Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are talking about goal setting and achieving goals. Now, we've done three full episodes about this topic previously. I did a solo episode about this topic where I described the neuroscience of the circuitry in the brain and body that underlies goal setting and pursuit. I also hosted two expert guests who have done extensive research on these topics. Those guests were Dr. Emily Balchettis from New York University and Dr. Maya Shankar. So today's episode is going to focus on the key takeaways from those three previous episodes, as well as incorporate new information that has been published in the scientific literature since those episodes aired, so that by the end of today's episode, you will have a potent toolkit for setting and pursuing goals. We will talk about how to select which goals to pursue and when. We will talk about how to measure your progress. We will talk about how to initiate and sustain motivation as you pursue your goals. We are also going to dispel some prominent myths about goal setting and pursuit. Given that this is a toolkit episode, I will talk about some of the underlying biological mechanisms for the protocols that I describe. But most of what I will cover are the protocols themselves, the how to identify a goal, select the best goal for you to pursue, how to initiate goal pursuit, how to maintain goal pursuit, how to evaluate progress, and how to do the post hoc analysis after you achieve a goal, or as the case may be, not achieve a goal. Although I am confident that if you implement even a subset of the protocols that we cover today, that you stand the greatest possible chance of both setting the proper goal and achieving that goal. And I can say that both with confidence and humility because the protocols I describe were not created by me. They are gleaned from the scientific peer-reviewed literature and they have been shown to work. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we're sleeping well and enough, everything in life goes much better. And when we aren't sleeping well or long enough, things in life get worse. We know that from data, we all know that from our own experience. One of the essential things to getting a great night's sleep is that the temperature of your sleeping environment needs to be such that your core body temperature drops by about one to three degrees in order to fall and stay deeply asleep and then increase by one to three degrees in order to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning. With 8Sleep Smart Mattress Covers, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment so that it's ideally matched to your temperature needs. I started sleeping on an 8Sleep Mattress Cover a few years ago and it has completely transformed the quality of the sleep that I get. So much so that I actually loathe traveling because I don't have my 8Sleep Mattress Cover when I travel. If you'd like to try 8Sleep, you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman and you'll save up to $150 off their Pod 3 cover. 8Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman.
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If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com/huberman and get 20% off your first order. Again, that's mauinuivenison.com/huberman to get 20% off. Okay, let's talk about goal setting and pursuit. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, this is a toolkit episode. So I'm not going to talk too much about the mechanistic underpinnings of the protocols for goal setting and pursuit. I'm mostly just going to give you those protocols. But before I do that, I want to take just three minutes, I promise just three minutes or less, and describe the neural circuitry involved in goal setting and pursuit. And there are two reasons to do that. First of all, the biology of goal setting and pursuit is absolutely beautiful. It's incredible that we and many other animals in fact, have this neural circuitry and that it works in the way that it does. But equally important is that when we have a mechanistic understanding or framework for how a protocol or set of protocols work, it makes it much easier to tweak those protocols and customize them to our unique needs. Okay, so with that said, the goal setting and pursuit circuitry essentially consists of four major stations in the brain, although it's important to point out that each of those stations has a number of other connections that are important for the whole goal setting and pursuit process. But we can distill things down to four major hubs or stations within the brain, and those are the basal ganglia, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbital frontal cortex. So going through those one by one, the amygdala is a structure within the brain. You actually have two of them, one on each side of the brain that is involved in circuits associated with arousal in driving levels of alertness. It's also involved in fear. You've probably heard that many times before, but also things like anxiety. And actually the amygdala can be involved in what we call positive valence experiences, not just the bad stuff like fear and anxiety, but also positive forms of arousal and even learning. The basal ganglia include a lot of different brain structures. But for sake of today's discussion, what you need to know is that the basal ganglia includes two major pathways. One is the so-called GO pathway, which is the pathway involved in generating actions. And the other is the so-called no-GO pathway, or the pathway involved in withholding or ceasing action. And this is really important to understand because with all goals, we have to ask ourselves, are we trying to learn how to do something new, or are we trying to withhold a certain set of actions? And of course, anytime we learn anything, it's a process of both generating and withholding certain actions. So we've got the amygdala and we have the basal ganglia, which has this GO, action initiating, and no-GO, action withholding, circuitry within it. And then there's the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in immediate and long-term planning. And this is going to be a key component of today's discussion because we aren't going to be talking about lateral prefrontal cortex per se, but we are going to be talking about time perception in the context of setting and achieving our goals because setting and achieving our goals is all about being able to orient both in space, knowing where we are and what we're doing, but also in time, know where we are in that road of progress toward achieving our goal or crossing that finish line and repeatedly updating those finish lines in many cases. And the fourth structure is the orbital frontal cortex, which like all brain areas, tends to be a multitasker, does a bunch of different things. But for sake of today's discussion, it's important to understand that the orbital frontal cortex is involved in evaluation of our current emotional state and arousal state as it relates to our goal pursuit. For instance, are we happy because we are sensing progress or are we unhappy and feeling frustrated or sad or angry because we are feeling that we are not achieving progress or that somehow we can't get into the sorts of actions that are going to allow us to eventually reach our goals. Okay, so I described four major structures, all of which communicate with each other and of course a lot of other brain areas. And those four structures were the amygdala, the basal ganglia, the go and no-go circuitry, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbital frontal cortex. And those represent the core components of the neural circuitry involved in goal setting and pursuit. Now I realize I didn't time that section, so I don't know whether or not it was three minutes or less, but if it was shorter than three minutes, great. And if it was longer than three minutes, well, I promise to shave a couple of minutes off the end of this episode. Okay, so now you have the understanding that we all have the same neural circuitry for goal setting and pursuit. I find that amazing, regardless of whether or not you want to achieve a fitness goal or an academic goal or a work goal, monetary goal, relationship goal. Maybe you want to just get better at relaxing. I've been told I should perhaps pursue that goal. Well, you're going to use the same neural circuits for each and any of those. I find that incredible. I also find that very reassuring because what it means is that if we can focus on the tools and protocols that are anchored in the biology of goal setting and pursuit, as we understand them to exist in all humans and indeed in other animals as well, well then we should have the greatest possible confidence that we will in fact achieve our goals. So how do we go about doing that? Well, the first question you need to ask yourself is what goal do I want to pursue? And the first protocol for deciding what goal you want to pursue is actually a quite simple one in terms of how it's stated, but it's fairly complex for a lot of people to answer. And that is which specific goal are you going to try and pursue because guess what, folks? Most people who are trying to achieve many goals simultaneously fail at all of them. This is what I call the overhaul approach when people think, okay, you know, on January 1 or next month or next week, or perhaps even today, I'm going to start exercising, I'm going to start meditating, I'm going to learn a language, I'm going to learn to dance, I'm going to do all these different things. And that's just too many goals. I think here is an appropriate place to highlight the word priority. A priority literally means one thing that you place ahead of all others. These days, we hear a lot about priorities, plural, but we really should be thinking about priority and defining our priority for learning in a given phase. So if you are somebody who wants to get more physically fit or you want to learn something cognitively, that's terrific. You are allowed to have multiple goals, but I highly recommend that you first select just one goal. Of course, you don't let go of other aspects of your mental health and physical health, that you don't throw your life away in service to this one goal. We've all seen how that goes and it's not a pretty picture, but rather that you continue to engage in healthy ways with the other aspects of your life that you're proficient at or mostly proficient at, but that you select one goal that you're going to try and attain. How you select that one goal, of course, is going to reflect your values, your motivation, your resources, but it's very important that you spend some serious time defining that one priority, that one goal for this initial goal setting and pursuit period. And in a moment, I'll tell you how long that goal pursuit period ought to be. But for some people, the best way to define which goal they're going to pursue is to write out the different things that they want, and then essentially cross off the various things that they're willing to put on hold for the time being and circle the thing that they're really going to focus on and only that thing. And again, this is highly individual. It's going to depend on you, your past, your present, your future, your resources, all of that. But having that one priority is going to really increase the probability that you're going to achieve your goal. Now we also know from the scientific literature that how lofty that goal is will impact whether or not you are able to achieve it. And I think most people mistakenly believe that if a goal is easy to achieve, it's more likely that they will achieve that goal. Sort of a duh. But in fact, the opposite has been shown to be true. If a goal is too easy to achieve, it seems that it doesn't recruit sufficient amounts of the arousal network that involves the amygdala, but a bunch of other brain structures as well, that get people into the necessary actions to continually pursue that goal. This perhaps should not be surprising. In order to learn something, we have to shift our nervous system into states that are somewhat uncomfortable. These should be safely uncomfortable states, but they should be uncomfortable states. And we're going to talk more about this as the episode continues, but any kind of successful learning or goal pursuit is going to involve errors. It's going to involve failures. It's going to involve frustration. It's going to involve anxiety. All of those states of mind and body, in fact, shift the brain into modes of so-called neuroplasticity. They give it the ability to change. And that should make perfect sense because if you can complete what you need to do easily, there's absolutely no reason for the neural circuitry in your brain or body to shift in any way. Why would it? Rather, those states of discomfort, frustration, anxiety, et cetera, represent shifts in neurochemical states that literally open the opportunity for neuroplasticity to occur. The changes between neurons that allow those neurons and their associated neural circuits to perform differently in the future when we learn something. So the key here is twofold. First, define the specific priority goal that you're going to pursue and set aside all other goal pursuits. And in doing that, it makes sense to pursue a somewhat loftier goal than perhaps a more mundane goal. Or if you know exactly what goal you're going to prioritize, that you try and achieve perhaps more than you think you ought to be able to achieve within that given goal.