Goals Toolkit - How to Set and Archive Your Goals

(321) Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrtR12PBKb0

Transcript: (00:00) welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I’m Andrew huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology 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 (00:36) research on these topics those guests were Dr Emily baltis from New York University and Dr MAA 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 tool kit 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 (01:10) 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 in 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 Hawk (01:42) analysis after you achieve a goal or as the case may be not achieve a goal although I’m 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 Ence 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 (02:13) 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 eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart match 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 (02:40) 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 1 to 3° in order to fall and stay deeply asleep and then in increase by 1 to 3° in order to wake up feeling refreshed in the morning with eights sleep smart mattress covers you can program the temperature of your (03:07) sleeping environment so that it’s ideally matched to your temperature needs I started sleeping on an eight- Sleep 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 eights Sleep mattress cover when I travel if you’d like to try eight sleep you can go to 8sleep. (03:25) com huberman and you’ll save up to 500 there were quite a few people in my lab and so it’s a significant cost to that and I must tell you there were numerous times throughout the day when I impulsively just thought okay I’m going need my phone damn it I don’t want to have to do it and I also wanted to demonstrate to them that I could create an incentive system whereby I could basically Scruff myself into getting the work done and indeed um much to their dismay I never once had to pay them out (1:08:26) although when we got the grants and indeed even when we didn’t get the grants I did take them all to dinner now another key protocol for maintaining motivation while pursuing your goals stems from our understanding of the dopamine reward and motivation Pathways topics for which I have done multiple indeed three podcast episodes previously and we can provide a link to all three of those as well as the toolkit that we’ve published and that’s available to you at zero cost on our website about how to regulate dopamine both Baseline (1:08:57) dopamine stores and peaks in dopamine there’s a lot there to be understood and Incorporated because it has to do with various things not just in the realm of goal Pursuit but also feelings of well-being um staving off depression things of that sort the dopamine system is linked to oh so many important aspects of Life far too many than we could discuss right now and we have those previous episodes in which we do discuss all of that material nonetheless it is important to understand that dopamine is the molecule of motivation (1:09:27) and to some extent reward but really motivation and that if you want to maintain consistent motivation during say your individual bouts of work toward your goals and from one bout to the next so not just within a session but from day to day across sessions and from week to week and indeed from 12we cycle to 12we cycle if that’s required and from one goal that you set to the next goal that you define and decide to pursue you want to understand this particular feature of dopamine which is that yes dopamine and its release is highly (1:10:08) valuable toward getting more motivated and feeling more motivated but that it has certain properties related to things like dopamine reward prediction error baselines of dopamine Etc that make it the case that if you reward yourself every time you reach a milestone say you finish out an hour or two hours of work so you treat yourself to something you reward yourself that you are going to diminish both the potency of that reward and you are going to reduce your motivation over time that might be surprising to you but if you (1:10:42) were to watch those episodes it would all become clear as to why that is the case it is also true that if you were to only reward yourself when you accomplish your goal or perhaps more commonly if you look at the accomplishment of your goal as the only reward in the whole process of goal Pursuit and achievement that is going to undermine your probability of success as well rather the best way to incorporate the mechanics of the dopamine system such that you can achieve not just immediate motivation but ongoing motivation is to (1:11:16) incorporate what is referred to as random intermittent reinforcement which is what the casinos use to keep people playing it simply means randomly reward yourself and randomly don’t reward yourself for successful completion of Milestones those Milestones could be within a bout of effort or it could be across bouts of effort so let’s say you set out at the beginning on your piece of paper to basically let’s say run or practice at some cognitive Endeavor four hours total per week and you’re going to do that Monday Wednesday Friday and Saturday (1:11:52) should you reward yourself at the end of each session should you reward yourself at the end of each week the answer is it depends and it should depend in a random intermittent way so the simplest way to do this is whenever you complete a milestone could be at the end of a day you did your one hour whatever it was that you designated you were going to do on that particular day should you reward yourself cognitively or with some physical thing I don’t know what that physical thing might be but it I don’t know could be a meal could be a movie (1:12:22) could be something that you enjoy well the answer is you should flip a coin and if it’s heads yes reward yourself and if it’s Tails don’t it’s that simple it is that simple it should be 50/50 probability and it’s random as to whether or not you reward yourself now with physical rewards like monetary Rewards or food rewards or a movie or participating in something else that you enjoy it’s a bit easier to define the cognitive rewarding of One’s Own efforts is something that people really struggle to comprehend but what I’m not referring (1:12:55) to when I say cognitive rewards is I’m not referring to saying yes I’m the best and really trying to shower yourself with internal praise and tell yourself that you’re the greatest thing that ever happened simply because you performed this learning bout what I’m simply referring to is the kind of internal dopamine reward that comes from telling yourself like yes I’m making progress I’m making progress I’m on the path I’m able to set a goal and achieve a goal which might seem like a healthy thing to do psychologically and in fact (1:13:22) it is it’s great I think it’s really important that people be able to self-reward themselves especially self-reward for verbs that put them in a more adaptive stance in life that enhance their mental health physical health and performance and that of course also includes relationships we’re not just talking about solitary Pursuits here we’re talking about Pursuits that bring us into the world that allow us to lean into life with more Vigor and with more Effectiveness not just to help ourselves but to help others so what I’m (1:13:47) referring to is completing something and internally patting yourself on the back for having completed that thing thing that is a good thing to do but if you want to maintain ongoing motivation you’re not going to do that every time you’re not going to punish yourself but rather you finish out a bout of learning you flip the coin let’s say it lands tails on that day you simply shift into the next thing you need to do that day now it is not easy to suppress thoughts we know this it’s very hard to suppress negative thoughts but it’s still hard to (1:14:18) suppress positive thoughts so internally if you’re glowing from the fact that you performed well don’t try and suppress that that’s okay but if you flip a Tails then you don’t want to actively engage in a self-reward process however if you flip the coin and it’s heads well then you should absolutely engage in a self-reward process and that process should consist of 30 to 60 seconds of closing your eyes well you don’t have to it works better if you close your eyes and simply thinking about the fact that yes you can set a goal you can engage in (1:14:47) the specific set of questions do I want to do this practice today do I not want to do this practice today and then the specific set of actions maybe they involve visual focus and the other tools we talked about turning off of your phone Etc and you are somebody who can get things done you are somebody that is moving forward toward your particular goal and so you just sort of create a little bit of a positive cognitive loop around that ability that you are in fact building up and that’s something that people often Overlook which is that not (1:15:14) only is moving toward a goal great because it establishes more robustness in the neural circuits that allow us to perform that thing right I mean after all that’s what learning is eventually you don’t achieve the same frustration and errors that you do when trying to perform that thing eventually you learn how to play the piano you learn how to speak conversational French you run that sub six-minute mile but also the neural circuits associated with self-generated motivation and with the tools that we’re talking about themselves are subject to (1:15:44) neuroplasticity so those become more robust and that’s fantastic because when you eventually reach one goal I would hope that you would then update and set out to achieve another goal and you will find that over time you will be more effective in achieving other goals by virtue of the work that you did in pursuing a previous goal because ultimately it’s really about defining goals and then learning how to quantify the actions required and then engaging in those actions so there’s the specific circuits involved in generating those (1:16:15) actions which are very goal specific and then there are the circuits which circuits are we talking about we’re talking about that amydala the lateral prefrontal cortex the orbital frontal cortex and the basil ganglia we talked about earlier that have been built up that have been reinforced because as I mentioned there is one universal circuit for goal Pursuit and achievement So Random intermittent reinforcement is the key and while I spent a good amount of time talking about self-generated cognitive reinforcement this also (1:16:44) applies to any kind of physical rewards the movie that you’re going to reward yourself with the ice cream cone the whatever that you’re going to reward yourself with perhaps it’s monetary perhaps it’s food perhaps it’s social random intermittent rewards are the ones that are going to keep you motivated and are going to best increase the probability of success not just within a given bout of learning not just dayto day not just week to week not just quarter to quarter but across the lifetime an important protocol to (1:17:13) incorporate in your goal Pursuits is one that I learned from Dr Maya Shankar when she was a guest on the huban Lab podcast and she talked about the so-called middle problem the middle problem is the fact that people tend to have a lot of motivation at the outset of pursuing a goal although you now know that sometimes or some people don’t have a lot of motivation when pursuing their goal at the start so they need to think about failures and how terrible everything will be and then they will certainly have motivation it’s going to (1:17:43) be a fear-based motivation but in general people tend to have more motivation at the start of pursuing a goal and at the end when they get close to or they start start to perceive the finish line but that most people experience the so-called middle problem where in the middle of a learning bout or in the middle of the week or in the middle of a 12-week cycle they are less motivated and this has actually been Quantified in numerous studies and there are several ways to overcome the middle problem the simplest one is to (1:18:16) acknowledge it to recognize that it’s coming and so when it does come and you’re experiencing lower levels of motivation perhaps even increased failure rates and you’re not performing as well you’re getting frustrated to know that that’s a natural process that everybody experiences and just knowing that can sometimes allow people to move through that to the place where then they can sense the end of the learning bout or they can sense that they’re making some progress the finish line is there and then they get that (1:18:44) increase in motivation again however sometimes the middle problem is such a problem that people need some tools to move through it and and the best way to move through the middle problem or in fact to eliminate it is actually to make the middle of a learning bout its own separate thing that you acknowledge the presence of and that you break up into three separate bouts so here we’re talking about carving up the 1 hour learning bout or the two-hour learning bout into an initial phase where you either have naturally occurring (1:19:15) motivation or you use fear-based visualization to increase your motivation you lean into that and then let’s assume it’s a 1H hour learning bout and then at about the 25 minute Mark you start to experience lower levels of focus perhaps then you use the visual Target protocol but then you go back into your bout of learning and you’re not feeling very motivated it’s hard your mind is drifting you want to pick up your phone you want to do other things you find yourself doing other things that’s the period of time to take (1:19:41) Say the 25 minute to 45 minute period within the session and divide it into perhaps three or even four smaller chunks of time and you perhaps have heard of chunking before chunking is simply breaking something down into smaller chunks that are more achievable that’s simply what we’re talking about here but really chunking up that middle section of a learning bout can be very effective at essentially eliminating the middle problem now for those of you that are going to be really nitpicky you’ll say wait you take that 20 minutes from (1:20:11) the 25 minute Mark to the 45 minute Mark within your hour learning bout and you divide it up into four little uh chunks and in those two middle chunks I’m going to feel the middle problem for those two middle chunks ah well that’s not not actually the way it pans out fortunately when you break things down into small enough chunks you eliminate the middle problem and you experience sustained motivation now the extreme interpretation of that would have you measuring every minute or even every second of a learning bout and having (1:20:39) consistent motivation throughout that because for instance if you can concentrate for 10 seconds why wouldn’t you simply be able to just mark off 10-second increments well at some point the marking off or the monitoring of those increments is going to be distracting to toward the thing that you actually want to do so the simple thing to do is to acknowledge the middle problem right the fact that we have more motivation at the start and at the end of our goal Pursuit sessions than we do within the middle and then to Simply (1:21:07) chunk that middle section into three maybe four smaller chunks and if you need to incorporate things like the visual Target protocol one or three or perhaps even eight times within that middle section so be it it’s going to help you move through with better focus and better motivation and what I just described can of course be applied to the longer bouts of effort that don’t occur just during one learning bout but perhaps across the week so for instance if you are doing four days a week of language learning or Fitness training so (1:21:35) maybe it’s a Monday Wednesday Friday Saturday type of Schedule H you may notice that in the middle of the week the Wednesday training session tends to be the one that you’re less motivated to do for whatever reason there could be any reason at all for which the motivation is lower in the middle of the week it doesn’t matter well in that case you would want to First acknowledge the presence of the middle problem so you would want to acknowledge that that Wednesday training bout is prone to the middle problem because it is indeed the (1:22:01) middle problem it’s in the middle of the Monday and the Friday training bouts so then you would want to approach it with the understanding that it’s going to be there and that you are going to need tools and protocols that will allow you to overcome it by for instance taking that one or two hour session on Wednesdays and putting a bit more time toward a visual Target protocol at the beginning to increase your focus a bit more more visualizing failure if you are feeling amotivated that means not motivated in nerd speak amotivated (1:22:29) toward doing that Wednesday session and you would want to break up that Wednesday session into smaller chunks so instead of looking at that 2hour session you might break it up into a series of 15 minute smaller learning bouts done consecutively back toback and then in doing so you have essentially taken that Wednesday session and I’ll bet that it becomes at least among your most motivated sessions so the middle problem exists it’s important to acknowledge and there are tools to overcome the middle problem on any time scale you simply (1:23:00) have to Chunk Up the middle and approach things with deliberate increased Vigor just as you would you know if you’re running and there’s always a tough Hill you have to really or gear up for attacking that hill and then to do that repeatedly in those smaller chunks until you’ve completed that session so today I’ve been talking about how to approach goal setting and pursuit at and in around the specific times that one is engaged in goal setting and pursuit the writing down of goals defining of goals the timing and then the actual training (1:23:29) sessions or the practice sessions toward achieving that goal what I haven’t talked about is how to show up to all of that in the best possible State of Mind and Body in order to achieve the best possible results and of course there are numerous things that we need to do in order to quote unquote show up at our best where we would stand the best possibility of Performing our best and learning the best in those learning bouts things like getting adequate sleep getting sunlight in our eyes early in the day adequate and proper nutrition (1:23:58) social connection and so on we talked about all of that on previous podcast episodes so I’m not going to talk about those again now but it is important to recognize that the backdrop of Our Lives how well we’ve slept what’s going on in our personal lives will all Impact things like motivation and frankly our ability to even identify what’s important because you know if we’re dealing with a Health crisis or someone close to us is dealing with a Health crisis we tend to have our attention diverted toward that but I do want to (1:24:24) acknowledge all of that because it is critically important in defining how you’re going to show up to these Endeavors and for that matter all Endeavors now with that said there are a few things that you can do in order to try and optimize your ability to focus and your level of motivation during your goal Pursuits and there are some really interesting data and protocols that I haven’t talked so much about on this podcast ever that are relevant to today’s discussion and this relates to our so-called circadian rhythms in (1:24:53) attention we have robust rhythms in our ability to focus and our level of motivation that vary across the 24-hour AKA circadian cycle with a regular rhythmicity that is independent of how badly we want a goal or how afraid we are of failure right all the stuff about motivation and fear of failure and desire Etc all of that is still true but we all have a naturally occurring rhythm of rise and fall and return to rise and fall of our levels of attention and motivation and this is something that’s been described beautifully in the (1:25:29) scientific literature in fact I’ll provide a link to what I consider a really nice review on this topic this is a review that was published by Pablo Valdes in the Yale Journal biology and Medicine in 2019 entitled circadian rhythms in attention and there’s a lot of information within this review but we can distill out of a couple of useful gems from it so if you are somebody who is embarking on the pursuit of a goal which is particularly hard that’s going to require a really high level of motivation and focus know that there are (1:25:59) three times during the day when you stand to have the greatest level of focus and attention and of course this will vary depending on when you went to sleep at night and when you wake up there’s natural variation in circadian rhythms but it’s worth knowing that most people find that their level of attention and motivation is going to be highest 30 minutes 3 hours and 11 hours after waking up okay so 30 minutes 3 hours and 11 hours after waking up and this relates to a number of important biological principles related to (1:26:30) circadian shifts in body temperature which are also related to circadian shifts that means changes around the 24-hour cycle in the release of particular neurochemicals so the amount of dopamine available to be released by any sort of goal pursuit or reward the amount of Serotonin available lots of neurochemistry in there lots of neural circuitry but these heighten levels of focus and motivation that just occur naturally regardless of what goal one is trying to pursue in fact regardless of whether or not you’re trying to pursue (1:26:59) any goal 30 minutes 3 hours and 11 hours after waking your focus and motivation are going to be their greatest relative to other times in that 24-hour cycle now as I tell you this I can imagine that some of you are thinking great I’m going to schedule one bout of goal Pursuits 3 hours after waking and another one 11 hours after waking great if you can do that and that fits with your work and other demands of Life your relationships Etc terrific however I don’t want this 30 minute 3-hour and 11-hour protocol to (1:27:33) be considered a rule and here’s why most people don’t have a tremendous degree of control over their schedule things like work and family and other demands constrain them in terms of when they can get the work in and while I do think it’s extremely valuable to schedule the specific time or roughly the specific time even though know that’s an oxymoron meaning a period of time during the day say before 9:00 a.m. (1:27:58) or between 9:00 and noon that you are going to carry out your goal Pursuit Endeavors I’ve talked about this in previous podcasts some people do very well by scheduling an exact time from noon to 2 I’m writing other people like myself do a little better if I set a constraint but it’s a little bit broader such as I’m going to exercise before 9 a.m. (1:28:17) that could be anytime before 9:00 a.m. or I’m going to engage in language learning some time between say 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. as opposed to setting a specific time that’s just what works best for me people vary in terms of whether or not they respond best to setting a specific time or a Time block and setting up these kind of barriers after which you are essentially telling yourself you won’t do it but and this is a very important but it is most important that you actually engage in the goal Pursuit and I experienced this recently I’m trying (1:28:48) to run more these days uh I still enjoy doing resistance training I still run three days a week but I’m trying to run a little bit longer as opposed to just doing the one long run per week and then two shorter runs later in the week I’ve talked about this in my optimal Fitness protocol episode if you want to check that out or check out the PDF where it’s all distilled down to one or two pages if you like but in any event these days I’m trying to extend the amount of time that I’m running I’m just enjoying that (1:29:13) it’s kind of a throwback for me to when I ran across country as a senior in high school and this was the time of year when I would start getting ready for the fall season so I’m enjoying running more and just this last week I had the experience of having a very full Sunday and that’s usually the day when I run in the morning or hike during the middle of the day and I simply did not get around to it because I had a lot of other important things to do and what I found was 9 p.m. (1:29:40) rolled around 10 p.m. rolled around and I started thinking ah like I wish I had gone running my Monday was going to be busy so what did I do I laced up my shoes and I went for a run at 1000 p.m. something I haven’t done since college or maybe even high school and I ended up running for 90 minutes from 10: p.m. until 11:30 p.m. definitely not the optimal time for me to go running in fact I was thinking oh this might disrupt my sleep but in fact it didn’t I came back I showered had a little bit of food which normally I don’t eat that late and I slept like a (1:30:06) baby and I felt great the next day waking up at my normal time which cues me to another important scientific fact that relates to protocol and protocol flexibility which is something that I gleaned from a colleague of mine at Stanford School of Medicine who works in the Sleep laboratory and I intend to have him as a guest on this podcast which is that much of our subjective feelings of energy and well-being during the day have to do not just with how well and how much we slept the night before but how positively we view our (1:30:37) previous days experiences and how positively we view our next day and in fact that same day Pursuits and experiences so in other words how we feel about our previous day performance and how we feel about what we’re about to embark on during our day can increase our energy and that might seem obvious to a number of you but these days as I and many others out there are talking so much about the importance of sleep which is of course essential you do want to get great sleep as many nights of your life as you possibly can and if you (1:31:08) don’t sleep much for a given night hopefully it’s for reasons that you enjoy and positive things like a party or a wedding or you know use your imagination but it’s also the case that when we successfully complete something that we told ourselves that we are going to do we feel great about it and that if it means that we sleep a little bit less or that we have to do our practice bout you know at 3: p.m. (1:31:29) or 2 p.m. a time of day when we’re really ordinarily in the trough of attention and we have to use 20 different tools or one tool 20 different times in order to get through that bout of learning the fact that we complete it leaves us with a feeling of accomplishment and I’m certain although I don’t know exactly which that there are neurochemicals and hormones that reflect that it’s almost with certainty going to involve dopamine and other neurochemicals but the point is not to get reductionist about it the point is that yes heightened attention and focus (1:31:57) occur naturally 30 minutes 3 hours and 11 hours after waking but the really important thing about all of this goal setting and pursuit is to do it to get it done to set the goal to do it specifically make it quantifiable when you’re going to do it make it about verb States and then simply do it thank you for joining me for today’s discussion all about science-based protocols for how to set and pursue your goals if you’re learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that’s a terrific zeroc costway (1:32:26) to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments 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Goals Toolkit - How to Set and Archive Your Goals

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