make an error, we know it feels frustrating,

00:02:46.380 | but that state of frustration actually cues up

00:02:49.760 | particular brain areas to be more alert

00:02:52.300 | so that on subsequent attempts to learn that thing,

00:02:54.960 | we have a heightened level of focus

00:02:56.400 | and a higher probability of learning the new skill,

00:02:58.980 | regardless of what that skill is.

00:03:00.980 | And I've talked about this before in various episodes

00:03:03.340 | as encouraging people to embrace errors or pursue errors,

00:03:08.000 | not as their own end goal, but errors as an entry point

00:03:11.220 | for making the brain more plastic.

00:03:13.020 | And if you think about it, it really makes sense.

00:03:14.640 | Why would the brain change at all

00:03:15.780 | if it's performing everything perfectly?

00:03:18.060 | When you make errors, well, in the immediate seconds

00:03:21.100 | and minutes after those errors,

00:03:22.820 | you are in a better position to learn.

00:03:25.440 | A common question I get, however,

00:03:27.200 | is what should be the rate of errors,

00:03:29.760 | which is really just a way of saying

00:03:31.100 | how hard should the given task be

00:03:34.760 | that you're trying to learn or perform?

00:03:37.140 | And it turns out there's an answer.

00:03:38.540 | There's a recent paper that was published

00:03:40.300 | in a great journal, Nature Communications.

00:03:42.680 | This is a paper, a last author, Jonathan Cohen,

00:03:45.720 | and the paper is entitled the 85% Rule for Optimal Learning.

00:03:50.720 | This paper we will make available

00:03:52.520 | by a link in the show note captions.

00:03:54.980 | But basically what this paper shows

00:03:56.980 | is that when trying to learn something new,

00:03:59.720 | you want to make the difficulty

00:04:01.020 | of what you're trying to learn

00:04:01.940 | such that you're getting things right about 85% of the time,

00:04:05.980 | that you're making errors about 15% of the time.

00:04:08.920 | And the reason I like this paper

00:04:10.800 | is it really points specifically

00:04:12.860 | to some protocols that we can implement

00:04:14.740 | because people always say, okay, you want to set a high goal.

00:04:17.700 | You want to try and achieve something that's really lofty,

00:04:19.920 | but you don't want to make the goal so lofty

00:04:21.640 | that you don't make any progress at all.

00:04:23.640 | Other people say you really want to start

00:04:24.980 | with really small goals

00:04:26.400 | and make things very, very incremental,

00:04:28.060 | only set out to do things that you know you can accomplish

00:04:30.940 | and that will feed back on your self-esteem

00:04:33.120 | and all these positive feedback loops.

00:04:34.680 | And then, you know, layer by layer, layer by layer,

00:04:37.240 | you'll eventually get where you want to go.

00:04:38.900 | Well, it turns out that neither is true.

00:04:40.400 | You need to set the level of difficulty

00:04:42.220 | such that you're making errors about 15% of the time.

00:04:45.180 | And I want to emphasize about 15% of the time

00:04:48.080 | because there's no way to configure protocols

00:04:51.660 | for sport or language or math or anything else

00:04:53.880 | where you're going to have exactly 15% of errors.

00:04:56.980 | So anyway, this paper, the 85% rule for optimal learning,

00:05:00.420 | again, we will supply the link,

00:05:01.820 | but it really points to the idea

00:05:02.820 | of making things pretty hard,

00:05:05.380 | but not so hard that you're failing every attempt

00:05:07.600 | or even half of the attempts.

00:05:09.100 | Failing about 15% of the time seems optimal for learning.

00:05:13.420 | Hopefully that information will be useful

00:05:14.840 | to any of you that are trying to learn something.

00:05:17.180 | Hopefully it will also be useful to those of you

00:05:19.140 | that are teaching kids or other adults.

00:05:21.980 | If you're teaching,

00:05:22.820 | keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching

00:05:26.060 | for higher and higher levels of proficiency

00:05:29.020 | in whatever that is that you're teaching,

00:05:30.820 | and that 15% of the time they should be failing.

00:05:33.820 | If it gets to 20%, that's probably okay.

00:05:35.860 | If they start failing about half the time,

00:05:37.780 | then probably what they're trying to learn

00:05:39.940 | is too difficult for them at that point.

00:05:42.260 | Now, of course, this is going to be controlled

00:05:43.740 | by all sorts of external factors,

00:05:45.300 | like whether or not they slept well the night before,

00:05:47.300 | whether or not you slept well the night before

00:05:48.860 | and you're being clear in your instructions

00:05:51.060 | to them, et cetera.

00:05:52.340 | But I think the 15% rule, as we may call it,

00:05:55.020 | is a good metric to aim for,

00:05:56.820 | and it can serve both students and teachers.

00:05:59.100 | In other words, it can serve both those teaching

00:06:01.140 | and those that are learning.

00:06:03.100 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:06:05.500 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:06:08.260 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:06:10.140 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:06:12.560 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:06:15.180 | In keeping with that theme,

00:06:16.180 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:06:18.900 | Our first sponsor is Element.

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00:06:30.420 | and in various interviews, I'm a big fan of salt.

00:06:33.460 | I sort of discovered this a few years ago

00:06:35.400 | when Science Magazine,

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00:06:40.760 | but also news articles about science,

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00:06:52.320 | there's an innate need for salt in our system.

00:06:54.700 | And indeed, if you dive into the textbooks on salt balance,

00:06:57.380 | we have entire biological systems or kidneys

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00:07:04.380 | In fact, neurons, nerve cells, function

00:07:07.200 | because salt, sodium, actually enters those cells quickly,

00:07:10.940 | and that's what causes them to fire action potentials,

00:07:13.880 | the common syllable or language of neurons, if you will.

00:07:17.780 | When we are low in sodium, our neurons don't work as well.

00:07:21.060 | And a few years later,

00:07:22.100 | I had the experience of feeling kind of shaky,

00:07:24.580 | and I thought I had blood sugar issues.

00:07:25.980 | I went and got my blood sugar checked and it was fine.

00:07:28.100 | And a physician made the recommendation

00:07:29.680 | that I actually upped my salt intake.

00:07:31.700 | My intake wasn't particularly low, I didn't think,

00:07:34.420 | but I quickly found was that if I consumed enough salt,

00:07:37.260 | usually I would do this in the form

00:07:38.340 | of putting a little pinch of salt into some water,

00:07:40.780 | adding a little lemon juice or something like that,

00:07:42.340 | or salting my food a little bit more,

00:07:44.380 | that I lost any kind of shakiness in my hands,

00:07:48.040 | that my mental functioning was better,

00:07:49.900 | my sports performance was better, et cetera.

00:07:52.140 | So it was really interesting to see that shift

00:07:53.860 | simply by increasing my salt intake,

00:07:56.020 | something that's really counterintuitive

00:07:57.380 | to a lot of what's out there.

00:08:00.240 | Salt isn't just important for the function of neurons,

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00:08:08.240 | it ensures that cells in our body function properly.

00:08:11.040 | And I think we're starting to see a shift out there now

00:08:14.280 | in the perception of what salt

00:08:15.900 | and the other electrolytes do.

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00:13:54.940 | Let's talk about the science, and in particular,

00:13:56.720 | the biology and neuroscience of setting and achieving goals.

00:14:01.100 | Setting and achieving goals

00:14:02.340 | is not a uniquely human endeavor.

00:14:05.440 | Other animals set and attempt to achieve goals.

00:14:08.600 | A honeybee attempts to collect honey

00:14:10.100 | and bring it back to the hive.

00:14:11.820 | A herbivore will go out and forage for plants,

00:14:14.900 | and will also have a need to reproduce

00:14:17.540 | at some point in its life.

00:14:18.620 | So it will need to find a mate and maybe even raise the young

00:14:21.800 | depending on what species that is.

00:14:23.460 | Predators will have to hunt and kill and eat their food,

00:14:28.320 | and they have to avoid getting injured in that process.

00:14:30.800 | They also have to raise young, et cetera.

00:14:32.860 | So humans are among the other animals,

00:14:35.500 | or we could say the animals are among us

00:14:38.020 | in the need to set goals and to make efforts to achieve

00:14:41.980 | those goals.

00:14:43.220 | Now, why do I emphasize this commonality of process?

00:14:46.260 | The reason I emphasize this commonality of process

00:14:48.800 | is that it turns out that there is one basic system

00:14:52.360 | by which all animals, including humans,

00:14:54.860 | set and attempt to achieve goals.

00:14:57.380 | Now, humans are unique in our ability

00:14:59.900 | to orient our mind toward immediate goals,

00:15:03.540 | moderately termed goals, meaning things that might exist

00:15:06.180 | on the scale of a week or a month or even a year,

00:15:08.700 | and very long-term goals, like a lifetime goal

00:15:12.100 | or a goal that lasts a decade

00:15:13.740 | or it takes a decade to achieve.

00:15:15.780 | That's what makes us unique.

00:15:17.340 | And of course, we don't have access to the mindset

00:15:19.440 | or the thinking or the emotions of other animals,

00:15:22.020 | but what we do know is that common neural circuits,

00:15:25.220 | meaning brain areas that are present in animal species

00:15:28.420 | and in humans, are responsible for orienting our thinking

00:15:33.120 | and our action toward particular goals.

00:15:35.800 | Another thing that's really unique about the human brain

00:15:38.800 | is that we are able to have multiple goals

00:15:41.200 | interacting at once.

00:15:42.700 | So for instance, we probably all have fitness goals,

00:15:46.400 | goals in relationships of different kinds,

00:15:48.260 | friendships and romantic partnerships,

00:15:50.140 | as well as maybe scholastic goals.

00:15:52.300 | Maybe you're in school, you're pursuing some kind of learning

00:15:54.820 | outside of the school environment

00:15:56.460 | and/or you have business goals or financial goals.

00:16:00.100 | We are able to have multiple goals at once.

00:16:02.260 | And other animals do this, but humans are unique

00:16:04.340 | in the ability to juggle a lot of goals.

00:16:06.700 | And actually one of the major challenges in pursuing goals

00:16:09.220 | is that goal pursuit often interacts.

00:16:11.840 | Meaning if you can spend 100% of your time

00:16:14.560 | chasing one particular goal,

00:16:16.280 | that might be very effective for that goal,

00:16:17.840 | but then we tend to fall back on some of our other goals.

00:16:20.780 | You can imagine how this plays out.

00:16:22.160 | If you're working very, very hard,

00:16:24.660 | you're solely focused on business,

00:16:26.520 | often your health will suffer.

00:16:28.020 | If you're solely focused on your health,

00:16:29.460 | often other things will suffer.

00:16:30.720 | And so we have to juggle both our goal setting

00:16:32.680 | and our goal pursuits.

00:16:33.520 | And today we're going to talk about

00:16:34.820 | a number of different ways to work with

00:16:36.880 | what could very well be called these interleaving goals

00:16:40.420 | by focusing on a common practice

00:16:43.540 | or common set of mechanisms

00:16:45.620 | that are present in all aspects of goal seeking.

00:16:48.980 | What is that process?

00:16:50.440 | Well, it turns out it's a neural circuit.

00:16:53.140 | A neural circuit is simply a collection of brain areas

00:16:56.580 | that when active in a particular sequence,

00:16:59.240 | give rise to a particular behavior or perception.

00:17:02.920 | So for instance, when you feel happy,

00:17:05.380 | it's not because you have a brain area

00:17:07.060 | that's the happy brain area that is electrically active,

00:17:10.960 | rather it's going to involve numerous brain areas

00:17:14.200 | being active in concert and to different degrees,

00:17:16.700 | in the same way that the keys on a piano together

00:17:21.240 | played in the appropriate sequence

00:17:23.720 | represent a particular song.

00:17:25.500 | You would never say that one key on the piano

00:17:27.480 | represents that song, but that key is necessary.

00:17:30.220 | Similarly in the brain,

00:17:31.660 | we can say that a brain area might be necessary,

00:17:33.820 | but not sufficient to give us a particular experience

00:17:37.220 | or generate a particular behavior.

00:17:38.900 | So when we think about goal seeking

00:17:41.240 | and the pursuit of goals of any kind in the brain,

00:17:43.740 | it doesn't matter what the goal is.

00:17:45.920 | It involves a common set of neural circuits.

00:17:49.260 | And the neural circuit that I'd like to orient us toward

00:17:51.780 | today, and we will return to it a few times,

00:17:53.840 | involves learning a couple of names,

00:17:55.460 | but you don't have to worry so much about memorizing these,

00:17:57.700 | just more important is to understand the logic

00:18:00.460 | of how it's put together.

00:18:01.340 | And I will explain that and make it very clear.

00:18:03.100 | If you want to learn the names, that's great.

00:18:05.120 | One of the brain areas is the so-called amygdala.

00:18:07.240 | The amygdala is most often associated with fear.

00:18:09.620 | So you might say, wow,

00:18:10.460 | how is that involved in goal-directed behavior?

00:18:13.220 | Well, a lot of our goal-directed behavior

00:18:15.220 | is to avoid punishments,

00:18:17.280 | including things like embarrassment or financial ruin

00:18:20.320 | or things of that sort.

00:18:21.740 | And so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear

00:18:24.940 | is actually built in to the circuits

00:18:26.860 | that generate goal seeking

00:18:28.940 | and our motivation to pursue goals.

00:18:31.140 | The other areas are the so-called ventral striatum.

00:18:35.140 | The striatum is part of what's called the basal ganglia.

00:18:37.980 | The basal ganglia is a neural circuit

00:18:40.100 | that can very simply be described as a neural circuit

00:18:43.020 | that helps us generate go,

00:18:44.700 | meaning the initiation of action and no go,

00:18:47.980 | the prevention of action type scenarios.

00:18:51.460 | Let me make that even simpler.

00:18:52.900 | The ventral striatum is part of this thing

00:18:54.540 | called the basal ganglia.

00:18:55.580 | The basal ganglia has sort of two circuits within it.

00:18:58.640 | One circuit is involved in getting us to do things

00:19:00.740 | like I'm going to get up tomorrow

00:19:02.200 | and I'm going to run five miles first thing in the morning.

00:19:04.780 | I don't know if I'm actually going to do that,

00:19:05.900 | but I'm just using that as an example.

00:19:08.060 | Another circuit within the basal ganglia

00:19:10.060 | is a no-go circuit.

00:19:11.140 | It's the one that says,

00:19:11.960 | no, I'm not going to go for the second cookie

00:19:14.900 | or the third cookie.

00:19:16.100 | I'm not going to eat that.

00:19:17.980 | And then the go circuit would be the one that's responsible

00:19:20.340 | for instead eating something else, okay?

00:19:22.880 | So we have go and no-go circuits within the basal ganglia.

00:19:26.140 | So we've got amygdala.

00:19:27.440 | So think of as kind of fear and anxiety and avoidance.

00:19:30.160 | We've got the basal ganglia,

00:19:32.000 | which are for initiating action and preventing action.

00:19:35.000 | And then there is the so-called cortex.

00:19:37.680 | The cortex is the outer shell of the brain

00:19:39.440 | and there are two sub regions of the cortex

00:19:40.980 | that are involved in goal-directed behavior.

00:19:43.360 | One is the lateral prefrontal cortex.

00:19:45.360 | Prefrontal cortex is involved

00:19:46.740 | in so-called executive function, things like planning,

00:19:49.660 | thinking about things under different timescales.

00:19:51.980 | So not just what we want in the immediate term,

00:19:54.020 | but what we might want tomorrow or the next day

00:19:56.860 | and how our actions currently

00:19:58.140 | are going to relate to the future.

00:19:59.860 | And the so-called orbitofrontal cortex.

00:20:02.800 | Orbitofrontal cortex has a large number of functions,

00:20:05.480 | but one of the key functions of the orbitofrontal cortex,

00:20:08.060 | it's involved in meshing some emotionality

00:20:10.740 | with our current state of progress

00:20:13.600 | and comparing that emotionality

00:20:15.580 | to where it might be when we are closer to a goal, okay?

00:20:20.400 | So there are basically four areas,

00:20:21.940 | one involved in anxiety, one involved in emotion,

00:20:25.940 | one involved in planning,

00:20:27.380 | and another involved in this go/no-go action.

00:20:30.380 | So that's a bunch of detail,

00:20:31.500 | but if I wanted to make it really simple for everyone,

00:20:34.140 | I would say there are four areas.

00:20:35.980 | One is an area associated with anxiety and fear,

00:20:39.220 | it's the amygdala.

00:20:40.100 | The second is involved in action and inaction.

00:20:43.700 | Remember, go and no-go.

00:20:45.300 | So that's the basal ganglia.

00:20:46.980 | The other one is involved in planning and thinking

00:20:50.940 | across different timescales.

00:20:52.120 | So that's lateral prefrontal cortex.

00:20:53.940 | And then the fourth one is involved in emotionality,

00:20:57.940 | where we sit emotionally at present

00:21:00.540 | compared to where we think we will be emotionally

00:21:03.040 | when we reach some particular goal,

00:21:05.300 | and that's the orbitofrontal cortex, okay?

00:21:07.660 | Again, you don't need to know all those names.

00:21:09.740 | You don't need to know all the details.

00:21:11.680 | Just understand that those different elements are involved

00:21:14.980 | in the decision-making processes

00:21:16.880 | that lead us toward particular goals

00:21:18.860 | and have us update our goal-seeking, et cetera.

00:21:22.060 | One key thing is it doesn't matter what the goal is.

00:21:26.360 | The same circuits are involved.

00:21:28.340 | So whether or not you're trying to build a company

00:21:30.860 | that's a billion-dollar company that's going to go public,

00:21:33.140 | or you're thinking about planning a craft's day at home

00:21:35.820 | with the kids or for yourself,

00:21:37.460 | or you're thinking about what movie to go see,

00:21:39.300 | goals, goal-seeking, and assessing progress towards goals

00:21:42.340 | all involve the exact same neural circuits.

00:21:45.340 | It's really remarkable.

00:21:46.420 | It's also very convenient for our discussion today.

00:21:49.780 | What's going on in these circuits can basically be boiled

00:21:53.000 | down to two particular things.

00:21:55.360 | The first is value information,

00:21:57.920 | trying to understand whether or not something

00:21:59.900 | is really worth pursuing or not, okay?

00:22:02.620 | So placing a value on a particular goal.

00:22:05.620 | The other component of this neural circuit

00:22:08.100 | is associated with action, which actions to take

00:22:11.380 | and which actions not to take,

00:22:13.220 | given the value of a particular goal

00:22:16.420 | in a given moment's time.

00:22:18.500 | I want to say that again.

00:22:19.540 | The other component of the circuit is involved in action,

00:22:23.580 | whether or not you should act or should not act

00:22:26.420 | based on your assessment of the value of a goal

00:22:29.940 | at a particular moment in time.

00:22:32.340 | And you're going to hear me say over and over again

00:22:34.740 | in this episode, the value information

00:22:36.980 | about a goal is so key.

00:22:38.660 | Here's why.

00:22:40.420 | There is basically one neurotransmitter

00:22:42.700 | or rather neuromodulator system

00:22:45.660 | that governs our goal-setting, goal assessment,

00:22:49.220 | and goal pursuit.

00:22:50.100 | And that is the neuromodulator dopamine.

00:22:52.340 | Dopamine is the common currency by which we assess

00:22:55.340 | our progress toward particular things of particular value.

00:22:59.220 | In fact, dopamine is the way that we assess value

00:23:02.820 | of our pursuits.

00:23:04.020 | And so as we take a moment and we shift our attention

00:23:08.120 | to the psychology of goal-setting,

00:23:10.220 | the things that you've probably heard a bit more about,

00:23:12.380 | about what sorts of goals are good and how to set goals

00:23:15.140 | and how to categorize goals,

00:23:16.900 | I want you to think about how dopamine could possibly

00:23:20.340 | be involved in these different processes.

00:23:22.780 | And the reason I want you to do this is that

00:23:25.120 | all of the psychology of goal-setting and goal pursuit

00:23:28.120 | is wonderful because it places things

00:23:29.860 | into different categories.

00:23:31.380 | It allows us to parse our thinking

00:23:33.140 | and organize our thinking, but what's not often seen,

00:23:36.380 | in fact, I'm not aware of any literature out there,

00:23:38.580 | scientific or literature in the popular press

00:23:42.220 | or in popular books, is an understanding

00:23:45.300 | of how the underlying neurobiology can be layered

00:23:48.420 | on top of the psychology of goal-setting

00:23:51.540 | to allow us to set and pursue our goals more effectively.

00:23:54.780 | And that's what we're going to do today.

00:23:55.940 | We are eventually going to arrive at a set of four practices

00:23:59.520 | that when performed on a regular basis

00:24:01.380 | will allow you to assess what is the value

00:24:03.820 | of this next particular action step?

00:24:06.820 | How worthwhile is it to do behavior A versus behavior B

00:24:11.460 | in order to achieve a particular goal?

00:24:13.620 | If any of this is vague now,

00:24:15.180 | I'm going to make it all very clear for you.

00:24:17.900 | You're going to come away

00:24:18.740 | with some very specific lists of takeaways

00:24:21.860 | that you can put down on paper if you like,

00:24:23.540 | and that you can use to set goals, assess goals,

00:24:26.580 | and execute goals more effectively

00:24:28.580 | using the neuroscience of the circuits I just described

00:24:31.660 | and an understanding of the neuromodulator dopamine.

00:24:34.660 | Let's take a look at the psychology

00:24:36.400 | of goal-setting and goal pursuit.

00:24:38.380 | This is an enormous literature,

00:24:40.160 | meaning there are tens of thousands,

00:24:41.700 | if not hundreds of thousands of scientific papers

00:24:44.700 | about the topic of goal-setting and goal pursuit.

00:24:48.180 | There's also a lot of information on the internet

00:24:50.120 | about goal pursuit.

00:24:51.500 | And in looking over this information,

00:24:54.160 | one comes to appreciate pretty quickly

00:24:56.500 | that acronyms are a big thing.

00:24:59.500 | Acronyms seem to dominate the area of goal-setting,

00:25:03.220 | especially as it relates to things in the business sector,

00:25:05.780 | but also in the relationship sector.

00:25:07.380 | Now, acronyms are wonderful.

00:25:08.940 | They allow us to organize our thinking into lists

00:25:11.820 | and conceptually, they can be very useful.

00:25:14.360 | But as I moved through this literature,

00:25:15.940 | I started to see some redundant themes.

00:25:17.980 | And so what I've attempted to do

00:25:19.360 | is distill out the redundant themes

00:25:21.360 | that regardless of the person teaching

00:25:23.520 | or the scientific laboratory

00:25:25.740 | that happened to come up with these acronyms,

00:25:28.900 | that they boil down to some common features.

00:25:32.020 | So let's talk about that literature.

00:25:33.220 | And I think we'll come away with an understanding

00:25:34.940 | of some basic elements that are common to all goals.

00:25:39.320 | Now, the modern science or the modern psychological science

00:25:43.280 | of trying to understand goal-setting and pursuit

00:25:46.180 | actually dates back to the 1930s.

00:25:48.200 | And we have to be sure that members of our species

00:25:50.700 | were focused on goal-setting and goal pursuit

00:25:52.620 | long before the scientific literature emerged.

00:25:55.220 | It just stands to reason that since the human brain

00:25:57.680 | hasn't evolved that much,

00:25:58.980 | we don't think in the last 10,000 years

00:26:01.740 | that people would be thinking about these things.

00:26:04.120 | They just didn't get them down into papers

00:26:05.800 | that we could evaluate on PubMed and so forth.

00:26:07.740 | But now we can, so we can look at those papers.

00:26:09.900 | And what you find is that acronyms abound

00:26:12.480 | in the psychology literature

00:26:14.000 | about goal-setting and goal pursuit.

00:26:15.960 | So for instance, you'll hear about

00:26:18.900 | the work of Locke and Small, for instance,

00:26:21.820 | these are the last names of various researchers,

00:26:24.640 | the so-called ABC method,

00:26:26.220 | that a goal should be achievable, it should be believable,

00:26:29.900 | and that the person be committed.

00:26:31.220 | It's sort of obvious once you hear it, but the ABC method.

00:26:33.540 | Then people came along and expanded on that.

00:26:35.940 | They talk about the so-called SMART method,

00:26:37.880 | SMART being another acronym, that it be specific,

00:26:40.660 | that the goal be measurable, that the goal be attainable,

00:26:43.220 | that the goal be realistic, and that it be time-bound,

00:26:45.720 | meaning that you set a certain period of time

00:26:47.740 | in which a given goal should be performed.

00:26:50.300 | And then people come along and modify these.

00:26:52.120 | This is the way that psychology research is done.

00:26:53.900 | I'm not laughing at it.

00:26:55.100 | I'm just chuckling because it seems like the acronyms

00:26:57.540 | get longer and longer and longer.

00:26:59.420 | They developed the SMART-er approach,

00:27:01.840 | adding an ER to the acronym SMART, S-M-A-R-T-E-R.

00:27:06.560 | They added ethical and rewarding,

00:27:08.520 | which fortunately are good things, I believe,

00:27:11.080 | ethical and rewarding.

00:27:12.160 | What does all this mean?

00:27:14.800 | Well, what it means is that any kind of goal pursuit,

00:27:18.460 | any kind of goal setting really has to involve

00:27:21.420 | a number of different states and neural circuits

00:27:24.720 | in the brain and body.

00:27:25.800 | At least that's how I view this literature.

00:27:27.880 | Why would I do that?

00:27:28.720 | Well, let's think about the very modern version

00:27:31.760 | of the kind of acronyms that I talked about a moment ago,

00:27:35.100 | dating back to the 1930s and extending into the 1990s.

00:27:38.900 | You can find beautiful talks online

00:27:40.940 | from people who have worked with some of the biggest

00:27:44.380 | companies and greatest high performers out there

00:27:47.360 | to achieve incredible things.

00:27:48.880 | And they will talk about generating

00:27:51.120 | a sort of objective mindset for goal setting.

00:27:54.480 | They'll talk about goals needing to be significant.

00:27:57.160 | That has to be a big goal, that it has to be concrete.

00:27:59.340 | So you have to be able to describe what the goal is.

00:28:01.100 | It has to be action oriented.

00:28:02.560 | It has to be inspirational, has to be time bound.

00:28:05.200 | You have to have reasonable, realistic, verifiable measures.

00:28:08.520 | You have to constantly up the ante.

00:28:10.500 | If it's starting to sound repetitive,

00:28:11.860 | it's because it is repetitive.

00:28:13.480 | There are basically only three or four elements

00:28:15.500 | to goal setting and goal pursuit.

00:28:17.660 | Basically an individual or set of individuals

00:28:20.680 | has to identify a specific thing

00:28:23.240 | that they're going to attain.

00:28:24.240 | In some communities, they talk about knowing

00:28:27.440 | what right looks like, meaning being able to define

00:28:30.860 | a very specific goal.

00:28:31.960 | You can't just say, "I want to be a champion athlete."

00:28:36.380 | You have to say, "What sport?"

00:28:38.040 | And you have to understand what the path to that is.

00:28:40.680 | So any big goal of course is broken up

00:28:42.440 | into a series of smaller goals,

00:28:44.320 | but the whole thing starts with thinking

00:28:45.880 | about the end in mind.

00:28:47.120 | And in a few minutes, we will talk about

00:28:48.800 | whether or not visualization of the end in mind

00:28:50.900 | is actually beneficial or detrimental to achieving goals.

00:28:54.080 | There's actually great neuroscience

00:28:55.400 | and psychology data on that now.

00:28:57.600 | So I mentioned all these acronyms,

00:28:59.520 | not as an attempt to disparage them.

00:29:01.620 | I think they're wonderful.

00:29:02.620 | And I mentioned all that psychology literature,

00:29:04.920 | not in an attempt to disparage it,

00:29:06.900 | but rather to just say that goal setting is the first step.

00:29:11.460 | Assessment of whether or not one is making progress

00:29:14.240 | towards those goals is a second but necessary step.

00:29:16.700 | And then there's the business of goal execution.

00:29:19.260 | And that brings us back to the neural circuit components.

00:29:21.540 | Remember, this neural circuit involving

00:29:23.420 | those four things earlier,

00:29:24.340 | the amygdala striatum over frontal cortex

00:29:26.920 | and the prefrontal cortex,

00:29:29.340 | they work together to divide the whole process,

00:29:31.740 | as I mentioned before, into two general categories.

00:29:34.440 | The first is assessing value,

00:29:36.640 | knowing whether or not where one is at one given moment

00:29:39.860 | relates to some external thing.

00:29:42.600 | Are things going well or are things going poorly?

00:29:45.600 | And knowing how to gauge that accurately.

00:29:47.840 | And then action steps, goes and no goes,

00:29:50.840 | do more of this, do less of that,

00:29:52.280 | do this, don't do that, et cetera.

00:29:54.460 | So now we are going to shift back to the neuroscience

00:29:57.420 | and we're going to talk about the practical applications

00:30:00.400 | of the information I just described,

00:30:02.260 | because I've given you a lot of kind of academic information.

00:30:04.580 | And as we do this, I'd like you to keep in mind,

00:30:07.980 | what are some things that you've either accomplished

00:30:10.240 | or that you'd like to accomplish going forward?

00:30:12.620 | Because as we do this,

00:30:13.580 | we can build toward a set of protocols that at the end,

00:30:15.900 | you'll be able to very quickly plug in your particular goals

00:30:19.380 | and a route to those particular goals

00:30:21.280 | that's grounded in the science

00:30:22.580 | and I think are going to be very effective

00:30:24.460 | in allowing you to reach those goals more quickly

00:30:26.960 | and with indeed less effort.

00:30:29.420 | In fact, let's start with a tool now,

00:30:31.960 | because as we move through all this information,

00:30:35.140 | I want to make sure that people are coming away

00:30:37.580 | with some practical things that they can implement

00:30:39.800 | and indeed some things that you can even do

00:30:41.380 | during the course of listening to or watching this podcast.

00:30:45.040 | The first thing to do is to understand the difference

00:30:48.940 | between peripersonal space and extra personal space.

00:30:52.880 | Peripersonal space is all the space literally

00:30:57.580 | that's within inside your body, the surface of your skin

00:31:00.580 | and in your immediate environment.

00:31:02.740 | Peripersonal space is a key concept in neuroscience

00:31:06.420 | because you have particular neural circuits

00:31:08.300 | and particular chemicals that are geared toward

00:31:11.420 | what are called consumatory behaviors,

00:31:13.340 | meaning using things and consuming things

00:31:15.860 | and enjoying things that are in your immediate

00:31:18.260 | peripersonal space.

00:31:19.840 | Let me give you an example of this for myself

00:31:21.860 | just to make it concrete.

00:31:23.040 | You can imagine similar examples for yourself right now.

00:31:25.940 | Within my current peripersonal space is my interoception,

00:31:30.420 | my understanding or perception of my internal body.

00:31:34.400 | So how quickly I'm breathing, my heart rate,

00:31:37.060 | the feelings on the surface of my skin, et cetera.

00:31:39.940 | But also within the confines of my peripersonal space

00:31:43.380 | is this coffee mug that if you're listening to this,

00:31:45.280 | you can't see this, but I'm lifting up a coffee mug.

00:31:47.660 | I'm going to take a sip of coffee.

00:31:50.020 | That's a consumatory behavior.

00:31:51.300 | I have the coffee.

00:31:52.260 | I don't have to do much or motivate much to get it.

00:31:55.020 | I have other things here, pens and computer, et cetera.

00:31:57.220 | Okay, so things in your peripersonal space

00:31:59.900 | and consuming those things is generally governed

00:32:02.980 | by a set of neurochemicals that center around

00:32:06.460 | the neuromodulator serotonin.

00:32:08.220 | And there are a few others as well,

00:32:09.540 | things like oxytocin, but mainly serotonin.

00:32:11.900 | Contrast that with the so-called extra personal space.

00:32:16.060 | Extra personal space is everything

00:32:17.540 | beyond the confines of my reach.

00:32:19.380 | It would be something in the next room.

00:32:21.100 | It would be something down the street.

00:32:22.780 | It will be something at some other location

00:32:26.140 | in space and time.

00:32:28.500 | And the neuromodulators and neurochemicals

00:32:30.680 | that are associated with any kind of thinking about anything

00:32:34.340 | in the extra personal space are distinct

00:32:36.540 | from the neurochemicals and neuromodulators

00:32:38.420 | that are involved in thinking about

00:32:40.540 | or making actions towards the peripersonal space.

00:32:43.700 | And the molecule that's most associated

00:32:45.740 | with thinking about or orienting

00:32:47.760 | toward the extra personal space,

00:32:49.260 | again, things beyond the confines of my skin

00:32:51.260 | or your skin is dopamine.

00:32:53.980 | And this is a vitally important concept to understand

00:32:56.780 | when you're setting goals and seeking goals.

00:32:59.000 | If we are to be good at goal-seeking,

00:33:03.780 | if we are to be good at setting goals and assessing goals,

00:33:07.580 | if we are to achieve our goals,

00:33:09.780 | we have to be able to toggle back and forth

00:33:13.880 | between a clear understanding of our peripersonal space,

00:33:18.420 | what we have and how we feel in the immediate present,

00:33:22.220 | and our ability to understand what's out there

00:33:25.980 | in the extra personal space

00:33:28.140 | and our ability to move into that extra personal space.

00:33:31.820 | And a simple way to conceive of all this

00:33:33.740 | is that we evaluate our progress in the peripersonal space.

00:33:38.740 | We evaluate how we feel about some pursuit,

00:33:42.920 | even if we haven't initiated that pursuit yet.

00:33:45.200 | How we feel about a particular goal

00:33:47.440 | is truly a feeling that we experience in the here and now,

00:33:50.140 | even though the goal is in the future, okay?

00:33:52.640 | If we are going to evaluate

00:33:55.260 | whether or not we made progress today or yesterday or not,

00:33:58.420 | that's an evaluation of how we feel

00:34:00.760 | in the immediate peripersonal space.

00:34:03.200 | However, moving toward any goal

00:34:06.960 | involves orienting our thinking

00:34:09.160 | towards the extra personal space.

00:34:11.660 | And as we go through today's episode,

00:34:13.700 | I'm going to teach you a technique

00:34:15.340 | or rather a neuroscience-based tool

00:34:17.640 | that will allow you to continually transition back and forth

00:34:21.000 | between the peripersonal space and the extra personal space

00:34:24.560 | in a way that will allow you to update and evaluate

00:34:28.220 | and better execute your goal seeking.

00:34:30.480 | The whole principle behind this

00:34:33.600 | is that human beings like other animals

00:34:36.400 | have to make evaluations about whether or not

00:34:38.360 | they are on the right track.

00:34:40.500 | However, the important thing to understand

00:34:42.460 | is that humans in particular can do this

00:34:45.440 | over different timescales.

00:34:47.100 | We don't just pursue food 'cause we are hungry,

00:34:49.120 | we pursue food, excuse me, for a particular meal

00:34:53.200 | that we might be having with people tomorrow, right?

00:34:55.660 | We can modulate the timescale

00:34:57.240 | in a way that other animals don't.

00:34:59.040 | That's how we adjust our goal seeking

00:35:00.920 | to different timescales.

00:35:02.400 | And in addition to that,

00:35:04.360 | humans are exquisitely good at biasing our behavior

00:35:08.160 | toward particular goals over very long periods of time.

00:35:12.000 | But there are a lot of mistakes out there.

00:35:13.780 | In fact, things that are outright wrong in the literature

00:35:16.280 | and in particular in the internet

00:35:17.480 | and then the kind of wellness and fitness

00:35:19.440 | and cognitive fitness space

00:35:21.800 | that send people down the wrong path.

00:35:24.540 | And those things we will talk about in a few minutes,

00:35:27.140 | but things like visualization,

00:35:29.240 | that visualization and visualization of this big goal

00:35:31.960 | is the best way to achieve your goals.

00:35:34.240 | In fact, that's not the case.

00:35:36.160 | There's a much better approach to doing all this.

00:35:38.840 | So now I'd like to shift gears

00:35:40.520 | towards talking about a few of the things

00:35:42.440 | that most people get badly wrong

00:35:44.640 | in setting and assessing and executing goals.

00:35:48.680 | This is based on peer-reviewed research.

00:35:50.840 | So I think it's very solid.

00:35:52.420 | I know it is very solid.

00:35:53.920 | And it runs counter to what many of us have been taught.

00:35:57.560 | Let's start with a simple one.

00:35:59.040 | We've all heard that multitasking is bad, okay?

00:36:01.680 | We've heard multitasking is bad.

00:36:03.220 | It doesn't allow for focus.

00:36:04.340 | If you want to achieve anything,

00:36:05.740 | you want to accomplish anything, you should not multitask.

00:36:08.840 | Well, it turns out that's wrong.

00:36:11.020 | It turns out that there is a role for multitasking,

00:36:14.320 | but the multitasking has to be placed at a particular time

00:36:18.500 | within your goal seeking behavior in order to be effective.

00:36:22.520 | Really nice studies done at Carnegie Mellon University

00:36:27.520 | and the Dabish Lab evaluated how long people are able

00:36:31.080 | to focus in different environments,

00:36:33.280 | how long they were able to stay concentrated on their work.

00:36:35.860 | And it turns out that number is exceedingly low.

00:36:39.120 | It turns out that most people,

00:36:40.540 | whether or not they're doing computer work

00:36:42.340 | or whether or not they're doing writing or accounting work

00:36:45.160 | or anything of that sort can hold their attention

00:36:48.220 | for about three minutes at a time

00:36:49.940 | before they shift their attention off.

00:36:52.260 | That's ridiculously low when you first hear it,

00:36:55.460 | but that probably reflects a basic state of brain function

00:36:59.860 | that hearkens back to a time when we were hunter-gatherers.

00:37:02.780 | I doubt that we were maintaining focus solidly

00:37:05.340 | for hours and hours and hours

00:37:06.520 | unless we were under some particular threat

00:37:08.480 | or in some particular crisis.

00:37:10.880 | Rather, you could imagine that people collected seeds

00:37:13.180 | and nuts and berries for about three minutes

00:37:14.660 | and then probably stood up, looked around,

00:37:16.000 | and then kept going, okay?

00:37:17.340 | Or that they were hunting animals

00:37:19.140 | or in some sort of pursuit, fishing, et cetera,

00:37:21.740 | and focused, focused, focused.

00:37:23.100 | Then every three minutes or so, they might've looked up

00:37:24.900 | and taken a look at the sky or looked around

00:37:27.140 | to make sure that other people were there

00:37:29.220 | or not there, et cetera.

00:37:30.500 | It all stands to reason that that will be the case.

00:37:32.220 | Again, the neural circuits haven't evolved much.

00:37:34.660 | Now, multitasking has been shown

00:37:37.300 | to have a very interesting physiological signature.

00:37:41.380 | When we multitask, when we jump back and forth

00:37:43.620 | between things, there is an increase

00:37:46.700 | in the level of the neurotransmitter,

00:37:49.100 | also sometimes called a neuromodulator,

00:37:50.900 | but basically same thing for sake of this discussion.

00:37:53.240 | There's an increase in the neurotransmitter epinephrine,

00:37:55.580 | which is adrenaline.

00:37:57.140 | And so there are really nice studies now point to the fact

00:38:00.220 | that doing a bit of multitasking prior

00:38:03.420 | to jumping into some focused goal-directed behavior,

00:38:07.140 | whether or not it's mental behavior or physical behavior,

00:38:09.060 | can actually be useful because it gets us into action.

00:38:12.540 | So we've all been told that multitasking is terrible,

00:38:14.920 | but if you, for instance, find yourself cleaning up

00:38:16.920 | your house and also checking your phone

00:38:18.340 | and doing a number of things right at the point

00:38:20.600 | where you should be sitting down to write

00:38:22.080 | or do some focused work,

00:38:23.620 | it probably reflects some adaptive mechanism

00:38:26.020 | where you use action and somewhat varied multitasking action

00:38:29.780 | in order to generate adrenaline in your system

00:38:31.820 | because adrenaline just gets you into action.

00:38:34.460 | Now that's great, but you don't want to multitask

00:38:38.460 | throughout any kind of goal seeking or goal pursuit behavior

00:38:41.980 | because what's also very clear,

00:38:44.220 | and we're going to talk about this in exquisite depth today,

00:38:47.900 | is that visual focus and in particular,

00:38:50.580 | contracting your visual window,

00:38:52.180 | bringing the aperture of what you see to a very fine point

00:38:56.540 | can absolutely increase your clarity of goal seeking

00:39:01.360 | and the likelihood that you will pursue your goals.

00:39:04.620 | I've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast

00:39:06.680 | as a way of increasing focus for any kind of pursuit.

00:39:09.940 | I've talked about a practice whereby you can literally look

00:39:13.380 | at a dot or a line placed on a wall

00:39:15.820 | or on your computer in front of you for 30 to 60 seconds,

00:39:19.420 | and then moving into some dedicated work

00:39:21.820 | where you need to focus.

00:39:22.700 | And indeed just looking at a narrow piece

00:39:25.300 | of the visual world, a small piece of the visual world

00:39:27.620 | for some period of time and forcing yourself

00:39:29.260 | to hold that gaze on that location as best you can,

00:39:32.900 | can increase your level of cognitive attention

00:39:35.440 | and your ability to focus and stay focused.

00:39:38.280 | And this is not magic.

00:39:39.780 | It is the consequence of the fact

00:39:41.120 | that most of your cognition follows your visual perception.

00:39:45.080 | For those of you that are low vision or no vision,

00:39:47.000 | meaning you're blind or you have trouble seeing,

00:39:49.400 | my lab does a lot of work with people

00:39:52.320 | who are low vision, no vision.

00:39:54.080 | They tend to use their auditory system, their hearing,

00:39:56.540 | as a way to anchor their attention to particular things.

00:39:59.300 | But most people out there can see and see pretty well,

00:40:02.380 | and visual focus is the way to do that.

00:40:05.880 | Now, earlier we were talking about this notion

00:40:08.820 | of peripersonal space versus extrapersonal space.

00:40:13.400 | And I'm just going to seed a little bit

00:40:15.180 | of the later conversation by saying that when we focus

00:40:18.660 | on an external point, we are in a process of exteroception,

00:40:22.860 | is the focus on the extrapersonal space,

00:40:25.520 | not the peripersonal space.

00:40:27.860 | So when we focus on something, say a line on the wall

00:40:32.080 | for 30 to 60 seconds or at our computer for 30 to 60 seconds

00:40:35.400 | and just look at it and then move into any kind of action,

00:40:38.800 | whether or not it's work action or physical action,

00:40:41.340 | we are at its very core,

00:40:43.600 | we are engaging in this pursuit of extrapersonal space.

00:40:46.800 | We are placing our focus outside our body,

00:40:49.360 | and therefore we are placing the brain

00:40:51.240 | into goal pursuit mode.

00:40:54.760 | Work at NYU, in particular in the laboratory

00:40:57.680 | of a phenomenal researcher in their psychology department

00:41:01.000 | by the name of Emily Balcetis, B-A-L-C-E-T-I-S,

00:41:05.440 | Emily Balcetis has done really nice work on this.

00:41:08.820 | They've done is they've had people focus

00:41:11.440 | their visual attention on a goal line of some sort,

00:41:14.520 | and then to engage in some sort of behavior

00:41:17.560 | that requires a lot of effort.

00:41:18.840 | And they've done a lot of different experiments like this,

00:41:21.280 | but I'll just explain one.

00:41:22.580 | They always include a control group

00:41:24.240 | where people have to go through the same physical effort

00:41:27.420 | or mental effort, but they don't focus their attention

00:41:30.360 | just on one location.

00:41:31.840 | The long and short of these studies

00:41:34.040 | is that when people have to focus their attention

00:41:37.000 | on one location, like a goal line,

00:41:39.260 | they are much more effective in reaching those goals

00:41:42.040 | and they achieve them with the perception

00:41:45.080 | that they expended less effort.

00:41:47.020 | I'll give you an example of one particularly nice study

00:41:49.580 | from the Balcetis lab.

00:41:50.960 | So this particular study involves physical exercise,

00:41:54.040 | although, as I mentioned before,

00:41:55.020 | they've done similar studies

00:41:56.400 | looking at cognitive type work.

00:41:58.680 | And what they did is they had a group of people

00:42:01.720 | exercise wearing 15 pound ankle weights,

00:42:05.360 | and they had to basically move a certain distance

00:42:07.580 | or run a certain distance to reach a goal line.

00:42:10.280 | One group was focused on the goal line,

00:42:12.520 | visually focused on the goal line.

00:42:14.280 | The other group was not told to visually focus

00:42:16.740 | on the goal line.

00:42:17.720 | And what they found was that the group

00:42:19.880 | that focused on the goal line

00:42:22.180 | was able to achieve reaching that goal

00:42:24.980 | with 17% less effort, they measured effort,

00:42:29.900 | and it got there 23% quicker.

00:42:33.120 | That's a remarkable difference, right?

00:42:35.060 | So same distance traveled with same workload

00:42:37.820 | because everyone's wearing the same

00:42:40.420 | 15 pound weights on their ankles.

00:42:42.100 | One group is simply looking at the goal line.

00:42:44.400 | The other group is not told to look at the goal line.

00:42:46.680 | Simply by looking at the goal line

00:42:48.620 | does something to the psychology

00:42:50.320 | and physiology of these people

00:42:52.620 | that allows them to move forward

00:42:55.300 | with less perceived effort and to do it more quickly.

00:42:58.360 | That's remarkable, right?

00:43:00.280 | And in this case, they're focused on the goal line,

00:43:02.120 | but in a few moments, we'll talk about

00:43:03.800 | how one can use updating of goal lines,

00:43:06.040 | so incremental goal lines,

00:43:07.160 | starting with an intermediate goal

00:43:08.840 | and then extending the goal line further and further.

00:43:11.160 | But just sit back for a second and think about that.

00:43:13.400 | Just by changing where a person looks,

00:43:16.860 | they change their perceived effort

00:43:19.020 | and their ability to do something more effectively,

00:43:22.840 | more quickly than a group that is not

00:43:25.980 | deliberately focusing their visual attention

00:43:27.960 | on one location.

00:43:29.340 | That's incredible.

00:43:30.520 | And it's so incredible, in fact, you might say,

00:43:32.120 | well, how could that possibly be?

00:43:33.860 | Well, it turns out it has a very specific

00:43:36.140 | underlying physiological reason,

00:43:37.980 | and that has to do with changes

00:43:39.980 | in our so-called autonomic nervous system,

00:43:42.040 | the aspects of our nervous system

00:43:44.120 | that prepare us for readiness and action,

00:43:46.780 | or that prepare us for resting and relaxing.

00:43:50.280 | So what is special about focusing one's visual attention

00:43:53.540 | at a given location?

00:43:55.280 | Well, it turns out that we have two branches

00:43:56.960 | of our visual system.

00:43:57.880 | So visual information all comes in through our eyes,

00:44:00.680 | but then it can head down two different pathways.

00:44:03.440 | One pathway is engaged when our vision

00:44:06.080 | is brought to a common point,

00:44:07.300 | what we call a vergence eye movement.

00:44:08.720 | So if we're focusing very intensely on a given point,

00:44:11.360 | regardless of how far away from us that point is,

00:44:14.460 | our visual system engages a certain set of neurons,

00:44:17.640 | neural circuits that are involved in resolving fine detail,

00:44:21.480 | and that can evaluate small changes

00:44:23.560 | over small periods of time.

00:44:24.880 | Just think of it as a very detailed camera

00:44:27.500 | of the visual world, and it tends to be very restricted.

00:44:30.160 | The other pathway through the visual system

00:44:32.260 | is a so-called magnocellular pathway.

00:44:33.900 | And this is a pathway that's involved

00:44:35.480 | in taking in global information

00:44:37.240 | about lots of things that are happening around us,

00:44:39.960 | movement of things to our right,

00:44:41.200 | movement of things to our left,

00:44:42.440 | things that are happening down on the ground

00:44:43.860 | and all around us.

00:44:44.700 | And that pathway involves a sort of relaxation, if you will,

00:44:49.700 | of the neural circuits that are associated

00:44:51.560 | with alertness and attention.

00:44:52.920 | When you walk down the street

00:44:53.880 | and you're not thinking about much,

00:44:54.840 | provided you're not looking at your phone,

00:44:56.440 | you're not focusing on one location,

00:44:58.560 | you're more or less in a relaxed state

00:45:00.620 | compared to when you're looking for a particular sign,

00:45:02.760 | you're looking for a bus or a train that's coming

00:45:04.680 | or a particular person,

00:45:05.680 | and that should inherently make sense.

00:45:07.760 | When your level of attention and alertness goes up,

00:45:10.000 | there's sort of a small but perceptible increase

00:45:12.840 | in your level of arousal.

00:45:14.160 | It's not really stress necessarily,

00:45:16.020 | but arousal of alertness.

00:45:18.200 | And it turns out that the visual system

00:45:20.660 | accomplishes this increase in alertness

00:45:23.200 | by communicating with your circulatory system

00:45:26.300 | and the system that delivers blood and nutrients and oxygen

00:45:29.140 | to the rest of the tissues in your body.

00:45:31.080 | So let's talk for a second about what focusing our vision

00:45:33.780 | on a particular location does,

00:45:35.160 | because in this study from the Balcetas lab,

00:45:37.100 | what they found was focusing on a goal line

00:45:39.020 | allows people to move more effectively toward that goal.

00:45:41.520 | This is something you can leverage in all aspects

00:45:43.860 | of all goal pursuits.

00:45:46.080 | What happens when we focus on a particular location?

00:45:49.660 | Believe it or not,

00:45:50.720 | there's an increase in a particular feature

00:45:52.840 | of our blood pressure.

00:45:54.640 | Now, your body has, of course,

00:45:56.120 | arteries, veins, and capillaries,

00:45:58.820 | and your heart pumps blood first to the arteries

00:46:01.660 | and then to the other components of your vascular system.

00:46:04.480 | And we have so-called blood pressure, right?

00:46:06.960 | Blood pressure is just how much the fluid volume

00:46:09.300 | is pressing on those arteries, veins, and capillaries, right?

00:46:12.400 | So you can imagine a pipe

00:46:13.260 | with very little fluid moving through it,

00:46:15.100 | that's low pressure.

00:46:16.000 | You have a pipe with a lot of fluid moving through it,

00:46:18.340 | that's even more pressure.

00:46:19.260 | You have a pipe with a lot of very viscous,

00:46:21.480 | meaning very kind of sticky thick stuff moving forward,

00:46:24.200 | that's even more pressure.

00:46:25.560 | We have blood pressure,

00:46:26.620 | and you've probably had your blood pressure measured.

00:46:28.560 | There's always two numbers, right?

00:46:29.980 | You have a top number, which is the systolic blood pressure,

00:46:32.740 | and then there's the bottom number below the line,

00:46:35.060 | which is the diastolic pressure.

00:46:37.200 | So the important thing to understand

00:46:38.500 | is that your blood pressure will rise when your heart beats

00:46:41.320 | because there's more fluid moving through those pipes

00:46:43.880 | that are your arteries, your veins, and your capillaries.

00:46:46.260 | And that top number is called the systole

00:46:48.940 | or the systolic blood pressure

00:46:50.740 | because that's the pressure

00:46:52.300 | at the time when your heart contracts, okay?

00:46:55.160 | So the top number,

00:46:56.380 | which normally if you have a healthy blood pressure

00:46:58.660 | is somewhere in the range of 90 to 120 millimeters

00:47:01.980 | of mercury.

00:47:02.800 | Millimeters of mercury is just the way

00:47:03.660 | that pressure is measured.

00:47:04.800 | That top number, your systole,

00:47:06.820 | your systolic blood pressure

00:47:08.620 | is what's measured when the heart contracts, okay?

00:47:11.740 | So that's the amount of pressure when there's a heartbeat

00:47:15.200 | and it's moving through your vasculature.

00:47:17.980 | Now, between beats, right?

00:47:19.620 | The heart beats, but then it relaxes.

00:47:21.600 | Your blood pressure is going to drop to a lower value, right?

00:47:24.980 | Because fluid isn't being pumped through the system

00:47:27.060 | at those moments.

00:47:28.060 | And that's the bottom value, the diastolic pressure.

00:47:31.340 | And typically for healthy people,

00:47:32.620 | that's going to be 60 to 80 millimeters of mercury.

00:47:35.680 | So you might hear about a normal blood pressure

00:47:37.760 | being about, again, this is an approximate, 120 over 80.

00:47:41.780 | What that means is at the point where blood was being pumped

00:47:45.080 | through your arteries and veins, boom,

00:47:47.580 | that it's 120 millimeters of mercury.

00:47:50.840 | But then when the heart relaxes for a second

00:47:53.220 | before the next beat, then it drops to 80, okay?

00:47:57.340 | So there's high pressure, low pressure,

00:47:58.940 | high pressure, low pressure.

00:48:00.240 | The fluid is being pumped through the system.

00:48:03.180 | Now, why am I telling you all this?

00:48:04.400 | Well, it turns out that there are neural circuits

00:48:07.160 | that link your visual system

00:48:09.620 | and focusing on a particular point with that top number,

00:48:13.140 | the systolic blood pressure.

00:48:14.660 | And when you focus your eyes on a particular location,

00:48:17.980 | that systolic blood pressure goes up,

00:48:20.300 | and there are some other systems that are coordinated

00:48:22.780 | with it in your brain and body

00:48:24.300 | that start releasing adrenaline,

00:48:26.480 | low amounts of adrenaline in most cases,

00:48:28.660 | and that adrenaline further readies your body for action.

00:48:32.040 | So bringing our visual focus to a particular location

00:48:36.020 | does a number of things to the brain

00:48:37.800 | and the whole system of the body to prepare it,

00:48:40.900 | to place it into a state of readiness

00:48:43.520 | that makes us more likely to lean into our goals,

00:48:47.140 | into action.

00:48:48.260 | And if we step back and think about this,

00:48:49.580 | this makes perfect sense.

00:48:51.080 | The brain and body need to be coordinated.

00:48:52.600 | We can't just think about a goal.

00:48:54.260 | In fact, a deer or a lion can't just think about a goal.

00:48:57.620 | It has to think about a goal

00:48:59.580 | and then has to feel some sort of activation energy,

00:49:03.400 | some willingness or desire to move forward

00:49:06.180 | in pursuit of that goal.

00:49:07.660 | So imagining a goal has to be coupled

00:49:11.480 | to the physical pursuit of the goal.

00:49:13.120 | So our visual system in a beautiful way

00:49:15.980 | brings together a focus, literally a visual focus

00:49:18.800 | on a particular point outside us.

00:49:21.440 | Then it recruits an increase in systolic blood pressure,

00:49:25.040 | which creates a systemic, a body-wide and brain-wide

00:49:28.760 | increase in fuel utilization, in oxygen availability,

00:49:32.660 | in our willingness to move forward as a body,

00:49:35.100 | as a whole coherent system.

00:49:37.040 | And then there are also neurotransmitter systems

00:49:39.340 | like epinephrine, as we will soon see dopamine,

00:49:42.840 | that get recruited as well

00:49:44.240 | to place us into a continual mode of action.

00:49:47.040 | This to me is a remarkable feature of our physiology.

00:49:51.960 | And it gets right to the point

00:49:53.600 | of some of the psychological phenomenon

00:49:55.640 | that we were talking about earlier.

00:49:56.920 | Let's just recall what some of those are.

00:49:58.320 | I won't list them all, but, you know,

00:49:59.800 | a goal has to be significant, they say, okay?

00:50:02.360 | All the psychologists, all the popular stuff online says

00:50:04.560 | it has to be significant, has to be inspirational,

00:50:07.420 | and it has to be action-oriented.

00:50:08.980 | Okay, so let's say you look out into the landscape

00:50:11.520 | of what's available to you,

00:50:12.860 | whether or not it's just in your mind,

00:50:14.240 | or you look at a specific point.

00:50:15.760 | You say, ah, I want to go to that particular restaurant

00:50:18.560 | to eat that particular food,

00:50:20.020 | and you orient towards it and you move towards it.

00:50:22.160 | This is the way that your brain and body

00:50:23.780 | are coordinating their actions together.

00:50:27.040 | Conversely, when our visual system

00:50:29.800 | is in a mode of looking at everything,

00:50:31.760 | when the aperture of our visual system is very broad,

00:50:34.500 | we know that there's also a reduction

00:50:37.840 | in our goal-directed behavior

00:50:39.240 | and a reduction in the systolic blood pressure.

00:50:42.280 | It's as if our peripersonal space is sufficient.

00:50:45.800 | We don't need to get beyond our current state.

00:50:47.880 | We're not oriented toward any one thing in particular.

00:50:51.000 | Okay, so I've now described some of the psychology

00:50:53.320 | and some of the underlying physiology.

00:50:55.440 | Now I'd like to mesh this within the context

00:50:58.140 | of actual specific goal setting and goal pursuit,

00:51:01.560 | because what many of you are probably thinking is,

00:51:03.280 | okay, well, that's some physiology, there's some psychology,

00:51:05.380 | but how do you actually apply this

00:51:07.300 | towards setting and achieving goals?

00:51:09.080 | Well, you do that by understanding that your mental frame

00:51:13.600 | and your attention are always either positioned

00:51:16.920 | to your peripersonal space,

00:51:18.580 | focused on your immediate possessions and state,

00:51:22.160 | or towards things outside you,

00:51:23.920 | but that you also have the ability to dynamically travel

00:51:26.400 | back and forth between those.

00:51:27.680 | And so next, we're going to talk about

00:51:28.920 | what the literature says about things like visualization,

00:51:32.120 | immediate and intermediate goals, long-term goals,

00:51:35.360 | and how to best achieve those.

00:51:36.840 | And then we're going to move specifically

00:51:38.300 | into the protocols that you can use.

00:51:40.080 | It's a protocol that I've specifically developed for you,

00:51:42.800 | the listeners, in order to incorporate all the science

00:51:45.260 | into a best practice that you can do anytime, any place,

00:51:49.260 | to really identify what it is specifically

00:51:51.740 | that you want to pursue and the best route to pursue

00:51:54.220 | and achieve that goal.

00:51:55.460 | Focusing our visual attention on one particular point

00:51:58.560 | is incredibly effective for all types of goal pursuit.

00:52:01.760 | And if you'd like to read some of the scientific studies

00:52:03.980 | or read a review of the scientific studies

00:52:06.780 | that have looked at how narrowing one's visual attention

00:52:09.880 | can really enhance the effectiveness of pursuing goals,

00:52:13.560 | I'll put a link to this study.

00:52:14.880 | The title of the study is "Keeping the Goal in Sight,

00:52:17.820 | Testing the Influence of Narrowed Visual Attention

00:52:20.340 | on Physical Activity."

00:52:21.720 | And this is a paper from Emily Balsettis' lab,

00:52:24.940 | focuses mainly on physical activities,

00:52:26.780 | but it mentioned some other things as well.

00:52:28.660 | This is an article published in "Personality

00:52:31.480 | and Social Psychology Bulletin" in 2020.

00:52:33.580 | So it's recent, it's an exceptional paper in my opinion,

00:52:37.420 | really gets to the heart of how all this works

00:52:39.640 | and some examples of where it's been implemented.

00:52:41.780 | So let's apply this visual tool in a very simple way

00:52:45.060 | to any type of goal that you want to pursue.

00:52:49.480 | If you already know what goal you want to pursue,

00:52:51.120 | maybe it's a workout,

00:52:52.000 | maybe it's a cognitive work of some particular sort.

00:52:54.740 | Again, the process is very simple.

00:52:56.400 | You're going to focus your visual attention on one point

00:52:59.380 | beyond your peripersonal space.

00:53:01.260 | So it could be on your computer, it could be on the wall,

00:53:03.360 | it could be a horizon, it could be at a distance,

00:53:06.040 | and you're going to focus your visual attention there.

00:53:08.260 | And with some effort,

00:53:09.100 | you're going to hold your visual attention

00:53:10.560 | for 30 to 60 seconds.

00:53:12.300 | You might blink, that's okay,

00:53:14.080 | but you're going to try and hold your visual attention there

00:53:16.060 | so no moving your head around,

00:53:17.780 | no diverting your attention to other locations.

00:53:19.740 | Some people will find it very easy to do,

00:53:21.300 | other people will find it quite hard.

00:53:23.020 | Your mind may drift cognitively, that's okay,

00:53:25.660 | but try and bring your visual attention

00:53:27.440 | to that common point.

00:53:28.620 | Several episodes ago,

00:53:30.780 | I talked about how there are actually studies

00:53:32.700 | looking at developing this kind of training in students

00:53:35.280 | for ADHD and the data on that are actually quite encouraging.

00:53:38.720 | So for people who have ADHD and focus issues

00:53:41.240 | and attentional issues, this can be effective.

00:53:43.340 | For people who don't, this can also be effective.

00:53:46.280 | Again, it places your brain and body

00:53:48.220 | into a state of readiness,

00:53:49.420 | and then the idea is to move into the particular actions

00:53:52.460 | that bring you closer to your goal, okay?

00:53:54.260 | We haven't yet talked about how to set goals

00:53:56.260 | and how to assess progress.

00:53:57.420 | This is simply how to pursue goals, okay?

00:54:00.500 | But the visual component is important.

00:54:02.900 | In fact, I would argue that the visual system

00:54:05.740 | and harnessing your visual attention to a narrow point

00:54:08.300 | is going to be the most effective way

00:54:10.340 | to get your brain and body into a mode of action

00:54:12.700 | to pursue whatever goal it is you're trying to pursue.

00:54:15.820 | That practice is in stark contrast to multitasking,

00:54:18.620 | where, by definition, your attention is moving

00:54:20.920 | from place to place to place, right?

00:54:22.660 | I mentioned that multitasking can be effective

00:54:24.760 | in getting your system into somewhat

00:54:26.620 | of an increased level of activation

00:54:29.080 | so that you can pursue a more focused goal.

00:54:30.860 | But the visual attention to a particular point

00:54:33.180 | is going to be the most effective way

00:54:34.800 | to bring your system into a state of readiness

00:54:36.620 | and action for goal pursuit.

00:54:38.160 | There's another really interesting way

00:54:39.820 | that you can leverage your visual system

00:54:41.700 | toward long-term goals.

00:54:44.800 | The Balcetas Lab has also done

00:54:46.380 | some really interesting experiments

00:54:47.860 | looking at people's ability to set

00:54:50.620 | and stick to long-term goals.

00:54:52.260 | And the long-term goal that they looked at

00:54:54.580 | was one related to saving money for later in life.

00:54:58.600 | This is something that a lot of people struggle with.

00:55:00.380 | A lot of people have a hard time investing money

00:55:02.420 | or saving money for later in life,

00:55:04.080 | simply because as human beings,

00:55:06.160 | we vary in the extent to which we worry

00:55:08.820 | about what's going to happen later.

00:55:10.800 | There's also a phenomenon of so-called delayed discounting.

00:55:14.400 | Delayed discounting is the fact

00:55:16.400 | that goals become less rewarding

00:55:18.700 | when they exist further out in the future, okay?

00:55:21.260 | You may have experienced this walking past a donut shop.

00:55:23.460 | I love donuts.

00:55:24.300 | I'm just going to admit it over and over again on this spot.

00:55:26.020 | I love the smell of them.

00:55:26.940 | I love the taste of them.

00:55:27.920 | I try not to eat them

00:55:28.760 | 'cause I'm told they're not that good for me.

00:55:30.300 | And indeed, I don't think they are.

00:55:32.300 | I occasionally cave and I eat one or many.

00:55:35.060 | But in general, I try not to cave

00:55:37.860 | to the immediately rewarding properties

00:55:40.080 | of the smell and the taste of the donut.

00:55:42.860 | But what we know is that if you smell a donut

00:55:46.500 | or you smell a wonderful piece of food,

00:55:48.960 | in the immediate term, it brings your level of focus,

00:55:51.920 | your mental focus, to the immediate phase.

00:55:54.560 | And it feels very rewarding.

00:55:55.920 | Like if you had it now, it would just be so good.

00:55:58.560 | But if you actually extend that reward out to tomorrow

00:56:01.480 | or the next day, you think, oh, you know,

00:56:03.660 | today happens to be a Saturday that we're recording,

00:56:05.560 | but oh, you know, on Tuesday morning,

00:56:07.320 | I'm going to get a donut.

00:56:08.460 | It doesn't have the same value

00:56:10.040 | because the reward system doesn't work as well

00:56:13.860 | for long-term goals.

00:56:15.640 | It's not as salient.

00:56:17.180 | It's not as tangible a goal,

00:56:18.940 | especially for something like a donut.

00:56:20.560 | Whereas the kinds of goals that work

00:56:22.500 | when you place them out into the longer term

00:56:24.320 | and can create a heightened sense of motivation

00:56:26.380 | tend to be things that are much more rewarding to us.

00:56:28.600 | So delayed discounting simply says

00:56:30.160 | that the further out in time that a given goal is,

00:56:32.880 | the less effective that reward will be

00:56:35.380 | in motivating one's behavior.

00:56:36.980 | And indeed, you see this with saving money for retirement.

00:56:39.720 | You see this with all sorts of long-term investment.

00:56:42.320 | The Balsettis lab therefore did an experiment

00:56:46.140 | where they looked at people's tendency

00:56:49.320 | to save money for later in life.

00:56:52.160 | But the groups that they created in the study

00:56:54.760 | were really interesting.

00:56:55.600 | They had one group imagine what it would be like

00:56:58.520 | to be 30 or 40 years older,

00:57:01.040 | and then to invest a certain amount of money

00:57:03.840 | according to whatever it is

00:57:05.280 | they thought that they would need.

00:57:06.400 | And they measured the amount that they had set aside

00:57:08.400 | and saved for later in life.

00:57:11.000 | The other group actually viewed photos of themselves.

00:57:15.500 | So picture images of themselves

00:57:17.480 | that were artificially digitally aged

00:57:20.920 | so that they could see themselves

00:57:22.400 | 30 or 40 years into the future.

00:57:25.020 | And it turns out that people in that second group

00:57:27.520 | simply by perceiving their own image in the future

00:57:32.440 | invested far more money into later life.

00:57:35.920 | They set aside more money.

00:57:36.960 | Somehow it bridged the gap

00:57:38.440 | between their immediate experience of life

00:57:40.520 | and the longer arc toward what it was going to be like

00:57:44.160 | in 30 or 40 years.

00:57:45.640 | So very powerful result in my opinion,

00:57:47.660 | because what it says again

00:57:49.160 | is that our visual perception of the future

00:57:51.880 | or our visual perception of the present

00:57:54.480 | is what allows us to anchor our goal-directed systems

00:57:57.480 | and our motivation to take on things

00:58:00.280 | that in the immediate term might not seem that useful.

00:58:03.200 | So you can imagine all sorts of variations on this.

00:58:06.480 | You can imagine that every time I want a donut,

00:58:09.680 | I'd see a vision of myself

00:58:11.360 | or an actual physical picture of myself

00:58:14.160 | as a consequence of that,

00:58:15.320 | having eaten many donuts every day for the next 10 years.

00:58:18.080 | I don't know what that image would look like

00:58:19.200 | 'cause I've never seen it.

00:58:21.200 | That's not an experiment that I necessarily need to do

00:58:23.160 | because I'm not that motivated to eat donuts.

00:58:25.600 | But I have to confess,

00:58:27.400 | somebody who I think I'm pretty good at managing resources,

00:58:31.320 | but I think if I were to see an image of myself at 70 or 75,

00:58:35.460 | there's so many things that are associated

00:58:36.760 | with visual images, like what our body must feel like,

00:58:39.400 | what our needs are probably going to be like in that state

00:58:42.480 | or in that age,

00:58:43.920 | what sorts of things we may or may not still be able to do

00:58:46.740 | at that age.

00:58:47.760 | And that anchors back to immediate goal-directed behaviors,

00:58:50.800 | such as setting aside money for retirement,

00:58:52.840 | such as investing in one's health practices.

00:58:55.600 | And indeed, there's a study that has looked at

00:58:57.920 | how people will invest in exercise and healthy eating.

00:59:01.060 | If they just think about the future

00:59:04.220 | and what they might be like in the future

00:59:06.700 | versus seeing images of themselves in the future

00:59:09.560 | if they were to go down a healthy or unhealthy route.

00:59:12.420 | So again, the point is that the visual system,

00:59:14.820 | what we see is principally important

00:59:18.740 | in defining what we do in the immediate term,

00:59:20.900 | even if what we see relates to something

00:59:22.520 | in the far off distance.

00:59:24.560 | I think these are phenomenal studies

00:59:26.080 | and they get right down to an important issue

00:59:28.280 | that's been kicked around over and over in the literature

00:59:31.360 | and in the discussion about goal-seeking,

00:59:32.800 | which is visualization.

00:59:34.440 | We hear keep the big goal in mind, focus on the big goal.

00:59:38.380 | So now we're going to address what does the science say

00:59:40.740 | about visualizing big goals?

00:59:43.480 | If you're somebody who's interested in business,

00:59:45.340 | or let's say you're focused on relationship,

00:59:47.500 | is thinking about the perfect relationship

00:59:49.860 | and what that would look like

00:59:50.960 | and the family that you would have and where you would live,

00:59:53.600 | is that effective in generating the kinds of behaviors

00:59:56.380 | that will lead you to that?

00:59:57.480 | Is it effective to think about the big win at the end?

01:00:00.740 | Well, it turns out it is,

01:00:02.600 | but you have to be very, very careful with when

01:00:05.080 | and how you implement that visualization,

01:00:07.020 | 'cause if you do it correctly,

01:00:08.600 | it can really serve your goal-seeking well.

01:00:10.660 | And if you do it incorrectly,

01:00:12.140 | it can undermine the entire process.

01:00:14.520 | So does visualization work?

01:00:17.040 | Well, turns out that visualization of the big win,

01:00:21.400 | the end goal, so the Super Bowl win,

01:00:23.820 | or eight gold medals in the Olympics,

01:00:26.480 | or graduation from the university of your choice,

01:00:30.020 | or making a certain amount of money,

01:00:31.400 | or finding the partner of your choice, et cetera,

01:00:34.720 | that visualization is effective

01:00:37.060 | in getting the goal pursuit process started,

01:00:40.360 | but it actually is a pretty lousy

01:00:42.660 | and maybe even counterproductive way

01:00:44.780 | of maintaining pursuit of that goal,

01:00:48.040 | meaning continuing to engage the sort of actions

01:00:51.300 | that are going to get you to eventually achieve that goal.

01:00:54.180 | I think this is going to be surprising to people at first,

01:00:57.440 | but if we think back to our discussion

01:01:00.120 | about the physiology of the blood pressure system,

01:01:03.960 | it'll make sense.

01:01:04.960 | Good scientific studies have been done

01:01:09.420 | where people are told to imagine

01:01:11.800 | or even script out their long-term vision

01:01:14.520 | and goal for themselves.

01:01:15.460 | What is the big goal?

01:01:16.520 | And they're taught to or told to imagine it

01:01:19.860 | with a rich amount of detail,

01:01:21.260 | to think about how it's going to feel in their body

01:01:23.160 | and the big win.

01:01:24.320 | And basically what happens is

01:01:25.880 | if you measure people's blood pressure

01:01:27.240 | or other metrics of physiology,

01:01:28.960 | you see an increase in that systolic blood pressure.

01:01:31.360 | There's kind of a ramping up of the readiness

01:01:34.640 | and excitement for that goal,

01:01:36.900 | but that increase in blood pressure quickly wanes.

01:01:40.120 | And over time, that visual of the long-term goal

01:01:43.760 | becomes a poor thing to rely on

01:01:47.240 | in order to generate the actions

01:01:49.640 | that are required to reach that goal.

01:01:52.080 | In fact, there's a much better way

01:01:54.240 | to maintain ongoing action toward a goal

01:01:57.680 | that also involves visualization,

01:02:00.120 | but it turns out it's not about visualizing success,

01:02:03.520 | it's about visualizing failure.

01:02:05.680 | The Balcetas Lab and other labs

01:02:08.000 | have looked at whether or not people make progress

01:02:10.820 | toward goals of different types,

01:02:13.240 | whether or not they're thinking about the goal,

01:02:16.020 | they're thinking about that goal line

01:02:17.340 | and what they want to achieve,

01:02:18.720 | that long-term goal and all the wonderful things

01:02:20.560 | associated with it,

01:02:21.920 | or whether or not they're thinking about all the ways

01:02:24.300 | in which they could fail and route to that goal, right?

01:02:27.660 | This is not typically what we are encouraged to do.

01:02:30.580 | Typically, we are told, don't imagine failure,

01:02:32.860 | push failure out of your mind, only focus on success,

01:02:36.180 | fake it till you make it,

01:02:37.300 | or it's a phrase that I absolutely hate, frankly,

01:02:39.620 | because it's not even clear what that means,

01:02:41.420 | and it's not even clear what the ethical form of that is.

01:02:44.120 | I think it means continue despite any anxiety or fear

01:02:47.340 | that things won't work out.

01:02:48.680 | But if you look at the literature,

01:02:50.540 | the scientific literature,

01:02:52.220 | what the Balcetas Lab and other labs have shown

01:02:54.180 | is that there's a near doubling, near doubling

01:02:57.740 | in the probability of reaching one's goal

01:03:00.780 | if you focus routinely on foreshadowing failure.

01:03:05.780 | You think about the ways in which things could fail

01:03:09.220 | if you take action A or you take action B,

01:03:12.300 | and instead, therefore, you take action C.

01:03:14.460 | You're supposed to think about how things could fail

01:03:16.780 | if you don't get up and run each morning

01:03:19.020 | if your goal is, say, a fitness goal.

01:03:20.700 | So let's use that as an example,

01:03:22.460 | because even though I realize people are in pursuit

01:03:25.020 | of many things, not just fitness,

01:03:27.020 | fitness goals and physical goals are a very concrete thing

01:03:29.380 | that we can all get on the same page about

01:03:31.740 | 'cause they're related to actions.

01:03:33.860 | Let's say somebody sets a goal of running five miles

01:03:38.840 | four times a week minimum and as many as seven

01:03:41.440 | four times a week minimum before 8 a.m., okay?

01:03:43.640 | In a previous podcast on habits,

01:03:45.060 | I talked about the benefits of not necessarily

01:03:47.460 | setting specific times that one will do things,

01:03:49.360 | but setting time blocks that one will do things.

01:03:51.340 | So you say before 8 a.m., you're going to run five miles,

01:03:54.300 | and that's going to happen up to seven days a week, okay?

01:03:57.580 | One version of this would be, okay,

01:03:59.940 | sit back in a chair and think about

01:04:02.300 | how great you're going to feel and look

01:04:03.740 | if you're doing this every day,

01:04:04.780 | how your health is going to improve,

01:04:06.300 | how everything's going to, your blood markers of lipids,

01:04:08.500 | et cetera, are going to improve, okay, fine.

01:04:10.420 | That's the visualization goal of visualizing the end point.

01:04:14.840 | Turns out that is far less effective

01:04:16.740 | and maybe even counterproductive

01:04:18.460 | compared to thinking about what's going to happen

01:04:20.940 | if you don't do this,

01:04:22.720 | the negative health outcomes that are going to occur,

01:04:25.020 | the disappointment you're going to have in yourself,

01:04:26.980 | the fact that you're going to wait until 7.30,

01:04:29.380 | that's not long enough for many people to run five miles,

01:04:32.140 | you got to put it on your shoes,

01:04:33.040 | it can be pouring rain or even hailing or snowing outside,

01:04:35.700 | and now you're not going outside unless you're somebody

01:04:37.540 | who's particularly motivated to do that, okay?

01:04:40.260 | So foreshadowing failure turns out to be the best way

01:04:43.620 | to motivate toward goal pursuit.

01:04:45.440 | In fact, as I mentioned before,

01:04:46.880 | there's a near doubling in the likelihood

01:04:48.620 | that people will reach goals of any kind

01:04:50.660 | when they're constantly thinking about

01:04:52.140 | how bad it's going to be if they fail.

01:04:54.460 | If we think back to the neural circuit

01:04:56.460 | associated with assessing value in our goal pursuits,

01:05:01.060 | this makes perfect sense.

01:05:02.060 | The amygdala, that center of the brain

01:05:03.780 | that's involved in anxiety and fear and worry,

01:05:06.280 | well, the amygdala is one of the four core components

01:05:09.340 | of our goal setting and goal pursuit circuitry,

01:05:12.540 | and there's no bypassing that,

01:05:14.100 | there is no one listening to this or watching this

01:05:16.820 | whose amygdala is not involved

01:05:18.460 | in their goal setting and goal pursuit,

01:05:20.480 | behavior, and so while I'd love to be able to tell you

01:05:23.020 | that all you should think about is rainbows and puppies

01:05:25.840 | and all the wonderful, rewarding things

01:05:27.700 | that are going to happen when you achieve your goals,

01:05:30.400 | the truth is you should be thinking mainly about

01:05:33.100 | how bad it's really going to get if you don't do it,

01:05:35.920 | how disappointing yourself you're going to feel,

01:05:37.820 | how it will negatively impact you,

01:05:40.420 | if not in the immediate term, in the longterm,

01:05:42.520 | if indeed your goal is to reach your goal.

01:05:44.980 | So I want to emphasize that I'm not interested

01:05:48.160 | in encouraging people to flagellate themselves,

01:05:50.540 | I'm encouraging people to achieve their goals,

01:05:54.260 | and it turns out the best way to do that

01:05:55.780 | is by foreshadowing failure,

01:05:57.520 | and the more specific you can get by writing down

01:06:00.820 | or thinking about or talking about how bad it will be

01:06:03.460 | if you don't achieve your goals,

01:06:04.780 | the more likely you are to achieve those goals.

01:06:07.740 | Part of the reason for that almost certainly has to do

01:06:10.880 | with increases in systolic blood pressure

01:06:13.100 | and increases in readiness in your system

01:06:15.700 | when you imagine failure.

01:06:16.900 | The brain and body are much better at moving away

01:06:20.940 | from fearful things than towards things we want.

01:06:23.340 | I wish I could tell you that wasn't the case,

01:06:24.900 | but there is a true asymmetry in the way we are built.

01:06:27.920 | In fact, the brain and body can engage

01:06:30.240 | in what's called one-trial learning.

01:06:31.640 | When something bad happens, we eat a food that makes us sick,

01:06:34.220 | we have an interaction with a person or place

01:06:36.020 | that we really don't like,

01:06:37.420 | it only takes one trial to really, one event, one time,

01:06:41.220 | to reorient or rewire our neural circuitry

01:06:43.800 | so that we have a bias toward moving away

01:06:45.380 | from that thing in the future.

01:06:46.780 | When things go well, unfortunately, that doesn't often occur.

01:06:50.300 | If things go really, really well,

01:06:51.820 | it might orient our brain and body

01:06:53.220 | toward wanting more of that thing

01:06:54.500 | and we'll have neural circuitry changes

01:06:56.180 | that will lead us to engage in that particular behavior

01:06:58.860 | or interaction again,

01:07:00.100 | but it is never as effective as these avoidance circuits.

01:07:04.300 | So again, foreshadow failure.

01:07:05.980 | If you're going to visualize in a positive way,

01:07:08.420 | do that at the very beginning of some goal pursuit,

01:07:10.580 | maybe intermittently every once in a while,

01:07:12.420 | you imagine the big win of scoring perfect on an exam

01:07:15.900 | or winning the championship or the great relationship.

01:07:18.060 | But most of the time, if you want to be effective,

01:07:20.400 | you should be focusing on avoiding failure

01:07:22.500 | and you should be really clear

01:07:23.460 | about what those failures would look like and feel like.

01:07:25.860 | Now let's talk about goal setting.

01:07:28.180 | Going back to that prominent literature,

01:07:30.060 | the psychology and popular literature again,

01:07:32.740 | we can hear some of these themes start to emerge.

01:07:35.640 | The goal should be significant, we are told.

01:07:38.620 | It should be inspirational.

01:07:40.500 | It should be aggressive yet realistic.

01:07:43.260 | Well, okay, that's all fine and good,

01:07:45.580 | but let's get semi-quantitative about this.

01:07:47.920 | Let's at least get biological about this.

01:07:50.240 | How inspirational does it need to be?

01:07:51.800 | Is does it need to be the kind of thing

01:07:53.080 | that is so inspiring to me that I can't sleep at all?

01:07:55.820 | Well, that wouldn't be good because I believe,

01:07:58.460 | and I know many of you have heard me say many,

01:08:00.360 | many times before, regular deep sleep,

01:08:03.120 | 80% or more of the nights that you go to sleep

01:08:05.140 | is going to be crucial to your cognitive

01:08:06.620 | and mental functioning and your ability

01:08:07.980 | to achieve your goals in the longterm.

01:08:09.740 | That's absolutely clear.

01:08:11.100 | So it's got to be inspirational and exciting,

01:08:13.660 | but what does that really look like?

01:08:15.200 | And what does that correspond to?

01:08:16.640 | And how do we actually make that happen?

01:08:18.780 | Well, once again, there is a mismatch

01:08:21.600 | between what the real data show

01:08:23.300 | and what we're most often told.

01:08:25.000 | Turns out that, again, work in Balsetto's lab,

01:08:29.620 | but also other laboratories has addressed

01:08:32.120 | whether or not the probability of achieving a goal

01:08:37.120 | goes up or down depending on whether or not

01:08:40.100 | one visualizes or sets a goal that is easy,

01:08:44.900 | moderate or impossible.

01:08:47.480 | Okay, an impossible goal would be, for instance,

01:08:49.720 | if I say, you know, I'm going to jump from my front driveway

01:08:53.860 | all the way up to the road,

01:08:55.160 | the road's quite a distance away,

01:08:56.560 | it's more than 20 meters away, it's just not going to happen.

01:08:58.560 | It's not going to happen in this lifetime,

01:08:59.640 | it's not going to happen in any other lifetime,

01:09:01.640 | not unless it involves some elaborate technology

01:09:04.200 | that I'm not aware of, a jet pack or something like that.

01:09:06.340 | It's just not going to happen, right?

01:09:08.420 | An easy goal would be something like, can you jump,

01:09:11.120 | or could I jump, you know, two feet in front of me?

01:09:12.900 | Obviously, yes.

01:09:13.740 | Okay, now I'm using a trivial example here,

01:09:15.440 | but this could be translated to any kind of goal,

01:09:17.500 | school goal, physical goal, et cetera.

01:09:19.840 | Turns out that when people set goals,

01:09:23.800 | whether or not they are nutritional goals,

01:09:26.320 | eat more of this or eat less of that,

01:09:28.120 | whether or not they're fitness goals,

01:09:29.600 | you know, run more, lift more,

01:09:30.760 | or some other goal, swim less, swim more,

01:09:33.400 | whatever it is their goal happens to be,

01:09:35.440 | some learning goal, some relationship goal,

01:09:38.440 | some attempt to modify their behavior,

01:09:41.000 | turns out that if the goal is too easy,

01:09:43.560 | it's too within reach,

01:09:45.320 | it doesn't recruit enough of the autonomic nervous system

01:09:49.240 | to make pursuit of that goal likely.

01:09:52.920 | Now that might be surprising.

01:09:54.180 | At least it was surprising to me.

01:09:55.240 | You think, well, something is really, really easy.

01:09:57.640 | You know, there's a very low bar to achieve it.

01:09:59.900 | People are probably more likely to do it,

01:10:01.640 | but it turns out that's not the case.

01:10:02.940 | When we hear that a goal needs to be inspirational,

01:10:04.980 | what do we mean?

01:10:05.920 | When we hear that something's too easy

01:10:07.260 | to recruit our action, what do we mean?

01:10:08.900 | Well, Balsettia's lab measures systolic blood pressure

01:10:12.200 | and found that when goals were too easy

01:10:14.760 | for people to attain,

01:10:15.960 | they didn't get that increase in systolic blood pressure

01:10:18.200 | and recruitment of the other neural and vascular systems,

01:10:20.680 | meaning the blood systems and the nervous system,

01:10:22.700 | that would place them into ongoing effort.

01:10:24.600 | And so they quickly gave up.

01:10:26.000 | Also, if a goal was too lofty,

01:10:29.880 | if it was too far from their current abilities,

01:10:32.440 | it didn't recruit enough systolic blood pressure.

01:10:36.220 | Even if people could get very excited

01:10:38.360 | about something mentally,

01:10:39.780 | it simply didn't place their body into a state of readiness

01:10:42.860 | because it wasn't tangible that they could actually

01:10:45.460 | perhaps really achieve it.

01:10:47.540 | So it turns out that when goals were moderate,

01:10:51.060 | when they were just outside of one's immediate abilities,

01:10:54.200 | or that one felt that, yeah, that would take a lot of effort,

01:10:57.100 | but it's within range or maybe in range,

01:11:00.460 | like maybe I can do it, maybe I can't,

01:11:02.980 | then there was a near doubling

01:11:05.940 | of the systolic blood pressure in the good sense.

01:11:08.220 | It didn't go into the unhealthy range

01:11:10.240 | and a doubling or more of the likelihood

01:11:13.640 | that they would engage in the ongoing pursuit

01:11:17.000 | of that particular goal.

01:11:18.400 | So here we're talking about goal setting.

01:11:19.760 | What we're saying is set goals that are realistic,

01:11:23.000 | but that aren't so realistic that they're easy.

01:11:26.460 | The goals need to be realistic and truly challenging.

01:11:29.900 | Don't set goals that are so challenging and so lofty

01:11:33.100 | that they crash that blood pressure system

01:11:36.480 | in the other direction and make you

01:11:38.420 | or anyone feel unmotivated.

01:11:40.260 | In hearing this, it makes sense,

01:11:41.600 | but I don't think I would have predicted it

01:11:43.120 | had they not done this very controlled study.

01:11:45.700 | I would have thought the loftier the goal,

01:11:47.780 | the bigger the goal,

01:11:48.820 | the more that it recruits the autonomic system

01:11:51.300 | and the more that people are likely to lean into the energy

01:11:54.180 | and effort to pursue and attain that goal.

01:11:57.020 | I also would have thought that if a goal

01:11:58.720 | is really easy to achieve,

01:12:00.740 | that it would engage the systems of action

01:12:04.100 | in the brain and body enough

01:12:05.140 | that people would sort of get into motion

01:12:06.740 | and pursue that goal.

01:12:07.580 | But neither is the case.

01:12:08.540 | Again, set goals that are difficult to achieve,

01:12:12.740 | but that are not so lofty that they collapse your system

01:12:17.180 | and that you feel overwhelmed.

01:12:18.440 | And the important thing here is that how we perceive a goal,

01:12:22.200 | whether or not we think it's within reach or not,

01:12:24.300 | of course will vary depending on whether or not we are

01:12:26.820 | rested, depending on whether or not other aspects

01:12:28.880 | of our life are going well.

01:12:30.300 | I mean, we can think that we are hot on the heels

01:12:33.020 | of a lifetime goal and everything's going well.

01:12:36.660 | And then there'll be some crisis, interpersonal crisis,

01:12:39.300 | or there'll be a health crisis and you'll be shut down.

01:12:41.540 | And then that goal seems very, very hard to attain.

01:12:44.140 | So we will talk about how to update goals

01:12:46.560 | under different contexts in a few minutes.

01:12:48.500 | But of course, this is going to be an averaging.

01:12:50.740 | This isn't something that you do just once.

01:12:52.660 | But the takeaway again is very simple,

01:12:54.180 | set goals that are moderately hard to hard,

01:12:56.980 | but not so hard nor so easy

01:12:59.460 | that they don't engage your brain and body properly.

01:13:02.380 | Moderate goals are best if you want to achieve your goals.

01:13:06.220 | Now I'd like to talk about three particular areas

01:13:08.380 | of scientific study that point to goal pursuit,

01:13:12.180 | goal assessment, and goal achievement.

01:13:14.220 | Previously, I told you that it's great to foreshadow failure

01:13:20.540 | that that's a great way to get your system

01:13:22.120 | into a state of activation.

01:13:23.420 | I also told you that you want to set goals

01:13:26.060 | that are challenging, but possible.

01:13:27.540 | And again, here I'm paraphrasing

01:13:29.180 | from the work of Emily Balcettas.

01:13:30.700 | I want to be very clear.

01:13:32.660 | There are a few other things that one can do

01:13:35.640 | in order to bias the likelihood that you will succeed

01:13:39.380 | in trying to achieve your goals.

01:13:41.100 | First of all, limit your options.

01:13:44.520 | Trying to pursue too many goals at once

01:13:46.780 | can definitely be counterproductive.

01:13:48.380 | Now I realize that life is complicated.

01:13:50.780 | We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue.

01:13:53.220 | But if we have particular goals that are important to us,

01:13:56.180 | we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals.

01:13:59.300 | And many people run into this problem.

01:14:01.060 | So setting one or two or maybe three major goals

01:14:05.260 | for a given year is going to be more than enough

01:14:07.780 | for most people and is actually going to be challenging

01:14:10.020 | for most people.

01:14:11.060 | Now, of course, we have daily goals and monthly goals

01:14:12.980 | and yearly goals, but if we have big lofty goals,

01:14:15.820 | we need to be careful not to contaminate our mental space

01:14:18.660 | and our visual space with too many goals.

01:14:20.500 | And why do I say visual goals?

01:14:22.220 | Well, what various department stores and supermarkets

01:14:26.480 | have discovered is that the greater the number of things

01:14:31.060 | in our visual attention,

01:14:32.700 | the more that we can draw our attention and our goals

01:14:36.320 | off a line of pursuit.

01:14:37.660 | What does that mean?

01:14:38.760 | Well, let's think about it in the practical context.

01:14:40.620 | This has actually been done.

01:14:42.180 | Big department stores have figured out

01:14:43.980 | that if they stock their shelves chock-a-block

01:14:46.460 | with many, many options of food or clothing items

01:14:50.040 | or objects or anything like that,

01:14:51.960 | people simply buy more stuff.

01:14:54.880 | People are very prone to orienting their attention

01:14:58.660 | to whatever's in front of them.

01:14:59.780 | You put a lot of stuff in front of them,

01:15:00.980 | their attention drifts.

01:15:01.820 | You put fewer things in front of them,

01:15:03.700 | their attention is more narrow.

01:15:05.920 | In a later episode, we'll talk about designing a workspace

01:15:08.980 | that's optimized on the basis of this.

01:15:11.020 | It doesn't mean being in a room with nothing

01:15:12.880 | except just your desk and a computer.

01:15:14.760 | It doesn't have to be that sparse,

01:15:16.920 | but visual sparseness actually can help us orient our focus

01:15:21.920 | and our behavior.

01:15:23.100 | When we have a lot of things in our visual environment

01:15:25.100 | or a lot of things in our cognitive environment,

01:15:27.120 | it's the same thing.

01:15:28.300 | And so if you're going to try and pursue a fitness goal,

01:15:30.920 | a relationship goal, an academic goal,

01:15:33.060 | and a long-term life financial goal all at once,

01:15:35.300 | that's four things.

01:15:36.460 | And you're going to have to come up with systems

01:15:38.140 | that allow you to isolate those goals in a very rigid way.

01:15:42.540 | And if you do have multiple interleaving goals

01:15:45.020 | and overlapping goals and simultaneous goals,

01:15:47.820 | in a few minutes, we're going to talk about a process

01:15:49.580 | that will allow you to use your visual system

01:15:52.080 | to align towards each of those goals sequentially

01:15:55.000 | in a way that makes it much more likely

01:15:56.820 | that you'll achieve them.

01:15:57.960 | So now let's talk about specificity of goals.

01:16:01.160 | We've all heard that the more specific a goal is

01:16:03.680 | and the more specific we are about

01:16:05.620 | when and how we are going to execute that goal,

01:16:08.540 | the higher probability

01:16:09.580 | that we will actually achieve that goal.

01:16:12.340 | And indeed that's the case,

01:16:13.420 | but there's an additional feature

01:16:14.980 | that's not often discussed that is vitally important

01:16:18.220 | and in fact, maybe more important

01:16:20.380 | than having a specific time of day

01:16:23.200 | or a specific end point in mind.

01:16:25.080 | There's a really nice study

01:16:26.800 | that was done looking at recycling.

01:16:29.420 | And this is something that a number of groups,

01:16:31.520 | businesses, households, and individuals

01:16:33.240 | are trying to do more of.

01:16:34.680 | They're trying to lower carbon footprint

01:16:36.200 | or contribute to the world in some general way

01:16:39.420 | by throwing away fewer things

01:16:41.760 | that could potentially be recycled.

01:16:44.840 | So this has been studied

01:16:45.840 | in the context of the work environment

01:16:48.080 | where a business decides and lets everybody know

01:16:52.360 | that there's going to be a greater effort

01:16:54.600 | toward recycling cans or bottles

01:16:57.000 | or bottles and cans, et cetera.

01:16:58.720 | And then the way these studies were done

01:17:00.900 | is that the janitorial staff was swapped out temporarily

01:17:04.940 | for researchers that actually measured

01:17:06.740 | the number of recyclable items

01:17:09.140 | that showed up in the trash and not in the recycle

01:17:13.280 | as a function of the total amount of trash.

01:17:14.780 | Why did I say as a function of the total amount of trash?

01:17:16.340 | Well, it's a way of controlling for differences

01:17:18.600 | in beverage consumption from one week to the next.

01:17:20.440 | Anyway, the point is they were able

01:17:22.600 | to very carefully measure how much people are recycling

01:17:27.120 | before and after this call to action to recycle more.

01:17:31.300 | What they found was if they said,

01:17:33.660 | we are going to try and recycle more,

01:17:35.480 | try not to put cans and bottles in the trash,

01:17:38.180 | there of course was an improvement in recycling,

01:17:41.360 | but it was pretty modest.

01:17:43.260 | Whereas when there was a very concrete plan

01:17:46.580 | and everyone knew what that concrete plan was,

01:17:48.760 | for instance, to place all bottles and cans

01:17:51.360 | into the recycle, not the trash,

01:17:53.320 | or to limit the amount of trash by 50%

01:17:57.820 | or to eliminate all recyclable items from the trash.

01:18:01.180 | So when they made it very concrete,

01:18:02.920 | exactly what the action steps were,

01:18:05.880 | there was a remarkable, I mean,

01:18:07.680 | close to a hundred fold or more improvement

01:18:10.800 | in recycling behavior that lasted many months

01:18:14.840 | after this call to action was made.

01:18:17.620 | The takeaway from this is quite straightforward.

01:18:19.460 | It means that having a concrete plan is essential.

01:18:22.740 | You can't just say, I'm going to become a better recycler,

01:18:25.200 | or I'm going to do things that are better for the environment

01:18:27.280 | or I'm going to become more physically fit.

01:18:29.640 | It has to be a specific set of action steps

01:18:33.240 | that get right down to details

01:18:35.120 | about what success would look like.

01:18:37.760 | I've heard this before described

01:18:39.040 | as what does right look like?

01:18:40.840 | What is the actual outcome that one would like to achieve

01:18:44.040 | in terms of action steps?

01:18:45.720 | So not necessarily feeling states.

01:18:47.480 | It wasn't that they all sat around and said,

01:18:48.860 | how great we're all going to feel about ourselves

01:18:50.400 | and the world when we accomplish this goal.

01:18:52.480 | It was very concrete statements,

01:18:54.680 | very concrete plans about action steps

01:18:57.600 | that would deliver one to one's goal.

01:18:59.520 | Somewhat straightforward and intuitive,

01:19:01.520 | but nonetheless worthwhile.

01:19:03.700 | What it suggests is that for all of us,

01:19:05.800 | if we have certain goals that we want to achieve,

01:19:08.020 | we need to be exquisitely detailed

01:19:10.840 | about what the action steps are that we're going to take

01:19:13.560 | and to constantly update those action steps

01:19:15.900 | so that we have a higher probability

01:19:17.420 | of meeting those action steps.

01:19:19.200 | Some of you may be asking,

01:19:20.460 | how often should one assess progress?

01:19:24.240 | Well, that of course will depend on the given goal

01:19:26.320 | that you're trying to pursue.

01:19:27.640 | But in the studies that I've been referring to here,

01:19:30.940 | the assessment of progress

01:19:32.480 | and the updating of concrete plans was done weekly.

01:19:35.900 | So it seems like weekly is a good starting place

01:19:38.760 | to address how well one performed in the previous week

01:19:42.080 | and then based on that performance

01:19:43.960 | to update the action plan for the upcoming week.

01:19:46.680 | So weekly seems like a good solid rule of thumb

01:19:49.880 | for setting particular action goals

01:19:52.560 | and assessing one's progress

01:19:54.720 | towards the immediate and longer term goals.

01:19:57.400 | Any discussion about goals and goal pursuit

01:20:00.360 | would be incomplete without a discussion

01:20:02.320 | about the molecule dopamine.

01:20:05.160 | Dopamine is often thought of

01:20:06.600 | as the molecule of pleasure and reward,

01:20:09.000 | but actually it is the molecule of motivation.

01:20:12.560 | This is best illustrated by a classic set of studies

01:20:15.580 | that have been carried out in both animals and in humans.

01:20:18.640 | The animal study can be described the following way.

01:20:22.060 | Two rats, each in a separate cage.

01:20:24.560 | You can provide those rats with the opportunity

01:20:27.000 | to indulge in something that they like,

01:20:29.220 | like food or mating or heat if it's cold in the environment

01:20:34.260 | or a cool spot in the cage,

01:20:36.740 | if it's warm in the environment and so forth.

01:20:39.560 | And what you find is that rats will very readily approach

01:20:43.820 | the rewarding thing.

01:20:46.160 | They will mate, they will eat,

01:20:47.920 | they will pursue something that is of pleasure.

01:20:51.880 | Now, if you are to take one of those rats

01:20:54.280 | and deplete its dopamine neurons,

01:20:56.200 | you can eliminate its dopamine neurons

01:20:57.780 | or block dopamine in the brain.

01:20:59.960 | What you find is that those animals

01:21:02.140 | will still enjoy pleasure.

01:21:05.720 | They will consume the food, they will mate, et cetera.

01:21:08.560 | However, their motivation to achieve pleasure

01:21:12.760 | is vastly reduced.

01:21:14.700 | In fact, if you place the item of pleasure,

01:21:17.240 | the mate, the food, et cetera,

01:21:19.320 | even just one rat's length away from that rat,

01:21:22.600 | the rat without dopamine will not even move

01:21:25.120 | one length of its own body

01:21:27.000 | in order to achieve that pleasure.

01:21:29.000 | And there are naturally occurring experiments in humans

01:21:31.280 | that mimic that result very accurately.

01:21:34.060 | There are certain conditions in humans

01:21:36.220 | where there's a depletion of dopamine.

01:21:37.820 | And what you find is that the depletion of dopamine

01:21:40.820 | does not inhibit an ability

01:21:42.740 | to experience pleasure necessarily.

01:21:45.100 | It inhibits an ability to pursue

01:21:47.460 | or go through the series of action steps

01:21:49.900 | in order to achieve pleasure.

01:21:52.080 | So dopamine really sits at the heart

01:21:54.240 | of our motivational state to seek out goals

01:21:57.940 | and to seek pleasure.

01:21:59.100 | And this is true for immediate goals

01:22:01.240 | that take place within a timeframe of minutes

01:22:04.360 | or a timeframe of a day or the timeframe of a week

01:22:06.760 | or the timeframe of a lifetime.

01:22:09.000 | Dopamine is the common currency by which we pursue goals.

01:22:12.960 | Now, dopamine does a number of things

01:22:15.120 | that are very interesting.

01:22:16.620 | I'm going to describe a few of them

01:22:17.920 | as they relate to goal-seeking behavior.

01:22:20.720 | First of all, there's a fundamental feature

01:22:23.560 | of how our brain releases and uses dopamine

01:22:27.680 | that's called reward prediction error.

01:22:29.640 | And the simplest way to think about dopamine

01:22:31.440 | reward prediction error

01:22:33.160 | is that dopamine is released in the greatest amount

01:22:36.760 | and places us into a greater state of motivation

01:22:40.440 | when something happens that's positive and novel.

01:22:44.640 | Now, an important thing to understand about dopamine

01:22:46.840 | is that it's not always released on the same schedule.

01:22:51.520 | There are a couple of different ways

01:22:52.480 | that dopamine is released.

01:22:53.600 | And when it is released relative to your anticipation

01:22:57.640 | of a reward is key.

01:23:00.080 | If you don't expect something positive to happen,

01:23:03.000 | you're just going about your day

01:23:04.220 | and something positive happens,

01:23:05.900 | dopamine and a lot of dopamine is released.

01:23:09.400 | I had this happen recently.

01:23:10.560 | I had no idea that I was going to be receiving

01:23:13.120 | something in the mail, but I went to the mail,

01:23:16.080 | I looked in the mail and I got something very positive

01:23:18.720 | and I was really, really excited about that.

01:23:20.400 | This is a real event that happened just today.

01:23:23.060 | However, if we anticipate something positive

01:23:26.880 | is going to happen, and then that thing happens,

01:23:29.740 | we experienced dopamine as part of the anticipation.

01:23:34.320 | So even before we get the reward,

01:23:36.460 | there's an increase in dopamine.

01:23:38.280 | It's not as high as it would be if something really novel

01:23:41.840 | and unexpected and positive happened,

01:23:43.720 | but we do get an increase in dopamine.

01:23:45.440 | And then when we actually experienced the reward,

01:23:49.340 | we experienced the positive thing,

01:23:51.100 | there's a smaller increase in dopamine.

01:23:53.360 | So again, the biggest increases in dopamine

01:23:55.320 | are response to things that are positive and unexpected.

01:23:59.520 | Lesser dopamine is released

01:24:01.880 | when we anticipate something good will happen.

01:24:04.840 | And when that happens, yes, we get some dopamine

01:24:07.280 | and we also get some dopamine

01:24:08.540 | when the positive thing happens.

01:24:09.720 | Think about anticipating a great meal with friends.

01:24:12.020 | We have some dopamine churning, friends come over,

01:24:14.360 | then we have the meal and we also get some dopamine

01:24:16.480 | from that, but not nearly as much as we would

01:24:19.160 | if it had all happened as a part of a big surprise.

01:24:22.480 | Then there's also the case in which we predict

01:24:24.920 | that something good will happen.

01:24:27.100 | When that happens, there's an increase in dopamine

01:24:29.160 | just as there was before.

01:24:30.640 | But then if that thing doesn't happen,

01:24:32.200 | for instance, our friends don't show up for dinner,

01:24:34.300 | then there's a drop in dopamine below our initial baseline.

01:24:38.380 | That drop in dopamine is the chemical essence

01:24:41.240 | of what we call disappointment.

01:24:43.600 | Now, this dopamine reward prediction error, as it's called,

01:24:47.660 | can be leveraged toward trying to reach our goals

01:24:50.920 | because it tells us where we should set our milestones.

01:24:55.440 | We can't be in a mode of simply being focused

01:24:58.680 | on the finish line.

01:25:00.240 | Very few people can do that over long periods of time

01:25:04.340 | in a way that's effective.

01:25:05.400 | Now, earlier I talked about a study

01:25:06.760 | where people were focused on a finish line visually

01:25:09.080 | and they were moving through space

01:25:10.400 | with these ankle weights on,

01:25:11.560 | but that was a very short-term goal, okay?

01:25:13.780 | So if a goal is within minutes or maybe even within an hour

01:25:17.480 | or is in with our immediate visuals environment,

01:25:20.360 | maybe we can do that.

01:25:21.620 | But most goals of the sort that most people are pursuing,

01:25:24.460 | fitness goals, academic goals, business goals,

01:25:26.300 | relationship goals, et cetera, involve some milestones.

01:25:29.940 | So understanding what we know about reward prediction error,

01:25:34.280 | we can make better choices

01:25:35.840 | about where to place the milestones,

01:25:37.920 | how far out in the future to place milestones.

01:25:41.180 | So then the question becomes how often

01:25:43.440 | or at what intervals should one assess progress?

01:25:47.240 | And it turns out this is very subjective,

01:25:49.100 | but that there's a way to make it objective.

01:25:51.760 | Now, in a previous episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

01:25:56.280 | I had a discussion with the great Robert Sapolsky.

01:25:58.960 | And we were talking about how the brain

01:26:01.360 | can subjectively change whether or not a given behavior

01:26:04.540 | or experience is positive or negative.

01:26:06.520 | And the example that Robert gave is a really phenomenal one.

01:26:10.400 | It's a study that's been done in rats and also in humans,

01:26:13.140 | where it took a rat and they had a rat

01:26:14.800 | run on a running wheel.

01:26:15.740 | Rats, turns out, like to run on running wheels.

01:26:18.720 | And the blood pressure of that animal,

01:26:20.840 | the health metrics for that animal, the lipid profiles,

01:26:23.800 | many, many things improved.

01:26:25.440 | Okay, the rat was exercising and it got healthier

01:26:27.500 | and presumably got happier.

01:26:28.560 | We don't know.

01:26:29.400 | We could have asked it, but we wouldn't know.

01:26:31.380 | Doesn't know how to tell us, but we can measure blood lipids.

01:26:33.700 | We can measure blood pressure and all sorts of things.

01:26:36.160 | And indeed, when that rat exercised

01:26:38.720 | or when people exercise, they generally get healthier.

01:26:42.080 | Except in that particular experiment,

01:26:44.240 | they had another animal where every time rat number one ran,

01:26:49.240 | rat number two was forced to run.

01:26:53.480 | It was on a running wheel and it was forced to run,

01:26:55.440 | not because it wanted to, but because it was forced to.

01:26:58.640 | And what was remarkable is that the physiological effects

01:27:01.720 | of being forced to do something

01:27:03.720 | were in the complete opposite direction as they were

01:27:06.560 | when those same behaviors were undertaken voluntarily.

01:27:09.560 | In other words, the rat that was choosing to run

01:27:12.180 | got healthier and the rat that was forced to run

01:27:15.400 | became unhealthy.

01:27:16.480 | Blood pressure went up in a direction

01:27:18.100 | that wasn't effective and useful.

01:27:19.720 | Blood lipids got worse.

01:27:20.860 | Stress hormones went up, et cetera, et cetera.

01:27:22.880 | And you see the same thing in humans.

01:27:25.020 | Now, what this says is that our subjective understanding

01:27:29.920 | of why we are doing something is fundamentally important

01:27:33.840 | for the effects that we will get from that behavior.

01:27:36.560 | And indeed the effects that that behavior will have on us.

01:27:39.560 | So this has two major implications.

01:27:41.480 | First of all, in terms of reward schedules,

01:27:44.040 | we can decide to use any reward schedule

01:27:46.560 | that we want for a given behavior.

01:27:48.420 | We can decide that the milestones for a,

01:27:51.580 | let's say a plan of getting in really terrific

01:27:54.040 | cardiovascular shape over the next year,

01:27:56.100 | we can decide to assess every day and ask ourselves,

01:28:00.440 | how good was our progress?

01:28:01.560 | And if we made progress,

01:28:02.560 | then we're going to reward ourselves.

01:28:03.740 | We could do that every third day.

01:28:05.420 | We could do it every week.

01:28:06.760 | We could do it every five minutes

01:28:08.140 | if we actually had the time to do that.

01:28:10.200 | The reward schedule, the dopamine system

01:28:12.760 | is highly susceptible to the subjective effects,

01:28:15.960 | the so-called top-down effects of when we decide

01:28:18.640 | that something is going to be good for us,

01:28:20.640 | if we analyze it on a given timeframe,

01:28:23.160 | well, then it's going to be good for us.

01:28:25.320 | So what I suggest people do is pick a particular interval

01:28:29.000 | at which they are going to assess progress.

01:28:31.040 | And if you've been making regular progress towards a goal

01:28:34.320 | that you reward yourself and the reward indeed

01:28:37.000 | is all cognitive, it's all mental.

01:28:39.320 | It's telling yourself, yes, I'm on the right track.

01:28:42.100 | Now, some people will say, wait,

01:28:44.320 | but I want to know exactly how often I should do that.

01:28:46.760 | You need to do that at an interval

01:28:49.040 | that you can maintain consistently, okay?

01:28:51.580 | So you're not going to reward yourself every minute

01:28:54.440 | or every step of every jog that you take,

01:28:56.880 | unless you can do it every minute of every step

01:28:58.760 | of every jog that you take.

01:29:00.040 | For that reason, I think that daily

01:29:02.720 | or ideally weekly assessments are going to be best.

01:29:05.780 | I think that checking in at the end of a week,

01:29:07.380 | looking back on the previous week

01:29:08.840 | and assessing how well you performed

01:29:11.120 | in pursuit of a given goal,

01:29:12.740 | how many times a week you ran

01:29:14.520 | or how many times you studied

01:29:15.760 | or how many times you did something that you wanted to do

01:29:17.760 | or avoided something that you didn't want to do.

01:29:19.760 | I think that's a reasonable and tractable schedule

01:29:24.300 | to assess once a week.

01:29:26.640 | So that's one point that pick a milestone

01:29:29.840 | that you can maintain consistently

01:29:31.640 | throughout the pursuit of a goal.

01:29:33.880 | The second thing is that the subjective effects

01:29:37.560 | that were described by that Sapolsky study

01:29:40.080 | or that Sapolsky described rather

01:29:41.880 | are absolutely essential

01:29:44.840 | for all aspects of goal-seeking behavior.

01:29:47.360 | We cannot underestimate the extent

01:29:49.440 | to which the dopamine system

01:29:51.040 | and our sense of whether or not we are on the right track

01:29:53.520 | is under our cognitive control.

01:29:56.020 | If we constantly place ourselves

01:29:58.440 | into a mode of thinking that we are failing,

01:30:01.380 | well, then indeed,

01:30:02.880 | we are not going to churn out much dopamine.

01:30:05.000 | Now, earlier I said we need to predict

01:30:07.160 | and visualize failure,

01:30:08.860 | but that is not the same thing

01:30:10.680 | as thinking about ourselves as failing.

01:30:13.280 | We need to predict what the outcome would be if we failed,

01:30:16.940 | but then encountering that

01:30:18.880 | and in behaving in a certain way

01:30:20.540 | and thinking in a certain way

01:30:21.560 | and pursuing our goals in an effective way,

01:30:24.700 | maybe checking in on that each week,

01:30:26.480 | we definitely need to reward ourselves cognitively

01:30:29.620 | for the correct and successful pursuit.

01:30:32.680 | What this means is that anticipate and think about failure

01:30:35.640 | as a mechanism of generating motivation

01:30:38.080 | and indeed fear and anxiety

01:30:39.620 | so that you lean into the correct behaviors

01:30:41.560 | and you lean away from the incorrect behaviors

01:30:43.640 | to reach your goal.

01:30:44.800 | But then weekly or so,

01:30:46.500 | whatever you can maintain consistently,

01:30:48.700 | you absolutely want to reward yourself cognitively

01:30:51.500 | by telling yourself I'm on the right track.

01:30:53.480 | I got another week where I accomplished

01:30:55.620 | whatever it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

01:30:57.800 | A concrete example that I'm following now

01:30:59.540 | is this 150 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio per week

01:31:02.500 | because that's shown to be very effective

01:31:04.280 | in improving mental and physical health metrics.

01:31:07.540 | So once a week, I'll check in with myself.

01:31:09.200 | If I reach that 150 to 200 minute threshold,

01:31:13.240 | then I'll reward myself simply by checking off a box

01:31:15.780 | and saying, okay, I'm on track, I'm on track, I'm on track.

01:31:19.020 | This dopamine system is critical to re-up,

01:31:22.160 | to remind ourselves that we are on track

01:31:24.000 | if indeed we are on track

01:31:25.680 | because dopamine itself provides a state of motivation

01:31:30.040 | and readiness to continue

01:31:31.640 | in the regular pursuit of our goals.

01:31:34.360 | Dopamine, the molecule is actually used

01:31:38.260 | to manufacture epinephrine and norepinephrine,

01:31:40.800 | which are other molecules in our brain and body

01:31:43.000 | which put us into that readiness and action state.

01:31:45.420 | They're actually the molecules that help generate

01:31:47.200 | that increase in systolic blood pressure

01:31:49.280 | that puts us into a state of readiness.

01:31:51.860 | So you can think about dopamine as a self-amplifying system

01:31:55.740 | provided that you are leveraging the dopamine system

01:31:59.640 | on a consistent schedule.

01:32:01.800 | Now, by also following a consistent schedule of self-reward,

01:32:05.200 | you set yourself up for any positive unanticipated rewards

01:32:09.600 | that may happen.

01:32:10.560 | So for instance, if you're checking in with yourself weekly,

01:32:13.400 | telling yourself that you're doing well if indeed you are,

01:32:15.800 | and then out of nowhere, for instance, you're out on a run

01:32:19.140 | or you're doing something, I'm using fitness as an example,

01:32:21.280 | but you're doing something,

01:32:22.120 | you find yourself performing particularly well,

01:32:24.200 | that's a unexpected dopamine reward

01:32:26.960 | that will further amplify the system.

01:32:29.380 | Now, I know many people out there

01:32:31.000 | having heard me talk about dopamine before worry,

01:32:33.300 | well, can I release too much dopamine?

01:32:35.340 | And then the whole system will crash

01:32:36.760 | and then I'll run out of motivation.

01:32:38.520 | In general, that doesn't happen

01:32:40.320 | unless people are using pharmacology supplements

01:32:43.280 | or prescription drugs or illicit drugs to increase dopamine.

01:32:46.640 | This is why I'm a big fan of things like cold showers

01:32:50.000 | and cold water exposure,

01:32:51.720 | which has been shown to lead to long lasting

01:32:53.980 | 2.5 X increases in dopamine,

01:32:57.480 | or in some cases supplementation with things like L-tyrosine

01:33:00.360 | which are precursors to dopamine,

01:33:01.960 | or in some cases caffeine

01:33:03.080 | which can increase the number of dopamine receptors

01:33:05.280 | that we have so that whatever dopamine we have

01:33:07.140 | floating around can be more effective

01:33:09.260 | in activating these motivational states.

01:33:11.920 | But things that really increase dopamine

01:33:14.920 | and then cause it to crash can be problematic.

01:33:17.480 | One way to conceive of dopamine

01:33:19.120 | is as a sort of dopamine wave pool.

01:33:21.400 | You've probably seen these wave pools

01:33:22.640 | where some pressure is pushed into the pool

01:33:24.920 | and then you get these waves going.

01:33:26.380 | If those waves are consistent enough

01:33:29.260 | and they're of high enough amplitude,

01:33:31.040 | the waves can continue to go up and down and up and down.

01:33:35.100 | But if it's a giant wave,

01:33:36.560 | if you get a huge blast of dopamine,

01:33:39.000 | well then a bunch of the water sloshes out of the wave pool

01:33:41.820 | and then you basically have to take some time off,

01:33:44.400 | reset that dopamine level.

01:33:45.780 | That's what happens in addiction

01:33:47.000 | and when people start pushing in a lot of drugs

01:33:50.800 | or other things into the system

01:33:51.900 | that increase dopamine too much.

01:33:53.820 | So today we've almost exclusively

01:33:55.320 | been talking about behavioral tools.

01:33:57.720 | It is possible to incorporate supplements

01:34:00.680 | and things of that sort that can increase dopamine

01:34:02.520 | as a way to getting into ongoing motivational states.

01:34:06.120 | But I caution people about relying on those too much.

01:34:09.800 | Really what you want is you want a situation

01:34:12.520 | where your own positive feedback,

01:34:14.500 | your own understanding that you are reaching the milestones

01:34:17.080 | that you've set out for yourself,

01:34:19.160 | that you're achieving those

01:34:20.640 | and that is what's causing these waves

01:34:22.520 | or these increases in dopamine

01:34:23.860 | that will further amplify your motivational states.

01:34:26.880 | Another very interesting aspect of dopamine

01:34:29.280 | that I've not talked about at all on this podcast before

01:34:32.360 | is actually how the dopamine system

01:34:34.440 | interacts with the visual system.

01:34:36.680 | We've talked a lot about how harnessing your visual attention

01:34:39.220 | to a particular point is great

01:34:41.440 | and can help serve your ability

01:34:43.800 | to both set and achieve goals.

01:34:46.960 | Really wonderful work that was done by Wolfram Schultz,

01:34:50.820 | who's one of the great pioneers in this area of dopamine

01:34:53.680 | and dopamine reward prediction error,

01:34:55.720 | showed that for people that have normal levels of dopamine,

01:34:58.880 | their visual search,

01:34:59.960 | meaning how they scanned visual environments

01:35:01.720 | tends to be pretty constrained.

01:35:03.020 | They might move their eyes

01:35:04.040 | around a particular visual environment searching somewhat.

01:35:07.060 | For people that lack dopamine,

01:35:10.740 | they actually have very little movement of their eyes.

01:35:13.320 | They don't actually tend to look very far into the horizon.

01:35:16.320 | They don't have that very focused vergence point

01:35:18.660 | that we're talking about that kind of,

01:35:19.960 | I guess for lack of a better phrase,

01:35:21.200 | that kind of eye of the tiger focus on a goal.

01:35:23.460 | Rather their eye movements are depleted

01:35:26.700 | and they're not actually evaluating horizons

01:35:29.160 | off in their future.

01:35:30.100 | They're not focused so much on the extra personal space.

01:35:34.060 | And this actually can be restored

01:35:35.780 | in some of these that took place in Parkinson's patients

01:35:38.360 | and other people who have dopamine depleted,

01:35:40.360 | that when dopamine is restored pharmacologically,

01:35:43.480 | their visual focus is re-enhanced again.

01:35:46.880 | Now, there are a lot of details to this study

01:35:48.700 | that don't map perfectly onto everything

01:35:50.280 | that I've talked about.

01:35:51.220 | But the point is this,

01:35:52.700 | when we are focused on a particular point in visual space

01:35:55.920 | or a particular goal or horizon,

01:35:59.060 | all those systems, our blood pressure, epinephrine,

01:36:01.820 | and indeed dopamine get recruited

01:36:03.880 | to put us into a state of readiness and willingness

01:36:06.600 | to go pursue things in that extra personal space.

01:36:10.000 | When our visual attention is very diffuse,

01:36:13.200 | all of that relaxes and we tend to be more comfortable

01:36:15.880 | staying in the place that we are in our peripersonal space.

01:36:19.920 | And the effect works in the other direction too.

01:36:23.020 | When dopamine is increased,

01:36:24.780 | our visual attention for particular things

01:36:26.820 | out in space increase.

01:36:28.300 | So the way it works is reciprocal.

01:36:30.920 | When we use our visual system in a particular way,

01:36:34.040 | bring it to a point of focus,

01:36:35.220 | it recruits chemical and neural systems

01:36:37.240 | in our brain and body

01:36:38.080 | that put us into a state of readiness and pursuit.

01:36:40.820 | And when we increase certain chemicals in our brain and body

01:36:45.360 | like epinephrine, like dopamine,

01:36:47.300 | then we also allow our visual system

01:36:50.440 | to be in a state of looking out at particular locations

01:36:54.100 | in our visual world.

01:36:55.260 | So the system works in both directions.

01:36:57.420 | And some people leverage this by using things like caffeine

01:37:00.300 | or taking things like L-tyrosine to increase dopamine.

01:37:03.020 | And again, it works both ways.

01:37:04.500 | There's no right or wrong way to do it.

01:37:06.380 | I'm a particular fan of using behavioral tools

01:37:09.580 | always prior to using supplementation

01:37:12.900 | or any kinds of other tools

01:37:14.380 | because behavioral tools have a very unique feature

01:37:16.900 | that supplementation and other chemical tools don't,

01:37:20.260 | which is that behavioral tools used over time

01:37:23.260 | engage neuroplasticity.

01:37:25.040 | As we start to practice using our visual system

01:37:27.580 | to harness our attention to particular locations

01:37:29.660 | and in that way move toward particular goals,

01:37:31.920 | we get better and better at using those systems.

01:37:34.120 | In fact, the systems for focus and motivation

01:37:36.860 | themselves have plasticity.

01:37:38.140 | So we get better at being motivated and focused

01:37:40.940 | when we place our visual attention at a given location.

01:37:44.380 | Using chemical assistance of a safe kind,

01:37:47.100 | of course, check with your doctor,

01:37:48.220 | but things like L-tyrosine or caffeine or those combined,

01:37:50.800 | yes, it will increase dopamine

01:37:52.300 | and will increase our ability

01:37:53.820 | to engage in visual focus somewhat.

01:37:55.980 | But those compounds alone don't modify the circuitry

01:37:59.460 | in the way that we want.

01:38:00.500 | So I always say behavioral tools first,

01:38:02.820 | then nutritional tools, then supplementation tools,

01:38:05.060 | and then if it's right for you and safe,

01:38:06.940 | maybe you advance into some of the other

01:38:08.340 | more sophisticated tools.

01:38:09.940 | I'd like to just briefly recap

01:38:11.380 | what I've covered up until now.

01:38:13.020 | And again, emphasize that much of what I've covered

01:38:14.980 | has been based on the beautiful work

01:38:16.380 | of Emily Balcetas and colleagues.

01:38:18.220 | I do hope to get her as a guest on the podcast, by the way.

01:38:21.360 | First of all, set goals that are challenging but possible.

01:38:24.500 | Those moderate goals, not super easy, not super difficult,

01:38:27.780 | but moderately challenging goals

01:38:29.720 | seem to be the most effective in moving people

01:38:32.060 | towards their goals over the short and long-term.

01:38:34.700 | Second, plan concretely.

01:38:36.820 | You need a concrete set of actions that you're going to follow

01:38:39.080 | in order to reach your goals.

01:38:41.820 | Third, foreshadow failure.

01:38:44.180 | This is a somewhat surprising one to me.

01:38:46.580 | I would have anticipated that imagining success

01:38:49.380 | is the way to go.

01:38:50.780 | It turns out that imagining success and visualizing success

01:38:53.960 | can be useful at the outset of a goal

01:38:56.380 | and maybe every once in a while in pursuit of that goal,

01:38:59.580 | but that it's not terrific for putting you

01:39:02.140 | in constant pursuit of that goal.

01:39:04.100 | Rather, foreshadowing failure, visualizing failure

01:39:06.840 | and all the terrible things that it's going to bring

01:39:09.100 | seems to be more effective and that maps very well

01:39:11.140 | to what's known about the neural circuitry

01:39:12.640 | and the involvement of the amygdala.

01:39:14.440 | Focus on particular visual points

01:39:18.280 | as a way to harness your attention and to remove distractors.

01:39:22.320 | Removing distractors and getting your body and brain

01:39:25.780 | into a mode of activation,

01:39:27.200 | getting that healthy increase in systolic blood pressure

01:39:29.720 | that puts you into forward motion towards your goals

01:39:32.520 | is absolutely key.

01:39:33.900 | So that's a brief summary of what I've covered

01:39:36.100 | up until now.

01:39:37.080 | There were other things too, of course,

01:39:38.460 | the dopamine system and the power of subjective

01:39:43.340 | top-down control in regulating that dopamine system.

01:39:46.980 | But I want to be sure to include a tool

01:39:49.660 | that's been especially powerful for me,

01:39:51.580 | that's grounded in the neuroscience research

01:39:53.820 | and in the psychology research.

01:39:55.700 | And as I describe this tool next,

01:39:57.860 | I think you'll see the ways in which it meshes nicely

01:40:00.840 | with the work that Emily Balcetas and colleagues have done.

01:40:04.400 | This is something that I've personally been doing

01:40:06.900 | for many years based on my understanding

01:40:08.880 | of the visual system and the understanding that indeed

01:40:12.780 | we can move our cognition and our perception

01:40:16.080 | from a place of interoception

01:40:18.920 | and focusing on our peripersonal space,

01:40:21.380 | that space within us and immediately around us

01:40:23.900 | and on the things that are immediately accessible to us,

01:40:27.120 | that we can shift from that mode to this mode

01:40:29.980 | of exteroception of focusing on things outside the confines

01:40:33.500 | of our skin and that are beyond our reach,

01:40:36.060 | that are literally goal-directed behaviors

01:40:38.180 | and goal-directed thoughts.

01:40:40.100 | And this is something that in the past

01:40:42.060 | I've talked about a little bit,

01:40:43.860 | and I've talked about something called space-time bridging.

01:40:46.040 | And we haven't talked too much about the time domain

01:40:48.340 | of the visual system today,

01:40:50.180 | but space-time bridging is simply a way

01:40:53.440 | of using one's visual system to focus

01:40:55.880 | on the peripersonal space and interoception,

01:40:58.580 | and then gradually in a deliberate way,

01:41:00.700 | stepping one's focus into the extra personal space

01:41:04.100 | and then back to the peripersonal space

01:41:06.160 | in a way that gives you a lot of flexibility

01:41:08.540 | and control over that ability in your daily life.

01:41:13.220 | So I'm going to first describe the tool,

01:41:15.580 | and then I will explain more about the underlying science

01:41:18.380 | and the underlying mechanism.

01:41:19.820 | Here's how you would do this.

01:41:22.300 | You could do this indoors or outdoors,

01:41:25.660 | although ideally you would do it in a location

01:41:28.380 | where you could view a horizon.

01:41:29.580 | It could be through a window

01:41:30.540 | or ideally outdoors without a window.

01:41:33.140 | Could be done any time of day.

01:41:34.340 | At night, it might be a little more challenging,

01:41:36.140 | but it goes the following way.

01:41:38.500 | What you first do is you would close your eyes.

01:41:41.780 | This could be done seated or standing,

01:41:43.140 | but you would close your eyes and you would focus

01:41:45.860 | as much of your attention, including your visual attention,

01:41:50.500 | on your inner landscape, on your interoception.

01:41:52.980 | So that would be your breathing, your heart rate,

01:41:54.820 | maybe even the surface of your skin,

01:41:56.220 | but really focusing internally.

01:41:57.980 | Now, how can you focus your visual attention internally

01:42:00.120 | if your eyes are closed?

01:42:01.260 | Well, you do that by imagining your inner landscape, okay?

01:42:04.900 | So you don't have to imagine your heart beating and so forth,

01:42:06.860 | but what you're trying to do is eliminate perception

01:42:08.900 | of the outside world.

01:42:10.180 | You're eliminating exteroception,

01:42:11.780 | and you're focusing all of your cognitive attention

01:42:14.860 | and your perceptual attention on what you're experiencing

01:42:17.340 | within the confines of your skin

01:42:19.660 | or at the level of the surface of your skin

01:42:21.980 | and inside your body.

01:42:23.140 | And you would do that for a duration

01:42:25.860 | of approximately three slow breaths, okay?

01:42:29.300 | So close your eyes, you would do breath one,

01:42:32.340 | breath two, and breath three,

01:42:34.440 | concentrating all your attention on your internal landscape.

01:42:37.300 | Then you would open your eyes

01:42:39.480 | and you would focus your visual attention

01:42:41.120 | on some area on the surface of your body.

01:42:43.420 | So for me, the way that I typically do this

01:42:44.900 | will be to focus on, say, the palm of my hand.

01:42:47.380 | So I'll focus my visual attention on the palm of my hand.

01:42:49.540 | And I then do three breaths again,

01:42:52.920 | focusing on my internal state,

01:42:55.100 | but now I'm splitting out a little bit of my attention

01:42:58.180 | from interoception to exteroception.

01:43:00.220 | I'm focusing on something outside me.

01:43:01.940 | The ratio or the split of attention is about 90/10.

01:43:05.580 | About 90% of my attention is focused internally,

01:43:08.380 | but I'm also focusing some of my attention externally.

01:43:12.580 | Most people can do this pretty easily.

01:43:14.540 | Then there's a third, what I call station.

01:43:17.020 | I now move my visual attention to outside my body,

01:43:20.640 | to some location in the room,

01:43:22.220 | or if I'm outside in the external environment,

01:43:24.020 | something in the range of five to 15 feet away.

01:43:26.780 | And I'm trying to move 90% of my attention

01:43:29.940 | to that external object.

01:43:31.160 | So now I'm really biasing my perception and my attention

01:43:34.060 | towards exteroception.

01:43:35.800 | As I breathe, I'm paying attention to those three breaths.

01:43:39.780 | So that's why there's still 10%

01:43:41.160 | that's focused on my internal landscape,

01:43:43.000 | because I want to pay attention to those three breaths,

01:43:45.060 | but I'm focusing as much of my attention outside of myself,

01:43:49.140 | maintaining just a little bit on my internal state

01:43:51.700 | so I can measure the cadence of those three breaths.

01:43:55.140 | Then I move my visual attention to yet another station,

01:43:58.020 | which is further away,

01:43:58.860 | typically a horizon or something as far off in the distance

01:44:01.940 | as I can possibly see,

01:44:03.340 | again, for the duration of three breaths.

01:44:06.700 | And at that point, I'm trying my very best to move 99,

01:44:10.500 | if not 100% of my attention to that external location.

01:44:14.420 | And then what I typically will do is I will try and expand

01:44:20.760 | both my vision and my cognition to a much broader sphere.

01:44:25.120 | This is that magnocellular vision

01:44:26.580 | that we talked about before,

01:44:28.060 | where I'm not focusing on a particular location

01:44:30.060 | on the horizon.

01:44:30.900 | I'm trying to dilate the aperture of my field of view

01:44:33.000 | so I can see as much of the visual landscape

01:44:35.380 | as I'm in as possible.

01:44:36.740 | If you're in an internal, excuse me, if you're in indoors,

01:44:41.200 | then that might be the ceiling, the walls,

01:44:43.420 | and the floor of the environment you're in.

01:44:45.040 | If you're outdoors,

01:44:45.880 | it would be to expand your visual focus

01:44:47.720 | as broadly as you possibly can,

01:44:50.020 | again, for the duration of three breaths.

01:44:53.180 | Then I would return immediately to my internal landscape.

01:44:56.860 | I would close my eyes and I would do three more breaths,

01:44:59.760 | focusing entirely on my interoception,

01:45:03.080 | on my internal landscape,

01:45:05.100 | what we called before my peripersonal space.

01:45:07.940 | And I would then repeat that.

01:45:09.680 | Peripersonal space, 100%.

01:45:12.800 | Focused on my hand, 90%,

01:45:15.480 | 10% on my peripersonal space or my internal landscape.

01:45:18.740 | Stepping out to another location

01:45:20.460 | where it's mostly exteroception, maybe a little bit

01:45:23.660 | of recognition of my internal state.

01:45:25.580 | Then to the horizon, then to this broader visual sphere,

01:45:28.540 | then back into my body.

01:45:29.620 | And I would work through each of those stations

01:45:31.860 | maybe two or three times.

01:45:33.160 | The entire thing takes about 90 seconds to three minutes,

01:45:36.580 | depending on how many breaths you do.

01:45:38.580 | I said three, but you could do one or 10,

01:45:40.980 | it doesn't really matter.

01:45:42.480 | Or it's also going to depend on, for instance,

01:45:46.060 | how slowly you're breathing,

01:45:47.420 | 'cause your breathing might be faster than mine

01:45:49.060 | or vice versa.

01:45:50.420 | What is all of this doing?

01:45:52.140 | Why do I call this space time bridging?

01:45:54.260 | And why is this useful for goal setting?

01:45:56.560 | The reason I call it space time bridging

01:45:58.680 | is that the visual system is not just about analyzing space,

01:46:03.080 | it's actually how we batch time.

01:46:05.300 | It's how we carve up time.

01:46:06.820 | And the simple way to state this

01:46:08.260 | is that when we focus our visual attention

01:46:10.460 | on a very narrow point,

01:46:12.600 | that's close to our body and our immediate experience,

01:46:16.400 | we tend to slice up time very finely.

01:46:19.200 | We're focused on our breathing.

01:46:20.840 | We're focused on our heartbeats.

01:46:22.800 | In fact, our breathing and our internal landscape

01:46:25.020 | and our heartbeats become the sort of second hand,

01:46:27.560 | if you will, on our experience.

01:46:29.460 | We are carving up time

01:46:30.780 | according to our immediate physiological experience.

01:46:34.260 | Whereas when we focus our visual attention outside our body,

01:46:37.960 | not only do we engage

01:46:39.220 | that exteroceptive extrapersonal space system,

01:46:42.100 | and we start to engage the dopamine system,

01:46:43.900 | the goal-directed system,

01:46:45.780 | but we also start batching time differently.

01:46:49.280 | When we focus our visual system

01:46:50.900 | into a broader sphere of space

01:46:52.680 | or into a space beyond the confines of our skin,

01:46:55.480 | we start carving up time, our frame rate changes.

01:46:59.220 | Now, this is useful in the context of goal setting,

01:47:02.480 | goal assessment, and goal pursuit,

01:47:04.180 | because with the exception of a very few isolated examples,

01:47:09.180 | almost all goals involve setting some goal

01:47:13.900 | that's off in the future,

01:47:15.580 | and then carving up the time between now

01:47:17.940 | and the achievement of that goal into milestones

01:47:21.220 | that range in duration.

01:47:23.160 | And the rewards,

01:47:24.620 | even if we try and just make them every week,

01:47:26.660 | are going to come at some unexpected intervals.

01:47:29.720 | And that's actually can be helpful for reinforcing behavior.

01:47:32.200 | Intermittent reward that's intermittent and random

01:47:35.420 | is the most effective reward schedule we know.

01:47:37.860 | But the problem is always

01:47:40.620 | how do we keep our cognition in line with the long-term goal

01:47:43.900 | while also being focused on these more immediate goals?

01:47:46.420 | And so this particular practice

01:47:47.900 | that I call space-time bridging,

01:47:49.160 | but we could give it a different name.

01:47:50.560 | I'm sure there are better names.

01:47:51.560 | Maybe you can suggest some in the comment section on YouTube

01:47:54.580 | that are more accurate or more mapped to it better.

01:47:57.340 | But this behavior or this practice, rather,

01:48:00.300 | is teaching us to use our visual system

01:48:02.760 | and thereby our cognitive system

01:48:04.660 | and thereby our reward systems

01:48:07.220 | to orient to different locations in space

01:48:09.860 | and therefore at different locations in time.

01:48:12.860 | And that is the essence of goal-directed behavior.

01:48:16.260 | That is the essence of setting a goal.

01:48:18.500 | It's about thinking about what you want.

01:48:20.480 | Then it's about setting milestones

01:48:23.380 | that are intermediate to that goal.

01:48:25.700 | Then it's about assessing

01:48:26.980 | whether or not you're reaching those milestones.

01:48:28.820 | And then it's, of course, about updating your goals

01:48:31.220 | if you need to update your goals.

01:48:32.980 | All of that is an enormously confusing batch of challenges

01:48:37.020 | if you think about it all at once.

01:48:38.660 | But if you break it down into these elements

01:48:40.780 | that the visual system can help you find

01:48:43.100 | and move towards those milestones,

01:48:44.600 | I think there's ample evidence to support that,

01:48:46.540 | and that your control over your visual system

01:48:49.140 | is indeed yours,

01:48:50.100 | that you can deliberately set it to different locations,

01:48:52.380 | and then you make a practice

01:48:54.500 | of stepping through these different stations

01:48:57.380 | on a regular basis.

01:48:58.340 | Again, I do this each morning.

01:48:59.700 | I do this once a day.

01:49:00.960 | Rarely have I done it twice a day.

01:49:03.540 | Rarely have I missed a day.

01:49:04.940 | But by doing that, you can be very effective

01:49:07.460 | in teaching the systems of your brain

01:49:09.900 | that are related to goal setting and reward

01:49:11.840 | to map to different timeframes.

01:49:13.860 | So I found this to be a very effective protocol.

01:49:16.900 | The Balsettis work has mainly focused on visual tools

01:49:21.700 | that are of a single horizon.

01:49:23.520 | Here I'm talking about multiple,

01:49:24.920 | what I called stations or horizons.

01:49:27.140 | But what's very clear is that an ability to move

01:49:30.340 | from different visual stations,

01:49:32.300 | and to do that in a deliberate way,

01:49:34.380 | in a focused and conscious way,

01:49:36.700 | clearly maps to an ability to conceive of different goals

01:49:40.260 | over different periods of time.

01:49:41.820 | And I do believe can be greatly beneficial

01:49:44.280 | in allowing one to set particular goals

01:49:47.100 | and then move through the milestones to those goals,

01:49:49.380 | and to constantly update one's pursuit and reward

01:49:52.380 | in reaching those milestones,

01:49:53.660 | and eventually the overall goal.

01:49:55.900 | Per usual, I covered a lot of material today.

01:49:58.020 | We talked about some of the neuroscience and psychology

01:50:01.380 | and popular understanding of goal-seeking behavior,

01:50:05.380 | how to assess goals, et cetera.

01:50:07.340 | Talked about the beautiful work of Emily Balsettis

01:50:09.300 | at New York University,

01:50:11.300 | and her work on the use of the visual system

01:50:14.620 | to better achieve goals.

01:50:16.620 | And indeed, things like visualization

01:50:19.340 | and why forecasting failure can be more effective

01:50:21.540 | than forecasting success.

01:50:23.100 | As counterintuitive as that might seem,

01:50:25.340 | that's what the data point to.

01:50:26.900 | And we talked about the importance of setting concrete plans

01:50:29.780 | and really what that means,

01:50:31.380 | and what intervals at which to assess progress.

01:50:34.860 | And what intervals at which to assess reward

01:50:37.540 | and how the dopamine system is involved.

01:50:39.580 | And in addition, I described this practice

01:50:41.660 | that one can incorporate as a daily or semi-daily practice

01:50:45.620 | of so-called space-time bridging,

01:50:46.940 | of using the visual system and your ability

01:50:49.340 | to deliberately step your visual system

01:50:51.780 | from stations that are within your body,

01:50:54.300 | so-called peripersonal or interoceptive space,

01:50:57.100 | out into the world further and further,

01:50:58.640 | and then back again in sequence

01:51:00.420 | as a way to harness and cultivate

01:51:02.940 | and build up these systems that link vision,

01:51:06.400 | space, time, reward systems, and so forth.

01:51:09.820 | Ultimately, as you set out to accomplish your goals,

01:51:13.420 | there are going to be a number of basic steps

01:51:15.640 | that everyone will have to follow.

01:51:16.880 | You have to clearly identify

01:51:18.300 | what the long-arching ultimate goal is.

01:51:20.660 | You have to identify what the milestones will be.

01:51:23.900 | You might not know all of them at the outset,

01:51:25.480 | but you ought to have some idea about the intervals

01:51:27.700 | at which you are going to set those milestones

01:51:30.980 | and set your reward schedule for assessing progress

01:51:35.100 | in route to those milestones and your ultimate goal.

01:51:37.980 | My hope is that you'll be able to incorporate these tools,

01:51:40.540 | if not all of them, perhaps just one of them or two of them,

01:51:44.100 | in pursuit of whatever particular goals

01:51:46.200 | you happen to be focused on at this point and in the future.

01:51:49.880 | If you're enjoying and/or learning from this podcast,

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01:52:28.260 | In today's episode and in previous episodes

01:52:30.100 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast, we talked about supplements.

01:52:32.700 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

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01:54:00.820 | And in closing, I want to thank you once again

01:54:03.280 | for joining me in this discussion

01:54:05.480 | about the biology, science, and in particular,

01:54:08.200 | the neuroscience of goal setting, goal assessment,

01:54:11.440 | and achieving goals.

01:54:13.220 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:54:15.780 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:54:17.640 | [upbeat music]

01:54:20.220 | (upbeat music)

The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #55

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