The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

1. 0:00 – 1:56

   The Neuroscience of Goals

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      (instrumental music) 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're talking all about goals and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals. There's a tremendous amount of information on the internet and in books and so forth about how to set goals, and assess your progress towards goals, and update your goals, and so forth. In fact, there are (laughs) so many programs out there that include so many different acronyms that it can be a little bit overwhelming. Today's conversation about goals is going to be quite a bit different. Indeed, we are going to talk about setting goals, we are also going to talk about how to assess progress towards goals, and we are going to talk about goal execution. However, we are going to do all of this in the context of neuroscience, because it turns out that there are not hundreds or dozens or even several neural circuits in your brain that control goal setting and movement toward your goals, there is one. And while it includes many different brain areas, that one circuit is the same circuit that's responsible for pursuing all goals, and it relates to some very basic neurochemical mechanisms that are understood. So while there's a wealth of information out there about goals and goal setting and goal achievement and so forth, there's comparatively little information that's been available to the public about the neuroscience of goal setting and goal achievement, so that's what we're going to focus on today. I promise that we're going to get into the neuroscience, we're going to touch on a little bit of the psychology and how the neuroscience relates to what's known in the psychology literature, and we are going to establish several, in fact, four specific protocols that you can use for goal setting, goal assessment, and goal execution in an ongoing basis regardless of what your personal goals happen to be.

2. 1:56 – 6:04

   Tool 1: Learn Fast(er) by the 85% Rule

   1. AHAndrew Huberman1:56

      Before we dive into our conversation about goals and goal setting and goal achievement, I'd like to highlight some recent scientific findings that I think are going to be interesting and actionable for many of you out there. In earlier podcasts, we talked about neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience. In fact, neuroplasticity underlies all forms of learning, whether or not it's language learning, or learning music, or math, or a physical skill, all forms of learning involve the reorganization of connections in the nervous system, the brain and spinal cord and body. One of the key principles of neuroplasticity is this notion of making errors as a good thing toward neuroplasticity. This is a little bit counterintuitive, but what the scientific literature tells us is that whenever we're trying to learn something new, if we make an error, we know it feels frustrating, but that state of frustration actually cues up particular brain areas to be more alert, so that on subsequent attempts to learn that thing, we have a heightened level of focus and a higher probability of learning the new skill, regardless of what that skill is. And I've talked about this before in various episodes, as encouraging people to embrace errors or pursue errors, not as their own end goal, but errors as an entry point for making the brain more plastic, and if you think about it, it really makes sense. Why would the brain change at all if it's performing everything perfectly? When you make errors, well, in the immediate seconds and minutes after those errors, you are in a better position to learn. A common question I get, however, is what should be the rate of errors, which is really just a way of saying, how hard should the given task be that you're trying to learn or perform? And it turns out there's an answer. There's a recent paper that was published in a great journal, Nature Communications. This is a paper, uh, last author, Jonathan Cohen, and the paper is entitled "The 85% Rule for Optimal Learning." This paper we will make available by a link in the show note captions, but basically what this paper shows is that when trying to learn something new, you want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you are getting things right about 85% of the time, that you're making errors about 15% of the time. And, uh, the reason I like this paper is it really points specifically to some protocols that we can implement, because people always say, "Okay, you want to set a high goal, you want to try and achieve something that's really lofty, but you don't want to make the goal so lofty that you don't make any progress at all." Other people say, "You really want to start with really small goals and make things very, very incremental, only set out to do things that you know you can accomplish, and that it will feed back on your self-esteem and all these positive feedback loops, and then, you know, layer by layer, layer by layer, you'll eventually get where you want to go." Well, it turns out that neither is true. You need to set the level of difficulty such that you're making errors about 15% of the time, and I want to emphasize about 15% of the time, because there's no way to co- figure protocols for sport or language or math or anything else where you're going to have exactly 15% of errors. So anyway, this paper, "The 85% Rule for Optimal Learning," again, we will supply the link, but it really points to the idea of making things pretty hard, but not so hard that you're failing every attempt or even half of the attempts. Failing about 15% of the time seems optimal for learning. Hopefully that information will be useful to any of you that are trying to learn something. Hopefully it will also be useful to those of you that are teaching kids or other adults. If you're teaching, keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching for higher and higher levels of proficiency in whatever that is that you're teaching, and that 15% of the time they should be failing. If it gets to 20%, that's probably okay. If they start failing about half the time, then probably what they're trying to learn is too difficult for them at that point. Now of course, this is going to be controlled by all sorts of external factors, like whether or not they slept well the night before, whether or not you slept well (laughs) the night before and you're being clear in your instructions, uh, to them, et cetera. But I think the 15% rule, as we may call it, is a good metric to aim for, and it can serve both students and teachers. In other words, it can serve both those teaching and those that are learning.Before we begin, I'd

3. 6:04 – 13:55

   LMNT, Athletic Greens, ROKA

   1. AHAndrew Huberman6:04

      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 LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt, some other electrolytes, and no sugar. As I've mentioned before on this podcast and in various interviews, I'm a big fan of salt. Sort of discovered this a few years ago when Science Magazine, one of the preeminent magazines out there that publishes research on science, but also news articles about science, talked about the myth of salt research. It turns out that contrary to what I had believed, which was that salt is going to cause hypertension or that salt is really bad for us, there's an innate need for salt in our system. And indeed, if you dive into the textbooks on salt balance, we have entire biological systems of our kidneys and fluid management, et cetera, that are involved in making sure that we get enough salt. In fact, neurons, nerve cells function because salt, sodium actually enters those cells quickly and that's what causes them to fire action potentials. The, the common syllable or, uh, language of neurons, if you will. When we are low in sodium, our neurons don't work as well, and a few years later, I had the experience of feeling kind of shaky and I thought I had blood sugar issues. I went and got my blood sugar checked and it was fine, and a physician made the recommendation that I actually up my salt intake. My intake wasn't particularly low I didn't think, but I quickly found was that if I consumed enough salt, usually I would do this in the form of putting a little pinch of salt into some water, adding a little lemon juice or something like that, or salting my food a little bit more, that I lost any kind of shakiness in my hands, that my mental functioning was better, my sports performance was better, et cetera. So it was really interesting to see that shift simply by increasing my salt intake, something that's really counterintuitive to a lot of what's out there. Salt isn't just important for the function of neurons, it's important for blood volume and working alongside the other electrolytes, magnesium and potassium, it ensures that cells in our body function properly. And I think we're starting to see a shift out there now in the perception of what salt and the ele- other electrolytes do, really seeing magnesium, which is one of the electrolytes, potassium, and especially salt, as not necessarily something to avoid, but in fact something to embrace provided that they're used properly. LMNT is formulated to help anyone reach their electrolyte needs and is particularly well-suited to people following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. For people f- following a low carb diet or doing intermittent fasting, what many people don't know is that carbohydrate holds water. It actually brings water into the system, and you don't want your system to be low on water. That's, uh, one form of dehydration. Salt holds water as well, meaning it keeps the water in your system, which is beneficial for brain and body function. LMNT contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium, and they use the very best forms of salt, potassium, and magnesium that are out there. So the way I use LMNT is I usually will mix up one packet into about 16 to 30 ounces of water in the morning and drink that, uh, first thing in the morning when I wake up or around breakfast time, doesn't really matter. I kind of sip on it through the morning or if I'm real thirsty, I'll drink it all at once, and then I always make sure to drink a volume of water with an LMNT packet in it somewhere around my exercise. Sometimes it's during the exercise. If I'm running, I'll wait until afterwards. I'll hydrate with it before and after, if it's a really hot day. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to DrinkLMNT, that's L-M-N-T.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack. You only cover the cost of shipping, otherwise it's completely free. Again, that's DrinkLMNT.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens is that it covers all of my foundational vitamin mineral probiotic needs. We, of course, need vitamins. We, of course, need minerals, and we do need a healthy gut microbiome and probiotics support a healthy gut microbiome. There is now a wealth of quality scientific published data showing that the microbiota, meaning the little microbes that live in our gut, are good for us, and our gut when it functions properly communicates with our brain and our brain communicates with our gut through the so-called gut-brain axis, and that gut-brain axis is vital for things like immune system, endocrine system, meaning hormones, and for mood and overall brain function. With Athletic Greens, I get my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics I need to support a healthy gut microbiome and gut-brain axis without having to worry about taking a bunch of other things. In fact, when people ask me, "What's the one supplement I should take that's going to make me feel better?" I always say, "Athletic Greens," because indeed it makes me feel better and it happens to taste terrific. I drink it twice a day typically. I'll have one in the morning. I mix it with water and a little bit of, uh, lemon or lime juice, and then I'll typically have it again in the afternoon or late afternoon, again mixed with water, some lemon or lime juice. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're in the car or traveling by plane, et cetera. Plus they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D3, and even for those of us that are getting sufficient sunshine, many of us still need to supplement with vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is involved in metabolism, immune system, brain function, hormones, et cetera. It has so many important functions, and K2 has been shown to be important for a variety of things, not the least of which is cardiovascular health. So again, if you go to athleticgreens.com/huberman, you can claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim this special offer.Today's episode is also brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I spent a lifetime working on the science of the visual system and I can tell you that your visual system, everywhere from your eyes to your brain, includes a ton of different mechanisms so that as you move through different environments, you can see things clearly, and even if it's bright out, or there's shadows, or it's really dim outside, or it's getting dark, that your visual system can try and manage to resolve what's out there in the world so you can see things clearly. Many people need corrective lenses, they need eyeglasses. Other people, they need sunglasses as well, or just simply need sunglasses because if it's too bright, it's very hard to see things. One problem with a lot of eyeglasses and sunglasses e- out there, however, is they don't take into account the nuanced biology of the visual system. You may have experienced this. If you've ever put on a pair of sunglasses that aren't so great, you move from a really bright area into a dimly lit area, and you have to take the eyeglasses off. Your eyes just don't seem to adjust. With ROKA eyeglasses and sunglasses, everything they've done to design those glasses and lenses is with the science of the visual system in mind, so you can move seamlessly from one environment to the next, and you always see things with crystal clarity. Their sunglasses and eyeglasses are really terrific because they can be used for anything. They have a terrific aesthetic, so you can wear them, you know, to work, to dinner, et cetera. They look great and they're also designed for athletic performance. You can use them while running or while cycling. If you get sweaty, they won't slip off your face. They're extremely lightweight. In fact, I often forget that they're even on my face. I wear readers at night and sometimes when I drive, and I wear sunglasses when it's really bright outside and I need sunglasses. If you want to try ROKA eyeglasses or sunglasses, you can go to roka.com, that's R-O-K-A dot-com, and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's ROKA, R-O-K-A dot-com, and enter the code Huberman at checkout.

4. 13:55 – 21:52

   Brain Circuits for Setting & Pursuing Goals

   1. AHAndrew Huberman13:55

      Let's talk about the science, and in particular, the biology and neuroscience, of setting and achieving goals. Setting and achieving goals is not a uniquely human endeavor. Other animals set and attempt to achieve goals. A honeybee attempts to collect honey and bring it back to the hive. A herbivore will go out and forage for plants and will also have a need to reproduce at some point in its life, so it will need to find a mate and maybe even raise the young, depending on what species that is. Predators will have to hunt and kill and eat their food, and they have to avoid getting injured in that process. They also have to raise young, et cetera. So humans are among the other animals, or we could say the animals are among us, in the need to set goals and to make efforts to achieve those goals. Now, why do I emphasize this commonality of process? The reason I emphasize this commonality of process is that it turns out that there is one basic system by which all animals, including humans, set and attempt to achieve goals. Now, humans are unique in our ability to orient our mind toward immediate goals, moderately termed goals, meaning things that might exist on the scale of a week, or a month, or even a year, and very long-term goals, like a lifetime goal, or a goal that lasts a decade, or it takes a decade to achieve. That's what makes us unique. And of course, we don't have access to the mindset, or the thinking, or the emotions of other animals, but what we do know is that common neural circuits, meaning brain areas that are present in animal species and in humans, are responsible for orienting our thinking and our action toward particular goals. Another thing that's really unique about the human brain is that we are able to have multiple goals interacting at once. So for instance, we probably all have fitness goals, goals in relationships of different kinds, friendships and romantic partnerships, as well as maybe scholastic goals, maybe, maybe you're in school, you're pursuing some kind of learning outside of the school environment, or yo- and/or you have business goals or financial goals. We are able to have multiple goals at once, and other animals do this, but humans are unique in the ability to juggle a lot of goals, and actually one of the major challenges in pursuing goals is that goal pursuit often interacts, meaning if you can spend 100% of your time chasing one particular goal, uh, that might be very effective for that goal, but then we tend to fall back on some of our other goals. Uh, you can imagine how this plays out. If you're working very, very hard, um, you're solely focused on business, often your health will suffer. If you're solely focused on your health, often other things will suffer. And so we have to juggle both our goal setting and our goal pursuits. In today's, we're going to talk about a number of different ways to work with what could very well be called these interleaving goals by focusing on a common practice or common set of mechanisms that are present in all aspects of goal seeking. What is that process? Well, turns out it's a neural circuit. A neural circuit is simply a collection of brain areas that, when active in a particular sequence, give rise to a particular behavior or perception. So for instance, when you feel happy, it's not because you have a brain area that's the happy brain area that is electrically active. Rather, it's going to involve numerous brain areas being active in concert and to different degrees, in the same way that the keys on a piano together played in the appropriate sequence represent a particular song. You would never say that one key on the piano represents that song, but that key is necessary. Similarly, in the brain, we can say that a brain area might be necessary but not sufficient to give us a particular experience or generate a particular behavior. So when we think about goal seeking and the pursuit of goals of any kind in the brain, it doesn't matter what the goal is. It involves a common set of neural circuits, and the neural circuit that I'd like to orient us toward today, and we will return to it a few times, involves learning a couple of names, but you don't have to worry so much about memorizing these. Just more important is to understand the logic of how it's put together, and I will explain that and make it very clear. If you want to learn the names, that's great. One of the brain areas is the so-called amygdala. The amygdala is most often associated with fear, so you might say, "Wow, how is that involved in goal-directed behavior?" Well, a lot of our goal-directed behavior is to avoid punishments...... including things like embarrassment or financial ruin or things of that sort. And so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built into the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation to pursue goals. The other areas are the so-called ventral striatum. The striatum is part of what's called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is a neural circuit that can very simply be described as a neural circuit that helps us generate go, meaning the initiation of action, and no-go, the prevention of action, type scenarios. Let me make that even simpler. The ventral striatum is part of this thing called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia has sort of two circuits within it. One circuit is involved in getting us to do things, like, "I'm going to get up tomorrow and I'm going to run five miles first thing in the morning." I don't know if I'm actually going to do that, but I'm just using that as an example. Another circuit within the basal ganglia is a no-go circuit. It's the one that says, "No, I'm not going to go for the second cookie or the third cookie. I'm not going to eat that." And then the go circuit would be the one that's responsible for instead eating something else. Okay? So we have go and no-go circuits within the basal ganglia. So we've got amygdala, so you can think of as kind of fear and anxiety and avoidance. We've got the basal ganglia, which are for initiating action and preventing action, and then there is the so-called cortex. The cortex is the outer shell of the brain, and there are two sub-regions of the cortex that are involved in goal-directed behavior. One is the lateral prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal cortex is involved in so-called executive function, things like planning, thinking about things under different time scales, so not just what we want in the immediate term, but what we might want tomorrow or the next day, and how our actions currently are going to relate to the future. And the so-called orbitofrontal cortex. Orbitofrontal cortex has a large number of functions, but one of the key functions of the orbitofrontal cortex, it's involved in meshing some emotionality with our current state of progress and comparing that emotionality to where we, it might be when we are closer to a goal. Okay? So there're basically four areas. One involved in anxiety, one involved in emotion, one involved in planning, and another involved in this go/no-go action. So that's a bunch of detail, but if I wanted to make it really simple for everyone, I would say there are four areas. One is an area associated with anxiety and fear, that's the amygdala. The second is involved in action and inaction, remember go and no-go, so that's the basal ganglia. The other one is involved in planning and thinking across different time scales, so that's lateral prefrontal cortex, and then the fourth one is involved in emotionality, where we sit emotionally at present compared to where we think we will be emotionally when we reach some particular goal, and that's the orbitofrontal cortex. Okay? Again, you don't need to know all those names, you don't need to know all the details, just understand that those different elements are involved in the decision-making processes that lead us toward particular goals and have us update our goal seeking, et cetera. One key thing is it doesn't matter what the goal is, the same circuits are involved. So whether or not you're trying to build a company that's a billion-dollar company that's going to go public or you're thinking about planning a crafts day at home with the kids or for yourself or you're thinking about what movie to go see, goals, goal seeking, and assessing progress towards goals all involve the exact same neural circuits. It's really remarkable. It's also very convenient for our discussion today. What's going on in these circuits can basically

5. 21:52 – 24:33

   Determining the Value of Goals

   1. AHAndrew Huberman21:52

      be boiled down to two particular things. The first is value information, trying to understand whether or not something is really worth pursuing or not, okay? So placing a value on a particular goal. The other component of this neural circuit is associated with action, which actions to take and which actions not to take given the value of a particular goal in a given moment's time. I want to say that again. The other component of the circuit is involved in action, whether or not you should act or should not act based on your assessment of the value of a goal at a particular moment in time. And I won't, you're going to hear me say over and over again in this episode, the value information about a goal is so key. Here's why. There is basically one neurotransmitter, or rather neuromodulator system, that governs our goal setting, goal assessment, and goal pursuit, and that is the neuromodulator dopamine. Dopamine is the common currency by which we assess our progress toward particular things of particular value. In fact, dopamine is the way that we assess value of our pursuits. And so as we take a moment and we shift our attention to the psychology of goal setting, the things that you've probably heard a bit more about, about what sorts of goals are good and how to set goals and how to categorize goals, I want you to think about how dopamine could possibly be involved in these different processes. And the reason I want you to do this is that all of the psychology of goal setting and goal pursuit is wonderful because it places things into different categories, it allows us to parse our thinking and organize our thinking, but what's not often seen, in fact, I'm not aware of any literature out there, scientific or literature in the popular press or in popular books, is an understanding of how the underlying neurobiology can be layered on top of the psychology of goal setting to allow us to set and pursue our goals more effectively, and that's what we're going to do today. We are eventually going to arrive at a set of four practices that when performed on a regular basis will allow you to assess, what is the value of this next particular action step? How worthwhile is it to do behavior A versus behavior B in order to achieve a particular goal? If any of this is vague now, I'm going to make it all very clear for you. You're going to come away with some very specific lists of takeaways that you can put down on paper if you like and that you can use to set goals, assess goals, and execute goals more effectively using the neuroscience of the circuits I just described and an understanding

6. 24:33 – 30:29

   Psychology of Goal Setting: Assessing Value, Action Steps

   1. AHAndrew Huberman24:33

      of the neuromodulator dopamine. Let's take a look at the psychology of goal setting and goal pursuit.This is an enormous literature, meaning there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of scientific papers about the topic of goal setting and goal pursuit. There's also a lot of information on the internet about goal pursuit. And in looking over this information, one comes to appreciate pretty quickly that acronyms are a big thing. (laughs) Acronyms seem to dominate the area of goal setting, especially as it relates to things in the business sector, but also in the relationship sector. Now, acronyms are wonderful, they allow us to organize our thinking into lists, and conceptually they can be very useful, but as I moved through this literature, I started to see some redundant themes. And so what I've attempted to do is distill out the redundant themes that regardless of the person teaching or the scientific laboratory that happened to come up with, um, these acronyms, that they boil down to some common features. So, let's talk about that literature, and I think we'll come away with an understanding of some basic elements that are common to all goals. Now, the modern science, or the modern psychological science of trying to understand goal setting and pursuit actually dates back to the 1930s. And we have to be sure that members of our species were focused on goal setting and goal pursuit long before the scientific literature emerged. It just stands to reason that since the human brain hasn't evolved that much, we don't think, in the last 10,000 years, that people would be thinking about these things, they just didn't get them down into papers that we could evaluate on PubMed and so forth. But now we can. So, we can look at those papers and what you find is that acronyms abound in the psychology literature about goal setting and goal pursuit. So for instance, you'll hear about, um, the work of, um, Lock and Small, for instance, these are the last names of, of various, uh, researchers, the so-called ABC method, that a goal should be achievable, it should be believable, and that the person be committed. It's sort of obvious once you hear it, but the ABC method. Then people came along and expanded on that. They talk about the so-called SMART method, SMART being another acronym, that it be specific, that the goal be measurable, that the goal be attainable, that the goal be realistic, and that it be time-bound, meaning that you set a certain period of time in which a given goal should be performed. And then people would come along and modify these. This is the way-

   2. NANarrator26:52

      (laughs)

   3. AHAndrew Huberman26:52

      ... that psychology research is done. I'm not laughing at it, I'm just chuckling because, um, it seems like the acronyms get longer and longer and longer. Um, they developed the SMARTER approach, adding an E-R to the acronym SMART, S-M-A-R-T-E-R. They added ethical and rewarding, which fortunately, um, are good things, I believe, ethical and rewarding. Um, what does all this mean? Well, what it means is that any kind of goal pursuit, any kind of goal setting really has to involve a number of different states and neural circuits in the brain and body. At least that's how I view this literature. Why would I do that? Well, let's think about the very modern version of the kind of acronyms that I talked about a moment ago, dating back to the 1930s and extending into the 1990s. You can find beautiful talks online from people who have worked with some of the biggest companies and greatest high performers out there to achieve incredible things, and they will talk about generating a sort of objective mindset for goal setting. They'll talk about goals needing to be significant, there has to be a big goal, that it has to be concrete, so you have to be able to describe what the goal is. It has to be action-oriented, it has to be inspirational, has to be time-bound. You have to have reasonable, realistic, verifiable measures. You have to constantly up the ante. If it's starting to sound repetitive, it's because it is repetitive. There are basically only three or four elements to goal setting and goal pursuit. Basically, an individual or set of individuals has to identify a specific thing that they're going to attain. In some communities, they talk about knowing what right looks like, meaning be ab- being able to define a very specific goal. You can't just say, "You know, I want to be a champion athlete." You have to say what sport, and you have to understand what the path to that is. So, any big goal, of course, is broken up into a series of smaller goals, but the whole thing starts with thinking about the end in mind. And in a few minutes, we will talk about whether or not visualization of the end in mind is actually beneficial or detrimental to achieving goals. There's actually great neuroscience and psychology data on that now. So, I mentioned all these acronyms not as an attempt to disparage them. I think they're wonderful, and I mentioned all that psychology literature not in an attempt to disparage it, but rather to just say that goal setting is the first step, assessment of what, whether or not one is making progress towards those goals is a second but necessary step, and then there's the business of goal execution, and that brings us back to the neural circuit components. Remember, this neural circuit involving those four things earlier, the amygdala, striatum, or r- frontal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex? They work together to divide the whole process, as I mentioned before, into two general categories. The first is assessing value, knowing whether or not where one is at one given moment relates to some external thing. Are things going well or are things going poorly? And knowing how to gauge that accurately. And then action steps, goes and no-gos. Do more of this, do less of that. Do this, don't do that, et cetera. So, now we are going to shift back to the neuroscience, and we're going to talk about the practical applications of the information I just described, because I've given you a lot of kind of academic information, and as we do this, I'd like you to keep in mind, what are some things that you've either accomplished or that you'd like to accomplish going forward? Because as we do this, we can build toward a set of protocols that, at the end, you'll be able to very quickly plug in your particular goals and a route to those particular goals that's grounded in the science and that I think are going to be very effective in allowing you to reach those goals more quickly and with, indeed, less effort.

7. 30:29 – 35:39

   Peripersonal Space vs. Extrapersonal Space

   1. AHAndrew Huberman30:29

      In fact, let's start with a tool now, because as we move through all this information, I want to make sure that people are coming away with some practical things that they can implement and, indeed, some things that you can even do during the course of listening to or watching this podcast.The first thing to do is to understand the difference between peripersonal space and extrapersonal space. Peripersonal space is all the space, literally, that's within inside your body, the surface of your skin, and in your immediate environment. Peripersonal space is a key concept in neuroscience, because you have particular neural circuits and particular chemicals that are geared toward what are called consummatory behaviors, meaning using things and consuming things and enjoying things that are in your immediate peripersonal space. Let me give you an example of this for myself, just to make it concrete. You can imagine similar examples for yourself right now. Within my current peripersonal space is my interoception, my understanding or perception of my internal body, so how quickly I'm breathing, my heart rate, the feelings on the surface of my skin, et cetera. But also within the confines of my peripersonal space is this coffee mug that if you're listening to this, you can't see this, but I'm lifting, lifting up a coffee mug, and I'm going to take a sip of coffee. (sipping) That's a consummatory behavior. I have the coffee. I don't have to do much or motivate much to get it. I have other things here, pens and computer, et cetera. Okay, so things in your peripersonal space, and consuming those things is generally governed by a set of neurochemicals that center around the neuromodulator serotonin, and there are a few others as well, things like oxytocin, but mainly serotonin. Contrast that with the so-called extrapersonal space. Extrapersonal space is everything beyond the confines of my reach. It would be something in the next room. It would be something down the street. It would be something at some other location in space and time. And the neuromodulators and neurochemicals that are associated with any kind of thinking about anything in the extrapersonal space are distinct from the neurochemicals and neuromodulators that are involved in thinking about or making actions towards the peripersonal space. And the molecule that's most associated with thinking about or orienting toward the extrapersonal space, again, things beyond the confines of my skin or your skin, is dopamine. And this is a vitally important concept to understand when you're setting goals and seeking goals. If we are to be good at goal seeking, if we are to be good at setting goals and assessing goals, if we are to achieve our goals, we have to be able to toggle back and forth between a clear understanding of our peripersonal space, what we have and how we feel in the immediate present, and our ability to understand what's out there in the extrapersonal space, and our ability to move into that extrapersonal space. And a simple way to conceive of all this is that we evaluate our progress in the peripersonal space. We evaluate how we feel about some pursuit, even if we haven't initiated that pursuit yet. How we feel about a particular goal is truly a feeling that we experience in the here and now, even though the goal is in the future, okay? If we are going to evaluate whether or not we made progress today or yesterday or not, that's an evaluation of how we feel in the immediate peripersonal space. However, moving toward any goal involves orienting our thinking towards the extrapersonal space. And as we go through today's episode, I'm going to teach you a technique, or rather a neuroscience- based tool, that will allow you to continually transition back and forth between the peripersonal space and the extrapersonal space in a way that will allow you to update and evaluate and better execute your goal seeking. The whole principle behind this is that human beings, like other animals, have to make evaluations about whether or not they are on the right track. However, the important thing to understand is that humans in particular can do this over different time scales. We don't just pursue food 'cause we are hungry. We pursu- pursue food, excuse me, for a particular meal that we might be having with people tomorrow, right? We can modulate the time scale in a way that other animals don't. That's how we adjust our goal seeking to different time scales. And in addition to that, humans are exquisitely good at biasing our behavior toward particular goals over very long periods of time, but there are a lot of mistakes out there, in fact, things that are outright wrong in the literature and in particular in the internet and in the kind of wellness and fitness and cognitive fitness space, that send people down the wrong path. And those things we will talk about in a few minutes, but things like visualization, that visualization and visualization of this big goal is the best way to achieve your goals. In fact, that's not the case. There's a much better approach to doing all this. So,

8. 35:39 – 43:50

   Visually Focusing on a Goal Line Improves Performance

   1. AHAndrew Huberman35:39

      now I'd like to shift gears towards talking about a few of the things that most people get badly wrong in setting and assessing and executing goals. This is based on peer-reviewed research, so I think it's very solid. I know it is very solid. And it runs counter to what many of us have been taught. Let's start with a simple one. We've all heard that multitasking is bad. Okay? We hear multitasking is bad. It doesn't allow for focus. If you want to achieve anything, you want to accomplish anything, you should not multitask. Well, turns out that's wrong. Turns out that there is a role for multitasking, but the multitasking has to be placed at a particular time within your goal-seeking behavior in order to be effective. Really nice studies done at Carni- Carnegie Mellon University in the Dabish Lab evaluated how long people are able to focus in different environments, how long they're able to stay concentrated on their work, and it turns out that number is exceedingly low. Turns out that most people, whether or not they're doing computer work or whether or not they're doing writing or accounting work or anything o- of that sort...... can hold their attention for about three minutes at a time before they shift their attention off. That's (laughs) ridiculously low when you first hear it, but that probably reflects a basic state of brain function that hearkens back to a time when we were hunter-gatherers. I doubt that we were maintaining focus solidly for hours and hours and hours unless we were under some particular threat or so- in some particular crisis. Rather, you could imagine that people collected seeds and nuts and berries for about three minutes, and then probably stood up, looked around, and then kept going, okay? Or that they were hunting animals or in some sort of pursuit, fishing, et cetera, and focused, focused, focused. Then every three minutes or so, they might have looked up and, you know, taken a look at the sky or looked around to make sure that, um, other people were there or not there, et cetera. It all stands to reason that that would be the case. Again, the neural circuits haven't evolved much. Now, multitasking has been shown to have a very interesting physiological signature. When we multitask, when we jump back and forth between things, there is an increase in the level of the neurotransmitter, also sometimes called the neuromodulator, but basically same thing for sake of this discussion, there's an increase in the neurotransmitter epinephrine, which is adrenaline. And so there are really nice studies now point to the fact that doing a bit of multitasking prior to jumping into some focused, goal-directed behavior, whether or not it's mental behavior or physical behavior, can actually be useful, because it gets us into action. So we've all been told that multitasking is terrible, but if you, for instance, find yourself cleaning up your house and also checking your phone and doing a number of things right at the point where you should be sitting down to write or do some focused work, it probably reflects some adaptive mechanism where you use action and somewhat varied multitasking action in order to generate adrenaline in your system, because adrenaline just gets you into action. Now, that's great, but you don't want to multitask throughout any kind of goal-seeking or goal pursuit behavior, because what's also very clear, and we're going to talk about this in exquisite depth today, is that visual focus, and in particular, contracting your visual window, bringing the aperture of what you see to a very fine point, can absolutely increase your clarity of goal-seeking and the likelihood that you will pursue your goals. I've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast as a way of increasing focus for any kind of pursuit. I've talked about a practice whereby you can literally look at a dot or a line placed on a wall or on your computer in front of you for 30 to 60 seconds, and then moving into some dedicated work where you need to focus, and indeed, just looking at a narrow piece of the visual world, a small piece of the visual world for some period of time, and forcing yourself to hold that gaze on that location as best you can, can increase your level of cognitive attention and your ability to focus and stay focused. And this is not magic. It is the consequence of the fact that most of your cognition follows your visual perception. For those of you that are low vision or no vision, meaning you're blind or you have trouble seeing, my lab does a lot of work with, uh, people who are low vision, no vision. They tend to use their auditory system, their hearing, as a way to anchor their attention to particular things, okay? But most people out there can see and see pretty well, and visual focus is the way to do that. Now, earlier, we were talking about this notion of peripersonal space versus extrapersonal space, and I'm just going to cede a little bit of the later conversation by saying that when we focus on an external point, we are in a process of exteroception. It's the e- focus on the extrapersonal space, not the peripersonal space. So when we focus on something, say, a line on the wall for 30 or 60 seconds, or at our computer for 30, 60 seconds, and just look at it, and then move into any kind of action, whether or not it's work action or physical action, we are, at its very core, we are engaging in this pursuit of extrapersonal space. We are placing our focus outside our body, and therefore, we are placing the brain into goal pursuit mode. Work at NYU, in particular, in the laboratory of a, a phenomenal researcher in their psychology department, um, by the name of Emily Balcetis, B-A-L-C-E-T-I-S, Emily Balcetis, has done really nice work on this. They've done is they've had people focus their visual attention on a goal line of some sort, and then to engage in some sort of behavior that requires a lot of effort, and they've done a lot of different experiments like this, but I'll just explain one. They always include a control group where people have to go through the same physical effort or mental effort, but they don't focus their attention just on one location. The long and short of these studies is that when people have to focus their attention on one location, like a goal line, they are much more effective in reaching those goals, and they achieve them with the perception that they expended less effort. I'll give you an example of one particularly nice study from the Balcetis lab. So this particular study involves physical exercise, although as I mentioned before, they've done similar studies looking at cognitive type work, and what they did is they had a group of people exercise wearing 15-pound ankle weights, and they had to basically move a certain distance or run a certain distance to reach a goal line. One group was focused on the goal line, visually focused on the goal line. The other group was not told to visually focus on the goal line. And what they found was that the group that focused on the goal line di- was able to achieve reaching that goal with 17% less effort, they measured effort, and th- it got there 23% quicker. That's a remarkable difference, right? So same distance traveled with same workload, because everyone's wearing the same 15-pound weights on their ankles, one group is simply looking at the goal line, the other group is not told to look at the goal line. Simply by looking at the goal line does something to the psychology and, and physiology of these people that allows them to move forward with less perceived effort and to do it more quickly. That's remarkable.Right? And in this case, they're focused on the goal line, but in a few moments, we'll talk about how one can use updating of goal lines, so incremental goal lines, starting with an intermediate goal and then extending the goal line further and further. But just sit back for a second and think about that. Just by changing where a person looks, they change their perceived effort and their ability to do something m- more effectively, more quickly than a group that is not deliberately focusing their visual attention on one location. That's incredible, and it's so incredible, in fact, you might say, "Well, how could that possibly be?" Well, it turns out it has a very specific underlying physiological reason and that has to do with changes in our so-called autonomic nervous system, the ner- aspects of our nervous system that prepare us for readiness and action or that prepare us for resting and relaxing.

9. 43:50 – 51:55

   How Vision Improves Performance: Blood Pressure

   1. AHAndrew Huberman43:50

      So, what is special about focusing one's visual attention at a given location? Well, it turns out that we have two branches of our visual system. So, visual information all comes in through our eyes, but then it can head down two different pathways. One pathway is engaged when our vision is brought to a common point, what we call a vergence eye movement. So, if we're focusing very intensely on a given point, regardless of how far away from us that point is, our visual system engages a certain set of neurons, neural circuits that are involved in resolving fine detail and that can evaluate small changes over small periods of time. Just think of it as a very detailed camera of the visual world, and it tends to be very restricted. The other pathway through the visual system is the so-called magnocellular pathway, and this is a pathway that's involved in taking in global information about lots of things that are happening around us, movement of things to our right, movement of things to our left, things that are happening down on the ground and all around us, and that pathway involves a sort of relaxation, if you will, of the neural circuits that are associated with alertness and attention. When you walk down the street and you're not thinking about much, provided you're not looking at your phone, you're not focusing on one location, you're more or less in a relaxed state compared to when you're looking for a particular sign, you're looking for a bus or a train that's coming, or a particular person, and that should inherently make sense. When your level of attention and alertness goes up, there's sort of a small, but perceptible increase in your level of arousal. It's not really stress necessarily, but arousal of alertness. And it turns out that the visual system accomplishes this increase in alertness by communicating with your circulatory system and the system that delivers blood and nutrients and oxygen to the rest of the tissues in your body. So, let's talk for a second about what focusing our vision on a particular location does, because in the study from the Balcetis lab, what they found was focusing on a goal line allows people to move more effectively toward that goal. This is something you can leverage in all aspects of all goal pursuits. What happens when we focus on a particular location? Believe it or not, there's an increase in a particular feature of our blood pressure. Now, your body has, of course, arteries, veins, and capillaries, and your heart pumps blood first to the arteries and then to the other, uh, components of your vascular system, and we have so-called blood pressure, right? Blood pressure is just how much f- the fluid volume is pressing on those arteries, veins, and capillaries, right? So, you can imagine a pipe with very little fluid moving through it, that's low pressure. You have a pipe with a lot of fluid moving through it, that's even more pressure. You have a pipe with a lot of very viscous, meaning very kind of, um, sticky, thick stuff moving through it, that's even more pressure. Well, we have blood pressure and you've probably had your blood pressure measured. There's always two numbers, right? You have a top number, which is the systolic blood pressure, and then you- there's the bottom number below the line, which is the diastolic pressure. So, the important thing to understand is that your blood pressure will rise when your heart beats because there's more fluid moving through those pipes that are your arteries, your veins, and your capillaries. And that top number is called the systole or the systolic blood pressure because that's the pressure at the time when your heart contracts, okay? So, the top number, which normally, if you have a healthy blood pressure, is somewhere in the range of 90 to 120 millimeters of mercury. Millimeters of mercury is just the way the pressure is measured. That top number, your sys- your systole or your systolic blood pressure is what's measured when the heart contracts, okay? So, that's the amount of pressure when there's a heartbeat and it's moving through your vasculature. Now, between beats, right, the heartbeats, but then it relaxes, your blood pressure is going to drop to a lower value, right? Because fluid isn't being pumped through the system at those moments, and that's the bottom value, the diastolic pressure, and typically for healthy people, that's going to be 60 to 80 millimeters of mercury. So, you might hear about a normal blood pressure being about, again this is an approximate, 120 over 80. What that means is at the point where blood was being pumped through the- your arteries and veins, boom, that it's 120 millimeters of mercury. But then when the heart relaxes for a second before the next beat, then it drops to 80. Okay? So, there's high pressure, low pressure, high pressure, low pressure. The s- the fluid is being pumped through the system. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, it turns out that there are neural circuits that link your visual system and focusing on a particular point with that top number, the systolic blood pressure, and when you focus your eyes on a particular location, that systolic blood pressure goes up and there are some other systems that are coordinated with it in your brain and body that start releasing adrenaline, low amounts of adrenaline in most cases, and that adrenaline further readies your body for action. So, bringing our visual focus to a particular location does a number of things to the brain and the whole system of the body to prepare it, to place it into a state of readiness that makes us more likely to lean into our goals, into action. And if we step back and think about this, this makes perfect sense. The brain and body need to be coordinated, we can't just think about a goal. In fact, a deer or a lion can't just think about a goal, it has to think about a goal and then t-... has to feel some sort of activation energy, some willingness or desire to move forward in pursuit of that goal. So imagining a goal has to be coupled to the physical pursuit of the goal. So our visual system, in a beautiful way, brings together a focus, literally a visual focus on a particular point outside us. Then it recruits an increase in systolic blood pressure, which creates a systemic, a body-wide and brain-wide increase in fuel utilization, in oxygen availability, in our willingness to move forward as a body, as a whole coherent system. And then there are also neurotransmitter systems like epinephrine, as- as we will soon see, dopamine, that get recruited as well to place us into a continual mode of action. This, to me, is a remarkable feature of our physiology, and it gets right to the point of some of the psychological phenomenon that we were talking about earlier. Let's just recall what some of those are, I won't list them all, but, you know, a goal has to be significant, they say. Okay, all the psychologists, all the popular stuff online says it has to be significant, has to be inspirational, and it has to be action-oriented. Okay. So let's say you look out into the landscape of what's available to you, whether or not it's just in your mind or you look at a specific point. You say, "Ah, I want to go to that particular restaurant to eat that particular food." And you orient towards it and you move towards it. This is the way that your brain and body are coordinating their actions together. Conversely, when our visual system is in a mode of looking at everything, when the aperture of our visual system is very broad, we know that there's also a reduction in our goal-directed behavior and a reduction in the systolic blood pressure. It's as if our peripersonal space is sufficient, we don't need to get beyond our current state, we're not oriented toward any one thing in particular. Okay. So I've now described some of the psychology and some of the underlying physiology, now I'd like to mesh this within the context of actual specific goal setting and goal pursuit. Because what many of you are probably thinking is, "Okay, well, that's some physiology, there's some psychology, but how do you actually apply this towards setting and achieving goals?" Well, you do that by understanding that your mental frame and your attention are always either positioned to your peripersonal space, focused on your immediate possessions and state, or towards things outside you, but that you also have the ability to dynamically travel back and forth between those. And so next we're going to talk about what the literature says about things like visualization, immediate and intermediate goals, long-term goals, and how to best achieve those. And then we're going to move specifically into the protocols that you can use. It's a protocol that I've specifically developed for you, the listeners, in order to incorporate all the signs into a best practice that you can do any time, any place, to really identify what it is specifically that you want to pursue and the best route to pursue and achieve that goal.

10. 51:55 – 54:40

    Tool 2: Use Focal Vision to Initiate Goal Pursuit

    1. AHAndrew Huberman51:55

       Focusing our visual attention on one particular point is incredibly effective for all types of goal pursuit. And if you'd like to read some of the scientific studies or read a review of the scientific studies that have looked at how narrowing one's visual attention can really enhance the effectiveness of pursuing goals, I'll put a link to this study. The title of the study is Keeping the Goal in Sight: Testing the Influence of Narrowed Visual Attention on Physical Activity. And this is a paper from Emily Balsatis' lab, focuses mainly on physical activities, but it mentions some other things as well. Uh, this is a, uh, article published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2020, so it's recent. Uh, it's- it's an exceptional paper, in my opinion, really gets to the heart of how all this works and some examples of where it's been implemented. So let's apply this visual tool in a very simple way to any type of goal that you want to pursue. If you already know what goal you want to pursue, maybe it's a workout, maybe it's, uh, cognitive work of some particular sort, again, the process is very simple. You're going to focus your visual attention on one point beyond your peripersonal space. So it could be on your computer, it could be on the wall, it could be a horizon, it could be at a- at a distance, and you're going to focus your visual attention there. And with some effort, you're going to hold your visual attention for 30 to 60 seconds. You might blink, that's okay, but you're going to try and hold your visual attention there. So no moving your head around, um, no diverting your attention to other locations. Some people will find it very easy to do, other people will find it quite hard. Your mind may drift cognitively, that's okay, but try and bring your visual attention to that common point. Several episodes ago, I talked about how there are actually studies looking at developing this kind of training in students for ADHD, and the data on that are actually quite encouraging. So for people who have ADHD and focus issues and attentional issues, this can be effective. For people who don't, this can also be effective. Again, it places your brain and body into a state of readiness, and then the idea is to move into the particular actions that bring you closer to your goal. Okay. We haven't yet talked about how to set goals and how to assess progress. This is simply how to pursue goals, okay? But the visual component is important. In fact, I would argue that the visual system and harnessing your visual attention to a narrow point is going to be the most effective way to get your brain and body into a mode of action to pursue whatever goal it is you're trying to pursue. That practice is in stark contrast to multitasking, where, by definition, your attention is moving from place to place to place. Right? I mentioned that multitasking can be effective in getting your system into somewhat of an increased level of acti- activation so that you can pursue a more focused goal. But the visual attention to a particular point is going to be the most effective way to bring your system into a state of readiness and action for goal pursuit. There's another really interesting way that

11. 54:40 – 59:33

    Tool 3: Use Aged Self-Images to Self-Motivate

    1. AHAndrew Huberman54:40

       you can leverage your visual system toward long-term goals. The Balsatis lab has also done some really interesting experiments looking at people's ability to set and stick to long-term goals, and the long-term goal that they looked at was one related to saving money for later in life. This is something that a lot of people struggle with, a lot of people have a hard time investing money or saving money for later in life simply because, as human beings, we vary in the extent to which we worry about what's going to happen later.There's also a phenomenon of so-called delayed discounting. Delayed discounting is the fact that goals become less rewarding when they exist further out in the future. 'Kay? You may have experienced this walking past a donut shop. I love donuts. I'm just going to admit it over and over again on the spot. I love the smell of them, I love the taste of them. I try not to eat them 'cause I'm told they're not that good for me, and indeed, I- I don't think they are. (smacks lips) I occasionally cave and I'll eat one or many, but in general, I try not to cave to the rew- immediately rewarding properties of the smell and the taste of the donut. (laughs) But what we know is that if you smell a donut or you smell a wonderful piece of food, in the immediate term, it brings your level of focus, your mental focus, to the immediate phase, and it feels very rewarding. Like if you had it now, it would just be so good. But if you actually extend that reward out to tomorrow or the next day, and you think, "Oh, you know, um, today happens to be a Saturday that we're recording, but oh, you know, on Tuesday morning I'm going to get a donut." It doesn't have the same value because the reward system doesn't work as well for long-term goals. It- it's not as- as salient, it's not as tangible a goal, especially for something like a donut. Whereas the kinds of goals that work when you place them out into the longer term and can create a heightened sense of motivation tend to be things that are much more rewarding to us. So delayed discounting simply says that the further out in time that a given goal is, the less effective that reward will be in motivating one's behavior. And indeed, you see this with saving money for retirement, you see this with all sorts of long-term investment. The Balcetis lab therefore did an experiment where they looked at people's tendency to save money for later in life, but the groups that they created in the study were really interesting. They had one group imagine what it would be like to be 30 or 40 years older, and then to invest a certain amount of money according to whatever it is they thought that they would need, and they measured the amount that they had set aside and saved for later in life. The other group actually viewed photos of themselves, so picture images of themselves that were artificially, right, digitally aged so that they could see themselves 30 or 40 years into the future. And it turns out that people in that second group, simply by perceiving their own image in the future, invested far more money into later life. Right? They set aside more money. Somehow it bridged the gap between their immediate experience of life and the longer arc toward what it was going to be like in 30 or 40 years. It's a very powerful result, in my opinion, because what it says, again, is that our visual perception of the future or our visual perception of the present is what allows us to anchor our goal-directed systems and our motivation to take on things that in the immediate term might not seem that useful. So you can imagine all sorts of, uh, variations on this. You can imagine that every time, uh, I want a donut, I'd see a vision of myself or an actual physical picture of myself, um, as a consequence of a- having eaten many donuts every day for the next 10 years. I don't know what that image would look like 'cause I've never seen it. Uh, that's not an experiment that I necessarily need to do because I'm not that motivated to eat donuts, but I have to confess, you know, I'm somebody who, uh, I think I'm pretty good at managing resources, but I think if I were to see an image of myself at 70 or 75, there's so many things that are associated with visual images, like what our body must feel like, what our needs are probably going to be like in that state or in that age, what sorts of things we may or may not still be able to do at that age, and that anchors back to immediate goal-directed behaviors, such as setting aside money for retirement, such as investing in one's health practices. And indeed, there's a study that has looked at how people will invest in exercise and healthy eating if they just think about the future and what they might be like in the future versus seeing images of themselves in the future if they were to go down a healthy or unhealthy route. So again, the point is that the visual system, what we see, is principally important in defining what we do in the immediate term, even if what we see relates to something in the far off distance. I think these are phenomenal studies and they get right down to an important issue that's been kicked around over and over in the literature and in the discussion about goal seeking, which

12. 59:33 – 1:02:05

    Tool 4: Visualization of Goals is Only Helpful at the Start

    1. AHAndrew Huberman59:33

       is visualization. We hear, "Keep the big goal in mind, focus on the big goal." So now we're going to address, what does the science say about visualizing big goals? If you're somebody who's interested in business or, uh, let's say you're focused on relationship, is thinking about the perfect relationship and what that would look like, and the- the family that you would have and where you would live, is that effective in generating the kinds of behaviors that will lead you to that? Is it effective to think about the big win at the end? Well, it turns out it is, but you have to be very, very careful with when and how you implement that visualization, 'cause if you do it correctly, it can really serve your goal seeking well, and if you do it incorrectly, it can undermine the entire process. So does visualization work? Well, turns out that visualization of the big win, the end goal, so the Super Bowl win or eight gold medals in the Olympics or graduation from the university of your choice or making a certain amount of money or finding the partner of your choice, et cetera, that visualization is effective in getting the goal pursuit process started, but it actually is a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way of maintaining pursuit of that goal, meaning continuing to engage the sort of actions that are going to get you to eventually achieve that goal. I think this is going to be surprising to people at first, but if we think back to our discussion about the physiology of the blood pressure system, it'll make sense.Good scientific studies have been done where people are told to imagine or even script out their long-term vision and goal for themselves. What is the big goal? And they're taught to or told to imagine it with a rich amount of detail, to think about how it's going to feel in their body, and the big win. And basically what happens is, if you measure people's blood pressure or other metrics of physiology, you see an increase in that systolic blood pressure. There's an, kind of a ramping up of the readiness and excitement for that goal. But that increase in blood pressure quickly wanes, and over time that visual of the long-term goal becomes a poor thing to rely on in order to generate the actions that are required to reach that goal. In fact, there's a much better way to maintain ongoing action toward a goal that also involves visualization, but it turns out it's not about visualizing success, it's about visualizing failure.

13. 1:02:05 – 1:07:26

    Tool 5: Visualizing Failure is the Best Ongoing Motivator

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:05

       The Balcetis lab and other labs have looked at whether or not people make progress toward goals of different types, whether or not they're thinking about the goal, they're thinking about that goal line and what they want to achieve, that long-term goal and all the wonderful things associated with it, or whether or not they're thinking about all the ways in which they could fail en route to that goal. Right? This is not typically what we are encouraged to do. Typically, we are told, "Don't imagine failure. Push failure out of your mind. Only focus on success." You know, "Fake it 'til you make it," or, is a phrase that I absolutely hate, uh, frankly, because, uh, it's not even clear what that means, and, uh, it's not even clear what the ethical form of that is. I think it means continue despite any anxiety or fear that things won't work out. But if you look at the literature, the scientific literature, what the Balcetis lab and other labs have shown is that there's a near doubling, near doubling in the probability of reaching one's goal if you focus rou- routinely on foreshadowing failure. You think about the ways in which things could fail if you take action A or you take action B, and instead, therefore, you take action C. You're supposed to think about how things could fail if you don't get up and run each morning if your goal is, say, a fitness goal. So, let's, uh, use that as an example, because even though I realize people are in pursuit of many things, not just fitness, fitness goals and physical goals are a very concrete thing that we can all get on the same page about, 'cause they're related to actions. Let's say somebody i- th- sets a goal of running five miles four times a week minimum, and as many as seven four times a week minimum, before 8:00 AM. Okay? In a previous podcast on habits, I talked about the benefits of not necessarily setting specific times that one will do things, but setting time blocks that one will do things. So, you say before 8:00 AM you're going to run five miles, and that's going to happen up to seven days a week. Okay? One version of this would be, okay, sit back in a chair and think about how great you're going to feel and look if you're doing this every day, how your health is going to improve, how everything's going to... Your blood markers of lipids, et cetera are going to improve. Okay, fine. That's the visualization goal of visualizing the endpoint. Turns out that is far less effective and maybe even counterproductive compared to thinking about what's going to happen if you don't do this, the negative health outcomes that are going to occur, the disappointment you're going to have in yourself, the fact that you're going to wait until 7:30. That's not long enough for many people to run five miles. You go to put on your shoes and it's gonna be pouring rain or even hailing or snowing outside, and now you're not going outside unless you're somebody who's particularly motivated to do that. Okay? So, foreshadowing failure turns out to be the best way to motivate toward goal pursuit. In fact, as I mentioned before, there's a near doubling in the likelihood that people will reach goals of any kind when they're constantly thinking about how bad it's going to be if they fail. If we think back to the neural circuit associated with assessing value in our goal pursuits, this makes perfect sense. The amygdala, that center of the brain that's involved in anxiety and fear and worry? Well, the amygdala is one of the four core components of our goal setting and goal pursuit circuitry. And there's no bypassing that. There is no one listening to this or watching this whose amygdala is not involved in their goal setting and goal pursuit behavior. And so, while I'd love to be able to tell you that all you should think about is rainbows and puppies and all the wonderful rewarding things that are going to happen when you achieve your goals, the truth is, you should be thinking mainly about how bad it's really going to get if you don't do it, how disappointed in yourself you're going to feel, how it will negatively impact you, if not in the immediate term, in the long term, if indeed your goal is to reach your goal. So, I want to emphasize, and I'm not interested in encouraging people to flagellate themselves, I'm encouraging people to achieve their goals, and it turns out the best way to do that is by foreshadowing failure. And the more specific you can get by writing down or thinking about or talking about how bad it will be if you don't achieve your goals, the more likely you are to achieve those goals. Part of the reason for that almost certainly has to do with increases in systolic blood pressure and increases in readiness in your system when you imagine failure. The brain and body are much better at moving away from fearful things than towards things we want. I wish I could tell you that wasn't the case, but there is a true asymmetry in the way we are built. In fact, the brain and body can engage in what's called one trial learning. When something bad happens, we eat a food that makes us sick, we have an interaction with a person or place that we really don't like, it only takes one trial to re- one event, one time to reorient or rewire our neural circuitry so that we have a bias toward moving away from that thing in the future. When things go well, unfortunately, that doesn't often occur. If things go really, really well, it might orient our brain and body toward wanting more of that thing, and we'll have neural circuitry changes that will lead us to engage in that particular behavior or interaction again, but it is never as effective as these avoidant circuits. So, again, foreshadow failure. If you're going to visualize in a positive way, do that at the very beginning of some goal pursuit. Maybe intermittently every once in a while you imagine the big win of, you know, scoring perfect on an exam, or winning the championship, or the great relationship, but most of the time, if you want to be effective you should be focusing on avoiding failure, and you should be really clear about what those failures would look like and feel like. Now

14. 1:07:26 – 1:13:05

    Tool 6: Make Goals Moderately Lofty

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:26

       let's talk about goal setting. Going back to that prominent literature, the psychology and popular literature again, we can hear some of these themes start to emerge.The goal should be significant, we are told. It should be inspirational. It should be aggressive yet realistic. Well, okay, that's all fine and good, but let's get semi-quantitative about this. Let's at least get biological about this. How inspirational does it need to be? Is, does it need to be the kind of thing that is so inspiring to me that I can't sleep at all? Well, that wouldn't be good because as I believe, and I know many of you have heard me say many, many times before, regular deep sleep, (laughs) 80% or more of the nights that you go to sleep is going to be crucial to your cognitive and mental functioning and your ability to achieve your goals in the long term. That's absolutely clear. So, it's got to be inspirational and exciting, but what does that really look like? And wha- what does that correspond to, and how do we actually make that happen? Well, once again there is a mismatch between what the real data show and what we're most often told. Turns out that, again work in Balcetis lab but also other laboratories has this addressed whether or not the probability of achieving a goal goes up or down depending on whether or not one visualizes or sets a goal that is easy, moderate, or impossible. Okay, an impossible goal would be, for instance if I say, you know, "I'm going to jump from my front driveway all the way up to the road." The road's quite a distance away, it's more than 20 meters away. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen in this lifetime, and it's not going to happen in any other lifetime. Not unless it involves some elaborate technology that I'm not aware of, a jet pack or something like that. It's just not going to happen, right? An easy goal would be something like, can you jump, or could I jump, you know, two feet in front of me? Obviously yes. Okay, now I'm using a trivial example here, but this could be translated to any kind of goal, school goal, physical goal, et cetera. Turns out that when people set goals, whether or not they are nutritional goals, eat more of this or eat less of that, whether or not they're fitness goals, you know, run more, lift more, or some other goal, swim less, swim more, whatever it is their goal happens to be, some learning goal, some relationship goal, some attempt to modify their behavior, turns out that if the goal is too easy, it's too within reach, it doesn't recruit enough of the autonomic nervous system to make pursuit of that goal likely. Now that might be surprising, at least it was surprising to me. You think, well something is really, really easy, you know, there's a very low bar to achieve it, people are probably more likely to do it, but turns out that's not the case. When we hear that a goal needs to be inspirational, what do we mean? When we hear that something's too easy to recruit our action, what do we mean? Well, Balcetis lab measured systolic blood pressure and found that when goals were too easy for people to attain, they didn't get that increase in systolic blood pressure and recruitment of the other neural and vascular systems, meaning the blood systems and the nervous system, that would place them into ongoing effort, and so they quickly gave up. Also, if a goal was too lofty, if it was too far from their current abilities, it didn't recruit enough systolic blood pressure. Even if people could get very excited about something mentally, it simply didn't place their body into a state of readiness, because they, it wasn't tangible that they could actually perhaps really achieve it. So it turns out that when goals were moderate, when they were just outside of one's immediate abilities, or that one felt that, yeah, that would take a lot of effort, but it's within range or maybe in range, like maybe I can do it, maybe I can't, then there was a near doubling of the systolic blood pressure, in the good sense, it didn't go into the unhealthy range, and a doubling or more of the likelihood that they would engage in the ongoing pursuit of that particular goal. So here we're talking about goal setting. What we're saying is, set goals that are realistic but that aren't so realistic that they're easy. The goals need to be realistic and truly challenging. Don't set goals that are so challenging and so lofty that they crash that blood pressure system in the other direction and make you or anyone feel unmotivated. In hearing this, it makes sense, but I don't think I would have predicted it had they not done this very controlled study. I would have thought the loftier the goal, the bigger the goal, the more that it recruits the autonomic system, and the more that people are likely to lean into the energy and effort to pursue and attain that goal. I also would have thought that if a goal is really easy to achieve, that it would engage the systems, uh, of action in the brain and body enough that people would sort of get into motion and pursue that goal, but neither is the case. Again, set goals that are difficult to achieve, but that are not so lofty that they collapse your system and that you feel overwhelmed. And the important thing here is that how we perceive a goal, whether or not we think it's within reach or not, of course will vary depending on whether or not we are rested, depending on whether or not other aspects of our life are going well. I mean, we can think that we are hot on the heels of a lifetime goal and everything's going well, and then there'll be some crisis, interpersonal crisis or there'll be a health crisis and you'll be shut down, and then that goal seems very, very hard to attain. So we, we will talk about how to update goals under different contexts in a few minutes, but of course this is going to be an averaging. This isn't something that you do just once. But the takeaway, again, is very simple, set goals that are moderately hard to hard, but not so hard nor so easy that they don't engage your brain and body properly. Moderate goals are best if you want to achieve

15. 1:13:05 – 1:15:57

    Tool 7: Avoid Goal Distraction; Focus on 1-2 Major Goals Per Year

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:13:05

       your goals. Now I'd like to talk about three particular areas of scientific study that point to goal pursuit, goal assessment, and goal achievement. Previously I told you that it's great to foreshadow failure, that that's a great way to get your system into a state of activation. I also told you that you want to set goals that are challenging but possible, and again, here I'm paraphrasing from the work of Emily Balcetis. I want to be very clear. There are a few other things that one can do in order to bias the likelihood that you will succeed in trying to achieve your goals. First of all-Limit your options. Trying to pursue too many goals at once can definitely be counterproductive. Now, I realize that life is complicated. We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue, but if we have particular goals that are important to us, we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals. And many people run into this problem. So setting one or two or maybe three major goals for a given year is going to be more than enough for most people, and is actually going to be challenging for most people. Now, of course, we have daily goals and monthly goals and yearly goals, but if we have big, lofty goals, we need to be careful not to contaminate our mental space and our visual space with too many goals. And why do I say visual goals? Well, what various department stores and supermarkets have discovered is that the greater the number of things in our visual attention, the more that we can draw our attention and our goals off a line of pursuit. What does that mean? Well, let's think about it in the practical context. This has actually been done. Big department stores have figured out that if they stock their shelves chock-a-block with many, many options of food or clothing items or objects or anything like that, people simply buy more stuff. People are very prone to orienting their attention to whatever's in front of them. You put a lot of stuff in front of them, their attention drifts. You put fewer things in front of them, their attention is more narrow. In a later episode, we'll talk about designing a work space that's optimized on the basis of this. It doesn't mean being in a room with nothing except just your desk and a computer. Doesn't have to be that sparse, but visual sparseness actually can help us orient our focus and our behavior. When we have a lot of things in our visual environment, or a lot of things in our cognitive environment, it's the same thing. And so if you're going to try and pursue a fitness goal, a relationship goal, an academic goal, and a long-term life financial goal all at once, that's four things. And you're going to have to come up with systems that allow you to isolate those goals in a very rigid way. And if you do have multiple interleaving goals and overlapping goals and simultaneous goals, in a few minutes, we're going to talk about a process that will allow you to use your visual system to align towards each of those goals sequentially, in a way that makes it much more likely that

16. 1:15:57 – 1:19:57

    Tool 8: Ensure Specificity of Goals, Weekly Assessment

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:57

       you'll achieve them. So now let's talk about specificity of goals. We've all heard that the more specific a goal is and the more specific we are about when and how we are going to execute that goal, the higher probability that we will actually achieve that goal. And indeed that's the case, but there's an additional feature that's not often discussed that is vitally important, and in fact may be more important than having a specific time of day or a specific endpoint in mind. There's a really nice study that was done looking at recycling. This is, uh, something that a number of groups, businesses, households, and individuals are trying to do more of. They're trying to lower carbon footprint or contribute to, um, the world in some general way by throwing away fewer things that could potentially be recycled. So this has been studied in the context of the work environment, where a business decides and lets everybody know that there's going to be a greater effort toward recycling cans or bottles, or bottles and cans, et cetera. And then, the way these studies were done is that the janitorial staff was swapped out temporarily for researchers that actually measured the number of recyclable items that showed up in the trash and not in the recycle, as a function of the total amount of trash. Why did I say as a function of the total amount of trash? Well, it's a way of controlling for, um, differences in beverage consumption from one week to the next. Anyway, the point is they were able to very carefully measure how much people are recycling before and after this call to action to recycle more. And what they found was if they said, "We are going to try and recycle more, try not to put cans and bottles in the trash," there, of course, was an improvement in recycling, but

Episode duration: 1:54:22