The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

(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. 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 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. 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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. 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 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 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-