Hacking Your Brain to Set and Achieve Goals

Hacking Your Brain to Set and Achieve Goals.

“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.” – Earl Nightingale

The best time is now

With winter festivities out of the way, the beginning of the New Year is, traditionally, the time when we reflect on where we are now and where we want to be in the future.

This is a great way to acknowledge all our successes, the opportunities to grow which we took, the people who helped and supported us along the way and to feel grateful for all these things in our lives. Acknowledging what went well will quieten our inner critic and calm our limbic system. It will also help to boost our self-compassion, self-esteem, confidence and motivation in preparation for the next year. You can use a brain-friendly EASY model of reflective practice to achieve this.

But don’t limit yourself to just once-a-year reflection and gratitude. According to a white paper The Science of Gratitude published by the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley in USA, people who regularly practise gratitude are happier, healthier and more successful in many areas of their lives. Gratitude helps us to retrain our brains to notice the good in our lives and to mitigate the impact of the hard-wired negativity bias which can hinder our motivation and stop us pursuing our goals and achieving our true potential.  

This gives us a good reason to pause to reflect and to appreciate ourselves and our progress regularly, and to start setting goals or adjusting our actions to achieve our existing goals quicker at any point of the year. As Napoleon Hill said: “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”

Our brains (secretly) love goals!

Yes, you read this correctly. You may not be aware of it, but our brains love goals because:

• having specific goals gives focus to our attention and uses our prefrontal cortex (which thrives of specificity), and the rest of the brain more efficiently;
• brains love tracking progress and pursuing our SMART goals allows our brains to track all incremental changes on our way to achieving these goals;
• reaching every milestone on our way to the goal – does not matter how small it may be – triggers the reward system in our brains, thus releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behaviours which led to that success;
• when we set ourselves stretching but achievable goals, we build self-efficacy which activates neural circuits associated with positive thinking and perseverance essential for overcoming obstacles and achieving goals;
• according to research, the limbic system (our emotional centre) engages deeply with relevant and meaningful goals and helps us mobilise our motivation and energy needed for sustainable efforts to achieve them;
• by prioritising time-bound goals and tasks, our brains exercise their time-keeping function which is essential for effective and efficient use of our limited resources.

It can be argued that goal setting changes the way our brains function and makes them more effective.

It is not setting goals that is the problem, but achieving them

As you probably know from your own experience, setting goals is not all that difficult – we do it all the time. Nowadays, goal setting is taught and encouraged in many educational establishments starting from a relatively young age. Yet up to 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February, according to a U.S. News & World Report published in 2015. Did you know that we even have a Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day (17^th January)?

There are many reasons why people fail to achieve their goals – you can find the top 10 in this article.

Because our brains play a crucial role not only in setting goals but also in achieving them, it does make sense to explore a few brain hacks which can help us in our pursuit of success.

Simple brain hacks to reach your goals

As explained earlier in the section about the brain’s love for goals, setting them SMART is a great brain hack in itself.

You can also consider using the following simple yet powerful brain hacks:

• Selecting only one or two most important goals and focusing on them – pursuing too many goals at the same time will distract us and use too much of our mental energy. There is a great book “The One Thing” by Gary Keller with valuable insights on prioritising your goals and eliminating distractions.
• Visualising your goals – this video of Dr Andrew Huberman and Dr Emily Balcetis will help you to do it in such a way that will maximise your chances of achieving them. For even more insights and useful tips you can read a book “Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World” by Dr Balcetis.
• Creating a consistent routine to build habits – this will help you to make your goal-directed behaviour consistent and automatic, will improve your brain’s ability to focus on your goal(s) and resist distractions. My earlier article about habits can help you with this.
• Holding yourself accountable by creating a progress checklist and scheduling regular reviews in your diary, using goal setting sheets (you can find plenty of those online) or productivity apps such as Strides or Done.
• Evaluating and adjusting your goal-oriented actions regularly – this will help your brain to identify improvement opportunities. This will also help to improve your self-regulation and cognitive flexibility which, in turn, will stimulate problem solving required for overcoming obstacles while remaining aligned with your goals and values.
• Utilising your brain’s reward system while being mindful of different sources of dopamine. Good sources of dopamine include: new experiences, exercise, good sleep, meeting milestones while working towards goals, being outdoors, healthy sleep. Bad sources of dopamine are: alcohol, drugs, junk food, gambling, bingeing on TV and social media. Read more about good dopamine vs bad dopamine and choose your sources of this neurotransmitter wisely to help you achieve your goals.

You can find some other brain-informed tips and strategies for achieving your goals in this article.

There is also a Goals Toolkit created by Dr Andrew Huberman. It contains science-based zero-cost strategies and protocols to set and achieve your goals in a way that maximises the likelihood of reaching them.

If your goals are about health and fitness, then it may be worth exploring a collection of videos by Dr Michael Kamalu (aka “Dr Gains”).

My list of good books on setting and achieving goals includes “Goals!” by Brian Tracy, “Hard Goals” by Mark Murphy, “Your Best Year Ever” by Michael Hyatt, “Succeed” by Heidi Grant Halvorson  and  “Goal Setting Hacks” by Oluseye Babajide.

I would like to conclude this article with the wise words of Elbert Hubbard: “Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage, but simply because they have never organised their energies around a goal.”  Remember – you don’t have to join those people.

Want to know more about brain hacking? My next article will follow soon!