Essentials: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Dr. Emily Balcetis

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Balcetis. Well, thanks for being here.

**Emily Balcetis** (0:22)
That's my pleasure.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:23)
Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time, because as a vision scientist, who is also very interested in real life tools and goal setting and motivation, your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests. Just to kick things off, you could tell us just a little bit about goal setting and goal retrieval. What's the deal with vision and motivation? How do those two things link up?

**Emily Balcetis** (0:47)
Totally. When psychologists ask people, like, how are you, what are you doing to help make progress on your goals? They say all kinds of things. A couple of things always pop to the top, which is, you know, self-pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job, or put up post-it notes around to, like, constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment. And so what a surprise that people burn out, right? It's exciting to work on a goal when you first set it. You might make some initial progress, but then eventually we get, you know, not even to the halfway point before things get real. Things are challenging and we fall by the wayside. So then I, you know, with my team, I was trying to think of, like, well, what are strategies that don't require as much effort, that we can automate, that we can take advantage of what's already happening within ourselves, within our body, within our mind, that might overcome one of those challenges? And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision. And we thought, you know what, there are strategies that we can use to look at the world in a different way and that we can automate that might help us to overcome some obstacles, to make progress on our goals, to maybe literally see opportunities that we hadn't been able to see before.

**Andrew Huberman** (1:56)
You've published a number of studies in this area, but maybe you could highlight some of the more important findings in the area of how people can adjust their vision in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently.

**Emily Balcetis** (2:09)
So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people that they struggle with the most? And regardless of where you look or who you ask or when you ask it, people's number one goal is something related to their health, right? So, one of the first things that I did was go over to Brooklyn. There's a couple armories all around the boroughs here around New York City. And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA. Somebody had invited me, a physical therapist said, hey, you should come out and check out what's happening here with your interest in exercise and trying to find new ways of helping people, new tactics that they can add to their tool belt. I think you're going to find some interesting people that are working out there who, as it turns out, are some of the fastest runners in the world. Like, you know, one of the people that was in the last Olympics before I showed up won the gold medal for the 400 meter. I thought when these people are running, I bet they are like hyper aware of everything that's going on in their surroundings. Where are they relative to the competition? What's happening in their peripheral vision? What's going on on the side? Who's behind them? Who's in front of them? They probably have this like master sense, this master visual plan at any point in time. And that's what probably makes them elite.
So when I started asking them, is that the case? Do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings? What's behind you? What's on the side? They said, no. Like all of them said, no. And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake. So that was surprising. I totally went against my intuition about what they do that likely contributes to their success. What they said instead was that they are hyper focused. They assume this narrowed focus of attention, almost like a spotlight is shining on a target. Now, when they're running a short distance, that target might literally be the finish line, the line that they're trying to cross. If it's a longer distance, they set sub goals, like the person, the shorts on the person up ahead that they're trying to beat or they choose some sort of stable landmark, like a sign that they would pass by. It's like a spotlight is shining just on that or they have blinders on the sides of their face. That's all they're paying attention to. And I thought, oh, that's something we can play with. They are elite and they are accomplished. So then we started thinking like, okay, what about people who aren't competitive runners? Is this a tactic we can teach people? The answer is yes. You can tell people about what these Olympic athletes are doing. Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target. Choose something up ahead. The stop sign two blocks up that you can just see. And imagine that you have blinders on so that you're not really paying attention to the people that are passing by or the buildings or the garbage cans or the trucks that are on the road.