Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman, and on my professor, neuber logy and oppom logy at stanford school of medicine. Today, we are talking about goal setting and achieving goals.

Now we've done three full episodes about this topic. previously. I did a solo episode about this topic where I described the neuroscience of the circuitry in the brain and body that underlies goal setting and pursuit. I also hosted two expert guests who have done extensive research on these topics. Those guests were doctor Emily bell chatz from new york university and doctor ma shang car.

So today's episode is going to focus on the key takeaway from those three previous episodes as well as incorporate new information that has been published in the scientific literature since those episodes air, so that by the end of today's episode, you will have a potent tool kit for setting and pursuing goals. We will talk about how to select which goals to pursue and when. We will talk about how to measure your progress, we will talk about how to initiate and sustain motivation as you pursue your goals.

We are also going to dispell some prominent myth about goal setting in pursuit. Given that this is a tool kit episode, I will talk about some of the underlying biological mechanisms for the protocols that I described, but most of what I will cover are the protocols themselves, the how to identify a goal, select the best goal for you to pursuit, how to initiate goal pursuit, how to maintain goal pursuit, how do you evaluate progress, and how to do the post talk analysis after you achieve a goal, or as the case, maybe not achieve a go. Although I am confident that if you implement even a subset of the protocols that we covered today, that you stand the greatest possible chance of both setting the proper goal and achieving that goal.

And I can say that both with confidence and humility, because the protocols I described, we're not created by me. They are clean from the scientific peer reviewed literature, and they have been shown to work. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired 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 element.

Element is an electrode drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and patache, this so called electorate, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium and parasitic are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions, intellectual al light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits and cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium.

I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough extra lights and while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found in an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions. Those you don't know.

Yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda. And something similar to IT called non sleep, deep breath or n sdr, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Okay, let's talk about goal setting and pursuit. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, this is a tool kit episode.

So i'm not going to talk too much about the mechanistic underpinnings of the protocols for goal setting a pursuit. I mostly just going to give you those protocols. But before I do that, I want to take just three minutes, I promise just three minutes or less, and described the neural circuitry involved in goal setting in pursuit.

And there are two reasons to do that. First of all, the biology of goal setting in pursuit is absolutely beautiful. It's incredible that we and many other animals, in fact, have this neural circuitry, and that IT works in the way that IT does. But equally important is that when we have a mechanistic understanding or framework for how a protocol or set of protocols work, IT makes IT much easier to tweet those protocols and customize them to our unique needs.

So with that said, the goal setting and pursuit circuitry essentially consists of four major stations in the brain, although it's important to point out that each of those stations has a number of other connections that are important for the whole goal setting, a pursuit process, but we can still things down to four major hubs or stations within the brain. And those are the basis of ganglia, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbital frontal cortex. So going through those one by one, the amiga as structure within the brain.

New ship, two of them were on each side of the brain that is involved in circuits associated with arouse, in driving levels of alertness, is also involved in fear. You probably heard that many times before, before, but also things like anxiety. And actually the ammidon IT can be involved in what we call positive violence.

Experience is not just the bad stuff like fear and anxiety, but also positive forms of arse all. And even learning the basel ganglia include a lot of different brain structures. But for sick of today's discussion, what you need to know is that the basel ganga includes two major pathways. S one is the so called go pathway, which is the way involved in generating actions, and the other is the so called no go pathway, or the pathway involved in withholding or ceasing action.

And this is really important, understand, because with all goals, we have to ask ourselves, are we trying to learn how to do something new, or are we trying to withhold a certain set of actions? And of course, anytime we learn anything, it's a process of both generating and with holding certain actions. So we ve got the amiga and we had the base of ganglia, which has this go action initiating and no go action withholding circuitry within IT.

And then there's the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in immediate and long term planning. And this is going to be a key component of today's discussion because we aren't going to be talking about later prefrontal cortex persae, but we aren't going to be talking about time perception in the context of setting and achieving our goals. Because setting and achieving our goals is all about being able to orient both in space, knowing where we are and what we're doing, but also in time, know where we are in that road of progress toward achieving our goal, crossing that finish line and repeatedly updating those finish lines in many cases.

And the force structure is the orbital frontal cortex, which, like all brain areas, tends to be a multitasking, does a bunch of different things. But for sake of today's discussion, it's important to understand that the orbital frontal cortex is involved in evaluation of our current emotional state and arousal state as IT relates to our goal pursuit. For instance, are we happy because we are sensing progress? Or are we unhappy and feeling frustrated or sad or angry because we are feeling that we are not achieving progress or that somehow we can't get into the sort of actions that are going to allow us to eventually reach our goals? OK.

So I described four major structures, all of which communicate with each other, and of course, a lot of other brain areas. And those four structures were the amiga la, the basel ganga, the go in nogo circuitry, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbit frontal cortex. And those represent the core components of the neural circuitry involved in goal setting and pursuit.

Now I realized that in time, that section, so I don't know whether not there was three minutes or less, but IT was shorter than three minutes. great. And if I was longer than three minutes, well, I promise to shave a couple minutes off the end of this episode.

okay. So now you have the understanding that we all have the same neural circuitry for goal setting in pursuit. I find that amazing, regardless of whether not you want to achieve a fitness goal or an academic goal or a work goal, monetary al relationship goal, maybe you wanted just get Better at relaxing.

I've been told I should perhaps pursue that goal. Well, you're going to use the same neural circuits for each and any of those. I find that incredible. I also find that very reassuring because what that means is that if we can focus on the tools and protocols that are anchored in the biology of goal setting, in pursuit as we understand them to exist in all humans, and indeed in other animals as well, well then we should have the greatest possible confidence that we will, in fact, achieve our goals.

So how do we go about doing that? Well, the first question you need to ask yourself is, what goal do I want to pursue? And the first protocol l for deciding what goal you want to pursue is actually quite simple one in terms of how IT stated, but it's fairly complex for a lot of people to answer.

And that is, which specific goal are you going to try and pursue? Because guess what, folks, most people who trying to achieve many goals, cy multi ously fail at all of them. This is what I call the overhaul approach.

When people think, okay, you know, in january one or next month or next week or perhaps even today, i'm going to start exercising, i'm going to start meditating, i'm going to learn a language, i'm going to learn to dance, i'm going to do all these different things. And that's just too many goals. I think here is an appropriate place to highlight the word of priority.

Priority literally means one thing that you place ahead of all others. These days we hear a lot about priorities, plural, but we really should be thinking about priority and defining our priority for learning in a given phase. So if you are somebody who wants to see IT more physically fit, or you want to learn something cognitively, that's terrific.

You are allowed to have multiple goals. But I highly recommend that you first select just one goal. Of course, you don't like go of other aspects of your mental health and physical health that you don't throw your life away in service to this one goal.

We've all seen how that goes, and it's not a pretty picture, but rather that you continue to engage in healthy ways with the other aspects of your life that you are proficient tat or mostly proficient at, but that you select one goal that you're going to try and change. How you select that one goal, of course, is going to reflect your values, your motivation, your resources. But it's very important that you spend some serious time defining that one priority, that one goal for this initial goal setting and pursuit period.

And in a moment, i'll tell you how long that goal pursuit period ought to be. But for some people, the best way to find which goal they're going to pursue is to write out the different things that they want and then essentially cross off the various things that they're willing to put on hold for the time being and circle the thing that they are really going to focus on. And only that thing.

And again, this is highly individual. It's going to pend on you, your past, your present, your future, your resources, all of that. But having that one priority is going to really increase the probability that you're going to achieve your goal.

Now we also know from the scientific literature that how lofty that goal is will impact whether not you are able to achieve IT. And I think most people mistakenly believe that if a goal is easy to achieve, it's more likely that they will achieve that goal sort of a duck. But in fact, the opposite has been shown to be true.

If a goal is too easy to achieve, if IT seems that IT doesn't recruit sufficient amounts of the arousal network that involves the a mida, but a bunch of other brain structures as well, that get people into the necessary actions to continually pursue that goal, this perhaps should not be surprising. In order to learn something, we have to shift our nervous system into states that are somewhat uncomfortable. They should be safely uncomfortable states, but they should be uncomfortable states.

And we're going to talk more about this as the episode continues. But any kind of successful learning or goal pursuit is going to involve errors. It's going to involve failures.

It's going to involve frustration. It's going to involve anxiety. All of those states of mind and body, in fact, shift the brain into modes of so called neuroplasticity. They give IT the ability to change. And that should make perfect sense. Because if you can complete what you need to do easily, there is absolutely no reason for the neural circuitry in your brain or body to shift in anyway.

Why would IT rather, those states of discomfort, frustration, anxiety and seta represent shifts in newer chemical states that literally open the opportunity for neural plasticity to occur, the changes between neurons that allow those neurons and their associated neural circuits to perform differently in the future when we learn something. So the key here is too old. First, define the specific priority goal that you are going to pursue. Set aside all other goal pursuits.

And in doing that, IT makes sense to pursue a somewhat loved your goal, then perhaps a more mundane goal, or if you know exactly what goal you're going to prioritize, that you try and achieve perhaps more than you think you ought to be able to achieve within that given goal and within the goal that you decide to prioritize, you want to set a level of progress, a level of performance that you're striving to obtain. That's a bit above what you actually believe at this time you can accomplish. Now in doing so, you are inevitably going to encounter some frustration and anxiety.

But remember the component of the neural circuitry that we talked about, the beginning of the episode, the orbit frontal cortex, that orbital frontal cortex is not just part of a neural circuitry that assess how we feel in a given moment as we are trying to pursue a goal. But IT also understands context. IT has the capacity to, for instance, see that you are experiencing anxiety, know that you are frustrated, but now that you understand that anxian frustration that comes with making errors is actually the gateway, it's a necessary gateway to achieving neural circuit changes, so called neural plasticity.

Well, the orbital frontal cortex understands that context that literally can take information about neuroplasticity, can take information about frustration, which you now have. And they can combine those such that when you experience that frustration, you experience those errors, and you previously would have wanted to quit. Now you know that you are literally making progress.

You're literally shifting those neural circuits in the direction of improved learning. Now it's also important to remind that neuroplasticity, the changes, the neural circuits that allow improved performance in the future does not occur instantaneously. That frustration that occurs during our attempts to learn to pursue goal is the trigger for neural plan to see the actual rewiring of neural circuits that are allows for proficient correct performance occurs during deep sleep in other forms of deep rest.

This is something i've covered extensively in epo des, on neural plastic and learning. And if you'd like to learn more about neuroplasticity, in fact, if you'd like a zero cost tool kit that defines the so called super protocol for neuroplasticity and learning, that is not just nested with the context of goal pursuit and learning we have that you can go to huberman lab dot com, you go to the many, you go scroll down to newsletter and you can sign up. It's completely your cost and you'll get that as a brief I believe it's a two or maybe three page PDF.

okay. So returning to go setting and pursuit fortunate to set your goal, you really should take the time required to define your priority. What are you going to try and to learn? And then you're going to pick a goal that really feels chAllenging, that feels like IT might even be out of reach because that will recruit the neural circuits associated with arouses.

They're motivating enough to get you into action. Now I want to be very clear. I'm not suggesting that you pick a goal that's impossible to achieve or that you believe is impossible to achieve that's not going to serve you well. Rather, i'm saying pick a goal that feels just a bit out of reach and don't obsess too much about whether or not it's a lot out of reach or a little bit out of reach.

Pick something you're excited to pursue that you would really like to accomplish, set that goal and then just set aside all other goals still, of course, maintain or improve other aspects of your life that are necessary for daily living, for mental health, physical health at ta, but really just focus on one goal. I promise that you will be far more satisfied with the results if you can truly set a priority. So once you've defined at a specific goal that you are going to prioritize, there are two more things that you need to do before you start to pursue that goal.

The first one is that you need to define the specific verbs, the actions that are involved in pursuing that goal. This is absolutely critical. A lot of people will set a sort of title goal or a goal state, say, oh, you know, I want to be rich, or I want to be smart, or they will say, I want to be fit or proficient in a given language.

It's really important that you put additional specificity on your goal. In fact, it's important that you put a lot of specificity on your goal and that you focus mainly on verbs when defining that specificity. Now there are a lot of reasons for this that have to do both with increasing the probability that you will achieve your goal as well as maintaining motivation as you pursue that goal.

So for instance, rather than saying you want to be fit or you want to be a Better runner or swimmer, you would want to get very specific about the verb that you are going to engage in, in order to achieve that goal. Now it's somewhat obvious in the case of running or swimming, I think everyone understands that if you want to be a Better runner, there is going to be some running involved. If you want to be a Better swimmer, there is going to be some swimming involved, of course.

But presumable, there will be some other behaviors as well, everything from driving to the pool or lacing up your shoes. I mean, there's a essentially near infinite number of verbs involved in any type of goal pursuit. So what we are talking about here is really defining the goal on a piece of paper.

And I do think that's important. You should write this down. And I think the process of selecting your goal, that priority, as well as defining the specificity of the verb action that you're going to pursue should be done on paper, you, of course, are going to think.

But then you should write IT out, seeing things on paper and writing them out by hand with penner pencil really has been shown to engage neural circuitry away that is different than typing with your thumbs into your phone. Which, by the way, is a new feature of human evolution. I do believe this is the first time in human evolution that we have a written with our thugs.

I don't know, I don't have a time machine, I can go back and check, but i'm willing to place a bet that that statement is correct. So at the point is that writing things out is not only important, is also the most effective way to embed knowledge in our nervous system. And so I highly recommend that you write things out on a piece of paper in your process of goal setting.

So when we are talking about generating verbs, specificity about your goal IT would look like the following. So let's say, I want to get more fit or learn conversational french or anything for that matter. gardening. Maybe I want to build a zibo in the backyard or a decked in the backyard. The key thing to answer is what is the major block of action that's going to be involved in pursuing that goal.

So for instance, if you want to get more fit and you're going to do that primarily through running and wait training or swiming wait training, you would want to get very specific in defining that priority goal as i'm going to run x number of miles per week or i'm going to go to the gym three times per week to lift. Although I would recommend getting even more specific than that, I would recommend that you literally write down i'm going to go to the gym three times per week for a minimum of sixty minutes where fifty minutes of that are Carrying out hard work, okay, with, of course, rest between sets at that. Or i'm going to attend three classes per week, or perhaps even just one class per week of learning conversational french.

Plus i'm going to spend two hours per week of practicing, say, word problems or mathematical problems. Whatever IT is you want to define, first the priority, then you want to define the verb action. That represents the bulk of effort towards that priority. So running, in the case of the person who wants to get fit by running, weight lifting, in the case of the person that wants to get fit by weight lifting, although of course, I have to recommend people do both resistance training and cardiovascular training, if indeed they want to be truly fit.

Or in the case of language learning, or learning how to code or gardening, something in that sort, to really define the verb actions involved, and then to place specificity in terms of the amount of time that one is going to try to achieve each week in pursuit of that special priority goal. Now I realize that that process itself takes a bit of time, but when you look back on the hundred year plus scientific literature of what leads to successful goal setting and pursuit, you find over and over again that those two components we've been talking about, specificity and measurability, are paramount. You just simply cannot discard those from the process if you expect yourself to achieve your goals.

So whether not is the A, B, C method or is the smart method or the smarter method, again, all acronyms going to, not by me, but by others, previous to this conversation, you're going to find elements of specificity and measurability showing up again and again. So these are key features of any protocol that you are going to use in order to try and set and achieve your goals. And I should mention that setting specific goals and clearly defining the verbs that you are going to engage to pursue those goals, and defining how long you are going to try to engage in those verbs each week to achieve those schools has significant impact on the probability of success.

We're not talking about a minor effect. In fact, in the original episode is about goal setting in pursuit. I talked about the so called recycling study. I'm not going to describing in a lot of detail right now, but essentially the study looked at motivating people to recycle more recycled products in the workplace.

And what they found was that when people were told what the specific goal was and what specific actions they need to engage in, where and how much of a given batch of review. So say, you know, after launch, there's some boxes, there's some force that said a some afghans, how much of that refuse they were going to try to put into the recycle versus the trash IT LED to a greater than doubling of successful achievement of that goal. Now that's a perhaps trivial goal to some of you.

Although, let's face, IT recycling is important, that result has been shown again and again and again for different domains of goal setting in pursuit. So this thing of setting specificity really spending time with IT on paper, setting specificity of actions of which specific actions, and then setting specificity of how long you are going engage in each of those actions each week, greatly increases the probability that you achieve that. What previously seemed to be a all too lofty goal.

Earlier, I mentioned that during the course of today's episode, we were going to dispell some common myths about goal setting in pursuit. So now i'd like to mention two popular myths about goal setting in pursuit. The first one is that if we set up posted in a little, posted sticky, where you write down what you're trying to achieve and you put that on the refrigerator, you put that on your myr, that IT increases the probability that you are going to stick to your goal.

Turns out that is not the case. And the reason for that is that your visual system adapts to whatever is regular in your environment. Doesn't matter whether not that environment is sparse, so IT only has a few things in IT, or whether not IT is dense like a forest, anything that shows up regularly, our visual environment gets cancelled out. This is actually a basic feature of the way your visual system is wired.

So for those of you that are taking a sticky note or a magnet or sign and putting IT on your mirror and leaving IT there from day to day, maybe that says, you know, run sixty minutes today, or study french twenty minutes, or whatever goal happens to be if you leave IT there today, today, today, IT actually diminishes the likelihood of progress. I know that seems hard to believe, but it's true. Instead, a Better approach is to continually write that thing out each day and put up a new sticky, put IT in a new place, perhaps on the refrigerator, in the kitchen, maybe on the windshield of your car.

Although, of course, we remove that one you're driving at seta. If you are going to incorporate visual reminders in your goal setting and goal pursuit process, you want to change those each and every day. This is actually something that perhaps APP developers will start to incorporate because I think the notifications that come through on various apps designed to remind us to do certain things can be helpful.

But there two, we tend to attenuate to them, and we simply either do not notice them where we start to swipe them away over time. So visual reminders can be very effective if you want to use them. great.

You certainly don't have to. But if you are going to use them, you want to update them every single day. Otherwise, your visual system, and certainly the areas of your brain that are associated with assessing novelty and will simply start to cancel those away.

So the first common myth that we're dispelling is what I call the posted fallacy, the idea that if you write something down on a post and you posted in the area that you frequent every morning or every day or every night, that you stand the higher probability of and hearing to what is on that post. That is simply not true. You would want to replace IT every day, and you would also be wise to move that posted to different locations.

The second myth is that if you want to increase your motivation toward pursuing a goal, and you want to increase the probability that you achieve that goal, that you should engage and so called accountability, meaning that you should tell people you are going to achieve that goal. Now, I realized that there are some prominent examples in pop culture of people posting something on social media and saying, you know, in three years, i'm gonna, you know, plane in whibley stadium. Or in two years, watch i'm going to be at the top level of my game, whatever that game happens.

To be sure, there are examples of that, and those are beautiful and inspiring examples. However, the scientific data tell us that if we inform people around us that, for instance, we are going to write a book or that we are going to start a podcast or that we are going to run a marathon or whatever IT happens to be, more often than not, we get feedback that is generally positive, inform. I think that's good and to be expected, Frankly, you friend tells us, hey, i'm going to write a book.

I'm going to pursue a new fitness goal. I'm going to learn language you said, great, go for IT. You can totally do IT.

You're very likely to succeed. Go for IT. How do you want me to support you? Is there anything I can do to support you? Those are, Frankly, healthy exchanges. And yet the data tell us that the positive feedback that we get from others, when we announced that we're going, after a goal, activate certain reward systems and motivation systems within our brain that then quickly dissipate and then diminish the probability that we engage in the type of behaviors that actually lead us to achieve that goal. So we have the posted false, and we have the myth of accountability falling within the context of goal pursuit.

I of course, i'm not saying that accountability is bad to the country, is a great thing about to ourselves and to others is something that we should all cultivate throughout life. I'm merely talking about the midst of accountability in the context of goal pursuit. And i'm actually being more specific than that.

I'm saying don't tell people that you're going to go out and achieve something prior to initiating action toward that goal because in fact, the positive feedback that we yet will diminish the probability that we will continually ly pursue that goal in a way that allows us to achieve IT. So you couldn't interpret the information I just gave you as meaning that perhaps it's Better to tell someone who doubts us that we are going to achieve a goal. And then, of course, they're not going to give us the positive fee back.

We're not going to get all that reward circuitry activated. Rather, we're going to get the friction circuitry activated of us wanting to prove ourselves and overcome the, let's just say, the lack of faith in our ability to achieve a go. And indeed, that can work.

There is evidence that can work. But then of course, you have to find someone who doesn't believe in you. You have to get them to tell you they don't believe in you.

And that could have all sorts of bilateral ous psychological effects that might undermine the goal pursuit process and other things as well. So if you are lucky enough to know somebody who doubts you, go head, tell them that you want to pursue your specific priority goal. But more likely than not, the best thing to do is to simply keep that goal to yourself.

You may need to inform a family member or others of where you will be between the hours of the ATM and nine am if you're going to be exercising or learning language or meditation, whatever IT is during that period of time. But what i'm referred to here is what I will call that don't tell the world, world, don't tell the world that you're going to achieve X, Y, S, Y. Just simply tell yourself, in fact, I would suggest that the more time you can spend with that one or two or three sheds of paper where you defined the goal, the specific actions that you're going to take, how you're going to measure progress, which we will talk about IT.

More later, the more time that you can spend with that goal in your mind and on that paper, the higher the probability that you will achieve that goal that stands and start contrast to telling everyone around you that you're going to achieve a certain goal, is so called accountability myth. Or the myth of accountability within the context of goal pursuit would be the more specific way to describe that myth. Now, IT turns out there is some utility to having one person that is a so called accountability body.

If that person is really just strictly addressing accountability, they are reminding you to do what you need to do, or they are asking you, did you do what you said you were going to do? But that's a bit more of a tough love accountability model. What they don't tell the world rule is really about is not getting the kind of doping and other forms of neurochemicals reward that come from.

Just simply saying that you are going to pursue a goal because as you'll soon learn that doping and other molecules too, of course, are going to be critically important, not just for initiating the sort of actions required to achieve your goals, but for the engaging and constantly updating your strategy to ensure that you reach goals. It's worth mentioning that the friction model of achieving your goals does work. I mean, I for insist on somebody that if I were to say to a family member of friend and achieve a particular goal, and they said, there's no way you can do IT that would recruit a certain set of neural circuits and hormones and neurochemicals in me that would make me much more likely to lean into the required set of efforts to achieve that goal.

But there's a danger in approaching a giving goal that way, especially if the goal is something that you already want to pursue, which is that then a lot of your effort becomes framed in the context of making someone else wrong as opposed to achieve in the goal. And of course, you can do two things in parallel. You can achieve your goal and prove somebody else wrong.

But as we've talked about in various episodes on motivation and pursuit and the dopamine system, and as we will talk about a bit more in a few minutes, there's something tremens, sly, powerful about learning how to derive pleasure from the effort process itself, that is, learning to enjoy the process of pursuing a goal for sake of that goal for yourself, rather than trying to pursue a goal simply to prove somebody else wrong. I'll just tell you right now that intrinsic motivation, motivation that is directly attached to the thing that you are doing and root to a goal, is the most powerful and sustainable source of motivation. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens.

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Our god is very important, is populated by that microbiota communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotic ics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiology alth. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, invitations and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and IT tastes great.

If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they will give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's athletic Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two. The final protocol related to goal setting because really up until now, we've been talking only about goal setting.

We haven't yet talking about goal pursuit, is that you want your goal to be measurable. And when we say memorable, you really have to define two things. First of all, you are going to have to define how long you are going to pursue this goal overall, in other words, how long you think IT will take before you achieve your goal.

And in addition to that, you are going to have to define how much time you are going to spend pursuing that goal each week or each day. Now there are an infinite number of time blocks that one could used to answer these questions. So for instance, that you could set in overall early goal and you could break IT down into monthly goals, where you spend x amount of time on that goal each week and x amount of time on that goal each day, and essentially latter up from the shortest time frames of the longest time frame required to achieve that goal.

And certainly, all of that is doable, but that, I believe, is going to be an overwhelming amount of work and indeed is going to be counterproductive. Tard, achieving your goal. What I recommend, which, of course, is clean from the scientific literature, at least the consistencies, or are the center of mass, that is the major findings that show up again and again in the scientific literature on goal setting, a pursuit is that you establish a roughly twelve week period of time to focus on your specific goal.

Now, of course, achieving the entire goal might take longer than twelve weeks, but chances are it's not going to take shorter than twelve weeks. Although if IT does, you could simply close out that goal pursuit and then pursue another goal. There's no reason you didn't do that, but there's nothing magical about this twelve week period.

But IT seems to adhere to a number of things in society and culture and work schedules in season, meaning the holidays and the shifts in the overall seasons that works for most goals and most people. So a twelve week cycle, or roughly a three months cycle, sometimes called the quarterly cycle of goal pursuit toward your particular goal, I think, is a good mro time to focus on. And then within that twelve week cycle to define very clearly how many hours each week and each day and on which days you will pursue that goal.

okay. So it's twelve week cycle to pursue your goal. That goal might be achieved by the end of that twelve weeks or even prior IT might not be. But you said a twelve weeks cycle or quarterly cycle or if you prefer to think about IT a three months cycle and then you define how many hours per week you are going to spend pursuing that goal and then you define how many hours per day you are going to spend pursuing that goal, and then you define which days of the week you are going to pursue that particular goal.

I think those three numbers, the twelve week quarterly OK three month cycle, the number of hours per week and the number of hours per day and particular days that you are going to spend working on a goal is going to be effective for ninety percent, if not more, of different types of goals out there. And as with defining the specific goal itself, I highly recommend that you write this down with a pen or pencil, just oh so much data to support the fact that writing things down ideally and complete sentences on a PSA paper with a Better pencil serves to reinforce the goal setting pursuit process, greatly increasing the probability that you will achieve those goals. So what you're really defining in that process are the specific verb actions that you are going to take and the specific quantifiable amount of time that you are engaging in those verb actions in order to achieve your goal.

What we haven't discuss yet, however, is how to define or quantify the goal itself. Now of course, in different endeavors, you're going to have the opportunity to quantify and define goal achievement in different ways. So instance, if you want to be able to run a sub six minute mile or a sub five minute mile or if you really impressive, a sub four minute mile, well, that's a highly quantifiable goal that you can break down into a series of training steps or milestones, meaning that you could quantify at the beginning of your goal pursuit, how long IT takes you to run a mile.

You could then set out to achieve a faster time within two weeks or three weeks, and then do the appropriate training to achieve those numbers and simply keep updating that in order to eventually reach your quantifiable goal. At twelve weeks, again, you might not complete your goal of running a sub five minute mile or sub six minute mile at the end of two of weeks. But perhaps if your goal is to be able to run a sub five minute mile by the end of the calendar year and you're initiating this whole goal pursuit thing on the first of the year, well then you have twelve months broken into four, three months cycles and you were essentially set the quantifiable goal at the end of the year december thirty first perhaps is when you actually do that run um where you hopefully would achieve that sub six minute, five minute mile or maybe in four minute mile.

And then you backtrack from that date and you set milestones of goals that you're trying to achieve p that's a highly quantifiable set of goals because IT is literally distance over time. However, in a lot of pursuits, in fact, I would argue in most pursuits you don't have that very clear quantifiable result. You might have, for instance, the achievement of a doctoral degree or a bachelor gree or an A A degree or a professional degree of some sort which represents a finish line um you could perhaps even attach a great point to average or a publication goal to that. But in most endeavors that aren't athletic or aren't within the realm of finance, IT becomes much harder to very clearly define your goal in purely quantitative terms.

So that is the reason why we spend so much time talking about the measure ability of the specific amount of time that you are going to engage in the verb actions that each day, which day, each week over the course of these twelve week cycles because ultimately, what's going to allow you to arrive at successful achievement of your goal, regardless of whether or not that goal is highly quantifiable? X number of dollars, x number of minutes to complete a mile run or swim at sea? Or is something that a bit more nebulous in terms of quantifiably, like conversational french? right? There is conversational french that you can learn.

There's also a conversational french that incorporates humor or that incorporates good humor or um perhaps you want to get Better at writing poetry or simply spend time writing poetry. Can you quantify the quality of that porch? Well, perhaps, uh, you know, if you could win a particular prize for poetry. But I think for most endeavors, they are more loosely defined in terms of their quantifiably. Now we can always attach quantifiably to the ultimate angle, if we choose. So for instance, I could decide that i'm going to learn conversational french, and I could decide that the ultimate goal at the end of this trial week period is to be able to have a ten minute conversation with somebody who is fluent in french, their native born in france, and that i'm going to make zero mistakes.

It's pretty lofty goal, but the point being that if you are picking a goal that is not easily quantifiable, you want to be exceptionally precise about the amount of time that you are going to spend engaging in the specific verb actions that are going to allow you to make progress toward your goal because ultimately, whether not a highly quantifiable goal or is a more loosely quantifiable goal in terms of the end goal, the process of achieving goals is always going to be in the form of actions, and actions themselves are always quantifiable. It's number of hours of dedicated work told that particular goal. A common example of an angle that's very hard to quantify in terms of the angle itself is the writing of a book, for instance.

Now you could set out to write an eight hundred page book, but most people agree that the length of the book should have something more or less to do with the content and not the other way around. In other words, that you don't just want to add words in order to achieve a certain number of pages. That said, most all experienced writers will will tell you at least two things.

They'll tell you, first, don't wait for inspiration, simply set a period d of time each day that you're going to write and write x number of words or for x amount of time each day, or perhaps even just three days a week. But most of the experience writers that i've spoken to every single day, and they write eight hundred words per day, or two thousand words per day, or five hundred words per day, whatever they can do consistently, they may do IT for time. They may do IT for words, but they are writing during that time.

They are not waiting for inspiration to land on them. They're not trying to get optimates caffeinated. And perhaps they didn't even sleep that well the night before. In other words, they are dedicated to engaging in a particular number of hours of word generating action, rather than trying to focus on getting the number one best seller at the end after the book is published.

Of course, they can wish for that number one position on the best seller, but ultimately, the greatest probability of achieving that goal is going to come from engaging in a particular number of hours, generating a particular number of words each day. So again, the highest probability of achieving our goals, of achieving any kind of goal, is going to be by understanding the specific verb actions that we need to engaging, and then quantifying the amount of time that we engage in those specific word actions, and then simply doing those verbs. So up until now, we've been talking about goal setting, and we really haven't talking about goal pursuit itself.

Now i'd like to talk about what the scientific literature says is the best protocol for initiating our goal pursuit, for starting toward our goal. And to do so, we have to address a set of key questions, the questions you have to ask yourself, or do I want to pursue this goal? Meaning, in I highly motivated to pursue this school, or even mildly motivated to pursue this goal?

Do I want to do the things involved to get this thing, to accomplish this thing, or in my feeling, resistance, do I not want to pursue this goal? Or perhaps this is a day to shift that occurs where some days you're really created in other days you are not. Now the reason to ask yourself to set of questions is that the data say that there are two different strategies, in fact, two markedly different strategies that you will want to incorporate depending on whether not you motivated or you are unmotivated to pursue that particularly goal for whatever reason.

And of course, there's an entire psychology to motivation, and you could get a therapies or a coach to work with in order to address that underlying psychology. Yes, IT might. Later back to childhood issues, latter back to the steam things.

None of that can be covered here in any sort of meaningful debt because, Frankly, we each have different circumstances, different past, different psychologies. There are, however, some universals that we can all apply in order to help us get started toward our goal. And this is nested in this whole concept of whether not we should visualize the end and successful completion of our goal.

So keep the end in mind as we start off towa goal or whether not we should incorporate a different strategy, here's how go. So if you ask yourself, do I want to achieve this goal? And I would hope the answer is yes, because the overall goal should be something that you want to pursuit, should be something you are deeply desire to accomplish.

Then you have to ask yourself, next, do I want to do the things required to achieve that goal? Now maybe don't want to do all of them. You only want to do some of them. But given that you now carefully quantified which specific actions you're going to be doing on which days for how many hours and how many weeks for these twelve week blocks, you could simply ask yourself, do I want to do this thing today? And if the answer is yes, well then IT turns out that spending just one to three, maybe five minutes, but even just one minute visualizing the outcome, the positive outcome, of course, and the feeling state that you may have because of course you don't know, you don't have a uh, time machine.

You can feel yourself into the future, but you can make a good as to how you might feel in the future if you accomplished that goal, spending one to three, maybe five minutes, in a sort of meditation, although sort of visualization is perhaps the Better way to describe IT thinking about that feeling state in the outcome. And some of the things that are going to be associated with that outcome turns out to be a great practice to engage in just prior to initiating that days work toward that goal. However, if you arrive to your practice, meaning you shop to the piano to learn piano, you're sitting down to the table or maybe you haven't even got enough motivation to go told the piano or toward your notebook or computer or whatever landscape IT is that you are going to be pursuing your goal within.

And you are having, quote, quote, a hard time getting motivated toward that goal. Well then IT turns out what the scientific erasure tells us is that visualizing the end, keeping the end in mind, positive visualization of all the good things that you experience when you achieve that goal is not going to be an effective strategy to motivate you. Rather, if you are not feeling motivated, then what the scientific literature tells us is that you actually want to spend one to three, maybe five minutes visualizing failure visualizing how terrible you will feel if you do not achieve your goal visualizing severe consequences, perhaps mostly of the sort like telling yourself, gosh, I set a goal.

I set up to the block, I quantified IT. I know I want to do this here. I have the time to do IT. And i'm simply just not doing IT. And in that case, you would think, okay, well, like you should kind of build yourself up, maybe call a friend texter friend, get some encouragement. No, the scientific literature tells us that when we are not motivated and IT is a goal that we actually want to pursue.

And of course you're i'm talking about adaptive goal pursuit mean things that are going to enrich your mental health, physical health, etta, not things that are going to be experimental to us. Well then if you're not feeling motivated, you want to spend a one to three, perhaps five minutes meditating, concentrating on what is going to feel like to fail in the fact that you are not succeeding, but indeed that you are fAiling. And I know this sounds like rather harsh advice that this protocol sounds like kind of a self laudation protocol, is not intended to be self laguerre.

In fact, IT should not be self ulaan. But rather, what you want to do when you are not motivated is to think about failure and what that failure at the end of twelve weeks will feel like. And the reason for that is that the data tell us that when we visualize positive outcomes, yes, IT deploys certain newer chemicals in our brain and body that make us feel good.

Although Frankly, if you've heard that imagining something creates the same neurochemical and neurotic irr IT states in the brain as actually experiencing that thing, that is simply not true. That's a math. We have talked about this some previous episodes, simply not true.

But if you are having a hard time getting motivated toward a goal that you actually want to achieve, then spending that short amount of time thinking about how loud you'll feel when you don't achieve, IT recruits certain elements of your so called automation ic nervous system and craig shifts in the release of things like een eren nor up an f. An even release of the so called reward molecule dopa, in which, in fact, is not the molecule of reward IT is the molecule of motivation, and its associated with pain is associated with negative thoughts. And of course, it's associated with positive thoughts and outcomes.

But basically, what i'm saying is if you are highly motivated to do something, you're ready to go spend one or three minutes, maybe five visualizing the positive outcomes that you're going to experience when you ultimately finish out that twelve week cycle as a consequence of all the great work that you've done. If, however, you are not motivated like I don't want to do this thing, i'm procrastinating. I'm just not feeling like doing IT.

Yes, I want achieve the goal, but I just don't feel like doing IT well, then your task is to take one to three, maybe five minutes, and think about how much more lousy you will feel when you do not achieve that goal at the end of twelve weeks. And that, the data tell us, recruits certain elements of your nervous system, your hormonal system, that are more successful in getting you into action, into starting toward your goal. Then we're you to try and build yourself up towards all that positivity.

So yes, indeed, there is a place for negative thinking now in terms of tools, are protocols to both initiate and to sustain effort during your goal pursuit process. We need to think about the specific time domain or the amount of time that we're trying to do that within. So for instance, there are tools that you can use to stay motivated within the one hour learning block that you happen to be doing on monday morning, for instance, and there are other tools and protocols that you can incorporate towards staying motivated from one day to the next or from one week to the next.

But I think the most useful of those tools are going to be the tools that you're incorporate to stay motivated within a given training block or practice block toward to your goal. Because what I just described a few minutes ago was the process of how to initiate your daily work, right? You ask yourself that question in my motivated.

The answer could be yes. Can you know, if you really want to get, you know, quantitative about IT, you could give yourself a one to ten score tending the most motivated. Frankly, i'm not that quantitative about that sort of thing.

I'm more subjective about IT. But I know some of you are real number junky and you really like to quantify everythin's y, but you are no and look back to how that relates. You're sleeping, know some people are of that orientation. Other people like myself are simply going to, you know, sit down and say, okay, it's time, it's time to train or it's time to practice, whatever the thing.

Maybe how motivates am I like a six ten or seven ten OK ready to go on and to visualize the end in mind in a positive way? Or if i'm a two out of ten or anything less than a four out of ten, i'm not that motivated. So then i'm going to basically scare myself into doing the work that day.

So that's how you initiate the work each day. And I just gave you a couple of quick examples of how you could quantify that. Took me about thirty seconds to do that example out loud.

Take you about thirty seconds to do. But again, if you want to quantify in more detail, write down and related other things, be my guest. So now you already have a science space protocol for how to get started each day toward your goal.

Now what about within the one or two hour block or perhaps nine minute block that you're going to use to pursue your goal? And here is very important that you have a number of tools that will allow you to both set the optimal amount of focus so that you're really concentrating on pursuing that goal. You're concentrate on the verb actions that will deliver you to that goals.

Perhaps the best way to state that and that you can constantly update or renewed level of focus should I start to dissipate? Now I want to be clear. I've done entire episodes about focus on how to increase focus with behavioral tools.

Everything relate to meditation, which indeed can increase your ability to focus. I've talked about nutritional tool, supplementation tool, prescription drug related tools. There's a lot of information on that. You can simply go to huberman lab dot com, put focus into the search function and IT will take you to not only those episodes and the tool kit for that, but the specific time stamps for that.

But what we are going to talk about now is not about how to increase focus per say, rather, it's about how to use focus, in particular visual focus, in order to increase your or maintain your level of motivation within a given learning block, within a given batch of time, on a given day where you are pursuing your goal. You're engaging in that practice, which of course, will include frustration. Initiate has to if you're going to get any Better, and how to set that motivation and keep that motivation throughout that hour or nine minutes or two hours is critical.

So how do you do that? Well, IT turns out it's fairly straight forward. So it's anchored in the fact that your cognitive focus, your ability to maintain a narrow cone of attention as well as your bodily state of readiness and your mental state of readiness to form work, is powerfully anchored to your visual system.

As many of you've heard me say before, your eyes are actually two pieces of brain. I mean, to be more specific, the neural retina that lined the back of your eyes like pyrus, are literally two pieces of your central nervous to of your brain that were excluded from the cranial wall during development. So yes, these two bits, and for those listening, i'm just pointing to my eyes.

Your eyes are two pieces of brain outside of your skull, and your eyes can view things broadly. You can so called soften your gays and view the entire horizon. And you can see the privy of the room by relaxing your eyes.

You can actually do this. Now, in fact, when you drive, most of the time you're doing this, you're not looking at a particular focal point viewing things and so called panama vision. And of course, you can draw your visual focus to a particular tion, what we call a virgins eye movement.

That is, you're bringing your eyes in, told the center, told your nose a little bit, and you're focusing them in a more narrow cone of visual attention. This is something you can do almost imperceptibly to others. Although if we were to measure your eye movement, what we would see is that your eyes are actually moving in.

Award a little bit toward your nose when you do this the virgins I movement and narrow ing that of visual attention and then they're relaxing into a state of um being slightly further out from your nose, not the eyes themselves. Of course they can't move within the sockets but yeah the pupils of your eyes are moving out a bit from your nose in your in so called panoramic c vision. So essentially what i'm saying is that you can narrow or broaden your visual attention and that something that can take a little bit of practice.

I highly recommend that you try this and that you practice A A little bit. But indeed, everyone has the neural machinery to do this from birth. This is not something that requires neural plasticity to be able to do.

You can do this right now. You can narrow your visual attention. You can expand or relax your visual attention and thereby narrow or relax your visual field from being smaller or larger.

There are data that show that when we narrow our visual attention and we hold that narrow visual attention on a spot, several things happened. First of all, there's a recruitment of circuit true within the so called brain stem that then deploys nor chemicals that increase our level of alertness and arousal. That's right.

When you focus your visual tension on a more narrow location or one location in front of you and you hold that focus, you are causing the release of neurochemicals that increase your overall level of alertness in the brain and body. Conversely, when you relax visual focus, so called panoramic vision, you are turning off that recruitment. You're not actively recruiting molecules for relaxation within the brain, but you are turning off this release of the neurochemicals associated with increasing focus and arousal.

So why am I talking about this in the context of goal pursuit? Well, if you are feeling lack of motivation at any point within a given training block or boutin m calling IT, this could be at the beginning. This could be five minutes in. This could be a half an hour in. You would be wise to pick a visual target, ideally a visual target that is within the general range of the work that you're trying to perform.

In other words, if you're doing this work or the piece of paper, you draw that visual target on a piece of paper approximately the same distance that you are reading or that you are looking at music um you can tell how little playing a piano i've done in my life. But the point being that you set the visual target at approximately the same distance that you will be performing your particular work. So if you are doing a sport, the distance might be some many meters off in the distance where where as if you're doing desk work of some kind, then IT might be much closer.

And then you focus your eyes on that location and you actively work to maintain that focus, just like i'm doing now into the camera for a given period time. And I recommend that you set a timer and that you, of course, allow yourself to blink like I just did there, and that you try, achieve at least thirty seconds. But even Better would be sixty seconds.

Even Better would be ninety seconds of that focused versions, eye movement, during which several things happen, including the deployment of those neurochemicals from the brain. And that I talked about before, we are going to increase your level of economic, social and also increase your level of focus further. And there are not just talking about visual focus on talking about coronal focus.

IT has also been shown that when we focus on a particular point in the way that i'm describing here that the increases are so called systolic blood pressure, as many of you know, blood pressure is always describe to us as a given number over another number. And the first number is the so called systole lor systolic pressure, which is the amount of pressure, new vascular system when the heart beats as the fluid of your blood is pumping through the arteries, veins and capitalize of your system. And then the bottom number is the amount of pressure within those arteries, veins and capitalists in between heartbeats.

So it's the systolic over the diastolic. And what we know is that visual focus. And here i'm still holding my now on the camera of the U.

S. You listening. I probably blink once or twice, but i'm really trying hard to maintain my focus directly within the camera. This visual focus increases the systolic blood pressure IT, increases the deployment of those newer chemicals from the brain stem. And we know IT also can recruit the liberation of molecules such as dupine and some associated molecules elsewhere in the brain that together act in a synergistic way to increase our level of focus and motivation.

This is based again on work describing the newer circuitry of what i'm describing here and work from Emily bell chat sz lab, which is shown that if people focus on a target, on a goal line, literally a physical location within their environment, and then they initiate some work, IT could be physical work or cognitive work. Not only do they experience tly decreased levels of perceived effort while engaging in that work, but they also complete that work in a significantly reduced amount of time, meaning that within a given training bout or training block, you are able to get significantly more work done. And you perceive that as less effort for, or requiring less effort than had you not done this visual focus.

Now, i've been doing this for quite some time now into the camera. This is actually a practice that i've been doing for well over a decade. And it's actually a practice that I use when I pod caster, when I post on social media, is part of the reason why I accused of being a non blinker quite often.

And but I want to remind people that you are allowed to blink. Don't let your eyes dry out. It's perfectly fine to blink is not going to inhibit the effect of this of this protocol.

But I don't think I can really overstate how valuable this sort of protocol is. First of all, it's completely behavior that costs nothing. It's completely safe, long you remember to blame. And IT allows you to increase your level of focus, your level of motivation and the sustainable of your focus and motivation while in goal pursuit.

So it's a quite valuable protocol to incorporate, and it's something that you can do once for thirty seconds and then lean into whatever IT is you're writing process, you're running process is something that you could do repeatedly throughout that learning about. And it's something you can practice offline a little bit away from that training about as a means to sort of learn and get familiar Whiter that then you can incorporate IT very quickly and repeatedly and with much more effectiveness during these different learning belts. Again, it's a highly valuable tool that's grounded in neurosis cut ry, grounded in newer chemistry and that Emily bell chat sz lab has shown in numerous domains.

Physical pursuits, cogent pursuits, can really help people achieve their goals and to achieve them more easily, or least with less perceived effort and more quickly. Now we can get a bit more granular about the incorporation of this tool, this protocol. But before we do, we should acknowledge that all of the things that lend themselves to improve cognitive focus and physical ability still hold true, right?

You still need to get good sleep as many knights of your life as you possibly can. You still need to eat properly. You still needs to try to limit your stress.

We have podcast episodes related to all of those topics. We have two kids available zero cost related to all of those topics. I'm not saying that this visual focus or visual target training is the only tool that you should incorporate.

It's a tool that you want to superimpose on the foundation of all the things that bring you to your practice with the best possible cognition, the best possible physical readiness, and that when added to the foundation of excEllent sleep, excEllent nutrition, social connection, sunlight in the morning is set a is going to increase the probability that you are going to make those learning about as effective as possible. Now, some of you maybe thinking, elevating your blood pressure is bad. Why would I want to elevate my blood pressure? Oh, well, turns out, increases in system lic blood pressure achieved with this visual target training or focusing on a finish line for some period time are transient and they're perfectly safe.

So essentially what this does is that boost or bolsters the activity of the autonomic door system that kick starts the deployment of those chemicals in those neural circuits that then allow you to be motivates for some period of time. But then that is a transient increase in economic growth, which is why perhaps every twenty minutes, or perhaps on the hour, you might stop, do a thirty second or sixty second visual target training and lean back into your process of however IT is you are pursuing your goal. I should also mention that if your eyes are getting tired, doing whatever goal pursuit you happen to be engaged in, it's also a good idea to go into that panoramic c vision mode.

The easiest way to do that is to go outside, or to be outside to view a horizon and not look at any one particular point on the horizon. But if you are indoors, as I am now, you can also just relax your ize blinking a few times and getting rid of that virgins ea movement, and try and visualize the corners of the room where the sides of the room, rather the floor and the ceiling all at once. That's a good to explain how to so called relax your eyes and take you out of that virgins side movement.

I say this because a lot of people will feel when they're pursuing their goal, that's kind fatigue. So you to remember to breathe, right? Still want to breathe as you're pursuing your goal.

And you certainly want to be visually focused on your goals. You're cognitively focused on your goal and you're motivated. But that from time to time, you also relax, take a moment, shake things off, look into your panthera mic vision mode, and then go back to your mode of goal pursuit.

Now there are few other protocols that might seem so simple, but Frankly are also effective, that i'd be remiss if I didn't mention them. The first of those is actually something that i'm borrowing from tim ferris, who did they post on instagram, which we will link to, which I think is just spectacular, which is thirty things that he wished he had known when he was twenty. And while the internet is chock block full of such less, that particular list is truly impressive.

Those are things that I too wish I had known when I was twenty, but also when I was thirty and forty. And but one particular thing on that list of the thirty is particularly relevant now, which is that the best productivity APP is already on your phone, which is to put your phone into airplane mode or more ideally. And this is the one that I try my best to incorporate to simply turn the phone off and remove IT from my work out, or are my attempts to learn language or my attempts to learn anything?

I realized that some people need to keep their phone with them for reasons relate to community, with family or coworkers. It's set a that's fine if you need your phone, but to the extent that you can remove yourself from distractions, that's certainly going to in hence your ability to focus on what you need to focus on, in pursuing your goals. That stands without saying it's kind of a duck.

And yet, I think a lot of people are searching foreign wide for the productivity APP, for the secret hack, for the thing that's going to allow them to be productive. And often times, there are due actions that we can take in order to become more productive. We're talking about some of those today.

We're talking about those in other episodes, but there are, of course, important. Don't so don't have your phone facing up with wifi and seller service on. If you want to be productive at something that doesn't evolve your phone, ideally you will turn IT over.

You will turn IT off. You'll get rid of put in the next room. If you're like me, you sometimes locked in the car. I think the most extreme that i've ever gone to ensure that I didn't engage with my phone during goal pursuit was during the early days of having my laboratory. And I was writing multiple grants in parallel, which is an immense amount work.

I would walk into the laboratory in the morning, and I would hand a student postdoc, my phone, and i'd say, don't give this back to me until five pm. And if I ask for IT back, if I even ask for IT once everyone in the lab gets five hundred dollars, there were quite a few people, my lab. And so it's a significant cost to that.

And I must tell you, there were numerous times throughout the day when I impulsively, just like, okay, when I need my phone, I don't want have to do IT. And I also wanted to demonstrate to them that I could create an incentive system whereby I could basically scruff myself into in the work done. And indeed, much to their dismay, I never once had to pay them out.

Although when we got the grants and indeed, even when we didn't get the grants, I did take them all to there. Now another key protocol for maintaining motivation while pursuing your goals stems from our understanding of the dopamine reward and motivation pathways. Topics for which I have done multiple indeed three podcast episodes previously, and we can provide a links to all three of those as well as the tool kit that we ve published and that's available to you at zero cost on our website about how to regulate dopamine, both baseline dopamine stories and pigs on doping.

There's a lot there to be understood and incorporated because he has to do with various things, not just in the realm of goal pursuit, but also feelings of well being. Staving off depression, things that sort the dope mean system, is linked to o so many important aspects of life, far too many then we could discuss right now. And we have those previous episodes in which we do discuss all of that material. Nonetheless, IT is important, understand that dopamine is the molecule motivation, and to some extent, reward, but really motivation.

And that if you want to maintain consistent motivation during, say, your individual bouts of work toward your goals and from one belt to the next, so not just within a session, but from day to day across sessions and from week to week, and indeed, from twelve week cycle to twelve week cycle of that required and from one goal that you set to the next goal that you define and decide to pursue, you want to understand this particular feature of dopamine, which is that, yes, dopamine and its release is highly valuable toward getting more motivated and feeling more motivated. But that IT has certain properties related. The things like dopamine reward prediction are based lines of dopamine a that make IT the case that if you reward yourself every time you reach a milestone, so you finish out an hour or two hours of work so you treat yourself to something, you reward yourself that you are going to diminish both the potency of that reward, and you are going to reduce your motivation over time.

That might be surprising to you, but if you were to watch those episodes, IT would all become clear as to why that is the case. IT is also true that if you were to only reward yourself when you accomplish your goal, or perhaps more commonly, if you look at the accomplishment of your goal as the only reward in the whole process of goal, pursuit and achievement, that is going to undermine your probability of success as well. Rather, the best way to incorporate the mechanics of the dopamine e system, such that you can achieve not just immediate motivation, but ongoing motivation, is to incorporate what is referred to as random internal reinforcement, which is what the casinos used to keep people playing and IT simply means randomly reward yourself and randomly ly don't reward yourself for successful completion of milestones.

Those milestones could be within a lot of effort or IT could be a cross belts of effort. So let's say you set out at the beginning on your piece of paper to basically, let's say, run or practice at some cognitive endeavor. Four hours total per week.

And you're going to do that monday, wednesday, friday and saturday. Should you reward yourself at the end of each session? Should you reward yourself at the end of each week? The answer is IT depends.

And IT should depend in a random intermitted way. So the simplest way to do this whenever you complete a milestone could be, at the end of the day you did, you're one hour. Whatever IT was that you designate you, you're gone to.

Do on that particular day, should you reward yourself cognitive ly or with some physical thing? I know what that physical thing might be, but IT, I don't know. Could be a meal, could be a movie, could be something that you enjoy? Well, the answer is you should flip a coin. And if its heads, yes, reward yourself. And if it's tails, don't, it's that simple IT is that simple IT should be fifty fifty probability and its analyst to whether not your reward yourself now with physical rewards like monetary or rewards or food rewards or a movie or participating in something else that you enjoy, it's a bit easier to define. The cognitive rewarding of one's own efforts is something that people really struggled to comprehend.

But what i'm not referring to when I say cognitive rewards is i'm not referring to think, yes, i'm the best and really trying to shower yourself with internal praise and tell yourself that you're the greatest thing that ever happened simply because you perform this learning about what i'm simply referring to is the kind of internal dopamine a reward that comes from telling yourself like, yes, i'm making progress. I'm making progress. I'm on the path able to set a goal and achieve a goal which might seem like a healthy thing to do psychologically.

In fact, IT is it's great. And I think it's really important that people be able to self reward themselves, especially self reward for verbs that put them in a more adaptive stance in life, that enhance their mental health, musical health and performance. And that, of course, also includes relationships.

We're not just talking about solitary pursuits here. We're talking about pursuits that bring us into the world that allows to lean into life with more vigor and with more effectiveness, not just to help ourselves, but to help others. So what i'm referring to is completing something and internally patting yourself on the back for having completed that thing.

That is a good thing to do. But if you want to maintain ongoing motivation, you're not going to do that every time. You're not going to punish yourself.

But rather you finish out about of learning. You flip the coin, let's say, IT lands tails on that day. You simply shift into the next thing you need to do that day.

Now IT is not easy to suppress thoughts. We know this is very largest suppress negative thoughts, but it's still hard to suppress positive thought. So internally, if you're glowing from the fact you performed well, don't try and suppress that, okay.

But if you flip a tail, then you don't want to actually engage in a self fare ware process. However, if you flip the coin and its heads well, then you should absolutely engage in a soft ward process. And that process should consist of thirty to sixty seconds of closing your eyes.

You don't have to work Better if you close your eyes and simply thinking about the fact that, yes, you can set a goal. You can engage in the specific set of questions. Do I want to do this practice today? Do I not want to do this practice, say? And then the specific set of actions, maybe they involve visual focus on the other tools.

We talk about turning off of your phone said, you are somebody who can get things done. You are somebody that is moving forward toward to your particular goal. And so you just have create a little bit of a positive cognitive loop around that ability that you are, in fact, building up.

And that's something that people often overlook, which is that not only is moving toward a goal great because IT establishes more robustness in the neural circuits that allows to perform that thing, after all, that's what learning is. Eventually, you don't achieve the same frustration and errors that you do when trying to perform that thing. Eventually you learn how to play the pin and you learn how to speak conversational friends.

You run that subs six minute mile. But also the neural circuits associated with self generated motivation and with the tools that we're talking about themselves are are subject to neural place. So those become more robust. And that's fantastic because when you eventually reach one goal, I would hope that you would then update and set out to achieve another goal.

And you will find that over time, you will be more effective in achieving other goals by virtue of the work that you did in pursuing a previous school because ultimately, it's really about defining goals and then learning how to quantify the actions required and then engaging in those actions. So there is the specific circuits involved in generating those actions, which are very goal specific. And then there are the circuit.

Which circuits are we talking about? Time, but that a middle, the later profound to court x, the orbital frontal cortex and the basis of ganglia that we talked about earlier that have been built up, that have been reinforced. Because, as I mentioned, there is one universal circuit for goal pursuit and achievement. So random international reinforcement is the key. And while I spent a good amount of time talking about self generated cognitive reinforcement, this also applies to any kind of physical rewards.

The movie that you're going to reward yourself with, the ice cream cone, whatever that you're going to reward yourself with, perhaps its monetary, perhaps its food, perhaps its social, random intervening rewards are the ones that are going to keep you motivated and are going to best increase the probability of success, not just within a given boult of learning, not just day a day, not just week to week, not just quarter a quarter, but across the lifetime. An important protocol to incorporate in your goal pursuit is one that I learned from doctor ma shang car when he was a guest on the human la podcast and SHE talk about the so called the middle problem. The middle problem is the fact that people tend to have a lot of motivation at the outset of pursuing a goal, although you now know that sometimes, or some people don't have a lot of motivation when pursuing their goal at the start.

So they need to think about failures and how terrible everything will be, and then they will certainly have motivation. It's going to be a fear base motivation, but in general, people tend to have more motivation at the start of pursuing a goal and at the end when they get close to, or they start to perceive the finish line. But that most people experienced so called middle problem, where in the middle of a learning about, or in the middle of the week, or in the middle of a twelve week cycle, they are less motivated.

This has actually been quantified in numerous studies, and there are several ways to overcome middle problem. The simply list one is to acknowledge IT, to recognize that it's coming. And so when IT does come on, you experiencing lower levels of motivation, perhaps even increased failure rates and you're not performing as well.

You're getting frustrated to know that, that's a natural process that everybody experiences and just knowing that can sometimes allow people to move through that to the place where then they can sense the end of the learning about where they can sense that they're making some progress, the finishing line is there and then they get that increase in motivation again. However, sometimes the middle problem is such a problem that people need some tools to move through IT. And the best way to move through the medal problem, or in fact, to eliminated, is actually to make the middle of a learning about its own separate thing that you acknowledge the presence of and that you break up into three separate belts.

So here we're talking about carving up the one hour learning about to the two hour learning about into an initial phase where you either have natural ocurred motivation or you use fear based visualization to increase your motivation. You lean into that and then let's assume it's a one hour learning about and then about the twenty five minute mark, you start to experience lower levels of focus perhaps that you use the visual target protocol, but then you go back into your bout of learning and you're not feeling very motivated. It's hard.

Your mind is drifting. You wants to pick up your phone, you want to do other things. You find yourself doing other things. That's the period of time to take, say, the twenty five minute to forty five minute period within the session, and divided into perhaps three or even four smaller chunks of time. And you perhaps have heard of chunking before.

Chunking is simply breaking something down into smaller chunks that are more achievable, simply what we're talking about here, but really chunking up that middle section of a learning about can be very effective at essentially eliminating the middle problem. Now for those of you that are going to be really nit picky, you'll say, wait, you take that twenty minutes from the twenty five minute mark to the forty five minute mark within your hour learning about, and you divide IT up into four little chunks. And in those two middle s i'm going to feel middle problem for those two middle unked h well, that's not actually way IT panned out.

Fortunately, when you break things down to small enough chunks, you eliminate the middle problem and you experience sustained motivation. Now, the extreme interpretation of that would have you measuring every minutes or even every second of a learning about and having consistent motivation throughout that. Because, for instance, if you can concentrate for ten seconds, why I won't, you simply be able to just mark off ten second increments.

Well, at some point, the marking off or the monitoring of those increments is going to be distracting toward the thing that you actually want to do. So the simple thing to do is to acknowledge the middle problem, right? The fact that we have more motivation to start, and at the end of our goal pursuit sessions, then we do within the middle and then to simply chunk that middle section into three, maybe four smaller chunks.

And if you need to incorporate things like the visual target protocol one or three or perhaps even eight times within that middle section. So beit, it's going to help you move through with Better focus and Better motivation. And what I described can, of course, be applied to the longer bouts of effort that don't occur just during one learning about, but perhaps across the week.

So for instance, if you are doing four days a week of language learning or fitness training, so maybe it's on monday, wednesday, friday, saturday schedule, you may notice that in the middle of the week, the wednesday training session tends to be the one that you're less motivated to do. For whatever reason, there could be any reason at all for which the motivation is lower in the middle week. IT doesn't matter.

Well, in that case, you would want to first acknowledge the presence of middle problems. So you would want to acknowledge that that wednesay training bell is prone to the middle problem, because IT is indeed the middle is in the middle of the monday and the friday training belt. So then you would want to approach IT with the understanding that it's going to be there and that you are going to need.

Tools and protocols that will allow you to overcome IT by, for instance, taking that one or two hour session on wednesday and putting a bit more time toward a visual target protocol to beginning to increase your focus, a bit more failure if you are feeling a motivated that means not motivated in nerd speak, a motivated toward doing that wednesday session. And you would want to break up that wednesday session into smaller chunk. So instead of looking at that two hour session, you might break IT up into a series of fifteen minutes, smaller learning bouts done consecutively, back to back.

And then in doing so, you have essentially taken that wednesday session and all bet that IT becomes at least among your most motivated section. So the middle problem exists, it's important to acknowledge, and there are tools to overcome the meal prom on any time scale. You simply have to chunk up the middle and approach things with deliberate increased bigger, just as you would you know, if you're running and there's always a tough hill, you have to really gear up for attacking that hill.

And then to do that repeatedly in those smaller chunks until you've completed that session. So today have been talking about how to approach goal setting in pursuit at and around the specific times that one is engaging in goal setting in pursuit, the writing down of goals, defining of goals, the timing and then the actual training sessions or the practice sessions toward achieving that goal. What I haven't talked about is how to show up to all of that in the best possible state of mind and body in order to achieve the best possible result.

And of course, there are numerous things that we need to do in order to could show up at our best, where we would stand the best possibility of performing our best and learning the best in those learning belts. Things like getting adequate sleep, getting sunlight in the ized really in the day, adequate and proper nutrition, social connection and so on talked about all of that in previous podcast episodes. So i'm not going to talk about those again now.

But IT is important to recognize that the backlog of our lives, how well we've slept, what's going on in our personal lives will all impact things like motivation and Frankly, our ability to even identify what's important because, you know, if we are dealing with a health crisis or someone close to us is dealing with the health crisis, we tend to have our attention diverted toward that. But I do want to acknowledge all of that because IT is critically important in defining how you're going to show up to these endeavors and for that matter, all endeavors. Now with that said, there are a few things that you can do in order to try and optimize your ability to focus on your level of a motivation during your goal pursuit.

And there are some really interesting data and protocols that I haven't talked so much about on this podcast ever that are relevant to today's discussion. And this relates to our so called circadian rythm in attention. We have robust rythm in our ability to focus and our level of motivation that vary across the twenty four hour a circadian cycle with a regular rithmetic that is independent of how badly we want a goal or how afraid we are a failure, right? All the stuff about motivation and fear of failure and desire and said, all of that is still true, but we all have a naturally curry's m of rise and fall and return to rise and fall of our levels of attention and motivation.

And this is something that's been described beautifully in the scientific feature. In fact, i'll provide a link to what I consider a really nice review on this topic. This is a review that was published by public valdas in the ye journal biology and medicine and two and nineteen, entitled certain rythm in attention.

And there's a lot of information within this review, but we can distill out of couple of useful gems from IT. So if you are somebody who is embarking on the pursuit of a goal which is particularly hard, that's going to require a really high level of motivation and focus. Know that there are three times during the day when you stand to have the greatest level of focus and attention.

And of course, this will vary depending on when you went to sleep at night. And when you wake up, there's natural variation in circuiting rhymes. But it's worth knowing that most people find that their level of attention and motivation is going to be highest.

Thirty minutes, three hours in eleven hours after waking up. Hey, so thirty minutes, three hours in eleven hours after waking up. And this relates to a number of important biological principles related to circadian shifts in body temperature, which are also related to circadian shifts.

That means changes around the twenty four hour cycle in the release of particular dw chemicals. So the amount of dopamine available to be released by any sort of goal pursuit reward, the amount of satan available, lots of neurochemistry. And there are lots of neural circuitry, but these heighten levels of focus on motivation that just occur naturally regardless of what goal is trying to pursue.

In fact, regardless of whether not you're trying to pursue any goal thirty minutes, three hours and eleven hours after waking, your focus on and motivation are going to be their greatest relative to other times in that twenty four hour cycle. Now as I tell you this, I can imagine that some of you are thinking, great. I'm going to schedule one bound of goal pursuit three hours after waking, another one, eleven hours after waking.

Great, if you can do that, and that fits with your work and other demands of life relationships and set a terrific however, I don't want this thirty minute, three hour and eleven hour protocol to be considered a rule. And here's why most people don't have a tremendous degree of control over their schedule. Things like work and family and other demands constrain them in terms of when they can get the work in.

And while I do think it's extremely valuable to schedule the specific time or roughly the specific time, though, that's an oxymoron, meaning a period of time during the day, say before nine am or between nine and noon, that you are going to Carry out your goal pursuit endeavors of. Talk about this in previous podcast, some people do very well by scheduling an exact time from noon to two. I'm writing other people like myself do a little Better if I said a constraint, but it's a little bit broader such as i'm going to exercise before nine am that could be any time before nine or i'm going to engaging language learning sometime between, say, six P M.

And nine P M is supposed to setting a specific time as just what works best for me. People vary in terms of whether not they respond best to setting a specific time or a time block and setting up these kind of barriers, after which you are essentially done yourself. You won't do IT, but and this is a very important but IT is most important that you actually engage in the goal pursuit.

And I experience this recently. I'm trying to run more these days. I still enjoy doing resistance training. I still run three days a week, but i'm trying to run a little bit longer as much, just the one long run per week and then two shorter runs later in the week. I've talked about this in my optimal fitness protocol, ephod.

If you want to check that out or check out the P, D, F, or it's all to still down to one or two pages, if you like. But in any event, these days, i'm trying to extend the amount of time that i'm running. I'm just enjoying that is kind of a throwback for me to when I ran across country as a senior in high school.

And this was the time of year when I was start getting ready for the full season. So i'm enjoying running more. And just this last week, I had the experience of having a very full sunday, and that's usually day when I run in the morning or hike during the middle the day.

And I simply did not get around to IT because I had a lot of other important things to do. And what I found was nine pm ruled around, ten pm rolled around, and I started in like, I wish i'd gone running. My monday was going to be busy, so what did I do? I list up my shoes, and I went for a run at ten pm, something I perham ant done since college, maybe even in high school.

And I ended up running for ninety minutes from ten P. M. Until eleven thirty P. M, definitely not the optimal time for me to go running. In fact, I was thinking, oh, this might disrupt my sleep, but in fact I didn't. I came back, I showered, had a little bit of food, which Normally I don't eat that late, and I slept like a baby. And I felt great the next day, waking up at my Normal time, which accuse me to another important sign tif c fact that relates to protocol and protocol flexibility, which is something that Green from a colleague of mine at ten ford school medicine who works in the sleep laboratory.

I intend to have him as a guess on this podcast, which is that much of our subjective feelings of energy and well being during the day have to do not just with how well and how much we sleep the night before, but how positively we view our previous stays experiences and how positively we view our next day, and in fact, that same day pursuits and experiences. So in other words, how we feel about our previous day performance and how we feel about what we're about to embark on during our day can increase our energy. That might seem obvious to a number of you, but these days, as I and many others out there are talking so much about the importance of sleep, which is, of course, essential.

You do want to get great sleep as many nights of your life as you possibly can, and if you don't sleep much for a given night, hopefully it's for reasons that you enjoy and positive things like a party or wedding or use your imagination. But it's also the case that when we successfully complete something that we told ourselves that we are going to do, we feel great about IT and that if IT means that we sleep a bit less or that have to do our practice about, you know, at three pm or two P M A time of day when we're really ordinary in the trough of attention and we have to use twenty different tools, or one tool twenty different times in order to get through that out of learning fact that we complete IT leaves us with the feeling of accomplishment. And i'm certain, although I don't know exactly which there are neurochemicals and hormones that reflect that it's almost a certainty going to involve doping and other neurochemicals.

But the point is not to get reductionist about IT. The point is that, yes, hired attention and focus OCR naturally thirty minutes, three hours and eleven hours after waking. But the really important thing about all of this goal setting and pursuit.

Is to do IT to get IT done, to set the goal, to do IT specifically, make IT quantifiable when you're going to do IT, make IT about worth state and then simply do IT. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion, all about science based protocols for how to set and pursue your goals. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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